Germany uses the He 277 agianst Rusia as strategic bomber

BlairWitch749

Banned
Strategic bombing wasn't practicle for Germany without several other PODS

the biggest and most important one is pilot pool. these bombers have HUGE crew and maintainence sections; and for the entire war the Germans had a severe shortage of pilots and aircrew (probably the most disorganized element of their war effort... and thats saying something look at their selection of tanks and ships)

so they would be building bombers with no pilots to fly them... for nearly the entire war, the germans litterally had hundreds of servicable aircraft on the ground with nobody to pilot them
 

MUC

In "The Luftwagge Victorious" book there is a POD with the Germans getting four-engine bombers up and running by the beginning of the war.

There aircraft are then also deployed against the Soviets and score some hits in disrupting Soviet mobilization, destroying railway networks and hitting factories.
 
Cook

Cook

Banned
Ok, I’ll point it out.

Strategic Bombing of industrial targets in World War Two was not decisive. It helped , but it was not decisive, and that was using fleets of bombers; one bombing raid on Hamburg involved a thousand bombers. The Reich just didn’t have the capacity to build that many, let alone fuel them, without castrating the rest of their armed forces.

And since the Soviet Union had shipped huge amounts of its industry to such remote locations as Ekaterinburg, 2000 km East of Moscow, you haven’t got many targets within range of any realistic aircraft design.
 

fastmongrel

Peisander said:
Nope no Spitfire reached 51,000 feet. That arose from a false claim by a pilot of a stripped down Mark VC Spitfire with a Merlin 46 engine over Egypt.
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If you notice I said PR19 Spits operated at 49,000 feet this is from THE SPITFIRE STORY by Alfred Price page 211. PR19s were in use by 542 Sqn from May 1944 and could operate higher than jets till the late Korean war model F 86s got into service.

If you can get a He 277 up to 48,000 feet with a useable bomb load which I doubt then the defenders can get an interceptor up to the same height. The RAF and USAF jet bombers of the 1950s and 60s couldnt carry big bomb loads at much over 40,000 feet so I cant see why a prop job could do any better.
 
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Redbeard

Banned
Strategic bombing of the Soviet Union might hamper production there to a degree, but hardly even near enough to significantly reduce the Soviet superiority in numbers and materiel (a part of which anyway was produced in USA and outside reach of strategic bombing).

But the resources needed to put up a strategic bomber force would cost so tremendously much that the German war effort probably would collapse soon after the Strategic bombing effort is initiated.

The British in 1942 calculated that keeping 40 twin engine bombers operational (incl. building, training crew and replacing losses) was equivalent to building, training, repairing etc. a battleship.

Wars are won and lost on the ground, and it was only because the Soviets did most of the dirty work on the ground that the western allies could focus so much on strategic bombing.

Best "tech-PoD" for Germany would be an extensive pre war breeding programme for tough little horses that can survive the Russian winter and supply the front units and supplemented by railway construction units capable of (re)laying railway track close to the advance rate of foot marching infantry.

Regards

Steffen Redbeard
 

Astrodragon

Michele said:
So this aircraft is deployed after the Battle of Britain.
_During_ the Battle of Britain itself, the first Spitfires armed with 20mm cannons were field-tested. By mid-1941, the Hurricane Mk IIC carried four such cannons.
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And given the rather difficult to hide development of a massive heavy bomber force, even the RAF is going to get its finger out and give the 20mm its top priority - they'd already done the tests, they knew what they needed to shoot down a big bomber
 

TofuTanker

BlairWitch749 said:
Strategic bombing wasn't practicle for Germany without several other PODS

the biggest and most important one is pilot pool. these bombers have HUGE crew and maintainence sections; and for the entire war the Germans had a severe shortage of pilots and aircrew (probably the most disorganized element of their war effort... and thats saying something look at their selection of tanks and ships)

so they would be building bombers with no pilots to fly them... for nearly the entire war, the germans litterally had hundreds of servicable aircraft on the ground with nobody to pilot them
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Really? I have read that the Germans had plenty of pilots, in fact a surplus, but their planes did not have fuel, which is what kept them on the ground. In fact, there were so many excess Luftwaffe personnel that they were organized into makeshift infantry formations when the Wehrmacht's strength was spent.
 

TofuTanker

Redbeard said:
Best "tech-PoD" for Germany would be an extensive pre war breeding programme for tough little horses that can survive the Russian winter and supply the front units and supplemented by railway construction units capable of (re)laying railway track close to the advance rate of foot marching infantry.
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Good idea, now we just need someone to write a TL. Or Calbear to tell us how it wouldn't work.
 

Astrodragon

I do love the way these magic LW bombers outperform everything the allies built by a truly amazing margin, are build faster, cheaper, and so much earlier....:confused::confused::confused:

Given the available tech (there are NO magic solutions, despite what it says on the back of the napkin), range/load performances are actually pretty similar for competing aircraft on both sides. To get better, you have to give up somethnig - hence the long range of IJL designs, bought at the expence of a fargile and delicate plane. Same goes for speed - WHY are the LW designs somehow so much faster and better than allied designs for the same cost/size etc??
 

xchen08

KyleB said:
I meant about the special German horse teams that were trained for the Russian winter.
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Surely horsebreeding takes longer than the decade max the Nazis have between getting into power and the absolute latest they could invade the USSR?

Peisander said:
The highest any Allied fighter could reach by the end of WW2 was the Spitfire Mark XIV at 44,500ft (estimated - never tested).

He-277 raids over Britain could have been commenced in mid 1944.

Incidentally it was no napkinwipe bomber. It made the B-29 look pedestrian.
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Curious how your standards for accepting a claim of performance by Allied fighters are so much higher than your standards for accepting a claim of performance by Nazi napkinwaffe. Please point to an instance, any instance at all, where an He-277 fitted with armament, and a full fuel and bomb load, even approached its paper specifications. Oh wait, you can't, because no production model was ever tested under combat conditions. In fact, it's unclear any model under any conditions was able to reach paper specifications in any test.

Not to mention that unless you are dropping atomic bombs, you can't hit a damn thing if you are flying too high to be intercepted. B-29s over Japan found they couldn't hit a damn thing even from 30k.

Cook said:
Strategic Bombing of industrial targets in World War Two was not decisive.
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And I'll point out that the USSBS demonstrates that in fact, it was decisive. The destruction of fuel production alone would have entirely paralyzed the German military by 1945 even if none of the other relentless Allied victories in that period occurred. That's not the say it would have forced Germany to surrender barring anything else, but it certainly qualifies under any realistic definition of decisive.

It's just the case that a lot of things were decisive against Germany given how overmatched it was, and the strategic bombing was historically neither the first, nor the most important event that guaranteed German defeat.

Of course, you are certainly correct that bombing only proved decisive with great technological advance and bomber fleets vastly beyond what Germany could possibly achieve. A few hundred He-277s trying to bomb from 40k feet would be no more decisive (or effective at all) than Bomber Command's efforts in 1941.
 

fastmongrel

xchen08 said:
Surely horsebreeding takes longer than the decade max the Nazis have between getting into power and the absolute latest they could invade the USSR?
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Yes but the specification sheet shows that the nazi prototype 8 legged pack horse codename Sleipnir could walk further faster and higher than the British Army mule and carry a bigger load
 

Kharn

Banned
If they can get it to work along with sufficient numbers, they can take out the oilfields at Batu and the Caucasus. Maybe. This might be enough to slow the Soviets down long enough for a valid defense to be held.
 

xchen08

fastmongrel said:
Yes but the specification sheet shows that the nazi prototype 8 legged pack horse codename Sleipnir could walk further faster and higher than the British Army mule and carry a bigger load
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:DYou got to include a smilie. There are way too many people on this forum and elsewhere that would be perfectly serious in making that claim.
 

colleen1227

Interceptor problems

While the allies could develop a plane to intercept the 277 the problem is at that alt. small fighters are not that maneuverable because of the loss of lift due to thinner air and small wing surface. I seem to remember reading that a B52 was intercepted by a F 16 and it flew rings around the fighter. So just getting up there would not guarantee an interception.
 

Just Leo

Nazi genetic scientists were attempting to re-create the Siberian wooly mammoth for transportation purposes. It was considered easier than creating arctic pack horses. Their efforts were thwarted by an American, I. Jones.

woolly_mammoth_siberian_tundra.jpg
 
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