Little Ear: After the Invasion

How did the Russians have jet fighters? Unless the Germans or the British (as per OTL Post war...the fools) provided them with the design they (the Russians) are about 5 or more years behind in Aircraft development and are very unlikely to have a jet fighter in service in 1945 and without western help or Jet engines to reverse engineer would have been unlikely to have had them for the OTL Korean war.

Just saying and still enjoying the TL

The MiG-9 was flying by 1946; it's not much of a stretch that with fewer resources to commit to all-out war until 1945, there's more to put into R&D. Not to mention the interest the Soviet spies in Germany and Britain might have in the jet engine technology. It only takes one piece of paper sent to Moscow for a breakthrough to happen.
 
The MiG-9 was flying by 1946; it's not much of a stretch that with fewer resources to commit to all-out war until 1945, there's more to put into R&D. Not to mention the interest the Soviet spies in Germany and Britain might have in the jet engine technology. It only takes one piece of paper sent to Moscow for a breakthrough to happen.

Well yes but the MIG - 9 was a quickly developed and relatively unsuccessful design using Russian copies of the BMW 003 engine which they had reverse engineered from captured German engines/aircraft after the war.

It took until 49 before it was in true operational service due to a number of design issues including its tail disintegrating in flight and even when in service it had a an alarming fault when it used to flame out its engines when it fired its guns - ultimately while these problems were being solved by 1950 'Russian Nene' powered MIG 15s had made it obsolete and most of the planes were sent to China.

Perhaps a Dissatisfied German pilot for whatever reason flies his jet plane to Russia in 43 or even as early as 42!

Perhaps Rudolph Hess - off his head on 'self medication' flies to Russia (instead of Britain in 41) to get them help win the war (sounded good to him at the time) and he takes an early jet with him to show how serious he is.
 
MIG - 9 was a quickly developed and relatively unsuccessful design using Russian copies of the BMW 003 engine which they had reverse engineered from captured German engines/aircraft after the war.

Which shows the Soviets had the industrial-technological capacity to build something akin to the BMW 003 even after all the devastation inflicted upon them. It’s a similar story with the Rolls-Royce engines they later managed to buy with the British and copies of which were used in the MiG-15. The whole “but they only got it because they reverse engineered it” ignores that reverse-engineering still requires that one have the level of scientific, engineering, and industrial expertise to build the thing your reverse-engineering. Plus, the Soviets were looking into jet engines prior to the war, they just abandoned any thought of them in 1941 because, ya know, giant German invasion demanding all resources going to manufacturing and refining existing variants of aircraft, damn any experimental work.

But even if we accept the premise that the dumb old Russkies could never have conceivably competed with German/British/American engineering except through technological theft on their own merits...

Perhaps a Dissatisfied German pilot for whatever reason flies his jet plane to Russia in 43 or even as early as 42!

It’s rather more likely that the Germans sold some engines to the Soviets in 1942-43 in order to meet the growing price of payments for raw materials needed to keep their war economy chuggibg.
 
Just caught up and the scenarios are intriguing to read. If you do another update, could we have something on how things went with Japan and China? Did Russia have time and troops to grab Korea and Manchuria?
 
Which shows the Soviets had the industrial-technological capacity to build something akin to the BMW 003 even after all the devastation inflicted upon them. It’s a similar story with the Rolls-Royce engines they later managed to buy with the British and copies of which were used in the MiG-15. The whole “but they only got it because they reverse engineered it” ignores that reverse-engineering still requires that one have the level of scientific, engineering, and industrial expertise to build the thing your reverse-engineering. Plus, the Soviets were looking into jet engines prior to the war, they just abandoned any thought of them in 1941 because, ya know, giant German invasion demanding all resources going to manufacturing and refining existing variants of aircraft, damn any experimental work.

But even if we accept the premise that the dumb old Russkies could never have conceivably competed with German/British/American engineering except through technological theft on their own merits...



It’s rather more likely that the Germans sold some engines to the Soviets in 1942-43 in order to meet the growing price of payments for raw materials needed to keep their war economy chuggibg.

The 'Russkis' were not dumb - however Stalin 'was' dumb or at least fundamentally deluded - it was not only the Armed forces he 'purged' - he had highly skilled aircraft engineers (among many others in the Russian Elite) chopping down trees in Siberia which is why OTL Russian Aircraft design was lagging behind the other major players in 41 (look at some of the aeronautical achievements they had in the 30s and then the state of the Russian aircraft designs relative to their 'peers' in the summer of 41 - utter gash!)

However as you say they did have the aeronautical engineering base and in this TL it's not inconceivable that they repatriated those siberian exiles along with the existing 'non purged engineers' and got them working (even more so given how they would be very eager to achieve success) - with or without gifted/stolen tech - all of which could have led to a jet fighter in 1945.

It's all good i've got my head around it now.
 
It’s rather more likely that the Germans sold some engines to the Soviets in 1942-43 in order to meet the growing price of payments for raw materials needed to keep their war economy chuggibg.

This. While OTL Soviet Union got German R&D only after conquering Germany, ITTL they will have the leverage to get most of it before - without the huge destruction of WWII. On the other hand, with better access to Soviet raw materials German jet development might be quicker than OTL.
 
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Really interesting TL?

Was Israel still founded ITTL under these different circumstances, and how many Jews survived the Shoah?
 
“The lifting of the Siege of Singapore in the summer of 1943, after more than a year of constant attack from the air and sea, was surely the turning point in the Asia-Pacific War as far as Britain was concerned. November’s Operation Stuart, landing British and Australian troops on the Malay Peninsula all along the Andaman coast, had been a slow and difficult process but a series of actions by the Royal Navy, its capital ships free to operate in the Pacific since the destruction of the German surface fleet in 1940, had ensured Japanese naval interference could only do so much. By the time Kuantan on the opposite side of the peninsula had fallen it was clear that the liberation of Singapore, whose defenders were mostly comprised of Indians – a fact shamefully whitewashed in the 2015 Abigail Sutcliffe film Singapore – was approaching. The famous Malacca Express, which had seen some of the bravest men in the world navigate supply ships through the Straits of Malacca under constant threat of bombardment, was now becoming more of a pleasure cruise than a daily dance with death as Japanese aircraft ceased to appear in the sky. Indeed, the Japanese government was fundamentally altering its security outlook. The concept of the Inner Circle had taken root regarding the sphere of the Empire of Japan; as the islands of the East Indies fell to the Commonwealth while the United States continued its island hopping campaign in the Pacific – U.S. Marines were landing at Guadalcanal on the same day that Singapore was relieved, beginning the reversal of the Midway shame – Japan began to define a new defensive perimeter. Tokyo saw which way the wind was blowing; soon the Allies would surely reach the Home Islands, and Japan couldn’t overstretch herself. And so the assault on Singapore was suddenly abandoned; one day its defenders awoke to realise they had overslept, as no Japanese aircraft had emerged to be their regular alarm clock. Days later a Major Eric Wedgewood, who before the war had been renovating Morecambe pier, strolled out of the forest leading the first units of the liberation. Greeting an Indian unit that approached to welcome them, he shook its colonel’s hand and said, ‘Hullo, I’m Major Wedgewood. Sorry we took a while.’”

- B. Gonzalez, In the Doldrums: The East Indies Wartime Experience, p.59.

“With no major fighting on European soil for nearly five years, the Reich had plenty of time to indulge in its most repulsive desires. Europe had been conquered, but it was what came after that proved most monstrous. The systematic murder of every Jewish man, woman, and child had occupied some part of Hitler’s damaged mind for a debatable amount of time but it gained form shortly after the final fall of North Africa to the British in the April of 1941. His belief that a final stalemate was now ensuing gave birth to the ‘purification memo.’ On one sheet of paper, dated May 5th, 1941 the Fuhrur advised Himmler that ‘the purification of Europe must commence forthwith.’ Thus what the Nazis called the Purification began. The industrial slaughter of the Jews, along with many other minority groups deemed undesirable, was the culmination of the intellectual madness which Germany had collapsed into. The Danish island of Bornholm, surrounded by the Baltic, was selected to be the eventual nexus of this supreme effort of genocide. Its entire population evacuated to mainland Denmark, Bornholm was renamed to its Old Norse name Burgundaholmr and annexed into Germany. The whole island would become one vast zone of death; at Vestermarie, a short drive from the port from which countless prisoners disembarked, three million people eventually perished. Other camps dotted across Poland – Zelechow, Kolbuszowa, and of course Auschwitz were the most infamous – killed another three million more as did widespread mass killings by Nazi death squads. So comprehensive was the killing that by the end of the war there were scarcely any Jews left in France, the Low Countries, Denmark, Germany, Poland, or Romania. Italy handed over her Jews to win favour with Germany after losing North Africa. The first post-war census in France recorded only 4,560; in 1933, there had been 235,000. The German ground forces that weren’t engaged in the Turkish attrition often found themselves assigned to ‘Jew duty.’ By 1945 only a handful had survived the camps, many of which had fallen into disrepair and when British paratroopers landed on Bornholm towards the end of the war they found a scene none of them had been briefed about. ‘You couldn’t tell the men and women apart,’ wrote one. ‘They were more skeleton than man.’ Today, the island is the territory of the United Nations; Denmark voluntarily gave it up, its residents unwilling to return to such a place of death. Yet though the Nazis were defeated, they did succeed in one goal. For by the end of the war, Europe was largely Jew free.”

- R. Ziegler, The Holocaust: A Comprehensive History, p.2.
 
The last part was very depressing to read. I know many parts are OTL, but still extremely sad that so many perished and their governments willingly and, at times, gleefully handing over there Jews and other undesirables.
 
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