I recently got an interesting email about an upcoming National Geographic Society documentary on Hitler's wonder weapons, especially about a Stealth jet. But it seems they have gone beyond truth to sell the documentary. And one wonders how valid the film will be if the person who wrote the email description had anything to do with the script. I see plenty of modern histories written about WWII that perpetuate concepts created before the true facts were opened to historians.
The popular notion that Nazi technology was far ahead if Allied technology is at best comic book history and IMHO, plain BS! The opposite is in fact the truth. German technology was far behind ours! The popular notion that we won the war only because we outproduced them is false. We won the war because of a wide range of advantages, from industrial capacity to technical superiority.
I am not going to rehash the history of WWII here but let me just provide some bullet points to you to reconsider assumptions and possibly investigate the true history of this crucial period.
1. Nazi subs never came close to winning the sub war in the Atlantic! For the entire war, less than 1% of Allied ships crossing the Atlantic were damaged or sunk by U-boats! We were not about to challenge Nazi propaganda at the time (they could only improve their results!). After the war we realized the Soviets were planning to replay U-boat strategy and we didn't want them to have any advantage, so the true history of the Battle of the Atlantic was classified until the end of the Cold War. How technologically advanced can they be if they lost 3/4 of their submarine crews?
2. German radar was years behind the Allies. U-boat commanders were told by their scientists that no radar small enough to fit in an aircraft was capable of finding a submarine at sea... later when the evidence suggested otherwise and Germans began using the Dutch-invented snorkel because they believed no aircraft radar could spot something as small as a snorkel head or periscope above the water at night.. Wrong Again!
3. Communications Intel was far behind the Allies. One reason they did so poorly in submarine warfare was that they didn't know that radio direction finding could track the position of all their subs chattering away in the Atlantic. Convoys were steered around their Wolfpacks whenever possible. Later, hunter-killer groups were dispatched to find them and as the name implies, KILL THEM!
4. The German physicists knew that splitting the atom could provide long-term power for a ship, powerplant, or maybe someday a sub, but only the "less-intelligent" Jewish physicists thought that splitting the atom could result in an explosive release of energy sufficient to provide a fantastically powerful bomb. Their research was geared at providing energy, not a bomb. Most of those "less intelligent" practitioners of "Judenphysik" came to the USA, and some when to work on some civil engineering program called The Manhattan Project.
5. Tanks... remember when the Sherman made its first appearance on the battlefield, it was the most heavily gunned and armored tank the Germans had encountered outside of the Soviet T-34! The contemporary German Mk. 2, 3 and 4 Panzers had thinner mild steel armor and smaller guns! Only because the much tougher Soviet T-34 had them outclassed did they rush production of bigger tanks like the Panther and Tigers, which although had thicker armor and better guns, were never able to exploit the doctrine of armored warfare--advance and maneuver to exploit successes on the battlefield. They broke down too often and were maintenance nightmares. But since the Germans were now losing ground, it really didn't matter much!
The plucky Sherman, never a perfect tank, was produced in numbers approaching 50,000 and was far better automotively. Also, our doctrine at the time never envisioned our tanks engaging their tanks. Rather, we saw tanks in an infantry support role. Tank destroyers, aircraft and artillery were supposed to deal with enemy tanks. But it sucks when the enemy doesn't use your playbook! But our trio of arty, TDs, and aircraft knocked out far more panzers than their tanks knocked out ours!
6. Code technology -- yea, still very secret. Let's just say that thanks to the ground work of the Polish military intelligence service and our vastly superior digital computing technology, the Nazi's never did anything important that we didn't know about with the exception of the Battle of the Bulge -- (radio blackout on their part because they thought just maybe we had something up our sleeves).
-- about cool German aircraft:
When your back is against the wall and you're running out of options, you will grasp at anything in desperation. Every scientist or engineer with a hair brained idea got funding from an even nuttier Hitler who was hoping for a satanic miracle that never came. Many of their ideas died on the drawing boards. A few were valid (V-2 rockets and the Me-262 jet). But were they good weapons? How many more conventional weapons could have been produced that might have delayed an Allied victory if vital production capacity had not been redirected to build rockets with horrible accuracy and relatively small warheads? The Brits flew the first jet in 1939, the US had a jet in 1941, but both nations understood that it would take too long to perfect the jet to make it worthwhile to go that route in wartime. Sure an Me-262 one-on-one was a tough opponent, but the reality was that there were 40 Mustangs to every Me-262... and his fuel consumption was horrendous, so he died sooner or later when he had to land to refuel. Their miracle subs were also full of bugs that would have prevented them from being serious threats in the Atlantic, not even considering the vast array of other Allied anti-sub technologies that stood against them!
And if their wonder weapons had achieved Hitler's goal of prolonging the war even a few more months, what would it have brought the Germans? Well, we wouldn't be talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki Day in August each year, but probably about the hell on earth that was a radioactive Berlin and Hamburg! Remember, those bombs were lovingly hand built with a German destination in mind...
Read, explore and learn from WWII history books written after 1990! Like Clay Blair's two volume set "Hitler's U-boat War."
