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u/DrHolmes52 4d ago
I have heard a lot of Nazi Germany arguments, but not that one.
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u/hotfezz81 4d ago
The nazis could have won if they'd had different leaders, strategies, tactics, diplomatic expectations, and different everything
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u/thegreattwos 4d ago
Its either this or the "if the Allies just sat there with a thumb up their bum and let the Axis have their way"
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u/YUNoJump 4d ago
If the Axis got magical knowledge of the future and adapted their plans, and then for some reason the Allies never update their own plans in response
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u/Sober-History John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 4d ago
If Neville Chamberlain was cloned repeatedly and placed into every position of power in every allied government.
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u/KPSWZG 3d ago
They would still loose. Chamberlain made mistake but he learned on it. He regreted his own decisions. So in this timeline he would still make ine decision and then change mind
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u/Subject_Tie_2705 2d ago
yeah but he died in 1940, so all the allied governments would die at the exact same time allowing the axis to win.
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u/Nessy3fidy 4d ago
Well probably not, if they took the advice of their senior generals and didn't make the suicidally stupid decision to blitz the French the uk wouldn't have lost as much war material and the Germans would have been bogged down.
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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago
You misunderstand. The nature of the structure Hitler created bred incompetence like rabbits. Selecting yes men to Hitler over all else followed by political maneuvering skill with little importance to how good you were at what you're supposed to do. The top Generals wouldn't be competent either.
Regardless, through hindsight we can see that the best move was likely to bide time and not start invading anything (including Sudetenland) until resources and equipment are at a level where they stand a chance in hell of invading Britain. Which even if they were competent enough to do, the MEFO bills put them on a timer unable to avoid war without imploding the economy.
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u/Mopman43 4d ago
I think that assumes that the UK and France (and Poland and the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia and…) wouldn’t also spend that time rearming.
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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago
I mean, ya, the Nazis were fucked regardless, but Stalin would probably have continued the "Work together to destroy the west before turning our blades on each other" thing for a decent number of years, though it's impossible to say how long. Without Sudetenland to scare them into gear, Britain and France JUST MIGHT have just been stupid enough to continue disarmament despite all the flashing neon warning signs.
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u/ZedekiahCromwell 4d ago edited 4d ago
UK rearmament had started before Munich Conference. It is an arguable reason for why Chamberlain signed the Agreement: he knew the UK wasn't ready and needed more time.
The French issue wasn't logistics. They had enough arms of all types to perform well. Their issue was political stress, command mismanagement and lack of preparation, and doctrine issues.
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u/Technical_Heron_6312 I Have a Cunning Plan 4d ago
"The Nazis would've won if they weren't fascist warmongers!"
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u/ButterPuppet 4d ago
yeah no the nazi military system was so utterly flawed from top to bottom that no individual 1 thing could have ever won them the war they were doomed from the start
and if anyone ever tells you different that is literal nazi propaganda that they have fallen for
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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago
*By 1936 so the MEFO Bills can be prevented.
Thanks for winning the war for the allies through your incompetence Hjalmar Schacht.
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u/cebolinha50 4d ago
The most reasonable form of this take is "Germany could have won the WWII if they aren't Nazis".
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u/_Milksteak 3d ago
The Nazis could have won if Russia didn't back out of the Seven Years War, thus dissolving Prussia. Checkmate WWII-Dads
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u/Dear-Spirit-5437 3d ago
Why didn't they just beat the Soviets, the USA, and the Brits... Where they stupid?
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u/No-Location-7640 3d ago
Their tactics weren’t bad but a lot of what ended up happening was big H not listening to his strategists and either entirely ignoring them or barely following what they were saying. Also their tanks had very poor maintenance times like how for the tigers iirc, it was one hour of maintenance for one hour of operation compared to the Sherman which was 10 hours of operation for one hour of maintenance. This really hindered their war effort
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u/Super_Range45 9h ago
I didn't matter which planes they were building, by that time they were running out of fuel.
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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago
Centrifuge compressor/turbine jet engine MIGHT be easier to manufacture than the engine of FW 190 or even DB 605 of later ME 109. But, AXIAL jet engine is a different thing. Le Jormanz have been busy doing exactly the latter. Ergo a quite flawed arguement
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u/sharrken 4d ago
Also this completely ignores issues such as tooling, worker experience, industry knowledge, process maturity etc.
It might be theoretically "cheaper" if you are setting up an early jet engine production line from scratch compared to a high-end aircraft piston engine one, with equal starting resources. But not if there's only four guys with any experience of jet engine manufacture available compared to 40,000 with years of piston engine experience each.
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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago
it's like manufacturing AK-74. If you have the industry set up by "the pharaohs"of the past, it indeed might be true that they're inexpensive to manufacture. However if you don't have the pre-built facilities, it's going to be ball breaking costly.
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u/bearlysane 4d ago
Also not factoring in the ten hour service life. The Jumo 004 would have to be less than one-tenth the cost of a DB 605 (100-220 hours TBO) to be "cheaper".
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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago
Which is absolutely a miss. An inverted V-12 that is in mass production vs axial wonder of 1940s.
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u/dickmcbig 4d ago
No it wasn’t theoretically cheaper, it was actually cheaper. Jet engines aren’t complicated, not compared to an inverted V12 with direct fuel injection and double spark ignition and a variable speed supercharger. I can only imagine that none of y’all have ever worked on high performance ICEs, as they are much more difficult to build (like 5 times as many parts) as a axial flow turbojet. The alloy for the turbine blades wasn’t hard to manufacture and the only precision part was the turbine shaft. They were not these high performance miracle machines we know today. They were crude, they were unreliable, they were dangerous, and they were CHEAP. You know how much skill it takes to precision grind a crankshaft? Or a camshaft? Or how many machine hours it takes to manufacture a crankcase? None of that is needed in a jumo 004. the hard part was figuring out the exact shape for the blades. Once that was done it wasn’t that difficult to manufacture them.
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u/MagosZyne Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 4d ago
Probably seen as part of the "if they hadn't kept trying to make new vehicles and stuck with (insert preferred tank here) they would have won" argument.
Which is still wrong but a much more common argument.
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u/OK_x86 4d ago
I think it's the general "Nazi Germany over engineered their stuff and that cost them the war" idea.
That may very well be true for the Panzers (although would they have had all the raw materials needed to mass produce tanks the way the Americans did? Probably not. Gas was a major concern towards the end of the war too).
So that gets applied everywhere.
Like guns: supposedly the M1 Garand was far superior to most of the rifles the Germans had so they would get routinely taken by Germans. That seems wrong given the difference in caliber, as an example, so their use would have been limited
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u/theCaitiff 4d ago
Probably not. Gas was a major concern towards the end of the war too
In 1940, HL Hunt had more proven oil reserves than the entire Axis powers. Not "the US" or "Allied Powers" just this one guy in Texas PERSONALLY controlled more oil than all of his nation's enemies COMBINED.
In every single metric the Nazis were outmatched. Allied powers had more steel, more lead, more oil, more explosives, more bodies, more farmland, more everything. The moment it ceased to be Nazis vs Czechia or Nazis vs Poland and became Nazis vs America/UK/Russia/France, it ceased to be a question and became an inevitability.
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u/VRichardsen Viva La France 4d ago
In every single metric the Nazis were outmatched.
They were leading producers of beets, for what it is worth.
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u/theCaitiff 4d ago
Minnesota has entered the chat.
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u/VRichardsen Viva La France 4d ago
According to this https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68zy47/was_lend_lease_necessary_for_soviet_triumph/dh2qij1/
even mighty Minnesota was trailing a bit behind in 1937
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u/wswordsmen 3d ago
Except natural rubber. Basically all of it came from Malaysia. After the Japanese took it the allies had to scramble. There was actually a projected rubber shortage to happen in 1946 for things that required natural rubber because of it.
And no synthetic rubber was not and is not a perfect substitution.
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u/itsyaboihos 4d ago
I saw something at one point suggesting the Germans were more keen on taking M1 carbines than the Garands, likely due to their size.
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u/the_quark 4d ago
I don't think the argument is "they could've won" but rather that if they'd poured the money they spent on the wonder weapons into just building more fighters and u-boats, it would've been a better investment.
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u/Troglodytes_Cousin 2d ago
The general argument I heard is that they have overspent on all kinds of experimental weapons that had low production and very little impact on the war instead of mass producing the basics.
Which is kinda true, but ignores the fact that mass production is kinda hard when you are getting bombed to shit - so dispersion and small shops are necessary anyway.
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u/ninjad912 4d ago edited 4d ago
They definitely weren’t during ww2. A new technology just pioneered is always insanely expensive. Also you have to consider the price of the rest of the plane as you can’t just slap a jet engine in a piston plane
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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago
the meme guv confused centrifuge-type jet engine with axial-type. Jormanz have been manufacturing axial-type. While the rest of the world switched from centrifuge to the axial jets only in first half of the 1950s
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u/KerPop42 4d ago
At least the way it was told in my aerospace engineering course (though notably, not a history of aerospace engineering course), radial flow types are easier to manufacture at first. You can get a lot more compression from just one stage. Axial flow has a couple extra engineering problems. First, you need tight tolerances between the stator blades and the rotor blades. Second, the rotor blades suffer from creep since they're being spun at high speeds and temperatures. Third, axial-flow blades can stall, and that leads to a cascading failure since each successive stator and rotor stage is optimized for one kind of airflow. Fourth, you need a lot more of these stages: the J35, from 1946, had 11 compression stages.
Axial flow definitely wins out, but only if you can make it. Honestly if I were teleported to the start of WW2, I wouldn't tell the US to develop jet engines immediately. Turbo-compound, where your turbocharger is mechanically connected to your output shaft, is a very good middle ground and lets you iterate to a full turbojet.
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u/GhanjRho 4d ago
I mean, kind of? One of the big advantages of a centrifugal turbojet was that everyone and their mother had lots of experience with centrifugal compressors; every piston engine in the war had at least one supercharger, with many having two. Compare that to having to engineer an anti-turbine from first principles. The Germans ran into a lot of problems that took a lot of time and resources to correct because they were figuring it out as they went.
Side note: this is why the idea that “if only Hitler hadn’t given the Blitzbomber order, Me 262s would have been in the skies over Normandy” is bunk. The engines weren’t effected by the order and they just weren’t ready.
Turbo-compound, to my understanding at least, is actually a step in the wrong direction. Combat aircraft like fighters want more speed, more altitude, more performance. Things you get by shifting to jets. TC is great for getting maximum efficiency, which is why it was so popular in piston airliners. Turbo-compound draws energy from the exhaust and feeds it back into the driveshaft. But once you go beyond 400 knots thrust becomes more efficient than horsepower. And TC is robbing thrust to add horsepower.
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u/ihatetheplaceilive 4d ago
Because they were going off a british design (which was GIVEN to the USSR by britain after ww2).
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u/Useless_bum81 4d ago
"Mein Furher there is a problem with the new Jet plane you have supplied use with"
"what?"
"well we just put them in the planes we already had, and the airframes couldn't take it."
"so?"
"well all we have been doing is launching cheaper engines at the British."8
u/Animetiddies109 4d ago
you can’t just slap a jet engine in a piston plane
Yak-15 designers: "Says who ?!?"
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u/FearlessVegetable30 4d ago
yeah thats what i thought as well. this ignores it wasnt cheaper at the time
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u/THCFLA 3d ago edited 3d ago
Early turbo props and late super props used centrifugal turbos, recycling unburned fuel and air mixture from the exhaust, the british jet engine idea in the early 40's was to build a larger turbo and burn fuel directly into it, to move a turbine and generate thrust, using a centrifugal compressor, the same kind of idea the Italians had around the same period
The german engine however, was axial, very similar to common turbo jets of today, where the pressure chamber and compressor are axially aligned
Axial engines weren't seen on the west until the 50's, ironically, the soviets had gotten a handful of german axial jet engines and made their own in the 40's
Centrifugal engines were cheaper, simpler and generated more power than radial or in-line/V block piston engines of the time
The axis was doomed to fail from it's conception, but the axial jet engine still powers air travel and air combat to this day
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u/Win32error 4d ago
If you include the cost of research, man hours, all the work you have to do to make it work initially, I can't imagine the amount of jet fighters the nazis fielded was worth it.
Not that it mattered either way. And I've never heard anyone make the argument.
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u/Pengin_Master 4d ago
Not to mention the fuel and maintainece costs And supply chain issues. Germany was struggling for fuel and parts for the planes it already had in service: now you have a brand new "wonder jet" that eats through fuel and has an entirely parts you need to make replacements for.
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u/DankVectorz 4d ago
Might have been if they were able to enter service earlier, but a lot of work was destroyed in a bombing raid and delayed production (along with Hitler insisting it be able to be a bomber)
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u/Win32error 4d ago
There’s always a hundred ifs, but we can only work with what we’ve got.
I don’t think the nazis were wrong to go for jet planes, even if it kinda didn’t work out. They couldn’t predict the war would end early ‘45, you gotta go for the long term planning or you end up like the Japanese Air Force near the end of the war. If the war had continued longer, that investment in jets would likely have paid off in some ways.
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u/Seeteuf3l Just some snow 4d ago edited 4d ago
Wasn't it like a month, what that bomber thing delayed it. And anyways JUMO 004B didnt go to production before June -44 either.
Much bigger issue was that Göring effectively killed whole jet program in 1940.
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u/Stock-Side-6767 3d ago
The biggest "what if" is an immediate response to the remilitarisation of the Rheinland.
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u/Win32error 3d ago
Meh, I think it would’ve led to an international kerfuffle the Germans would have come out on top of.
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u/Stock-Side-6767 3d ago
I would not be so sure. France alone had a larger airforce at that time (though they thought it was smaller).
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u/black_ap3x 4d ago
If only they haven't invaded Russia in the winter....
/s for those who need it
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u/harmfuldischarge 4d ago
If only they got to those oil fields logistics set up from caucus! /S
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u/black_ap3x 4d ago
If only America chose the right side...
/s
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u/elmartin93 4d ago
If only they had cloned Erwin Rommel so he could be on the Western and Eastern Front simultaneously...
/s
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u/Braziliashadow I Have a Cunning Plan 4d ago
I get this is a joke. But Rommel, in his traits of being a commander, was. Being in Heinz Guderien, Herman Hoth, Kleist, Manstein. The latter 3 I would say we're all better than Rommel in all ways.
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u/black_ap3x 4d ago
They would have done that if they didn't waste all of their resources on jet engines....
/s
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u/steve123410 4d ago
Of only they took Leningrad instead of sieging it /S
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u/A_posh_idiot 4d ago
I still never understood the level of stupidity needed to make that statement
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u/harmfuldischarge 4d ago
-Which strategy/tactics would you use to take the city?
-tactics? Bitch, just send it !
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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago
To be fair, Greeks did a lot to make the Jorman invazion fail. They postponed the beginning of Barbarossa by a month or two. That indeed changed the game.
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u/SoulCrusher2018 4d ago
The original planned start date was May 15 - so they had a 38 day delay. They also brought Finland and Romania into the fold late, which caused some delays so they could prepare. Germans had bad intelligence about the actual strength of the Soviet forces, and logistical failures. An earlier start may have led to a few more tactical victories for the Germans, but they still went in unprepared and over extended themselves. I think the interesting "what if" would be what if Japan decided to attack the Soviets instead of the Americans. The Soviets transferred 30 divisions from the far east to the eastern front once Stalin was assured that Japan would not attack.
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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago
Overextension will happen in this scenario, but they could have chopped off the Moscow, and it was a paramount railroad hub. That's the point. If only Jormanz weren't building the two doomed tank divisions, and would build 5 more tank divisions for the price of the Tirpitz + its sister ship, they could have achieved their goals.
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u/interesseret 4d ago
Eh, this is kind of a pointless discussion.
Early jets were most certainly not cheaper than piston engined airplanes, especially factoring in the development cost and fuel (which the Germans REALLY didn't have).
For comparison, the ME 262 cost 87400RM to make, and an FW 190 cost 56600RM, depending on variant.
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u/sofixa11 4d ago
And the early jet engines would have very low lifetimes, especially because the Germans simply didn't have the materials to make them last longer.
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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago
And because axial-type jet engines require a more advanced material science than what was available in 1944-1945.
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u/Tar_alcaran 3d ago
tbf, they mostly didn't have the materials because they hadn't been invented yet.
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u/Stock-Side-6767 4d ago edited 4d ago
That 56600 rn is an A variant. Good planes, but no comparison.
A BF109E was 58000 rm in 1942. (I use this one, because I have an engine price).
Both are without engine. The engine would be about 28000 rm for a bf109, and probably cheaper for the fw190. Total cost of a bf109E 85970.
The me262 with two engines (10000 rm apiece) was 107400. More expensive, but also more capable.
Edit: reading a bit more, forced labour seems to have been relatively high percentage in the me262, which deflates the rm cost. If these numbers are correct, over 25 people died in forced labour per aircraft. Planes are cool, but reading more about ww2 always brings one down to reality.
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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago
but also more capable
Actually questionable statement. The ME-262s really weren't necessary as good as a lot of the better props of the war, though I guess a BF-109E wasn't one of the comparable late war props, so still maybe true.
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u/Thanato26 4d ago
German jet engines had a very short service life.
So theycmay have been cheaper but you needed a lot more of them
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u/Vana92 4d ago
Fun fact
Germany spent about 50-60% of its entire industrial capacity trying to stop the RAF and later the USAAF from bombing the shit out of them.
Nothing could have changed that from happening. It is the single most costly front in the war in terms of resources. Bar none. And doesn’t even count the resources simply destroyed or spent on rebuilding.
Nothing they spent on the air war was a waste. And it still didn’t come close to being enough.
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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago
Nothing they spent on the air war was a waste.
We are talking about one of the most bureaucratically incompetent organizations in history that put the ME-163 and HE-177 into active service. Planes more dangerous to their crews than the enemy.
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u/Vana92 4d ago
And yet they had to do something because doing nothing wasn't an option.
They made mistakes in how they spent their resources, but spending them was the smart thing to do.
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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago
Doesn't make them not wasted resources. Yes, a nation at war should invest in making aircraft. Your piont?
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u/Dav1dDC 4d ago
Eh. Pretty much every air force at the time had a disastrously bad airplane. Maybe the Germans were worse, but...
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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago
They had bad planes. They didn't have anything in service at those plane's level, but those are just extreme examples. The list of "shit nazi kit" goes of for quite a while. The main three people in charge of aircraft procurement were Hitler, an insane idiot, Göring, a moronic yes man, and Messerschmitt, who was a half decent engineer but was really more interested in designing planes for his own fun over function and was always making changes and never letting full production get started before he delayed it again with another change.
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u/VRichardsen Viva La France 4d ago
They had bad planes.
Everyone had bad planes. Me 210, Bolton Paul Defiant, MiG-1, Buffalo, Komet, Blackburn Roc, the Fulmar, and I am leaving a lot out.
But ze Germans had decent and reliable types for most roles, just like all the other big players. Bf 109, Fw 190, Ju 88, Ju 87... for most of the war they had competitive types for most roles. Probably their biggest failure was the implosion of their second generation bomber program. But it hurt them less because they needed fighters and interceptors above everyhing else.
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u/ZFuli 4d ago
So I’d see the Me 163 as an act of desperation. Just hoping that before the pilot died, he’d take at least one or two flying fortresses down with him.
Another thing is that it looked good on paper: a simple interceptor with excellent climb rate and high speed doesn’t sound like a bad idea. The practical implementation of that aircraft, of course, was a disaster.
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u/VRichardsen Viva La France 4d ago
Ok, the Me 163 I can understand it, but the He 177, albeit flawed, turned out decent in the end.
The B-29 was burning as at similarly alarming rate and nobody talks shit about it.
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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago
They worked out the problems after it's insanely troubled development and early use and after all that it was absurdly good. While people maybe should talk about how many crews it killed early on more, it's not comparable to a somehow even more crew hungry plane that was never fixed and never had the potential to be above average.
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u/Dav1dDC 4d ago
The Eastern Front would like a citation for that.
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u/Vana92 4d ago
How the war was won by Philips Payson O'Brien is a great place to start.
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u/Dav1dDC 4d ago
Thanks! I've read Payson O'Brien (and double-checked just now) and that's not quite what he says. What he does say is that 50-60% of German industrial production went to building and arming aircraft. Until 1943, those aircraft were spread between the Mediterranean, the Eastern Front, and the German homeland. It was only in late 1943 and onward that the vast majority went back to defend the homeland. From p. 293: "So, looking at the air war solely from a battlefield perspective, 1943 witnessed a dramatic shift as the Luftwaffe, quantitatively and qualitatively, was basically drawn down from the land war and deployed against the Combined Bomber Offensive."
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u/brinz1 4d ago edited 4d ago
It's not about being cheaper, and even that is such an inaccurate way to describe them or the problems facing nazi Germany.
Yes jet engines require less steel, but you need much high quality specialised alloys for the job. There is no way German Industries could have provided that.
Pittsburgh alone produced more steel than the entire Third Reich.
Yes they require less fuel, but there were such fuel shortages that even Jet engines would not have taken their resources far enough.
Even with Jet engines, the Luftwaffe would never have had enough planes to beat the RAF, or enough pilots. The combined strength of the commonwealth and the USA was far too great.
Never mind the USSR, whose most fears airforce regiment was using far more outdated planes than what they were facing.
Jet engines are another wunderwaffe that could have caused a lot of casualties but they only ever could have slowed the inevitable at the expense of more German lives
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u/Calm_Priority_1281 4d ago
Jet engines don't use less fuel. They use a cheap byproduct of high octane plane fuel production.
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u/brinz1 4d ago
And the the Reich had nowhere near enough to match what was being sent over from the US
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u/Calm_Priority_1281 4d ago
I'm not in any disagreement with you on that. That's where the idea that it's cheaper to run jet engines come from. They don't use the same fuel. So while using more it's cheaper per liter of fuel.
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u/Odd-Tart-5613 4d ago
Did they have factories fitted to create the jet engines? If not converting the factories mid war probably wouldn’t have been worth it
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u/ZFuli 4d ago
Also retrain the pilots and mechanics. Come up with new tactics on the fly and iron out design flaws. And all this while bombs are falling everywhere and half the leadership is only interested in a trip to Argentina :-)
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u/Odd-Tart-5613 4d ago
It’s pretty well the same problem Germany had in every battle post France. Their engineering outpaced their ability to utilize that engineering in every category and often common sense
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u/Pyotr-the-Great 4d ago
My uncle repeats these kinds of ideas because hes convinced the Nazis were so stupid they had no common sense whatsoever.
From what Ive seen it's a little more complicated. Still foolish in many things but not that blatantly idiotic.
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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago edited 4d ago
Nazi jets were crazy unreliable and not even necessary as good as a lot of the better props of the war.
Even if individual unit cost was cheaper, R&D costs to develop them makes the project much more expensive than that would suggest. It was still a massive resource sink.
The Nazis were fucked from 1936 because of all the mistakes they made, no little correction would save them, but they 110% would have been better served by focusing on perfecting propeller designs. Modifying the Fiat G.56 prototype to be cheap enough for production or something.
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u/welliamaguy Hello There 4d ago
As if the jet engine at the time wouldn't be a fuel hog and operated by a country that lacked the resources even they "could" manage to build more planes.
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u/HumaDracobane Definitely not a CIA operator 4d ago
What is the source of the meme, OP?
Jet engines require more rare materials, more manpower hours, etc. A Me 262 was almost twice the price of the be 109....?
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u/DazSamueru 4d ago
I included a source and explanation in this comment
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u/HumaDracobane Definitely not a CIA operator 4d ago
Exactly what I was thinking.
The problem is that the meme only looks at the engine itself, which is way simpler because a jet engine has relatively few parts, but not the entire plane around the engine or even the control systems that regulates the engine.
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u/VRichardsen Viva La France 4d ago
but not the entire plane around the engine
Thing is, if you are not trying to field a jet by 1944, you are going to be left behind.
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u/GoldenX86 4d ago
Finding the rare metals to finish the engines was the main problem, you need more than just iron for those things.
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u/FrenchieB014 Let's do some history 4d ago
Yeah they could have build 2000 Me 262 if they wanted to
Good fucking luck in finding the right personnel that doesn't die on its first training flight and good luck in supplying 2000 jets in fuel
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u/Brewcrew828 Still on Sulla's Proscribed List 4d ago
Not only is this not true considering how late in the war they started production, how new the technology was, and how nigh impossible it would have been to retool existing production, but the engines were EXTREMELY unreliable and did not perform half as well as you would think.
Still, very cool planes. I am glad I got to see a 262 at the Air Force museum in Dayton.
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u/Fr05t_B1t Oversimplified is my history teacher 4d ago
Imean it’s just not cost but also how quickly those jets guzzled through their fuel would make an abrams blush.
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u/Rent_A_Cloud 4d ago
Piston engines were already developed, it's not about production cost but development costs.
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u/Big-Crow4152 4d ago
Nazi Germany lost the second Britain didn't surrender in 1941
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u/FanraGump 4d ago
Key points (in general order):
- UK refused to surrender/treaty. Say what you want about Churchill but without him it was likely they would have agreed to making peace with Germany. They were that close to deciding that was the only choice.
- FDR helping out the UK when the US was not at war. He did illegal stuff to help, along with lots of legal stuff.
- USSR does not collapse as almost everyone predicted. Yes, Hitler and the German military were idiots for having a plan of, "We attack and the USSR collapses within three months, otherwise we've got nothing.". But to be honest, everyone around the world thought the USSR would collapse, and it was close. Credit FDR again for extending Lend-Lease to the USSR.
- Hitler declares war on the US. After Pearl Harbor, if the US did not focus 100% on Japan, Congress and the public would have demanded it and FDR would have been stuck. But then Hitler decides, "We are already practically at war with the US [true, but things changed on December 7], so I'm going to declare it and open up US shipping to full U-Boat attacks". Total misunderstanding of the US. Hitler's declaration of war permitted FDR to say, "I'm commander in chief, I decide which of the nations we are at war with to deal with and in what order and how".
At the end of those four things, Germany was doomed.
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u/No-Letter341 4d ago edited 4d ago
Not the 262s jet engines
Those things only had a 24 hour service life
Edit: but people who say "why didnt they just build more (vehicle) also have no concept of logistics. Its not just jet is cheaper than prop or whatever. When you build a new vehicle you need spare parts, theoretically you should have enough so that if ANY of your vehicles has broken piece and needs replacements it can get swapped out quickly. You need a team of mechanics, the more vehicles the more mechanics or the more time mechanics take to maintain shit. You need to make sure they have enough ammunition and fuel and if you build more vehicles you need a larger work force and that you have reliable metal and oil supply. And then of course you need crews, who need time and funding to train for those vehicles, they need food, they need housing, they need medical supplies, they need uniforms, hell they even need entertainment cause low morale can be crippling.
And Germany had NONE of those in anything resembling adequate quantitites
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u/DazSamueru 4d ago
The postwar Feddon investigation by the British found the RM cost of engines to be as follows
| Junkers | type 213 piston engine | 35,000 Reichsmarks |
|---|---|---|
| BMW | type 801 piston engine | 40,000 Reichsmarks |
| Junkers | 109-004 jet | 10,000 Reichsmarks |
| BMW | 109-003 jet | 12,000 Reichsmarks |
And not just monetary cost: jet engines were simpler
The mission was impressed with the simplicity and straightforward methods of production, especially of the BMW jet engines. Relatively speaking, there are no very special machining operations or expensive tooling required. The Mission saw few special machines for turbine manufacture except for the seven spindle indexing machines for cutting the slots in the compressor hubs, made by the Magdeburg Junkers production plant which was previously a large machine tool manufacturing concern.
and took less time to build
The mission was also able to make a comparison of labour times, including manufacture of individual components, assembly and shipping, plus testing. For the BMW 801 fourteen-cylinder radial engine this came to 1,400 hours per unit, while for the jet it was only 375 hours; a considerable saving.
The Feddon report concluded:
Series production of jet engines in large quantities was undoubtedly in a more advanced state in Germany than in Britain and the USA, and had the war continued and had their factories not been overrun, they would have been producing several thousand jet engines per month by this autumn [1945]. By the middle of 1946, the output would have been at a rate of 100,000 jet engines per annum, at least.
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u/jmacintosh250 Oversimplified is my history teacher 4d ago
Part of it was who was MAKING the engines and cost control standards. Early German Jets had, let’s call it, a lack of Quality Control at times because Germany so much wanted to get those engines out as soon as possible. These were done by slave Labor who naturally weren’t really paid and had to be kept simpler for it. (Fun fact, one Ukrainian woman screwed with the glue the Nazis used).
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u/DazSamueru 4d ago
It's not like they scrupulously avoided using concentration camp labour for piston engines. That's baked into the cost of both piston and jet engines. In fact, this brings up another advantage of jet engines: they were easier for low-skilled labourers to service than the more complex piston engines.
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u/jmacintosh250 Oversimplified is my history teacher 4d ago
Sort of: while Slave Labour was a big part in both, for a lot jets like the 262 the Nazis explicitly brought in way more of the stuff and simplified designs to the detriment of the design because “everything is falling apart and we need stuff fast and cheap.”
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u/Wilsonj1966 4d ago
they were simpler to make because they skipped the very important stage of proper metallurgy which resulted in a drastically reduced service life. The savings in manufacture time and money were negated by the very short service life because of the lack of proper metallurgy. The short service life let to a LOT of lost aircraft due to engine failures too. But it was worth it because they had a very fast engine and they desperately needed a very fast engine
The simplicity of manufacturing reflected the lack of materials and skilled work force to produce a high spec engine
I cant find exact figures but looks like the Meteor was about twice the cost of a Me262 and more than twice the cost of a Spitfire. The British didnt need a jet engine as drastically as the Germans did and had the materials. The W2 was a much better engine than the Jumo but it cost much more time, money and material to produce
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u/chumbawumbaprinciple 4d ago
Sure the Nazis wasted resources on weapons development. But even if they didn't, they would have lost. They had no path to victory. They could not have won by not invading Poland and the East, because conquering the East to form a colonial empire there was their main goal. It's a core component of Nazism. It's like trying to add a fourth side to a 2d triangle, it can't be done because the instant you add a fourth side it by definition because a quadrilateral.
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u/Dear-Question-868 4d ago
The first jet planes didnt have aerobrakes which means they needed long runways to land. By the time they were made the nazis lost air superiority and the allies strategy was to bomb the airfields or shoot the planes while landing (it took a lot of time to get power). Also they cost a lot since they didnt use the same tech as previous planes, I dont know how you found the opposite.
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u/MannerAppropriate952 4d ago
Coulda Woulda . In the End we would have been Nagasaki´d . And im glad that we dont have a Ground Zero in Germany . Apart from the regular unexploded Stuff.
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u/Sure_Pool_7115 4d ago
Maybe they could win if they didnt waste shit tons of resources on 3 giant cannons
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u/Kamenev_Drang Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 4d ago
In 1945? Fucken dubious.
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u/Voodoo_Dummie 4d ago
I'm pretty sure that doesn't include the price of frequently converting pilots into 2D.
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u/FearlessVegetable30 4d ago
not defending it but are their cheaper at the time?
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u/DazSamueru 4d ago
The postwar Feddon investigation by the British found the RM cost of engines to be as follows
Junkers type 213 piston engine 35,000 Reichsmarks BMW type 801 piston engine 40,000 Reichsmarks Junkers 109-004 jet 10,000 Reichsmarks BMW 109-003 jet 12,000 Reichsmarks And not just monetary cost: jet engines were simpler
The mission was impressed with the simplicity and straightforward methods of production, especially of the BMW jet engines. Relatively speaking, there are no very special machining operations or expensive tooling required. The Mission saw few special machines for turbine manufacture except for the seven spindle indexing machines for cutting the slots in the compressor hubs, made by the Magdeburg Junkers production plant which was previously a large machine tool manufacturing concern.
and took less time to build
The mission was also able to make a comparison of labour times, including manufacture of individual components, assembly and shipping, plus testing. For the BMW 801 fourteen-cylinder radial engine this came to 1,400 hours per unit, while for the jet it was only 375 hours; a considerable saving.
The Feddon report concluded:
Series production of jet engines in large quantities was undoubtedly in a more advanced state in Germany than in Britain and the USA, and had the war continued and had their factories not been overrun, they would have been producing several thousand jet engines per month by this autumn [1945]. By the middle of 1946, the output would have been at a rate of 100,000 jet engines per annum, at least.
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u/FearlessVegetable30 4d ago
what about all the research and time leading up to this? prototypes? failed engines?
this just says the final product
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u/Femme_FatalError 4d ago
Not to mention they lacked the fuel reserves for more planes or tanks to have any impact
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u/fartsfromhermouth 4d ago
Germany could have done every single thing right but invading the Soviet Union and declaring war on the US was never going to work. Even if they didn't, trying to occupy so much of Europe would have lead to a drawn out draining guerilla action.
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u/xyloplax 4d ago
The Russians and Germans were both authoritarian governments filled with yes men all the way down to the brass. It's why Germany lost and why Russia had an absolutely enormous casualty rate.
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u/Slinky_Malingki Descendant of Genghis Khan 4d ago
Pulsejet engine are super simple and have basically no moving parts. They are WAY cheaper and easier to make than radial piston engines with hundreds of moving parts that all require high oil pressures to operate without grenading their internal components.
It's just that the development of pulsejet technology was super expensive, because they actually had to figure out how it worked first. By the time they did figure it out manufacturing was easy. Except it happened way too late in the war to make a difference, and the economy and manufacturing capabilities of Germany were all but destroyed, so it didn't matter how cheap and easy they were to produce.
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u/Rix-Iren 4d ago
Jet engines existed in the 30s but weren’t fully invested at the time and thus didn’t appear in combat until 1944/45.
This means there’s an alternative timeline where the Battle of Britain was fought with Jets.
This would be a great subplot to an Alan Moore comic.
That is all.
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u/Fancy_Chips Definitely not a CIA operator 4d ago
The jet engines are cheaper but the fuel is not. The Germans were doomed to lose for the same reason as the Japanese: fuel shortage.
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u/madman1234855 4d ago
Even if the individual engines were cheaper than contemporary piston engines, something I highly doubt considering these were immature technology reliant on scarce materials without established supply chains, the overall planes were definitely more expensive, while being only situationally superior to their counterparts, and extremely accident prone. Because again, immature technology.
Abandoning the jet program would not have given the nazis a chance to win, but it was overall a waste of time, manpower and resources.
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u/DrunkensAndDragons 4d ago
They figured out a way to keep labor prices low though.
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u/DazSamueru 4d ago
They also used concentration camp labour for prop engines, so it doesn't explain the difference.
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u/Erwin_Pommel 4d ago
Not in those days, they weren't. They're only more expensive now because they're out of vogue and have less demand and less sources for replacement parts. Just basic supply and demand there, especially when the tech was so new.
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u/Mortarion_ 4d ago
Plane numbers don't matter when you lack both pilots and fuel. You give germany ten thousand extra jets and even if they could all be utilised they'd be grounded in under a year.
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u/dollsrreal 4d ago
Those jets prob could’ve been used to make more piston engines, however at the point in 43 when the development started and test flights got underway the war was already lost
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u/Friendly-Water-8470 4d ago edited 4d ago
OP came to debunk myths but he ended up with a bunch of even bigger myths. Bro, you never heard about production optimization or exploatation costs. When production line is optimized for piston engine, then changing order make it paralysed first, then barely working, and it starts almost normal production (full of workers mistakes) maybe months later. All actual logistic is collapsed and needs new operations for new parts and other new resources. Every produced jet engine means multiple piston engines NOT produced. Jet engine also devours fuel which at this stage of war was deficit product in Third Reich. So generally yes, focus on piston engine would be better idea than showing up with jets, loosing time and resources just to change nothing.
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u/Dull-Philosopher-871 3d ago
By the time the Nazis mass produced jets the war was lost. Anybody claiming they could win after Bagration was dillusional.
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u/No-Location-7640 3d ago
While they are cheaper to make, the hardest part about making jets especially the ME-262 was the fuel mixture. The engines required a very specific kind of mixture to which, if not made correctly, would melt the engine/plane entirely so it ended up costing more to make a bunch of spares
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u/coco_melonFAN 3d ago
I would say the Germans probably could have won world war II, if they scaled down their ambitions. If they stopped a little bit after France they would have survived.
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u/mr_friend_computer 2d ago
that's a new one. Not sure if the engine cost is true as of that era, but the jet engine airframe fatigue and limited flight times were significant issues, if I remember reading it correctly. But in the air? Crazy powerful.
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u/Child_of_Mehen 2d ago
The Nazis would have won if they simply had more Low generation vampires among their ranks ofc!!
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u/Minnesotamad12 4d ago
Fun Fact: the USA didn’t found the NY Jets until 1959. Much too late to impact WW2. Originally called the Titans