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To: mountn man
If he would have listened to Donitz and followed through on Plan Z, Germany would have conquered all of western Europe in a matter of months.

Be careful, delaying the war would also have allowed the British especially to have improved their equipment. Two examples, the Supermarine Spitfire underwent testing and acceptance during the period between Munich and the invasion of Poland. IF the war had started even six month later SMS Bismark could not have sunk HMS Hood, because Hood would have been in drydock with her engine rooms in pieces (upgrades to her Armoring scheme was also planned).

As for the Me262, that plane was rushed from proof of concept to operational use due to desperation. several more years of development would have been of great benefit as among other problems it had was engine reliability (40 hours!).

89 posted on 08/03/2015 2:58:02 AM PDT by Fraxinus (My opinion, worth what you paid.)
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To: Fraxinus
From conception, Hood had armor problems. It was a calculated problem. Armoring her would have slowed her substantially. It already had, as she already had come out of a refit in '41. After adding an armor belt, her speed dropped from 31kts to 28.

The keels for two of the proposed six H-class battleships were already laid. Both of these would have been larger, faster and with bigger guns than Bizmarck (16" vs 15")

The Spitfire was a fine plane, in its day. But it was a 370 mph plane vs a 560 mph. 190 mph difference. That's almost 100 yds every second. Even IF a 262 came from directly behind and passed, the Spitfire pilot would have only a matter of seconds to acquire the target to shoot. The effective range of the guns was about 1500 yds.

Unfortunately for Allied pilots, the preferred method of attack for the 262 was a slash and dash, thus not allowing the Allied pilots much countering ability.

Hitler was an idiot, who thought himself a military genius. If he would have paid attention to his military experts, and not only delayed the war, by at least 2 years, but also focus on the projects THEY deemed important, their military would have been FAR superior to anything the Allies had. As it was, it pushed us to the very brink. Britain almost fell in '40. Without Britain, D-day NEVER would have happened. western Europe would have been lost. We could have built all the Liberty and Victory ships we wanted. We would have had no where to stage the operation.

THEN Hitler could have attacked Russia. Then Russia would have been the country trying to fight a war on 2 fronts, with Japan controlling everything east.

The US, without help from both Russia and Britain, could not have gone on the offensive against Germany. As it was, we were limited in our attacks against Germany from our bases in Europe. Imagine trying to mount those attacks across an entire ocean. Of course that ocean works both ways preventing Hitler from attacking us.

If Hitler would have had US conquest in mind, he would have had to come up from South America. By that time our manufacturing would have had us on par, for the most part with Germany.

Personally, I think it would have been in Hitlers best interest to have taken all of Europe, Africa and the entire Middle East and probably India. And then stayed put.

At this point you need to think economics. Germany would have had everything it needed. At the same time, most of the US trading partners would have been overtaken. We would have been either trading with Germany...or isolated.

134 posted on 08/03/2015 7:39:19 AM PDT by mountn man (The Pleasure You Get From Life, Is Equal To The Attitude You Put Into It)
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