[sam_paine]

German scientists were better than the Soviets German scientists.....

Uh. Wright, Curtiss, Martin, Douglas, Loughead, Boeing, Hughes, etc etc....were better than the German and Soviet scientists....

[Richard Kimball]

No argument that there were some brilliant US scientists. The Germans, however, had some very forward thinking work. Here's a link to some of the stuff they had on the design board:http://www.luft46.com/mmart/lufartmm.html. The Nazis had some incredible stuff going. Some of it was bizarre, some still affects modern design.

[RFEngineer]

"Uh. Wright, Curtiss, Martin, Douglas, Loughead, Boeing, Hughes, etc etc....were better than the German and Soviet scientists...."

It takes nothing away from the great American aircraft designers to acknowledge that things like rocket-powered aircraft and jet-powered aircraft were first accomplished in combat by German aircraft designers.

We wouldn't have been able to develop the rockets that got us to the moon and back without those German rocket scientists, esp. Von Braun. They were simply the best.