She'll fly a lot faster if they remove that giant steel cone from her belly.
Posted on 06/26/2009 4:37:21 AM PDT by Dallas59
ON TV Hitler's Stealth Fighter airs Sunday, June 28, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. About the show >>
Top stealth-plane experts have re-created a radical, nearly forgotten Nazi aircraft: the Horten 2-29, a retro-futuristic fighter that arrived too late in World War II to make it into mass production. (See Hitler's stealth fighter in pictures.)
The engineers' goal was to determine whether the so-called stealth fighter was truly radar resistant. In the process, they've uncovered new clues to just how close Nazi engineers were to unleashing a jet that some say could have changed the course of the war.
To replicate the Ho 2-29 late last year for a documentary premiering Sunday, a team from the Northrop Grumman defense-contracting corporation used original Nazi blueprints (re-created blueprints of Hitler's stealth fighter) and the only surviving Ho 2-29, which has been stored in a U.S. government facility for more than 50 years.
The all-wing Ho 2-29 looked more like today's U.S. B-2 bomber (B-2 bomber picture)—or something from a Star Wars prequel—than like any other World War II aircraft. Made primarily of wood and powered by jet engines, the plane was designed for speeds of up to 600 miles an hour (970 kilometers an hour).
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
She'll fly a lot faster if they remove that giant steel cone from her belly.
That’s classic.
And I bet that tail gunner gets pretty cold from the wind whipping around him. Seems like painting his station red sure isn't very stealthy either.
I’ve always thought that the P-38 was the greatest looking airplane in the war.
Getting Yamamoto was the icing on the cake for that aircraft.
There are modern planes today made of playwood.
Yep, it is wasn’t sharp and pointy they didn’t want it. Hence, we had really bad aircraft throughout the 50’s and 60’s. Fast, but not very good at anything. Remember the Air Force fought even using the F-16 until budget cuts caused them to rethink that position.
The British Mosquito was made of wood.
Wood was used for a number of designs because it wasn’t a strategic material; Germany used up a lot of metal in its war effort. Metals shortages pulled the plug on the A-10 terror rocket project, which had as its goal bombing New York City. The A-9 warhead/spacecraft loaded with high explosives (and presumably, eventually a nuclear weapon) would have been live piloted, and after terminal trajectory was locked in (and sufficiently low altitude), the pilot was to bail out, parachute into the ocean, and be picked up by U-boat. :’)
The obvious alternative (hindsight being 20-20) would have been A) not invading the USSR, or at least not in 1940, and B) concentrating on domination of the Mediterranean, finishing off the British in N Africa and the Suez Canal, and shutting down the British navy by denying them petroleum. Imagine the level of carnage had the resources used in the eastern campaign been diverted first to N Africa and the Med, and then to a terror missile campaign against a starving home island.
LOL!
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Thanks Dallas59. And well put. And I needed a WWII topic, well, another one. |
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Somebody at the Pentagon got special clearance to let Jack Northrop go in and tour the (still secret) B-2 before he died. I've always thought that was a really classy thing to do.
The SÄNGER AMERIKA BOMBER ... now that was something way out there http://www.luft46.com/misc/sanger.html
Well, Germany occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia; in alliance with the USSR beat the Poles and occupied western Poland; won the war against Britain, France, and the rest of western Europe, with a small amount of help from Italian forces, and neutrality by Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and I think Turkey; and that was in the space of a few years at the end of the 1930s.
Germany’s land war was nearly entirely fought against the USSR (and the Russian winters), with some sideshows in North Africa, parts of Scandinavia, the Balkans, and Greece. From 1940 through mid-1944, the Germans (mostly, with various foreign nationals fighting for the Waffen SS, plus some Italians) only had to face the Red Army.
Still, in both WWs casualty rates and KIAs were much in their favor, at least until late in the war. Stalin unleashed the 1st Byelorussian and 1st Ukraine armies in the taking of Berlin, right at the end of the Reich, and those Red Army components lost something like 600,000 troops. Just maintaining such a long, large, cold, violent front in the USSR, while tremendously outnumbered basically the whole time, and with Hitler insisting on major mistakes; shows just how skilled Germany’s forces were.
But until D-Day, the Germans didn’t have to worry much about second fronts. Churchill wanted to go back via what he called the “soft underbelly” — forgetting that both Greece and Italy are mountainous and make for great defensive stands. Apparently he just wasn’t much of a military thinker — none of the major heads of state in WWII appear to have been. During one of the wartime conferences, Stalin finally humiliated Churchill regarding the failure to take Italy, and insisted that the French landings no longer be postponed.
By the time D-Day happened, the Germans had been in retreat for almost a year, following the defeat at Kursk. Having to deal with a second front (along with Hitler’s usual stupidity in micromanaging the campaigns) was nearly the final straw; the winter offensive of 30 divisions known forever as the Battle of the Bulge was a desperate gamble, but it delayed the western allied push almost as much as Montgomery and Churchill. Ultimately it hastened the end of the war, because Germany’s eastern front was collapsing.
Ooops, and thanks, interesting link!
I think the hope for the Germans was that if they had succeeded in the The Battle of Bulge, they could have gotten a deal with the Western Allies, and to have them fight the Russians.
I bet a lot of people would have gone for that deal had it been available.
That is really cool...I will have to watch this. Thanks
There were Ukrainians in the Waffen SS, but anyway... I think we’re in agreement — which is to say, Germany’s only fatal error was in attacking the USSR. It’s puzzled people for a long time, although the main idea cited as a possible explanation is, Hitler was following his own “Mein Kampf” framework. When he came into power, he gave out his expectations of the steps he wanted followed, in order, but each in a consecutive year. That’s obviously about half of a good plan with the other half a kind of doomed to failure tweak.
In “Interrogations”, a book based on the transcripts of postwar interrogations of Nazis (some of whom were imprisoned or executed later), some officer mentions that Hitler obsessed about the cross-border raids from the Soviet-controlled side of the frontier in occupied Poland, and felt goaded into a major response. That’s interesting.
Another recent book noted that Stalin was so sure the agreement with Hitler would hold, and incredulous over the scale of the invasion (and probably didn’t feel up to jumping headlong into another world war), that he refused to believe that what was actually going on. Stalin was for a short time, and possibly for the only time during his dictatorship, indecisive and inert.
Molotov was sent east for secret meetings with the Japanese, and came back with the understanding that the Czarist-era armistice and peace treaty with Japan would hold, despite the Axis treaty requirements. That freed Stalin to pull literally everything out of the east, something like 70 divisions, moving it round the clock by rail, and sending the offloaded trains completely empty, back to pick up more. The speed of the Red Army response came as a surprise by winter of 1940, after those early massive German victories over cannon fodder “patriotic armies”.
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