Webb wrote on May 20^th, 2012 at 9:45pm:


New to me. Quite dumb. And for ego reasons too. Would have had the rest of the world after his jugular in by far faster time he did already.

The ego of rulers is the ruination of their empires.


Webb wrote on May 20^th, 2012 at 9:45pm:


...beside targets the size of London, yeah, and being extremely costly... then again, they didn't have the GPS satellite system and the miniaturized integrated circuitry today we can boast about and had to make due with miniaturized thermoionic tubes and gyroscopes...

Just think about the simple Commodore C64 made in such a backward way and the sheer amount of power and space it would need, not to talk about more modern computers and the worldwide net we commonly use today...

And to justify the cost of every V1 and V2 was the desperate hope to awe into submission the allies with their wonder weapons...

That they only made the Allies angrier and more determined to tear them another one... I guess came as a complete surprise to them.


Webb wrote on May 20^th, 2012 at 9:45pm:


Again, new to me, but hardly surprising. I reckon that had things gone differently on the other two fronts, he could have diverted enough Wehrmacht divisions to take Switzerland too.

The by far dumbest thing he did was to open a second war front after his Luftwaffe had their communal butts handed to them by the RAF... just weeks away from the entering of the USA in the conflict... ONLY TO TOP IT ALL OFF BY DECLARING WAR TO USA AFTER PEARL HARBOR, making a huge favor to Roosevelt along the way.

Sometimes I stop thinking about it and feel awestruck at the sheer idiocy and bad timing. Then I can't help but feel so good Hitler was such a dunce that his assassination by allies forces commandos was rejected on the basis that his death would surely hand the control of the Reich to someone who actually knew what he was doing. Until he remained there, final victory would be easier.


Webb wrote on May 20^th, 2012 at 9:45pm:


ALL censorship is stupid. Full stop.

The greater hypocrisy of it was that he tried to sell the "degenerate art", as he, a failed painter, called it, for money for his Reich anyway.


Webb wrote on May 20^th, 2012 at 9:45pm:


That was for their propaganda machine. For them and the people following them it was a way to... feel better about their way too much humble origins they could stand, we could say (I am offending no one nor unveiling any state secret saying that ancient Germanic people in the millenniums past were rather backwards if compared to Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and all the other voices in that list... and their Reich could not accept that), like some people nowadays squanders good money in the hope to find some ancestor that was noble and other somesuch idiocy.

They did squander a lot of money fabricating false "proofs" that even to my eyes when I was thirteen would have looked phony. Sometimes I cannot help but wonder who were they trying to fool... beside themselves, that is.

No real surprise, really. After all, True History tells that power and intelligence rarely, VERY RARELY have gone hand to hand, and most of the times it was the other way around.

And still is. This is the sadder part. Still is.

andy190 wrote on May 22^nd, 2012 at 2:00am:


Hitler was allied with Baldy in Italy and caved tunnels cannot deliver food and materials, especially war materials. Had Hitler had the time and the leeway, he'd had Switzerland hemmed in and it would have been easy to take the time to take them out by starvation thanks to the the continuous Luftwaffe bombardments while searching for other inserting points for the infantry.

It was a matter of time for the Germans to crack that nut. Time they didn't have, fortunately.


andy190 wrote on May 22^nd, 2012 at 2:00am:


With the outlook and the wisdom of nowadays they were only little better than junk, but for the times they were cutting edge technology. They had the main problems of being imprecise, like the only attempt to destroy a bridge on the Rhine which name I've forgot to stop the Allies from entering German land clearly showed, and extremely costly.

Developed in the mad hope of scaring the Allies and with the intent in mind to use fortunately never employed "alternative" kind of warheads ever since the first pencil had to touch the first design paper, there are those who believe that had the resources used to build them been used on the battlefields, on proved war technologies of the times, Germany could have resisted longer and given a tougher job to the Allies.

Anyway, you're comparing what were in all effects the first experiments of Wernher von Braun with his greatest achievements reached 25 years later under the flag of the willingness to sacrifice tax income for the victory in the war of prestige the USA government of the time engaged with Russia on who would have been the first to make a short walk on our rocky satellite. Though from that the ICBM's and all the other more useful rocketry were born (thanks to which nowadays we can use the GPS Nav even in our cars, to say only one), so it was not a waste of resources like in WWII Germany. It is like comparing a DH106 Comet with a 787.

andy190 wrote on May 22^nd, 2012 at 9:25pm:

A bridge is one of the most difficult targets to destroy from the air. The fact that the eleven launched at it landed anywhere near such a small target, one within 300 metres, proves the V2 was not as inaccurate as people make out.  The V2 was never intended as a precision weapon.

At least some of the failures would have been due to sabotage at the factory. One of the problems of using slave labour. Also, the failure of many to hit London was due to false intelligence reports from double agents that they were overshooting the target. This led to the guidance systems being recalibrated & the rockets falling short in Kent, not always harmlessly.

Hagar wrote on May 23^rd, 2012 at 3:48am:


I may have forgot the name of the bridge, and I could have sworn it was one on the Rhine while it wasn't. I just ask you not to give me a bad vote or my mum will ground me, please.

But everything considered, I beg to differ. The fact that the warhead struck at a distance of 300 meters (taking your word for it, as I cannot remember) shows that it was possibly even more imprecise than the contemporary high altitude bombing, which boasted, with the use of the Norden Bombsight, better precision than that. And we're talking ONE warhead on ONE missile against multiple bombs to reduce the imprecisions further by adding more bang, here.


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Indeed. And the fact that it was used as such that time shows stellar levels of incompetence at best, if not even bigger levels of idiocy at worst. Those ballistic suppositories were extremely expensive, and to use them for a job not suited was akin to burn Reichmarks on an open fire.


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Nowadays, modern GPS guided ballistic or cruise missiles, beside being extremely less expensive per unit, can boast precision of 3 meters at worst on target. It may still be hard, but they can crack the the job if needed, while their ancestors couldn't, and those who built them KNEW it too.


Hagar wrote on May 23^rd, 2012 at 3:48am:


Leaving aside the nonetheless intriguing British intelligence network and their counter-espionage, of what failures are you talking about? If your Wonder Weapon isn't able to center the side of a barn, and it ultimately doesn't, it's hardly a failure, but simply limitation of the design.

andy190 wrote on May 23^rd, 2012 at 11:41pm:

Indeed. http://www.v2rocket.com/start/deployment/denhaag.html

On October 26, nine rockets were fired, three of them in the space of twenty-five minutes. The next day there were two launch failures near Beukenhorst; one crashed into area of De Kruisvaarder; another crashed into the opposite end of Beukenhorst. The next day was even worse for the Sonderkommando troops at Beukenhorst – at (14.00 hr.) a rocket failure occurred at a height of 90 meters. The rocket fell back onto the launch site destroying equipment and killing twelve German soldiers. This would be the worst accident (pertaining to German losses) during the Den Haag operations. Afterwards, the Beukenhorst launch site was no longer used.

A rocket launched from the Rijswijkse Bos exploded at Huis van de Kruisvaarders / van St. Jan and killed seven boys, five brothers and two others in the afternoon. In the following months there were a lot of failures. In Rijswijk a rocket came down on the Roman Catholic Institute killing almost 20 people. In Voorburg at Koning Wilhelminastraat six houses were destroyed and even a rocket came down on the railway station in Wassenaar.

Even though the missiles were now fresh from the Central Works factory, launching failures continued. Dutch intelligence put the failure rate for launchings at 8%. During October, 83 rockets were launched of which 5 were failures. Some rockets blew up on their launch stands, killing and injuring crew members; some failed to ignite at all. Others hung in the air for a moment, then crashed to earth and blew up or fell into the sea. Whenever civilians heard the roar of a rocket ignition, everyone would begin to count the seconds.  After thirty seconds, they were safe; if the engine stopped after thirty seconds or more had gone by, the rocket would either crash into the North Sea or fall on the other side of the city.

When the engine cut out before the thirty second limit, that was the worst time. The missile would slow down and hang in the air for a few seconds before it began to fall back to earth. Rockets were seen blasting wildly over the city, out of control; shooting horizontally only to crash a few kilometers from the firing site. Most exploded on impact; if the warhead did not go off, German specialists would try to defuse it. Many of the failed shots fell on the residents of the city. The detonation of the 2000 LB (1000 kg) warhead, along with the alcohol and liquid oxygen supply, blew up hundreds of houses and caused many civilian casualties.

The ‘air burst’ problem had not been completely solved either. Rockets frequently broke up in the upper atmosphere, high above the North Sea. On November 12, a rocket broke up in the air over London's Victoria Station. Astonished people saw a puff of smoke bloom in the sky, followed a few seconds later by a distant explosion and a hail of metal fragments.

Webb wrote on May 20^th, 2012 at 9:45pm:


A map of V2 hits in SE England. Could destroy a complete block fairly easily, and arrived without any warning. unlike the V-1. 9000 civilians killed. The first one landed a bit short, about a mile from where I went to school.

http://londonist.com/2009/01/london_v2_rocket_sitesmapped.php

Hardly dumb. Rather hit the spot, so to speak.

Strategic Retreat wrote on May 23^rd, 2012 at 9:19pm:


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