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Borgholio wrote:Has anybody given thought to assistance from our allies? Canada and Mexico are within striking distance already for long-range bomber attacks. Their fighters could easily be relocated to the Midwest and Texas respectively while their land forces take the highways and assemble in whatever staging areas we have set up. European navies could arrive within a week once they were loaded and stocked with supplies.

It would be hilarious if Germany came to the rescue.

It would be hilarious if Germany came to the rescue.

I wouldn't be surprised if they at least tried to talk them into surrendering peacefully. These would be modern Germany's fathers and grandfathers...so fighting them would probably be a hard pill to swallow.

The Mexican Air Force is militarily insignificant- a squadron of F-5s and a collection of turboprop attack aircraft that don't have a tactically significant performance advantage over the Luftwaffe. The Royal Canadian Air Force, on the other hand, has roughly a hundred F-18s, plus at least some munitions stocks of their own that are probably NOT scattered overseas to anything like the same extent as the US's. They could make a significant contribution.

European aircraft flying in would mainly be helpful if they can keep up supply, which they can to an extent... but in my opinion, well, to what extent? We've seen the difficulty the European nations have with high-intensity combat that burns through their munitions supply rapidly in cases like Libya. If they really decide to go all out they can deliver a significant punch which would help, and in this case, they probably would- but they'd eat pretty heavily into their stockpiles.

Frankly, I expect this to be over before land forces from anywhere except maybe Canada could arrive in the theater of operations.

Thanas wrote: No they don't and I never stated that. Go back and read what I said.

Also, there are several thousand tanks. There are not several thousand guided munitions or predators available. Heck, the US has at best several hundreds of them and most will have to be transferred back. That too takes time.

Yeah that's a load of bullshit in every single issue. Over half of all US combat aircraft are based on the lower 48 states and the US has something around two hundred thousand guided air to surface weapons in its inventory. You just have no clue.

I highly doubt the USA has tens of thousands of guided munition bombs or missiles around ready for deployment. To my knowledge the Tomahawk and guided munitions stockpile at the start of the Iraq war was around ~20.000 Link.

Your knowlege is based off a useless link. The link quotes Tomahawks at a number now obsolete, over 3,500 new Tomahawks have been produced since, and the JDAM is from when JDAM was a brand new weapon only a few years old and only recently in full rate production. It meanwhile does not count laser guided bombs, or WCMD, or guided air launch missiles such as ALCM, Hellfire, AGM-130, Skipper II, or guided glide bombs. Or several weapons invented and mass produced since 2003. In fact JDAM gross production alone is now past 195,000 kits, and while large numbers were exported and others used, its nothing like that many, certainly over 100,000 kits are on hand for US use. The actual stockpile goal is about ~250,000 kits, enough to equip every iron bomb the USAF/USN intend to retain. In comparison the Cold War the US maintained about 1 million iron bombs on stockpile. A couple thousand laser guided bombs, Hellfires and TOW missiles apiece are produced each year, along with hundreds of each of several different type of stand off and ground launched missiles and glide bombs. The standing inventories of these weapons are much greater. SDB-1 inventory is around 12,000 weapons. Western Europe might be hopeless in a sustained war, but the US sure isn't.

comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/documents/defbudget/fy2015/fy2015_Weapons.pdf
Now meanwhile if you look at an actual document, of which the US provides vast numbers online in detail, this isn't detailed but its easier to read, this one is saying the US bought 10,415 JDAM kits in FY2014 alone. That's with budget cuts in play.

That is not enough to stop an invasion of 12 million men. Heck, the Nazi Army here has got ~19k tanks alone (and that is not including the assualt guns (13.5k), Tank hunters (~6.1k) and self-propelled armored artillery (1.7k)).

Of course something like a third of those vehicles have no better or even worse armor then found on a modern MRAP, and are vulnerable to modern .50cal gunfire at useful ranges. Which isn't really surprising anyway when you consider how much they weigh. Meanwhile the US Army has about eighteen hundred active duty M1 tanks. Zero are in Europe, about a hundred are in Korea, Something like twenty are in Afghanistan, and almost all of the rest are in the lower 48 states. Sounds like a fight to me considering that the US also has 20,000 something Javelin missiles and god knows how many TOW missiles. Honestly I suspect the US does not know how many it really has, production for the world is some comical number like 375,000, around half for the US service but also going back to 1971.

The US would easily down the old planes with SAMs, but it is unlikely to put a huge dent in the Nazi forces with AAMs, as there are not that many combat aircraft (see sortie rate) and even after firing every single RIM-7 and AIM-120 still combat-worthy (around 40 k IRRC), Germans will still have over 90 000 aircraft pieces. The total production is 133 000 after all.

I wonder just how much could be destroyed within the first day of the attack. That is the most important question which determines just how fast the war ends.

Well, as soon as all those planes try to land after their first sorties, the Germans encounter problems.

US air defenses (mostly scrambled fighters; our ground based air defense is not stellar) will reap an enormous destructive toll on Luftwaffe planes in the air; there will probably be a lot of 100 and 200-bomber raids that turn back after taking 20% or higher losses on the way to the target without ever even seeing the enemy. That kind of thing is very demoralizing and in normal military operations would be a sign that you might want to reconsider the attack.

[Yes, a WWII bomber force sometimes will press the attack after taking double-digit-percent casualties, as witnessed at Ploesti, but they generally aren't very effective at that point.]

Other formations, not engaged so heavily (i.e., they don't get four F-15s firing full loads of missiles into them and blowing away thirty aircraft in a matter of seconds), or not engaged at all (due to the sheer number of different attack groups that must be countered) will press the attack and deliver their payloads- but even assuming detailed maps of the eastern United States, the Germans would be bombing targets based on their perception of what is strategically important and desirable to destroy. Expect a lot of area bombing of urban centers, which frankly won't have much effect on the military response in the short term even if it causes massive property damage. The worst damage would be that caused to transportation nodes, but if the Germans are planning to spread out over a wide area to avoid being clumped up and destroyed in a giant Kesselschlacht around Atlanta, they can't afford to blow up too many highway interchanges.

Now, the Germans have a whole mess of problems.

1) As observed above, the Luftwaffe necessarily has fewer pilots, aircrews, and maintenance teams than it does aircraft. Because while a pilot often outlives their plane, the reverse is seldom true.

2) The aircraft they do have are of literally every type they ever fielded, which is going to make maintenance a nightmare.

3) They do not have a pre-established system of ground-based control infrastructure. They can commandeer civilian air traffic control, but a lot of these controls are computerized and literally no one in the Luftwaffe knows how to operate a computer. Moreover, the civilian infrastructure in and around Atlanta is totally unequipped to cope with a hundred and twenty thousand planes all trying to land on the same day.

So in effect, the Luftwaffe planes will have no ground control, few or no navigational beacons (important if some of them are landing in unfavorable conditions). The actual airports in the area will be swamped, even assuming massive Luftwaffe ground crews are instantaneously standing by to get planes off the runway as fast as possible. Planes damaged by ground fire (there will be some) may crash on landing, causing fires that block runways, and the equipment to remove those planes will be minimal.

So you'll get German planes in the air trying to find any place to land, in serious danger of running out of fuel.

Someone suggested that they try landing on random stretches of highway- but wait! Highways in this area are choked with German troops and refugees, all trying to spread outward. There are no long straight stretches of road that one can confidently put a plane down on without blocking them- and even if you try, you'll block that road for any troop columns or supply convoys trying to move down it later.

Honestly, I suspect that the Germans will suffer more effective losses to the chaos of landing after their first wave of attacks than they will to the US Air Force during those attacks... which is saying quite a bit. Many of the 'lost' planes could in theory be salvaged and refurbished by ground crews*... but there's no time and there aren't remotely enough crews or equipment to do that before the whole thing becomes irrelevant.

Because in the first night after the invasion, you're going to see massive US airstrikes against any concentration of German planes on the ground. Runways at the airports immediately around Atlanta will effectively cease to exist.

The chaotic tangles of airplanes that were frantically pulled off the runways by ground crews to make more room for massive numbers of extra landings, tens or hundreds of times more planes than those airports were ever intended to receive at once, will be hit from the air by long range bombs or missiles, after detailed information on their positions is acquired by satellites and high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft (the 1960-era PVO may have been able to handle U-2s quite well, but the Luftwaffe hasn't a prayer).

I have no idea how many planes the Germans will lose to the combination of crashes and rough-field landings on the first day, plus bombing of the actual airfields on the first night. But it's going to be staggering. When the surviving German pilots make it out of their dugouts the next day, they will not awake to see functioning airbases capable of launching fresh thousand-bomber sorties. They will see total chaos.

In many cases, just physically locating pilots trained to operate the surviving available aircraft will be hard. Say, all the Me-262 pilots at one base were killed when a 2000-pound bomb crashed through their roof, while all the Me-262 airframes at another base were destroyed on the ground by aerial cluster bombing. So somehow you need to figure out which pilots should go to which airfields and ship them there, without centralized computer databases, with enemy ELINT assets methodically identifying any command center that transmits enough radio signals and calling up a plane to fire a homing missile at it.

So... as a practical matter, the Luftwaffe will be hors de combat after the first round of sorties. Not so much because of the casualties inflicted in the air by Air Force planes, as by the casualties inflicted afterward by the massively over-concentrated starting position the Germans start from, which makes the planes unlikely to land safely and very easy to target for destruction while parked on the ground.

There will be a certain number of sorties flown, of course- but nowhere near enough to matter on the overall scale of the offensive.
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*Say, after landing on isolated rural roads that don't go anywhere, and hopefully the pilots not getting killed by angry farmers with shotguns, as might happen in Britain during the Blitz...

Just to play with this a little more, I went here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ai ... lanta_area

Now, Atlanta's main international airport is hugely busy, and they manage a daily average of about 2600 flights per day. That is per day, not "all in a span of 3-4 hours as airplanes that are out of gas come in for landings." Moreover, that is with the full use of their computerized traffic management systems, which the Germans can't access and can't operate.

Let us assume that by pixie magic, the Germans can somehow manage to coordinate landings as fast as the Atlanta airport's personnel under normal operating conditions.

That's on five runways.

Given that Luftwaffe planes need MUCH shorter runways than modern jets, each runway could for German purposes probably be subdivided into two (you guys land at THIS end, you guys land at THAT end, try not to taxi too far into the middle). You can't subdivide into three, because then the approach corridor for the planes landing in the middle is at most a few hundred feet above the corridor for planes landing at either end.

Assume that by further pixie magic, that gives them the capacity to land as if the airport had ten runways rather than five, and that this actually does double the number of planes that can safely land (which is bullshit, but we're being generous).

The nearest air force base (Dobbins ARB) has two runways, one of which can probably be subdivided into two (it's ten thousand feet long), and one of which probably can't (it's only 3500 feet long; Luftwaffe planes MIGHT be able to land in a 1500-foot space but it sounds risky). That makes three.

Covington Municipal Airport has one runway (probably subdividable, 5500 feet long). Peachtree-DeKalb has four runways (one probably subdividable, three probably not). Fulton County Airport has three runways (one subdividable). Cobb, Gwinnett, and Newnan-Coweta County Airports each have one ~6000 foot runway (subdividable). Cartersville Airport likewise. Cherokee and Henry County Airports have runways too short to safely subdivide unless you really like living dangerously, as does Atlanta Regional. Paulding Northwest Atlanta's runway... probably subdividable.

So we have thirteen plus... one plus five plus four plus six plus two plus three plus two. Thirty-six runways, many of which consist of the other end of an existing runway.

And, hm, there are a few small private or closed airports- call that about six more runways.

Assuming the Germans can operate ALL these fields at the same extremely high rate that record-setting Hartsfeld-Jackson operates (i.e. a bout 500 flights per runway per day, averaging about 20 flights per runway per hour, which probably translates into a peak capacity of more like 25 or even 30 flights per runway per hour). Again, this will involve pixie magic.

[EDIT: a friend suggested I be even MORE generous. Since German planes are tiny compared to passenger jets, they won't cause so much turbulence, so we can hope to land them safely at only one-minute intervals instead of two, so make that 60 flights per runway per hour.

Making these extremely favorable assumptions, they can physically land about 2500 planes per hour on actual airports in the Atlanta area. That translates to only fifteen or at most twenty thousand of the Luftwaffe planes being able to land in anything like an orderly fashion before the whole landing operation becomes a moot point due to the planes all having run out of gas... also it being pitch dark. By the end of it, each runway is home to a 'parking lot' full of roughly 400 or 500 densely packed aircraft, an inviting target for cluster bombs or for that matter a stick of regular bombs.

So we can just plain write off the vast majority of the planes the Luftwaffe put in the air. Either they're ditched on a random highway in the middle of nowhere (and cannot be reserviced and prepared to fly again tomorrow), or they crashed when they ran out of fuel while waiting to land. Or they're packed tight on runways that are going to get blown to hell some time that night, during which time the US can put several hundred German planes out of commission with the bombload of a few F-16s bombing each 'parking lot.' That involves hitting at most 30-40 targets spread out over about fifteen locations.

The Germans may get 120000 sorties on the first day (many of them from transport, trainer, and fighter aircraft, not bombers), but they'll be desperately, insanely lucky to get 10% of that on the second day. It might be more like 1%.

Simon what about the local airfields? You forget America is lousy with small and regional airports which would be fine for landing a squadron or two of planes at. Hell I have two state parks near me which are converted airfields the county no wanted to maintain. However the airfields are just fine for landing small planes if not a 747.

Simon_Jester wrote:Well, as soon as all those planes try to land after their first sorties, the Germans encounter problems.
US air defenses (mostly scrambled fighters; our ground based air defense is not stellar) will reap an enormous destructive toll on Luftwaffe planes in the air; there will probably be a lot of 100 and 200-bomber raids that turn back after taking 20% or higher losses on the way to the target without ever even seeing the enemy. That kind of thing is very demoralizing and in normal military operations would be a sign that you might want to reconsider the attack.

But they know what they are up against, and they also know there is nothing good for them if they surrender. Being efficient only matters in the first few hours of the first day, while the shock is still fresh. The more they wait, the more they lose. It is imperative to cause the greatest casualties in the first few hours because time plays against them. Retreat or reconsideration is actually defeat, while kamikaze-like destructive insanity at the start will tip the scales a bit in their favor.

the Germans would be bombing targets based on their perception of what is strategically important and desirable to destroy. Expect a lot of area bombing of urban centers, which frankly won't have much effect on the military response in the short term even if it causes massive property damage. The worst damage would be that caused to transportation nodes, but if the Germans are planning to spread out over a wide area to avoid being clumped up and destroyed in a giant Kesselschlacht around Atlanta, they can't afford to blow up too many highway interchanges.

I thought Zor specified they have awareness of the military targets, that is airbases first and foremost. Not sure how US aircraft is stored at present, but I doubt that in bunkers. Given the no warning situation, dispersal will not occur in immediate vicinity, and airfields will burn, with hangars, too. The forward deployed Russian airforce was wiped out on the ground, and on the ground an I-16 is the same thing as an F-22.

Maintenance is irrelevant, the aircraft is largely useful only for the first day, maybe two at most. It is unlikely anything except jet powered bombers and fighters will return, or even matter enough to warrant a return and landing. You are right - only the first hours matter. Pilots have a map and they know there is no return. All planes are fully loaded for ATG, so it is a wave of destruction and then no airforce to speak of.

they also know there is nothing good for them if they surrender.

How so? Rather than attacking outright and killing millions of US citizens, they choose to surrender and negotiate with the US in peace. That right there means we won't be as harsh with them as if they had proceeded with their attacks. I mean they just appeared out of nowhere, 70 years after they had left, in the middle of a nation which can pound them into the ground once the shock wears off. Why go forward with it and get killed? Why not just surrender and go home?

Mr Bean wrote:Simon what about the local airfields? You forget America is lousy with small and regional airports which would be fine for landing a squadron or two of planes at. Hell I have two state parks near me which are converted airfields the county no wanted to maintain. However the airfields are just fine for landing small planes if not a 747.

I explicitly included a number of such small and regional airports; there is considerable duplication between the list you linked to and the list I linked to.

However, I did NOT include airports not "in the Atlanta area," because I deemed it unlikely that the Germans would be able to occupy and secure the entire state of Georgia in time to perform highly efficient and fast landing operations at airports in the vicinity of, say, Savannah. By the time the ground force physically arrives at those locations, even assuming it doesn't run into serious resistance anywhere along the way, it's too late. The planes already in the air are too low on fuel and there won't be enough time to land more than a handful of them.

Now don't get me wrong. Of the planes outside those 'lucky' 15-20 thousand that make it down to airports around Atlanta with the aid of magic pixie Air Traffic Control... most of them are in some sense 'survived.'

Lots and lots of German planes will set down on roads and grass strips and random fields and state parks that used to be runways, and so on. These planes aren't GONE, they're not physically destroyed, the crews usually survive.

But on the whole, all these tens of thousands of planes that make desperately improvised rough field landings... they are 'mission killed' for purposes of getting to sortie again the next day. They're not located in a place where they can realistically be serviced, rearmed, and prepared to fight again the next day.

Granted, some of them can, so maybe my "1%" figure is unduly pessimistic on that basis. Maybe the total Luftwaffe sortie capability on the second day is in the high single digit thousands, or even the low double digit thousands.

But you can't land hundreds of Messerschmidts and Ju-88s on a single isolated grass strip in the middle of a park, and expect them to be operational again the next day.

And to really 'fix' this problem the Luftwaffe faces, you would need not just a few small airstrips but dozens of big ones, enough to coordinate tens of thousands of aircraft landings an hour, with dispersed, protected revetments to keep the planes from being taken out on the ground by cluster bombs.

That kind of infrastructure just plain doesn't exist in or around Atlanta, or for that matter anywhere in the state of Georgia.

Stas Bush wrote:But they know what they are up against, and they also know there is nothing good for them if they surrender. Being efficient only matters in the first few hours of the first day, while the shock is still fresh. The more they wait, the more they lose. It is imperative to cause the greatest casualties in the first few hours because time plays against them. Retreat or reconsideration is actually defeat, while kamikaze-like destructive insanity at the start will tip the scales a bit in their favor.

Except that you aren't going to see all pilots in the whole Luftwaffe turning into kamikazes like that.

The point is, just happening to run into one USAF fighter squadron could turn a confident MIGHTY SEVERAL HUNDRED BOMBER RAID force into an "OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED" force of the sort produced by mass casualties over Ploesti and Schweinfurt in a matter of minutes. And the US Air Force has the potential to inflict such casualties on various Luftwaffe attack groups many, many times over the course of the day.

I thought Zor specified they have awareness of the military targets, that is airbases first and foremost. Not sure how US aircraft is stored at present, but I doubt that in bunkers. Given the no warning situation, dispersal will not occur in immediate vicinity, and airfields will burn, with hangars, too. The forward deployed Russian airforce was wiped out on the ground, and on the ground an I-16 is the same thing as an F-22.

The German bombers are flying at a few hundred miles an hour over a country with basically universal radar coverage. The military airbases close to Atlanta will be targeted and destroyed before their planes can take off.

But if you look at, say, Andrews Air Force Base in the neighborhood of Washington DC... it's definitely on the Luftwaffe's target list, but it's roughly 550 miles from Atlanta to Washington. They'll have about two hours advance notice of the German attack before bombers can possibly arrive. They WILL have F-16s in the air by then.

And for this purpose it really doesn't matter how many planes the Germans devote to destroying the base- they physically can't get there fast enough to outrun news of their coming, or to stop fighters from taking off before they arrive.

Maintenance is irrelevant, the aircraft is largely useful only for the first day, maybe two at most. It is unlikely anything except jet powered bombers and fighters will return, or even matter enough to warrant a return and landing. You are right - only the first hours matter. Pilots have a map and they know there is no return. All planes are fully loaded for ATG, so it is a wave of destruction and then no airforce to speak of.

Except that this kind of mass kamikaze attack is not humanly realistic and practical, unless we assume that literally every Luftwaffe pilot has been replaced by a frothing lunatic whose only desire in life is to kill and die for the cause of making the RAR work.

Borgholio wrote:

they also know there is nothing good for them if they surrender.

How so? Rather than attacking outright and killing millions of US citizens, they choose to surrender and negotiate with the US in peace. That right there means we won't be as harsh with them as if they had proceeded with their attacks. I mean they just appeared out of nowhere, 70 years after they had left, in the middle of a nation which can pound them into the ground once the shock wears off. Why go forward with it and get killed? Why not just surrender and go home?

Where is home, in this context? Modern Germany doesn't want millions of Nazi refugees. Modern US doesn't, either. There would be no sense of belonging or continuity, and assimilating them into the population would be at best extremely awkward, in either case. Some of them would probably give up and try to lead something close to a normal life, sure, but for many, the displacement would probably create a "nothing to lose" scenario, too.

Well keep in mind they're not all actual Nazis. A vast majority of the German military was not part of the Nazi party, they were just doing their duty to fight for Germany. I wonder how many of them would want to live to see their (now elderly) children or their grandchildren? The RAR only says they appear out of nowhere, it doesn't actually explain their motivation to fight. Who told them to attack? Why do they have to attack?

Raw Shark wrote:Where is home, in this context? Modern Germany doesn't want millions of Nazi refugees. Modern US doesn't, either. There would be no sense of belonging or continuity, and assimilating them into the population would be at best extremely awkward, in either case. Some of them would probably give up and try to lead something close to a normal life, sure, but for many, the displacement would probably create a "nothing to lose" scenario, too.

Speaking of that. How the hell did these German soldiers get where they are? And I am not talking about the means but the motive. Basically, can we seriously realistically expect that these people were somehow willingly convinced into entering the situation as described? I can easily see the German army realizing that they are screwed and just collectively taking out what ever fanatical leaders refuse to surrender before trying to negotiate terms.

Borgholio wrote:

they also know there is nothing good for them if they surrender.

How so? Rather than attacking outright and killing millions of US citizens, they choose to surrender and negotiate with the US in peace. That right there means we won't be as harsh with them as if they had proceeded with their attacks. I mean they just appeared out of nowhere, 70 years after they had left, in the middle of a nation which can pound them into the ground once the shock wears off. Why go forward with it and get killed? Why not just surrender and go home?

It depends. Nazis were fanatically loyal and devoted to the Reich; many kept fighting until the bitter end, after all. The OP stipulates a scenario where they already have crews headed to bomb the hell out of US airbases. After all, with the maps there the Germans can concentrate on annihilating military targets first and foremost with fanatical dedication; even if they do not firebomb the town centers and try to keep civilian casualties to a minimum, they are going to be trialled for war crimes in both this and past life immediately upon surrendering. The life of a time-travelling Nazi soldier, if survived, would be hell: the life of the lowest type of migrant, despised and hated by everyone as scum, including even their descendants in present-day Germany, no citizenship and quite likely treated much worse than illegal mirgants from Latin America.

Meanwhile, if they really concentrate all they have on bombing the hell out of the US and if they (as per the second option) get advanced gear, say, every medium bomber being an Ar 234 or even Ju 287, the nearby airfields are going to be wasted.

Simon_Jester wrote:Except that you aren't going to see all pilots in the whole Luftwaffe turning into kamikazes like that.

But are they kamikaze? Jumping off the plane with a parachute because there's nowhere to land is perfectly normal. Trying to return back knowing that (1) there is nowhere to land (2) by next dawn most of the planes will not be able to take off or even be destroyed is pointless. Only if the first attack is strong enough to literally cripple the USAF, can the Germans care about the Luftwaffe machines surviving. As to the Germans, they would surrender after parachuting.

Simon_Jester wrote:And the US Air Force has the potential to inflict such casualties on various Luftwaffe attack groups many, many times over the course of the day.

It does, but the numerical disparity is immense and, depending on how and where the fighters are placed and what sort of technology the Germans have, may become even more lopsided when the first airfields are wrecked. In essence, the first wave knows that their attack is the best chance they have.

Simon_Jester wrote:But if you look at, say, Andrews Air Force Base in the neighborhood of Washington DC... it's definitely on the Luftwaffe's target list, but it's roughly 550 miles from Atlanta to Washington. They'll have about two hours advance notice of the German attack before bombers can possibly arrive. They WILL have F-16s in the air by then.

That is true - in the low-tech scenario they are going to have planes in the air before that. In the high-tech scenario the time to raise airplanes before DC is hit is slightly less than one hour, and then the jet bombers will arrive at DC. In this case airplanes will still be in the air, but how many? All? I just wonder how many planes the US can raise in 1 hour or so.

I am not saying they are kamikazes; they can parachute all they want and surrender, but the attack already started, did it not? And they are a fanatically loyal Nazi military, too.

Borgholio wrote:A vast majority of the German military was not part of the Nazi party, they were just doing their duty to fight for Germany.

They were soldiers who were trained to hate subhumans for a whole decade by the Nazi government. Their military committed untold crimes against civilian populations in Eastern Europe precisely because they were following the Nazi ideology where the life of subhumans is worth nothing. The military was given special orders to consider the conquered people of a lesser sort, and thus only useful to build the Reich while dying in the process. The most fanatically devoted went to the SS, that was like an order, but all of them to a degree were Nazi: that was the only ideology ever known to them.

Stas Bush wrote:It depends. Nazis were fanatically loyal and devoted to the Reich; many kept fighting until the bitter end, after all. The OP stipulates a scenario where they already have crews headed to bomb the hell out of US airbases. After all, with the maps there the Germans can concentrate on annihilating military targets first and foremost with fanatical dedication; even if they do not firebomb the town centers and try to keep civilian casualties to a minimum, they are going to be trialled for war crimes in both this and past life immediately upon surrendering. The life of a time-travelling Nazi soldier, if survived, would be hell: the life of the lowest type of migrant, despised and hated by everyone as scum, including even their descendants in present-day Germany, no citizenship and quite likely treated much worse than illegal mirgants from Latin America.

I think the lack of a civilian population to protect will reduce the 'fanatical resistance' aspect. That was a major factor in the desperate resistance on the Eastern Front as it collapsed in 1944-45, and the relatively weaker resistance on the Western Front after December 1944.

While the time-traveling German soldiers might well experience some bad years, the average front-line soldier or airman has a reasonably good chance of having a good life over the long haul- enough so that they are NOT likely to decide as one to go "DEATH BEFORE SURRENDER" and commit suicide against vastly superior forces.

Meanwhile, if they really concentrate all they have on bombing the hell out of the US and if they (as per the second option) get advanced gear, say, every medium bomber being an Ar 234 or even Ju 287, the nearby airfields are going to be wasted.

The nearby airfields get pounded no matter what happens, because the German bombers can move faster than the jets can scramble. The definition of "near" depends on the speed of the planes. Under no condition is it going to be more than a radius of a few hundred miles.

Simon_Jester wrote:Except that you aren't going to see all pilots in the whole Luftwaffe turning into kamikazes like that.

But are they kamikaze? Jumping off the plane with a parachute because there's nowhere to land is perfectly normal. Trying to return back knowing that (1) there is nowhere to land (2) by next dawn most of the planes will not be able to take off or even be destroyed is pointless.

What I mean is, choosing to remain in the air and wait for the next attack to instantly kill thirty of your planes, and the next, and the next... rather than turning back or just trying to find a place to land. You might as well land NOW in the middle of hostile territory rather than waiting for a missile to get you.

Or, hell, having the attack be so disrupted by these sudden missile attacks blowing holes in the formations that many of the attack groups just plain get lost and fail to attack the target. Remember that this was a real hazard for WWII formations; their navigation capabilities were primitive and it was easy for a large bomber force to get scattered on the way to the target. Even if everyone's grimly determined to press the attack, a lot of them will end up hitting the wrong target or hitting nothing of any importance, and they won't arrive together which makes it much easier for any air defense units in the vicinity to pick them off.

That is true - in the low-tech scenario they are going to have planes in the air before that. In the high-tech scenario the time to raise airplanes before DC is hit is slightly less than one hour, and then the jet bombers will arrive at DC. In this case airplanes will still be in the air, but how many? All? I just wonder how many planes the US can raise in 1 hour or so.

Quite a few- enough to at least meaningfully harass Luftwaffe formations and make precision bombing difficult.

The aircraft destroyed on the ground are most likely to be things like transport planes that take longer to get airborne and are lower priority.

Also note that there are very great numbers of USAF aircraft that aren't within range of Luftwaffe attacks except at the end of long one-way flights, and such attacks will have been in the air for so long that not only will the fighters at target bases have had time to get into the air and fight back, they'll have had time to get up, shoot, land, shoot again, and possibly repeat the process.

Simon_Jester wrote:I think the lack of a civilian population to protect will reduce the 'fanatical resistance' aspect. That was a major factor in the desperate resistance on the Eastern Front as it collapsed in 1944-45, and the relatively weaker resistance on the Western Front after December 1944.

While the time-traveling German soldiers might well experience some bad years, the average front-line soldier or airman has a reasonably good chance of having a good life over the long haul- enough so that they are NOT likely to decide as one to go "DEATH BEFORE SURRENDER" and commit suicide against vastly superior forces.

Depends on what they know about their situation, really. If they know they're attacking a different US (with maps and everything), and they either know or will soon know that they are basically ressurected war soldiers of the defeated Reich, they may very well consider themselves to be on a revenge mission from Providence, God, Valhalla or you name it - a higher power. That gives a greater sense of purpose to their mission.

Simon_Jester wrote:The nearby airfields get pounded no matter what happens, because the German bombers can move faster than the jets can scramble. The definition of "near" depends on the speed of the planes. Under no condition is it going to be more than a radius of a few hundred miles.

Like I said, a lot of it depends on whether they get a mix of old and new craft or all their jet aircraft in the same numbers. With jets, they could obliterate every airbase within 200 km before the first airplanes rise. By 30:00 min every airbase within 400 km would be obliterated. By 60:00 min, every airbase within 600 km is within reach and, given the sheer numbers, likely to be obliterated even if some raised craft survive. And on the other hand with old planes only 100 to 300 km are going to be a zone of complete airbase obliteration.

Simon_Jester wrote:What I mean is, choosing to remain in the air and wait for the next attack to instantly kill thirty of your planes, and the next, and the next... rather than turning back or just trying to find a place to land. You might as well land NOW in the middle of hostile territory rather than waiting for a missile to get you.

You may also concentrate on nearby areas understanding that the enemy is likely to be decades ahead of you in terms of technology. Yes, one attack can kill thirty airplanes, but to replenish missiles the enemy aircraft has to return and be serviced at an airbase. Attacking farther targets may be deemed impossible under the circumstances (when first waves of planes are slaughtered) and it will only give the Nazis a greater incentive to get the most out of their short-range superiority.

Simon_Jester wrote:Quite a few- enough to at least meaningfully harass Luftwaffe formations and make precision bombing difficult

How many planes can be scrambled in a given time? I guess only Sea Skimmer can adequately answer that.

Simon_Jester wrote:Also note that there are very great numbers of USAF aircraft that aren't within range of Luftwaffe attacks except at the end of long one-way flights, and such attacks will have been in the air for so long that not only will the fighters at target bases have had time to get into the air and fight back, they'll have had time to get up, shoot, land, shoot again, and possibly repeat the process.

It is quite possible these won't even be attacked. What is the point of sending your 1500 km one-way bomber to fly 1000 km and risk being lost when the enemy capital (Washington, DC) is ~700 km away? If 'Nazis from hell' have some sort of a plan to fight a vastly superior enemy, surely they can understand this much.

Borgholio wrote:Well keep in mind they're not all actual Nazis. A vast majority of the German military was not part of the Nazi party, they were just doing their duty to fight for Germany. I wonder how many of them would want to live to see their (now elderly) children or their grandchildren? The RAR only says they appear out of nowhere, it doesn't actually explain their motivation to fight. Who told them to attack? Why do they have to attack?

Long story short they have memories about being displaced in a special one way one time event by the Nazi government to take over the US using some strange artifact that they found somewhere in the balkans.

Zor

Stas Bush wrote:Like I said, a lot of it depends on whether they get a mix of old and new craft or all their jet aircraft in the same numbers. With jets, they could obliterate every airbase within 200 km before the first airplanes rise. By 30:00 min every airbase within 400 km would be obliterated. By 60:00 min, every airbase within 600 km is within reach and, given the sheer numbers, likely to be obliterated even if some raised craft survive. And on the other hand with old planes only 100 to 300 km are going to be a zone of complete airbase obliteration.

On the other hand, certain targets actually are well protected, to the tune of being able to defeat hundred or thousand bomber raids or at least disrupt them so fully that they would be ineffectual. Washington, D.C. has a large number of Avenger vehicles that can drown any aircraft flying below 15000 feet or so with Stinger missile barrages. Norfolk Navy Yard has AEGIS destroyers tied up in harbor that can fire off literally hundreds of SAMs and down more (WWII-quality) aircraft with gunfire.

And while they have many planes they do not have infinitely many planes- it takes something like 100-1000 sorties to assure destruction of any given large target with WWII technology.

...Also, I'm trying to find statistics for the number of bombers the Luftwaffe actually had, and... where is this 120000 plane figure coming from? Luftwaffe operational strength doesn't seem to have exceeded about 5000 serviceable airframes at any point in the war, and while I'm sure a lot of planes were lost quickly, it seems hard to believe that planes were being. The number of planes they can actually operate, which can deliver significant bombload to bases several hundred kilometers away, is thus going to look a lot more like single digit thousands of bombers than like the much-dreaded tens of thousands of bombers. Even if all those bombers are jets, that still limits the total number of targets they can hit in force.

You may also concentrate on nearby areas understanding that the enemy is likely to be decades ahead of you in terms of technology. Yes, one attack can kill thirty airplanes, but to replenish missiles the enemy aircraft has to return and be serviced at an airbase. Attacking farther targets may be deemed impossible under the circumstances (when first waves of planes are slaughtered) and it will only give the Nazis a greater incentive to get the most out of their short-range superiority.

Right- but the point is that causing this kind of destruction is ultimately irrelevant given that the bulk of the operational combat aircraft remain out of your reach, because they will either take off (and land at a base you didn't hit), or simply never get attacked at all.

Simon_Jester wrote:Quite a few- enough to at least meaningfully harass Luftwaffe formations and make precision bombing difficult

How many planes can be scrambled in a given time? I guess only Sea Skimmer can adequately answer that.

While I don't have exact numbers, the US Air Force certainly does retain a large if not 100% fraction of its fighter force ready to scramble on short notice.

It is quite possible these won't even be attacked. What is the point of sending your 1500 km one-way bomber to fly 1000 km and risk being lost when the enemy capital (Washington, DC) is ~700 km away? If 'Nazis from hell' have some sort of a plan to fight a vastly superior enemy, surely they can understand this much.

The point is that if these bases are not attacked then they represent an unattackable redoubt from which the enemy can coordinate their own long range airstrikes and hammer the expanding German pocket.

1.) German jets were not bombers. There were stupid attempts to make them fighter bombers but they failed.

2.) There numbers were small and the Luftwaffe had pilots to fly a small percent of them.

3. ) Their range was short. An me262 has a combat radius of 300 miles.

Patroklos wrote:1.) German jets were not bombers. There were stupid attempts to make them fighter bombers but they failed.

Wait a tick, the Arado 234 never had a chance to do any serious bombing, the 262 by contrast was used and when they tried area bombardment it worked fine but ground attack was a disaster which speaks to me more to German pilots trained and familiar with one set of speeds and feelings being asked to now do it with 20% less reaction time due to the higher speeds not to mention the 262 lack of armoring.

Still all told in scenario 1 it's less than a 1000 planes all told.

Simon_Jester wrote:The point is, just happening to run into one USAF fighter squadron could turn a confident MIGHTY SEVERAL HUNDRED BOMBER RAID force into an "OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED" force of the sort produced by mass casualties over Ploesti and Schweinfurt in a matter of minutes. And the US Air Force has the potential to inflict such casualties on various Luftwaffe attack groups many, many times over the course of the day.

How quickly would the US forces have to move to make sure the radio chatter from one of those unlucky raids is heard by other bomber raids ?

The US screwing with their radio communications could be a big deal. How much damage could the US do by feeding them false intel/orders ?

Mr Bean wrote:

Patroklos wrote:1.) German jets were not bombers. There were stupid attempts to make them fighter bombers but they failed.

Wait a tick, the Arado 234 never had a chance to do any serious bombing, the 262 by contrast was used and when they tried area bombardment it worked fine but ground attack was a disaster which speaks to me more to German pilots trained and familiar with one set of speeds and feelings being asked to now do it with 20% less reaction time due to the higher speeds not to mention the 262 lack of armoring.

Frankly, at jet fighter speeds, ground attack becomes difficult if not impossible without guided weapons, or at least without computerized bombsights and gunsights. There's a reason that turboprop aircraft hung on in the ground attack role into the Vietnam era.

Still all told in scenario 1 it's less than a 1000 planes all told.

Well, the scenario 1 Luftwaffe has about 200-250 Ar 234s, of varying models. About 1700 jet fighters, mostly Me-262s that can at least sort of carry a bomb load to nearby targets (not like they'll be useful as fighters, so even if they're miserably inadequate as Jabos, it's the best that can be done under the circumstances)... and no tactically significant numbers of any other jet aircraft. So they have enough real jet bombers for one or two strikes, probably against the most distant targets they can hope to surprise.

Plus the Me 262s which would likewise probably best be employed as long range light bombers against a small number of key targets that they can hope to achieve tactical surprise against.

In the "UBERMENSCHEN" scenario or whatever we're calling it, literally all Luftwaffe twin-engine bombers are presumably replaced by Ar 234s, all twin engine fighters by '262s, and the massive swarm of single-engine fighter aircraft would probably be replaced by a mix of high-end piston engine aircraft (i.e. late model Fw 190, or the Ta 152) and jet interceptors (i.e the He 163).

However, this still only gives them a finite number of actual bombers, especially in light of the limited available aircrews. I can't find any reasonable estimate of the total number of trained jet pilots the Luftwaffe ever had; note that many of them will NOT be very experienced on jet aircraft.

bilateralrope wrote:

Simon_Jester wrote:The point is, just happening to run into one USAF fighter squadron could turn a confident MIGHTY SEVERAL HUNDRED BOMBER RAID force into an "OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED" force of the sort produced by mass casualties over Ploesti and Schweinfurt in a matter of minutes. And the US Air Force has the potential to inflict such casualties on various Luftwaffe attack groups many, many times over the course of the day.

How quickly would the US forces have to move to make sure the radio chatter from one of those unlucky raids is heard by other bomber raids ?

Uh... I don't think it'd be very useful to do this. While taking thirty planes down in thirty seconds might break up and neutralize one attacking force, it will not neutralize all of them; the Germans aren't going to scare that easily.

The US screwing with their radio communications could be a big deal. How much damage could the US do by feeding them false intel/orders ?

While the US will be able to decrypt German communications faster than the Germans themselves can, effectively falsifying their communications might actually not be a trivially easy task. Historically, this was not tried often even when the available radio technology would arguably have allowed it, although the British had a lot of fun creating decoy navigational beacons so that German bombers would get lost and bomb random cornfields instead of their actual cities.

Jamming, on the other hand, is gonna be an issue- the US forces have a much more complex and capable array of more powerful radio jammers than the Germans.

Zor wrote:

Borgholio wrote:Well keep in mind they're not all actual Nazis. A vast majority of the German military was not part of the Nazi party, they were just doing their duty to fight for Germany. I wonder how many of them would want to live to see their (now elderly) children or their grandchildren? The RAR only says they appear out of nowhere, it doesn't actually explain their motivation to fight. Who told them to attack? Why do they have to attack?

Long story short they have memories about being displaced in a special one way one time event by the Nazi government to take over the US using some strange artifact that they found somewhere in the balkans.

Zor

So they are still under the impression we're at war and thus will attack as if it was still 1944. Gotcha. So the only way to get them to surrender is to beat the snot out of them first and make them reconsider.

In reality, no German jets were very useful because they were only active at the very tail end of WW2. Giving the Germans all these Ar-234s and Me-262s is sort of inflating the Wehrmacht's actual historical capabilities.