Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Luftwaffe 1946: Wunderwaffen - Propaganda vs. Reality (feat. Flugwerft Schleißheim)" video.
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I think Germany had some scientific advantage over their opponents, but it could not in itself help bring Germany to victory.
Those who (unlike me) love to speculate about "what if" scenarios could of course argue if Germany maybe could have a realistic chance to win the war if Germany somehow had killed the Normandy landing, avoided the Bagration disaster, and been able to use all panzers lost at Falaise, the Ardennes, Arracourt and other places in the west and thrown them into the east instead to retake the Romanian oil fields, and to inflict heavy manpower losses on the heavily exhausted red army.
Germany had a good education system ever since Frederick the Great and his system was later on copied by countries all over the world. And the heavy investments done by the German Kaiser helped to create many high tech industries in electricity, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Germany had the best educated people in the world. And Hitler would later on inherit this
fantastic science base.
And the rest of the world could not even catch up with Germany, even after the Versaille treaty had forced the country to share its secrets in the chemical industry with the Americans.
It is no surprise that Germany invested so heavily into creating new super weapons that would change the outcome of the war.
In both World wars were Germany fighting a war against enemies with much larger resources, and Germany could simply not win a war of atrittion. Germany needed a fast victory so it tried all kinds of methods to get a speedy victory even if it sometimes
meant using methods that would upset the global world opinion.
During WW1 did the Germans try to break the stalemate with poison gas, flame throwers, and unrestricted submarine warfare.
And in world war 2 was Germany also forced to gamble on new technologies since it did not have manpower or industrial production capacity to compete with the allies on equal terms.
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On the other hand would better planes result in more military victories which in turn would result in more resources.
Maybe jet fighters and SAMs would be able to prevent some american bombers from destroying factories so more planes could be built. And with more jet fighters it would be possible to protect mines, and prevent railways transports from being bombed - which would lead to more resources to Germany.
And maybe a few jets could make a difference to cling on to important strategic locations a little longer so Germany could get rare earths from Norway and Ukraine, metal from France and oil from Romania.
The problem for Germany would rather be to produce victories in the long run. USA had hundreds of thousands of planes and airmen ready to fight. While Germany didn't have huge amounts of aluminium and high quality oil like USA.
The technological development was speedy during this time period. Only 13 years after the war ended did F4 Phantom and F105 Thunderchief enter service. F4 is a plane capable of flying mach 2, and landing on aircraft carriers, and with upgrades this plane could still be a worthy opponent in air combats of today.
And F105 was almost a stealth bomber built in 1958, and despite it only had a single engine it could fly twice the speed of sound and carry a bombload twice as big as of a B17.
And in 1955, only 10 years after world war 2 did Sweden also develop Draken which was a fighter which also was capable of flying mach2 and it would remain in service with several nordic air forces until the late 1990s, and Austria kept their last Drakens in service until 2005.
All of those three planes would be able to outclass any early war allied or axis aircraft. And not only that. Every plane in service in 1945 would be slaughtered in an air combat against F4, F105 or Draken.
Compare that to today, when upgraded versions of old planes (like F16 Viper, Gripen NG, Eurofighter) still are deadly opponents to even the most advanced fighter jets in service - like F22 which is usally considered the best plane in the world. We are talking about planes which are 40 years old.
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