Don't think so. If they had been in a postion to use it becasue the war was dragging on and there were no allied troops inside Germany borders I don't belive there is any doubt it would have been used there first.
Agreed, if allied troops were outside Germany.
I don't think captured German scientists had all that much affect on the early A bombs. Germans who left because of Nazi religious and racial policy did though...
I took the liberty of computing the numbers for just 1939-1943 to give an idea of who would have been on top in the timeline resulting in RecruitMonty's mod (1944-45 is an abnormal situation for the purposes of this mod).
Junkers: 18,019 aircraft, of which the majority (53%) is the Ju-88. But they are very diversified, with 2,469 transports (Ju-52,Ju-252,Ju-290,Ju-352) and 3,869 Ju-87 Stukas being built.
Messerschmidt: 17,853 aircraft, of which the majority (76%) are Bf-109s. Remainder of their product line is largely fighters (Bf-110, Me 210, Me 410).
Focke-Wulf: 6,584 aircraft, of which majority (83%) are FW-190 derivatives.
Heinkel: 5,761 aircraft, of which 85% are He-111 bombers.
Dornier: 2,330 aircraft, of which majority (58%) are Do 217 Bombers followed by 20% Do 17.
Henschel: 1,149 aircraft, of which 55% are Hs129 Strafers.
Gotha: 43 aircraft, of which 100% are Go 244 transports.
Likely prospects Post War: The Big Four (Junkers, Messerschmidt, Focke-Wulf and Heinkel) are likely to swallow up smaller competitors as the cost of military aircraft gets bigger and bigger with the coming of the Late Jet Age (1950s), then the first airborne computers (late 1950s, early 1960s).
According to Flying Magazine Sep 1945; it took the US in 1939 about 150,000 engineering man hours to bring a heavy bomber to just beyond prototype stage; but this had been increased to 1.5 million man hours for the B-29 at the same stage of development; so you can see where this is going.
Its quite interesting watching peoples rational for where things would have gone & trying to base it on history.
First you have to take DRGs post & rationalise the atomic bomb never worked as Germany would have been the first target if things did not go the way they did.
Marks post with regards to manufacturing & Suhiirs about Panther being flawed also possibly hold little merit.
German designs at the start of the war were okay, Panther was good & fixed as best as a nation in industrial crisis probably could.
It was most likely rushed into service because Germany had limited manpower so better equipment would help alleviate that. The guy in charge had lost his marbles by then & pushed stuff into service ready or not I would guess. So what happens when he is dead & a more level head to R&D takes over.
Yes you can generalise to a degree using Suhiirs post Panther vs Sherman
USA take their time develop reliable easy to manufacture equipment, its a if not the main criteria.
Brits etc a more Ad Hoc approach possibly
Germany did make more (overly) complex stuff but if they had less "silly projects" & they were not rushed into service who knows how good they could have been.
Germany would have had to be at the forefront of new ammo & armour & engine research using different materials because they didn't have enough to maintain the war till it ended let alone if it extended.
Actually thinking about it if the war had gone on another 6 months or so the German Army of the early 50s would have been just the same as it was in real life.
Very little artillery because there are no shells to fire & hardly any vehicles because there was nothing to run them on even if they could manage somehow to keep production going.
Guys, the "Bah" was more of a general "hey wait, maybe we're getting sidetracked a little too much and talking a bit too much about alternate counterfactuals, plausibilities, instead of RecruitMonty's mod?"
I hope that RecruitMonty will be happy to see his interesting mod generating discussion and interest on here. I very strongly suspect the more interest and discussion the more people might take a look at and use the mod...
I wasn't expecting it but I'm chuffed about it.
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"Wir Deutschen sollten die Wahrheit auch dann ertragen lernen, wenn sie für uns günstig ist."
Don't think so. If they had been in a postion to use it becasue the war was dragging on and there were no allied troops inside Germany borders I don't belive there is any doubt it would have been used there first.
Agreed, if allied troops were outside Germany.
I don't think captured German scientists had all that much affect on the early A bombs. Germans who left because of Nazi religious and racial policy did though...
Germany was close to developing the A-Bomb. Some say the second US bomb was "made in Germany" - at least the raw materials. In 45 the US was still a long way off from being able to mass produce nuclear weapons. I believe you underestimate the destructive power of regular bombing on the Reich from 42-45. The same goes for the German peoples' will to resist. It took two A-bombs to knock Japan out - on top of everything else - and the US would not have been able to come up with a third so quick.
What is one more city in a war for survival?
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"Wir Deutschen sollten die Wahrheit auch dann ertragen lernen, wenn sie für uns günstig ist."
I should perhaps say I am not against this mod in any way (I have even downloaded it). I am just against the idea Hitler could have invaded Britain, or have forced her to make peace.
If I were going to do the -alternative- history I might base it on UK and France calling Hitlers bluff at Munich and the German General Staff removing Hitler at that point - as a good many of them planned, had war broken out in 1938- and then producing what would have been a right wing, but rather more democratic German Government, perhaps even including a return of a Kaiser (but perhaps in a more constitutional form) as many German soldiers desired, and coupled with an end to the vile, evil, and totally stupid, Nazi race laws.
In 1938 Germany, by then including Austria, certainly could have got peace on the removal of Hitler, and the other Nazis, from power.
Germany could continue to expand her military. Britain and France would have done likewise. Czechoslovakia and Poland would continue in the game, as would Great Britain and the Empire, France and Stalin's USSR, the USA, Japan and Italy.
Germany might still want to expand, but without a madman and a group of vile, evil, thugs leading the country and minus the racial/religious genocide and cold blooded deliberate, industrial, murder of millions of men, women and children.
Now on that basis it might make some sort of sense and in a German-Soviet war -without racial/religious genocide or the deliberate killing of civilians and POW's by Germany, Germany might even get allies not just within the USSR but outside it, since prior to 1939 Stalin had killed a lot more civilians than Germany had and the USSR was hardly popular in Western Europe.
What you have to give up on is Germany building a fleet. If she tries to then the British Empire becomes her enemy -because it has to to survive- and Germany cannot win that naval war as 1914-18 and 1939-45 proved beyond any doubt.
Germany, in the 1930's, minus Hitler and the Nazis, can make the British Empire and the USA, more or less, genuinely neutral, in the East, if she either avoids commitments to Japan or gets Japan to also look East and north and not South.
Mind you the USA had a fairly odd commitment to China in those days, that I have never seen much sense in, beyond the awful Japanese atrocities like their vile behaviour in Nanking in 1937.
Still food for thought I hope...
Of course, I have made my own thoughts about an alternate history. Many in fact - hence the different versions of the OOB. I thought, however, that it would be better if people came up with their own story.
Regarding the Eastern Front. There would not be Ukrainian "Nazis" fighting Russians in the Donetsk region at the moment if the Nazis had not been able to make friends with the locals. There were legions of Europeans - east and west alike - who were more than happy to go and fight the Bolsheviks. Don't always believe the hype.
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"Wir Deutschen sollten die Wahrheit auch dann ertragen lernen, wenn sie für uns günstig ist."
Would you folks mind posting some screenshots up of your various battles etc with the mod? I think the community might like seeing them. I don't have a clue how to otherwise I'd have done so already.
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"Wir Deutschen sollten die Wahrheit auch dann ertragen lernen, wenn sie für uns günstig ist."
Likely prospects Post War: The Big Four (Junkers, Messerschmidt, Focke-Wulf and Heinkel) are likely to swallow up smaller competitors as the cost of military aircraft gets bigger and bigger with the coming of the Late Jet Age (1950s), then the first airborne computers (late 1950s, early 1960s).
Then again, this may not be the actual result. In the United States; Curtiss-Wright produced 29,269 airplanes and employed 180,000 workers and was #2 in total contracts awarded just behind General Motors.
Yet Curtiss-Wright's last plane made for the US military was the XF-87 Blackhawk in 1948; with the entire airplane division of Curtiss-Wright being sold 100% to North American Aviation after the F-87 contracts were cancelled.
Likewise, McDonnell Aircraft Corporation started in 1939 and spent most of WW2 being a major parts subcontractor for the bigger primes; and produced a few prototype aircraft, then got big with the jet age in aviation and then swallowed Douglas Aircraft to become McDonnell Douglas.
Then there's internal politics: the German aviation industry is pretty much a deliberate creation of the Reich Air Ministry (RLM); so politics is a big thing in it -- in May 1941, Milch managed to bring Junkers, Messerschmitt and Heinkel under near-direct RLM control by:
*Using the dud of the Me210 to force Willy Messerschmidt from managerial control
*Ending the RLM practice of advance payments for aircraft yet to be delivered to cause a financial crisis at Heinkel, to force Ernst Heinkel out of management.
*Forcing Junkers' chairman Heinrich Koppenberg, into retirement.
So there's a lot of room for flavor here for the late 1950s and early 1960s stuff; e.g. you might as well see the Me 910 Gerfalke instead of the MBB Gerfalke (Slots 764-769 in OBAT35 - Grossdeutsches Reich); as the mergers of Messerschmitt with Bölkow and Blohm + Voss might never happen -- or the corporate identities of the two lesser units are subsumed by the larger company, as what happened with North American Rockwell / Rockwell International and Boeing -- the NAA/Rockwell identity was destroyed in Boeing, to the point that Boeing basically threw away a good portion of the North American Rockwell archives in dumpsters following the merger.
There is no question it would have been used there first if the war had dragged on. Germany was lucky it ended there in May[/color]
Don
Apparently, sometime in December 1944, as the Battle of the Bulge was reaching it's peak; FDR asked Groves if the bomb could be ready soon [tm] through speeded up research for tactical use against German spearheads.
The answer was no, but we'd have it ready by about August 1945.
Groves related some of this in a news interview in 1965 following publication of his book NOW IT CAN BE TOLD.