What if Germany does beat Russia?

As a niggling consideration: Just how is Germany going to do anything in the manner of logistics/movement of men and material etc with their main railroad marshalling yards/railroad stations totally destroyed and radioactive. Nothing is going east, west, north or south except by road or water.
 

Das_Colonel

Banned
Ive been following this thread for the past couple of days and I think it would make for an interesting TL.

As for the idea of missile carrying U-boats I have an old copy of ''Sea Classics'' magazine from 1985 with an interesting article on said subject. The article was titled ''Hitler's secret U-boat missiles''.
The article tells the story of Fritz Steinhoff U-boat commander of the U-511 and his brother Dr. Ernst Steinhoff a rocket scientist at peenemunde. According to the article commander Steinhoff came up with the idea of attacking the US.seaboard with submarine launched missiles.

He took the idea to his brother who took the idea to Wener Von Braun who is quoted as saying ''If a rocket can work in space, it also can work in water. Interesting I never thought of this. let's try and figure it out.'' And figure it out they did.

The article goes on to say that on june 4,1942 the U-511 fired 16 model 42 H.E. 30cm rockets from underwater. The rockets were launched from steel structures mounted on the deck of the sub at a 45 degree angle. The nozzles of the rockets were sealed with candle wax. tests were made at depths of 46 feet with ranges averaging three miles.

The tests were conducted off the coast of stettin. When the results of the tests were calculated it was determined that the range could be increased by more than seven miles if the weight of the propellant was increased.

I can provide more details from the article if you guys are interested. But could someone please tell me how to avoid the THE WALL OF TEXT I know it's annoying but no matter what I try it keeps coming out like this sorry :eek:

It's just a matter of formatting. One trick to remember is if you are changing the subject, tack etc. of a paragraph, it needs a new paragraph. Generally if your paragraphs are more than 5-6 sentences long - consider a new one.

I've had a go at editing your post for you :)
 

nbcman

Donor
Can I just interject here and say that during WWII, Germany did experiment with launching V-1s and other types of rockets off the deck of a u-boat, both while submerged and surfaced. Now, I fully recognize that these experiments were a failure and not pursued (Mainly due to launch problems, horrible accuracy and inter-service rivalry). Time and greater experimentation can solve the launch problems, Hitler can just order it be done thus overcomming the rivalry between Raeder/Donitz and Goering, and in a pinch - If you only care about shock and effect - Accuracy can be ignored.

As this had already been tested during 1942 OTL, it is a viable option, although you would probably be lucky to get 3x rockets a sub.

Source is here. Ignore the V-2 part, I am not referring to that.

While the Germans may have worked out more of the issues with the sub-launched missiles, the Americans in OTL had their own plans to detect and sink subs: Operation Teardrop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Teardrop

While the Type XXI boats with missile launchers probably would have performed better than the Type IX boats without missle launchers based on the information presented, the Americans were not unaware of a sub launched missile threat and had taken steps to interdict them. However, if the Germans attempted it during poor North Atlantic weather, they stood a much better chance to get through as it severely impacted the WAllies ability to detect inbound subs. Hopefully the Germans made a change to their Enigma machines or the WAllies would have still been reading the KM messages and could have prepared some countermeasures at the target cities in addition to the patrol lines in the North Atlantic.
 
While would the Kriegsmarine broadcast that mission over the air? Just gather the crews at harbor, load the weapons and give the captains a closed envelope with their orders. There is no need to coordinate with other unit, nor to correct initial orders, nor anything else.
 
I agree Jaunml82 theirs no need to use enigma for these missions.

However I also agree with nbcman that the US. Navy would make these missions very dangerous.

But if the US. was delivering doses of artificial sunlight to Germany I’m sure there would have been no shortage of volunteers from the U-boat arm for what they would’ve called vengeance missions.

By the way I’ve read on other threads here that rockets and poison gas in WWII were not a good mix. Was it a problem of leakage?
If someone here could provide more info I would be great full.



PS. I would like to thank Das Colonel for editing my earlier post.
 
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