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Zor said they appeared around Atlanta, so I suppose we went with the assumption that they were taking the city as a FOB. Makes some sense given that it's got a major airport (useful for all those planes although I doubt it could handle the capacity). Again... 12 million men is a *big* number. Hard to visualize. It's easier to think small. So that's a good point to bring up.

Sure, they could try to take Georgia in its entirety. Hell, they could probably try to spread into Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina. It takes time to do all that though, and they need decent roads to operate on, which means taking interstates or country roads. It would take them a few hours at least from the initial appearance around Atlanta to disperse throughout the state.

That's enough time for Fort Benning, Fort Stewart, Parris Island and Camp Lejeune to get a move on once they dust off from the initial Luftwaffe strikes. Fort Benning is one of the Army's primary encampments in the US, and Stewart is a good-sized post as well. Lejeune is a major USMC base; it's in North Carolina, so somewhat further away from the action, but still within an easy day's drive.

You are quite right though in that assuming they'll stick around Atlanta is simply thinking too small for a 12-million-man army. Perhaps it would be the primary location for a 'home base', but they would certainly spread out much more than the metropolitan area can accommodate. So it's more of a conventional fight than simply urban warfare as we envisioned earlier.

Not that it makes a whole lot of difference. If anything, it gives the Air Force more power-- they can simply load up a whole passel of planes with a few thousand (tens of thousands? hundred thousand? I'm not the one who would know) tons of iron bombs and turn the countryside, and the Wehrmacht on top of it, into an excellent impression of a waffle iron from way too high and fast for the Luftwaffe and the German AAA to touch. There's plenty of open country once you get out of the cities just ripe for that kind of action. The United States is a really big place, once you get down to it, and if the Germans don't keep their heads down it will be all too easy for the USAF to blow them to kingdom come if they're sitting out in the countryside.

There isn't enough readiness to really stop them from taking Georgia. The US can only scramble a few dozen fighters iirc, which means that it will probably do nothing for the first two or three days. That is more than enough.

Thanas wrote:There isn't enough readiness to really stop them from taking Georgia. The US can only scramble a few dozen fighters iirc, which means that it will probably do nothing for the first two or three days. That is more than enough.

The numbers game if nothing else is going to kick the local national guard and military bases ass. Bluntly put we don't have two thousand anti-air missiles on hand in the regions military bases. Even if none of the American stock goes kaboom on launch or merely damages a plane everything inside of two hundred miles of Atlanta will have shot itself dry the first day never mind the possibility that defenses are down checked for maintenance or lack of funding at the time.

I think this problem could only be exacerbated if the event were to repeat itself with different people. For instance, imagine the Imperial Japanese Army showing up in the middle of modern-day China, or the Soviet Army showing up outside of Berlin.

Lord Revan wrote:the thing is though that you don't have beat every single tank, plane or soldier of the Wehrmacht individually to defeat them as a whole and lets be honest even if our "grunt" wehrmacht soldier knew of modern weapons, it doesn't mean he'd be prepared to face them if unleashed against him. Even without things like nukes, even regular Cruise missles with conventional warheads would wreck havok on the german morale simply cause they had never faced anything like it.

I wouldn't overestimate that. German soldiers at the east front from 1943 on faced death every day with no winning options. They knew they wouldn't win, they knew they wouldn't survive imprisonment, and had to expect total devastation of their homeland after the loss of the war. Compared with that technical advances that they would very well expect after a 60 year time shift isn't that much of an issue.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:In short, I'm not sure that the German numerical advantage means all that much.

It means a lot of the Americans run out of ammunition. An invasion of this scale will trouble even the USA and their output.

I think trying to undermine the industrial base of the USA would be the only viable winning solution for the German forces. They should to capture the industrial centres of the USA and cut them of from supplies and instead use them themselves. The primary target then would be the aviation industry, since the air force is the biggest threat for their forces.
Which makes Atlanta a terrible starting point for an invasion since there isn't much of that industry there. There's an window of maybe 1 or 2 hours where confusion will keep the US from using their full available potential and German fighter planes can bomb targets like airfields or factories. In Atlanta they won't be able to use that window for anything useful.
The best moment to attack would be a national holiday shortly after dark. Then it takes the longest to recall all the servicemen who are off to visit their families. Best place would be somewhere at the east cost where they can hit both manufacturing centres and the political elite in Washington.

But even with that a defeat is inevitably, the US is simply too big and too strong. Although I expect it to take months rather than weeks.
The invasion may be shorter if the leadership decides that they will stop listening to Hitler because technically he is dead and there's a legitimate German government they are now supposed to take orders from.

Elheru Aran wrote:

bilateralrope wrote:Shortly afterwards, the bottom drops out of the K98 Mauser war-surplus market and the ATF gets very busy turning a huge pile of tanks and guns into junk. The vintage-vehicles folks have a hell of a lot of fun driving mint Bf109's and half-tracks around. Twelve million ex-Wehrmacht soldiers become a massive influx of new immigrants, though I imagine they might be offered the opportunity to emigrate back to Germany...

I think almost all will go to Germany. It's their home after all and they will have families there. Their parents will be dead, the generation of their siblings is almost gone, too, but they may have children, even if they never saw them before the time jump.
Also they'll have jobs.

Welf wrote:I think trying to undermine the industrial base of the USA would be the only viable winning solution for the German forces. They should to capture the industrial centres of the USA and cut them of from supplies and instead use them themselves. The primary target then would be the aviation industry, since the air force is the biggest threat for their forces.
Which makes Atlanta a terrible starting point for an invasion since there isn't much of that industry there. There's an window of maybe 1 or 2 hours where confusion will keep the US from using their full available potential and German fighter planes can bomb targets like airfields or factories. In Atlanta they won't be able to use that window for anything useful.

Atlanta's primary role in the American economy, from what I've gathered living here the past five years or so, is largely as a transportation hub. Several major highways intersect here, and it has the busiest airport in the world. It's the headquarters location of FedEx and a number of airlines. There are massive quantities of warehouses and distribution centers ringing the whole city-- it's a large chunk of the service sector jobs around here.

But no, we don't necessarily manufacture a whole lot. There's a Ford plant by one of the interstates, but I don't know if they even still manufacture-- it may be a parts facility if anything. There is definitely some manufacturing but this is not one of the big locations in the country for it.

Mind you, appearing over Atlanta still means the German planes have plenty of targets they can reach within that two hours' or so window, as I pointed out previously-- Hartsfield, Dobbins AFB, and so forth.

The big problem with Atlanta though is that once you get out of the metropolitan area... it's all country around it. It doesn't have that massive of a city-sprawl like, say, the Jersey-NYC area. It's a fairly abrupt cut-off once you get around thirty or forty miles out from the urban center. There's plenty of little towns, sure, but they're pretty much insignificant. So, metro Atlanta is not terribly important as a strategic target if you're bringing war to the North American continent. Taking it will freeze a good deal of commercial traffic throughout the Southeast, but it's not nearly as bad as knocking off, say, NYC, Chicago or Los Angeles.

As strategic targets go, the US has plenty... all spread out over the place. They do cluster up some, most notably in the northeastern states (PA, NY, NJ, Mass, etc). There's a lot of space between them in general, though. The Germans are gonna need a lot of trucks, which Zor has thoughtfully provided.

I think almost all will go to Germany. It's their home after all and they will have families there. Their parents will be dead, the generation of their siblings is almost gone, too, but they may have children, even if they never saw them before the time jump.
Also they'll have jobs.

The German government is gonna come up with jobs for 12 million ex-soldiers? Also, are any soldiers with children actually going to be aware that they had children to start with? How are these children going to feel about their suddenly young fathers showing up? I think the existential dislocation is going to be extreme enough that they may want to settle down in the States for a while just to catch up.

One job option that I suppose could come up is that they might decide to offer their services as trained soldiers to various governments. The Saudis, for example, might decide to simply buy themselves a whole new army. Something along those lines.

Oh yeah. Related question that would be helpful to know, I suppose. Should really have been asked last week, but there you go.

I'm certain there have been estimates made of how quickly America's armed forces can be mobilized and put into action in times of crisis. I imagine they may actually have been put on alert a number of times, definitely during 9/11.

So what numbers do we have on that kind of thing? If there was a sudden, unexpected invasion (not necessarily of a time-travelling army of Germans, but you know what I mean), what's the time-scale we are looking at for getting every soldier, Marine, airman, and sailor into action, boots on the ground (or the deck as the case may be)?

Well airstrikes could happen very quickly, within hours for the first jets and drones launched from land bases. A few more hours for bombers to be launched from more distant airstrips. Once any of our carrier groups get in range we can start launching airstrikes and missile attacks that way. Can't be more than a day or to to get a couple carriers within striking range at flank speed.

Land forces will be a bit longer. It will take longer to fire up and arm a tank division than it will to scramble a fighter squadron or launch cruise missiles, then travel time to the battlefield as well will take longer.

Elheru Aran wrote:Oh yeah. Related question that would be helpful to know, I suppose. Should really have been asked last week, but there you go.

I'm certain there have been estimates made of how quickly America's armed forces can be mobilized and put into action in times of crisis. I imagine they may actually have been put on alert a number of times, definitely during 9/11.

So what numbers do we have on that kind of thing? If there was a sudden, unexpected invasion (not necessarily of a time-travelling army of Germans, but you know what I mean), what's the time-scale we are looking at for getting every soldier, Marine, airman, and sailor into action, boots on the ground (or the deck as the case may be)?

Best I can come up is the REFORGER plans at the end of the cold war, which had over 5 divisions earmarked for rapid transport to Germany. However, this does not apply here as REFORGER planned to have most of the heavy material already stored in Germany. So I doubt the US could mobilize several divisions on short notice (like suddenly).

Thinking more upon it, it's clear that the Air Force and Naval aircraft would be the first and for some time about the only response to such an attack. Unless there are soldiers on base ready to go, they still have to get all their transportation lined up, fueled and loaded before they can start sending off troops. Never mind loading tanks on trains or trucks to get them going if they're coming from much further than Georgia. Fort Benning could probably deploy forces on-base within a few hours, but say it's a holiday and most of the soldiers are off base celebrating... that could muck up affairs considerably.

I think it would have to be a given that there would be a number of announcements across the nation mandating that military traffic on the roads and in the air would be given the utmost priority. Commercial flights are almost certain to be grounded and nearby airbases seconded to the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine aircraft involved.

Even with all that assistance, I suppose that outside of the immediate states involved, Army response time would be a matter of a day or two as far as getting troops to the war zone.

Thanas wrote:I have got to laugh at the idea of using drones to take out the military leadership. Germany already dealt with dedicated fighter-bomber attacks on their headquarters during the war. What, you think the allies never thought of bombing headquarters?

Did they have to deal with single stealthy 24 hour coverage (Predators have amazing loiter time) with infrared night/all weather cameras that can read license plates from well above any conceivable Wehrmacht anti air weapon, fielding missiles that can penetrate several feet of the Wehrmacht best steel or a JDAMed bunker buster that would have made the Fuhrer bunker a death trap with one shot, a shot they wouldn't know was coming until it exploded?

For that matter screw the generals, we would just cycle any of a thousand drones or aircraft that are well north of Luftwaffe ceilings and pick off their armor via TV guided infrared munitions by the hundreds a day. This would be like the Highway of Death x1000.

Thanas wrote:
Best I can come up is the REFORGER plans at the end of the cold war, which had over 5 divisions earmarked for rapid transport to Germany. However, this does not apply here as REFORGER planned to have most of the heavy material already stored in Germany. So I doubt the US could mobilize several divisions on short notice (like suddenly).

Days if not hours for some. What some of you are seem to be forgetting is the active duty components live around the bases they serve in. Those bases have pretty much all of the equipment for their entire combined arms units physically there. In the case of the Navy the weapons base that arms the ships that are deploying are within miles of the units they supply. This isn't a bring the tanks from Washington, bring the ammunition from Arkansas, brink the trucks from Maine and fly in the soldiers from Wyoming. There is plenty right there on had to at the very least be fully armed and manned. The problem is fuel, because that isn't stored in massive quantities on bases. But thats a good question for the Wehrmacht. How much fuel do they have and what does Atlanta have on hand to top them off?

Also be aware that up to a third of the army's combat arms units are actually in the field in various forms for training or deployment workups at any one time. Not necessarily combat ready but not on leave and much of their equipment marshaled and ready to go. It just so happens Fort Benning and Bragg are major training locations. Fort Bragg is also the base for most Army SOF units as well as the airborne and air assault units, formations specifically designed for rapid delopyment worldwide. The Luftwaffe is irrelevant, ATL airport's runways would be moonscapes within hours, the German planes there useless of tinfoil scraps and toothpicks.

Also don't forget Fort Knox is not very far away to the North, the home of Army armor forces. EDIT: I guess all that was moved to Ft Benning, even WORSE for the Germans.

Patroklos wrote:Also don't forget Fort Knox is not very far away to the North, the home of Army armor forces.

The US Army moved its Armor School to Fort Benning in 2010.

Patroklos wrote: Did they have to deal with single stealthy 24 hour coverage (Predators have amazing loiter time) with infrared night/all weather cameras that can read license plates from well above any conceivable Wehrmacht anti air weapon, fielding missiles that can penetrate several feet of the Wehrmacht best steel or a JDAMed bunker buster that would have made the Fuhrer bunker a death trap with one shot, a shot they wouldn't know was coming until it exploded?

For that matter screw the generals, we would just cycle any of a thousand drones or aircraft that are well north of Luftwaffe ceilings and pick off their armor via TV guided infrared munitions by the hundreds a day. This would be like the Highway of Death x1000.

Did you just miss the rest of the thread?

Thanas wrote:

Elheru Aran wrote:Oh yeah. Related question that would be helpful to know, I suppose. Should really have been asked last week, but there you go.

I'm certain there have been estimates made of how quickly America's armed forces can be mobilized and put into action in times of crisis. I imagine they may actually have been put on alert a number of times, definitely during 9/11.

So what numbers do we have on that kind of thing? If there was a sudden, unexpected invasion (not necessarily of a time-travelling army of Germans, but you know what I mean), what's the time-scale we are looking at for getting every soldier, Marine, airman, and sailor into action, boots on the ground (or the deck as the case may be)?

Best I can come up is the REFORGER plans at the end of the cold war, which had over 5 divisions earmarked for rapid transport to Germany. However, this does not apply here as REFORGER planned to have most of the heavy material already stored in Germany. So I doubt the US could mobilize several divisions on short notice (like suddenly).

Yeah, not correct. We use cell phones and FROST calls. You have to be reachable at all times, or they have to know why you aren't, and off the top of my head there's 4 divisions (plus at least two of reserves) in less than half a day's drive. You have to understand that our troops live either on base or just off it, and reservists live within 50 miles of their unit or they can transfer to a closer one.

Thanas wrote:

Patroklos wrote: Did they have to deal with single stealthy 24 hour coverage (Predators have amazing loiter time) with infrared night/all weather cameras that can read license plates from well above any conceivable Wehrmacht anti air weapon, fielding missiles that can penetrate several feet of the Wehrmacht best steel or a JDAMed bunker buster that would have made the Fuhrer bunker a death trap with one shot, a shot they wouldn't know was coming until it exploded?

For that matter screw the generals, we would just cycle any of a thousand drones or aircraft that are well north of Luftwaffe ceilings and pick off their armor via TV guided infrared munitions by the hundreds a day. This would be like the Highway of Death x1000.

Did you just miss the rest of the thread?

No, all of your posts were all equally amateur. I picked the one of yours that best encapsulated that.

Patroklos wrote:No, all of your posts were all equally amateur. I picked the one of yours that best encapsulated that.

Oh goodie, the idiot is back.

Now kindly explain how:

1. Predators outrange the Schwalbe or other Nazi fighters (given that the Predator max ceiling is over 10k more this could be a good one - and while Reaper has slightly higher ceiling than the Schwalbe its operational altittude is far within the reach)
2. How the US will magically get more ammunition than it has available all over the country
3. How this is at all different from allied air superiority that the German armored forces encountered all over the fronts? It isn't even on the same scale - Soviet ground forces flew hundreds of sorties on a given day, there is no way the US drones can match that. They may be more effective pound for pound but that is about it.

Thanas wrote:
Oh goodie, the idiot is back.

Ah, the "bombastic in place of competence" tactic. Can't say its unexpected...

1. Predators outrange the Schwalbe or other Nazi fighters (given that the Predator max ceiling is over 10k more this could be a good one - and while Reaper has slightly higher ceiling than the
Schwalbe its operational altittude is far within the reach)

Predators/Reapers can operate out of any of literally a HUNDREDS international/municipal/corporate airports and military airbases in a 1100 mile radius and with a 14 hour full load loiter they don't need them as often as any German aircraft would, so there really is no problem operating from safe locations (not that attack is likely anyway). As you just stated both models have at least 10K' in ceiling advantage so they can pick their engagements at will (or just do them at night). Add in an AWACS (also invulnerable) and avoiding whatever German air cover (decreasing in effectiveness drastically by the hour) will simply be avoided outright. We can put a single F-18 in orbit overheadd to shoot AMRAAMs down on any interceptors if we wanted (also invulnerable). I suppose the Germans could haver 94K aircraft line up in wing to wing formation and just fly circles over Atlanta until the F-15s are done with them if they are so inclined, but how much fuel do they have again? Where exactly do you get Me262 fuel in 2014 Atlanta?

This is of course assuming there are no F-15s/F-16s/F-18s/F-22s shooting Luftwaffe aircraft out of the sky by the dozen per sortie anyway. They don't need missiles to do this btw. They would be swatting 190s out of the sky of course, so making holes for strike packages is a minor thing.

This isn't really the Luftwaffe's major problem though. While it is not as simplistic as ALT airport being the only place the Germans can operate out of as there is a half dozen other airfields that their generation of aircraft can easily use plus quite a few strips of freeway I'd assume, they are not going to have any operating base to use whatsoever once the US decides to do something. Leaving the air force out of it entirely the USN could drop 500 TLAMs on area runways/taxiways in whatever the travel time for cruise missiles is from Norfolk/King's Bay/Jacksonville. This is just the VLS tubes that are already loaded for upcoming deployments/surge ships, we could reload the fleet at a dozen ships a day until the stock goes dry. If there happens to be an SSGN returning or leaving for deployment on the day in question add another 100 odd TLAMS to that. These ships could launch their full magazines from the pier if they really wanted to, they don't even need to waste time heading to sea. Lets say half HE to crater the runways and destroy fuel stores, 1/2 whatever cluster munition versions we have in inventory and other types to destroy the densely packed airframes on the ground (with 94K they don't really have a choice).

2. How the US will magically get more ammunition than it has available all over the country

Do you have a source that actually says there is any shortage relevant to any specific tactic we are discussing? Do the Germans have a magic porthole back to the Fatherland to get ammunition from?

3. How this is at all different from allied air superiority that the German armored forces encountered all over the fronts? It isn't even on the same scale - Soviet ground forces flew hundreds of sorties on a given day, there is no way the US drones can match that. They may be more effective pound for pound but that is about it.

Because sortie generation is only one data point? The Soviets flew that many sorties with that many aircraft because they HAD to, their weapons were so inaccurate and they were expected to take so many loses that in order to get an acceptable kill ratio those tactics were required. In our case our weapons are one shot one kill (or one shot multiple kill for cluster munitions) and unlike the Soviets who were vulnerable to the entire range of German AAA outside some very specific examples the US is vulnerable to none of it.

In this case pretty much any aircraft with an IR camera (or mountable pod) can sit back and scan casually from invulnerable positions and look for heat blooms from German engine decks (even during those afternoon thunderstorms the South is famous for that would ground the entire Luftwaffe). A hellfire here, a Maverick or JDAM there. Or in other words do exactly what they did to the Iraqis in 91 and 2003 but only now with even better optics and sensors and no need for run up SAM suppression missions or radar jamming (the Germans have none). The Iraqis dispersed their armor just like many here are suggesting, and then basically turned them off and camped 100 yards away because they knew the second they lighted them off a Maverick was on the way. The same goes for artillery, the allies just had a observation plane loiter overhead and as soon as they saw an IR bloom from an Iraqi artillery piece firing immediately ordered in counter battery fire. The Iraqis just abandoned their positions.

Note, they abandoned their tanks and artillery BEFORE most of them were destroyed based on the knowledge of the opposition they were facing. I am not sure why we are assuming the Germans have a death wish. The certainly didn't in Africa or anywhere else where perceived Slavic hordes were not advancing towards the Fatherland. Granted while we don't have an ammunition shortage we certainly don't have 49K Mavericks to assign to each individual panzer, but we don't have too. Lets say we destroy 2000K in German armor in a couple of days on top of nuetralizing the entire Luftwaffe from air attack alone. What do you think the average German officer is going to think or do about that? Exactly what the Iraqis officers thought and did. Its the smart move.

But I will throw the Germans a bone. On the artillery front the have far too many tubes to be countered by precision weapons. they would hole up and devastate an forward area as long as their ammunition held. This would be effective until B-52s started carpet bombing their concentration areas and ammo dumps.

Which brings up another thing. The Wehrmacht has no logistics operations in place. This is particularly important because for much of the war the Germans were very dependent on horses for many things and this part of the Wehrmacht continuum is present here. On top of that for ALL of the war the Germans extensively used rail. Does Atlanta have a glut of fodder sitting around? Is the rail infrastructure of the South and Atlanta in particular up to handling Wehrmacht standard procedures? When a Panther throws a track or chews up a transmission (which they were prone to doing) where does the replacement come from? They will have to establish ammo and fuel dumps. Field hospitals and headquarters. Phone lines and radio infrastructure. If you think things like electricity, running water, internet, phone, cell phone or radio (jamming) will be available after a couple hours you are fooling yourself. There will be no massive movement of Germans to outlying areas before they organize and set themselves up.

A few points you may have missed:

Patroklos wrote: how much fuel do they have again? Where exactly do you get Me262 fuel in 2014 Atlanta?

WWII aircraft used more or less standard automobile gasoline with added octane. It may well have been leaded gasoline, I don't know if they could run on unleaded but I see no reason to assume they can't. High-octane or premium gasoline would suit them well; all they would really need to do is take some of their tanker trucks (which they actually do have, btw, per Zor's OP) and put a detachment on full-time duty yanking it from gas stations.

This is of course assuming there are no F-15s/F-16s/F-18s/F-22s shooting Luftwaffe aircraft out of the sky by the dozen per sortie anyway. They don't need missiles to do this btw. They would be swatting 190s out of the sky of course, so making holes for strike packages is a minor thing.

While modern fighters do have guns, IIRC the training with them is largely a formality and the general assumption is that guns will almost never be used as many engagements will be almost BVR. I could be wrong on that but I do believe that almost all fighter conflicts these days involve missiles-- the only gun kill by the USAF in recent memory was by an A-10 on an Iraqi helicopter in the original Gulf War. Additionally, the massive speed advantage the jets have will be a drawback against the Luftwaffe-- they will be moving too fast to hold a gun lock more than a few milliseconds. Lots of wasted ammo that way, and they don't carry a whole lot as it is thanks to missiles being the priority weapon.

I do see some comments about the Israelis using guns in combat with their F-15s, so it's possible. However, those are a.) Israelis, not Americans-- they're freaking crazy, and b.) fighting MiG's, which are flying at more or less the same speed. Sea Skimmer is the one to ask about this, I think.

Which brings up another thing. The Wehrmacht has no logistics operations in place. This is particularly important because for much of the war the Germans were very dependent on horses for many things and this part of the Wehrmacht continuum is present here. On top of that for ALL of the war the Germans extensively used rail. Does Atlanta have a glut of fodder sitting around? Is the rail infrastructure of the South and Atlanta in particular up to handling Wehrmacht standard procedures? When a Panther throws a track or chews up a transmission (which they were prone to doing) where does the replacement come from? They will have to establish ammo and fuel dumps. Field hospitals and headquarters. Phone lines and radio infrastructure. If you think things like electricity, running water, internet, phone, cell phone or radio (jamming) will be available after a couple hours you are fooling yourself. There will be no massive movement of Germans to outlying areas before they organize and set themselves up.

Per Zor, the Germans have a large complement of hands and trucks along with manufacturing and engineering supplies. So they have logistics aplenty, just not actually emplaced.

Zor wrote:In this scenario, the Wehrmacht ... with a large amount of supplies (in particular mechanical supplies and ammo) and has been given the memory of having been order by Hitler to Conquer the US. Along with them are 500,000 engineers, technicians, machinists and similar who are charged with making US industries able to produce additional ammunition and spare parts for the German War machine.

As for rail traffic, maybe you can put this to use.
http://panethos.wordpress.com/2013/12/2 ... n-traffic/

Atlanta, as I previously noted, is a major transport and logistic hub of the Southeast. So there is a decent amount of rail traffic through the city. I cannot say how much of it could be *used* by the Germans, but it's possible they can still employ it.

Elheru Aran wrote: WWII aircraft used more or less standard automobile gasoline with added octane. It may well have been leaded gasoline, I don't know if they could run on unleaded but I see no reason to assume they can't. High-octane or premium gasoline would suit them well; all they would really need to do is take some of their tanker trucks (which they actually do have, btw, per Zor's OP) and put a detachment on full-time duty yanking it from gas stations.

Yeah but that takes time. Are German WWII fuel truck couplings compatible with any of our modern fuel infrastructure for instance? There is plenty of fuel in all ATLs cars but can you imagine organizing the siphoning of all of them and getting the supply to the right places gallons at a time? I imagine all of this will be helpful to some extent, but it probably won't make an overall difference unless they can find and secure a very large local distribution location for central management.

And in general does Atlanta have that much gasoline in large storage locations to supply 49000/94000 gas guzzling tanks/aircraft plus however many hundreds of thousands of trucks and other vehicles we are talking about during combat operations? How about after those highly vulnerable stock piles become top tier USAF targets?

While modern fighters do have guns, IIRC the training with them is largely a formality and the general assumption is that guns will almost never be used as many engagements will be almost BVR. I could be wrong on that but I do believe that almost all fighter conflicts these days involve missiles-- the only gun kill by the USAF in recent memory was by an A-10 on an Iraqi helicopter in the original Gulf War. Additionally, the massive speed advantage the jets have will be a drawback against the Luftwaffe-- they will be moving too fast to hold a gun lock more than a few milliseconds. Lots of wasted ammo that way, and they don't carry a whole lot as it is thanks to missiles being the priority weapon.

Modern fighters can go very fast, but they don't have to go very fast if they don't want to. I imagine this would probably in practice be US fighters loitering above Luftwaffe ceilings until the spot something themselves or via AWACS direction, swooping down fast and unseen and slowing down just enough to get a good gun hit and then gunning it out or harm’s way. That’s after they expend their half dozen odd missiles for pretty much 100% kills of course.

Just like the ground forces it would not take long for their thousands of loses to zero air victories for the Luftwaffe leadership to decline to fly or their personnel to just refuse to fly. This has been the case for pretty much every modern air campaign we have seen from Serbia to Iraq to Libya. You get a few die hards up front and then the skies are clear, the enemies abandoned aircraft dying an inglorious death on their taxiway/useless bunkers.

I do see some comments about the Israelis using guns in combat with their F-15s, so it's possible. However, those are a.) Israelis, not Americans-- they're freaking crazy, and b.) fighting MiG's, which are flying at more or less the same speed. Sea Skimmer is the one to ask about this, I think.

That’s right, fighting jets that are faster and have the benefit of things like countermeasures, sometimes their own onboard radar, ground based radar direction and warning, friendly SAM and effecting AA screens to flee into as well as defend their operating bases to some extent. This makes them HARDER to hit, not easier
Slower targets with no chance of detecting or any safe place to flee to or operate out of to say nothing of their complete inability to respond mean this would just be easier.
I don't know anything about lack gun training but I do know that for the Airforce and Marines in onboard cannon was made a very expensive requirement for the F-35 program. The Navy opted out of an internal gun to allow more strengthening of the airframe but they intend to use gun pods. Obviously guns are important to them to some extent.

Per Zor, the Germans have a large complement of hands and trucks along with manufacturing and engineering supplies. So they have logistics aplenty, just not actually emplaced.

I can go to Auto Zone and fix a lot of things on my car, but I can't pull a transmission off the shelf. We have a saying in Navy logistics, “You can’t tow another USS Whatever behind you”. Regardless of how many engineers they bring with them unless it comes with factories in place that are also hooked up to the supporting industrial support logistics of the German economy of that time it will be of limited use for the timeframe this conflict would take place over. You can have ready spares, but you can’t carry a spare for everything. The Wehrmacht of WWII might be a technologically inferior force to modern day US forces but it is still a modern army and is as dependent on its own industrial and technology base as ours is.
Let’s say they did find a car factory to try and use for their purposes. What the hell would they do with a place devoid of metal presses and manual lathes and instead stocked with robots and computer controlled assembly lines? You could put one thousand of 1945 Germany’s best and brightest engineers and they would all be foiled by a Windows password screen in the control booth assuming they figured out how the mouse works.

As for rail traffic, maybe you can put this to use.
http://panethos.wordpress.com/2013/12/2 ... n-traffic/

Atlanta, as I previously noted, is a major transport and logistic hub of the Southeast. So there is a decent amount of rail traffic through the city. I cannot say how much of it could be *used* by the Germans, but it's possible they can still employ it.

Yes I realizedthis, but what I was actually getting at was that Zor mentioned nothing about rolling stock. I doubt Atlanta has too many flat bed rail cars suitable for tank transportation laying around. Luckily for the Germans the US uses the same gauge rail as WWII German if they do get to bring their own rolling stock with them, but even then I am sure the minutia of an industry evolving over 60 years means there will be some issues just plopping them on US lines. Maybe if they can find a major car factory (not sure if ATL has any) they can get lucky here. Even if they did the Germans would have to marshal them all, get the engines (which are very different from their period types) where they need them, etc. This is going to take days to weeks. Meanwhile all those rail yards, rail bridges and trains themselves are targets.

A plus for the Germans is that there are plenty of civilian prime movers in ATL they can commandeer, including flat beds. Far more powerful prime movers than they brought with them at that.

Of course that will be little comfort to them when they start to starve to death. Fulton county and the surroundings has a population of around 1.5 million, most of whom will still be there and the food infrustructure to support that. Unfortunetly for them and their 12 million occupiers they are a metropolitain area so they don't generate that food themselves. No, they get it via their connection the the complocated US food markets which they are now cut off from.

Patroklos wrote:
Yeah but that takes time. Are German WWII fuel truck couplings compatible with any of our modern fuel infrastructure for instance? There is plenty of fuel in all ATLs cars but can you imagine organizing the siphoning of all of them and getting the supply to the right places gallons at a time? I imagine all of this will be helpful to some extent, but it probably won't make an overall difference unless they can find and secure a very large local distribution location for central management.

And in general does Atlanta have that much gasoline in large storage locations to supply 49000/94000 gas guzzling tanks/aircraft plus however many hundreds of thousands of trucks and other vehicles we are talking about during combat operations? How about after those highly vulnerable stock piles become top tier USAF targets?

Wanted to chime in here. By my count the USAF is currently at 1.8 million "prime" targets and counting and the more we go into this the higher it gets. Then you get into the civilian control part of this. While bombing Tiger's and shooting down Messerschmitts can easily be justified it's going to be much harder to justify dropping the 500 odd bridges into the rivers of Georgia, harder to justify cratering international airports and hardest of all for the President to order gas stations and commandeered tanker trucks to be blown up.

Hell the Germans have within spitting distance access to refineries that collectively process 1,200,000 barrels of oil per day. The Baton Rouge Refinery and Garyville Refinery are both within striking distance of Atalanta and both are in the top ten list of oil refiners in the world (9 and 10 respectively). Can you see the US President ordering that we need to blow up facilities that have four million odd barrels of oil on hand in the first twelve hours?

Depending on who's in the hot seat when the balloon goes up, we have a serious issue with US authorities having a strong desire to not start going scorched earth on our own land.

I think you would have a much higher chance of that if the army that popped up wasn't NAZIs. They are literally the perfect enemy to hate, everybody knows about them and we still make movies about it today on a regular basis. I see what you are saying though, but given the reaction when a bunch of nobodies blew up an office building I think you are unestimating the reaction of Americans to the most visibly evil force in modern history we are still conditioned to hate showing up.

Also Baton Rouge is about 500 miles away through the mostly sparsely populated forests and swamps of Mississippi and Alabama. Not to mention there are major Airforce and Army bases on the way or nearby. They could try to bomb it I suppose, but also worth noting is the home of Army ADA is in not too far away in Oklahoma.

The military aspect of this scenario isn't that interesting. Regardless of the details, nobody seriously believes the Wehrmacht stands a chance in hell against a military that is literally ahead by 7 decades worth of technological development. But the interesting thing here is that there's so many fucking Germans - appearing all at once - in a populated area. Yes the US airforce can destroy their artillery and vehicles at ease, but then what? Are we supposed to like, drop a MOAB on Atlanta? We can't do that without massive civilian casualties. Unless the Nazis immediately surrender (which is a serious possibility, and in fact, probably the most-likely scenario), this will take years of Stalingrad-esque urban warefare and modern siege tactics to kill or subdue every last German or at least try and kill their generals. Hopefully, some of the generals will be like Friedrich Paulus and just defect to the Americans before things get too bloody.

Patroklos wrote:You could put one thousand of 1945 Germany’s best and brightest engineers and they would all be foiled by a Windows password screen in the control booth assuming they figured out how the mouse works.

Ha. Well, yeah - I suppose they could coerce some American captives to help them figure these things out.

In leaded gasoline, the lead serves as a lubricant, meaning an engine that is designed to use leaded gasoline, CANNOT use unleaded gasoline. (Reference: Yahoo! Answers.)

As for the Wehrmacht taking over a car factory... Ha! Most contemporary vehicles have engines with ELECTRONIC fuel injection, meaning it's COMPUTER-CONTROLLED. They do NOT use carburetors- in fact, a Jay Leno's Garage article specifically mentioned contemporary mechanics find the device confusing. If the WW2 Germans try to fit a contemporary diesel into their Panther tank, they'll have no satisfactory answer for question "Where's the carburetor?"

Sidewinder wrote:In leaded gasoline, the lead serves as a lubricant, meaning an engine that is designed to use leaded gasoline, CANNOT use unleaded gasoline. (Reference: Yahoo! Answers.)

Well then that fucks the Germans pretty thoroughly as far as fuel supplies go. Their vehicles and aircraft will all pretty much exclusively use leaded. That said, if they have fuel supplies of their own and they try mixing the two, they might be able to stretch it a while. Plus that Yahoo Answers doesn't discount the possibility of still using unleaded-- the engines will be shot after a while is the main problem but it might do for a little while.

They will have to figure this out, though-- likely enough English-literate people in the Wehrmacht that someone will start reading the gas pumps and alert everybody that it's unleaded-- but the problem will be procuring lead substitute or additive if they want to use local supplies. A bit of situational provisioning will be in order.

Sidewinder wrote:In leaded gasoline, the lead serves as a lubricant, meaning an engine that is designed to use leaded gasoline, CANNOT use unleaded gasoline. (Reference: Yahoo! Answers.)

They mainly need to change to harder valve seats to solve the issue. Now actually doing that for thousands of engines is... problematic at best so they'd do better to raid local parts shops for additive as Elheru Aran suggests. On the plus side our higher octane gas might allow them to get extra horsepower out of their engines if they adjust the tuning properly.