Perinquus wrote:
They wouldn't necessarily need suicide pilots. They might very well be able to adapt their
Mistel concept, which they developed to compensate for their lack of a heavy bomber to fill the tactical niche that U.S. Fortresses and Liberators, and British Lancasters did.
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Though they might need to develop the capability with a larger plane.
The
Mistel was tested operationally, and actually proved successful. The fighter pilot would fly the composite to the target, then release, and guide the unmanned, explosive-filled bomber in by remote control.
While the composite aircraft worked, their guidance links could be easily jammed as often happened, and maneuverability was horrible. IIRC, the guidance link was also very limited in what it could do, the fighter had to stree the aircraft into its terminal dive before releasining. The plane would of course remain fodder for defenses, it would be far worse of acutally since at least the cargo plane in its nomal mode could carry alot of defensive guns.
Also, if the Nazis had somehow gained the ability to make an a-bomb, I think it is entirely reasonable to suppose that they would have made the development of a larger rocket than the V2 an extremely high priority, and devoted the necessary resources, especially given how fanatical Hitler was for offensive "super weapons".
Your starting with a false premise "if they gained the ability to make an A-bomb". That is simply not possibul. If Germany had those resources everything is completely different and where basically discussing a fictional nation in a very different fictional war.
But anyway, the technolgoy and metallurgy where up to the job of building an atomic bomb. They could not support a ballistic missile with four times the throw weight. You can't simply scale the thing up. It took the US and USSR years with greater resources, and the full benfit of all of Germany's work through 1945 to do it. They also had the aid of such useful things as peace.
I realize they were wroking on this already, but they were also working on other "super weapons" which might have been scrapped or postponed in order to devote the maximum available resources to this project.
The entire German system was organized so as to ensure resources where wasted in vast amounts. But even with a maximum effort your not going to get much of a boost. Certainly not one equivalent to years of work by nations of superior resources.
To simply write it off by flatly saying: "Nope. Even if they got the bomb there's no way they could do it." just doesn't take into account the inevitable reordering of priorities that would take place in light of new capabilities. Now they might not develop a larger rocket in time to do them any good, but I think there can be little doubt that they would try.
Sure they'd try, and they'd fail. Look at the reality of the situation. The rest of the world didn't have nuclear capable ballistic missiles until the early 1950's, and those only then could loft nuclear warheads far lighter then the designs of the mid to late 40's. And that was with the benefit of German research and captured weapons and personal. How are the Germans going to do better then nations with three times the resources working in peace at with wartime priories, while having a hard pressed economy and allied bombers roving about by the thousands? It can't be done. All there going to do is waste even more resources.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
