Fastest Piston Fighter Of WWII

[Jackson_Slugger]

The Germans were so far ahead of their time.

They were still producing large numbers of Me-109's first flown in the early 1930's at the end of the war...

 

[Jackson_Slugger]

The SA did not become the SS. They were rivals. Although the SA existed before the SS, the SS arrested and then executed all SA members, including SA leader Ernst Rohm, around 1933 or 1934. Look it up. If grandpa survived the purge, he was lucky.

The "Night of the Long Knives" targeted only the leaders, like Rohm. They SA continued to exist for a while but gradually I think most of the rank and file were folded into the SS or Heer, as Himmler and Heydrich won the purge and the Waffen SS became the Nazi military faction...

 

[Jackson_Slugger]

my dad was in the 210th m.p. co. guarding the newly captured ludendorff bridge over the rhine river at remagen in march 1945. one of his repeated stories was seeing me262 jet fighters screaming just above the river coming at the river crossing with p51 mustangs hot on their tails. after releasing their payloads the me262s would go vertical, leaving the mustangs far behind in the dust. he said that the sights and sound of it opened the future. it amazed him what germany was capable of producing even so late in the war. half of his m.p. unit, him included, assaulted easy red sector, omaha beach, normandy, before first tide on june 6, 1944. he was eternally grateful that the luftwaffe had no jet fighters a year earlier.

Then the Mustangs and Spitfires learned to simply cover Luftwaffe aerodromes, where the **** engines on the Me262 took a long time to spool up on takeoff, and down prior to landing, as they were easy pickin's. They German jet engines also had a very short lifespan and the US was ready to bring the F-80 Shooting Star online...

The German wonder weapons cliches are way overdone, especially in the light of massive fuel and pilot shortages...

 

[OilReport99]

The "Night of the Long Knives" targeted only the leaders, like Rohm. They SA continued to exist for a while but gradually I think most of the rank and file were folded into the SS or Heer, as Himmler and Heydrich won the purge and the Waffen SS became the Nazi military faction...

Their existence after "The Night..." was only symbolic. With Röhm and Strasser out of sight, it was only a matter of (short) time before they were irrelevant. Lutze did a “terrific” job making that happened.
The SS with H&H at the helm became the only faction that mattered. They were no better, no worse than the former, they were just more disciplined. And that’s what made them scarier, as History has (sadly) proven.

 

[BlueOvalFitter]

They were still producing large numbers of Me-109's first flown in the early 1930's at the end of the war...

They WERE STILL ahead of their time!
You and others here can dance around the subject all you want, but it's a proven fact! Just accept it. SMH!

 

[BlueOvalFitter]

Their existence after "The Night..." was only symbolic. With Röhm and Strasser out of sight, it was only a matter of (short) time before they were irrelevant. Lutze did a “terrific” job making that happened.
The SS with H&H at the helm became the only faction that mattered. They were no better, no worse than the former, they were just more disciplined. And that’s what made them scarier, as History has (sadly) proven.

My grandfather was an Waffen SS officer. And, I'm STILL proud of him!

 

[Jackson_Slugger]

Then the Mustangs and Spitfires learned to simply cover Luftwaffe aerodromes, where the **** engines on the Me262 took a long time to spool up on takeoff, and down prior to landing, as they were easy pickin's. They German jet engines also had a very short lifespan and the US was ready to bring the F-80 Shooting Star online...

They WERE STILL ahead of their time!
You and others here can dance around the subject all you want, but it's a proven fact! Just accept it. SMH!

I'm not dancing around anything, just stating a fact. They may have had some interesting projects but the Nazi War Economy was also a confused mess dwarfed by the Allies. Todt tried to organize things before he was killed and then Albert Speer came in and continued doing so and taking credit while pretending he never saw the Jews being worked and systematically starved to death in Nazi factories and positioning himself as "the good Nazi" that wanted to kill Hitler and shorten the war. This according to Adam Tooze's acclaimed book in the Nazi War machine, The Wages of Destruction...

Incidentally, the United States had produced about 550 P-51H Mustangs that never saw action, but were capable of 472mph, about the same as the initial post of the Do335 you posted. There was the "Dallas" edition of that plane noted as the P-51M, possibly capable of speeds near 500mph (someone guessed about 491mph) but was cancelled as unnecessary! I guess the Allies were also "ahead of their time" and vastly more capable of mass production...

 

[Jackson_Slugger]

To be fair Germany was slightly ahead in jet technology, mainly because they had gov't funding while it withered on the vine in the US and Britain. But the British Rolls Royce engine was overall a better long term design because it lasted.

The Germans had a long standing prewar rocketry tradition as they were not allowed to have heavy artillery under the Versaille Treaty so they explored using missiles as a way to get around restrictions. In the end they were costly white elephants and basically militarily ineffectual.

The Luftwaffe guided bomb, the Fritz X, used during the early phases of Italian Campaign where the Allies did not have air superiority however was probably the single most effective German "wonder weapon" as they caused sheer havoc on the US and Royal Navies and inflicted serious damage. They were mitigated by electronic countermeasures and Allied air supremacy after early 1944...

 

[wpod]

A bit more on topic, when I was in Strausberg, Germany at the Stemme glider factory, I stayed in the old "tower" which has been converted into dorms. Next door was a small, but rather interesting aviation museum (flugplatzmuseum) and inside was a table with a number of German WW-II aviation "engine parts" which I found fascinating. I can't find online pictures of these parts at that museum, and I'm not at all sure where my pics went.

Even at a casual glance, there was no question the quality and engineering of the parts was superb. These are parts designed in the 1930's and early 1940's. They were clearly superior to the parts we commonly use today in General Aviation. Well designed ports, large valves, adequate cooling, etc. I found myself admiring the quality.

It is amazing to be able to look at things and ponder the how and why and what it took for the people to design and build !

 

[Surestick]

I'm not dancing around anything, just stating a fact. They may have had some interesting projects but the Nazi War Economy was also a confused mess dwarfed by the Allies. Todt tried to organize things before he was killed and then Albert Speer came in and continued doing so and taking credit while pretending he never saw the Jews being worked and systematically starved to death in Nazi factories and positioning himself as "the good Nazi" that wanted to kill Hitler and shorten the war. This according to Adam Tooze's acclaimed book in the Nazi War machine, The Wages of Destruction...

Incidentally, the United States had produced about 550 P-51H Mustangs that never saw action, but were capable of 472mph, about the same as the initial post of the Do335 you posted. There was the "Dallas" edition of that plane noted as the P-51M, possibly capable of speeds near 500mph (someone guessed about 491mph) but was cancelled as unnecessary! I guess the Allies were also "ahead of their time" and vastly more capable of mass production...

A lot of the issues the Germans had were down to a lack of access to metals needed to make high temperature alloys.
Even their aviation piston engines were severely hampered by shortages of certain materials that made them have to operate at lower power.
That was a big contributor to the short TBO time of their jet engines.

If anything, the axial-flow design of the German engines was ahead of what the Allies were using.

 

[BlueOvalFitter]

You failed to mention a whooping 37 were built. In contrast 1500 P-51 Mustangs were built.

So far ahead.............................

If Hitler had not been so greedy I would be carrying on my grandfathers legacy. Be it suffering upon the world, or his great mechanical abilities and how it played a great part with the NA*I War Machine!
Think about that.................

 

[Wolf359]

The design for the original nuclear weapons was a British-American partnership. The development occurred in the US where there was space and resources but the scientists were British and American.

German scientists had been early on the scene in theoretical nuclear work well before WWII. A number of European scientists fled while that was still possible. Germany had a nuclear program in WWII but I'm unclear how advanced it was. The allies did their best to slow them down by disrupting their supply of heavy water (most of which was being extracted with hydroelectricity in Norway) and they don't seem to have realized that carbon would also work as a moderator.

One television program claimed that a brilliant flash and a mushroom cloud had been observed from the edge of one of the German experimental areas with the suggestion it had been a nuclear weapons test. That explosion (assuming it occurred) might not have been nuclear, though it does sound suspicious. And Hitler was really big on developing revenge weapons.

It's interesting to consider how the war would have all turned out if the Nazis had been able to deliver a few nuclear weapons, say to London and New York (using a multi-stage V2, which they were also working on).

No doubt the Germans were decades ahead of everyone else in rocket/missile development. In fact the joke went around that progress on the early satellites depended on who had more German rocket scientists. Germany had developed an early cruise missile (the V1) and of course a missile capable of delivering a heavy explosive (the V2). Their extreme range field gun (the V3) was disrupted by destroying the site with bombs.

Many of the top scientists at the time like Einstein were actually at German universities but left when the policies went against them. They would have had a much better chance if they hadn't been driven out. Then those guys ended up in the US and worked on the bomb. It was Einstein who wrote a letter to Roosevelt about building an atomic bomb and got the Manhattan project underway. Germany was left with very few scientists who could actually work on a bomb like Werner Heisenberg, took him a while to work his way back into grace after the war. He was working on heavy water as a method for building a bomb, but it was a dead end, there's no heavy water bomb even now.

 

[ecotourist]

Many of the top scientists at the time like Einstein were actually at German universities but left when the policies went against them. They would have had a much better chance if they hadn't been driven out. Then those guys ended up in the US and worked on the bomb. It was Einstein who wrote a letter to Roosevelt about building an atomic bomb and got the Manhattan project underway. Germany was left with very few scientists who could actually work on a bomb like Werner Heisenberg, took him a while to work his way back into grace after the war. He was working on heavy water as a method for building a bomb, but it was a dead end, there's no heavy water bomb even now.

True enough. But "Fat Man", the second nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was a plutonium implosion bomb.

Plutonium is produced in a nuclear reactor. And a nuclear reactor needs a moderator like heavy water (or carbon, which the German scientists seemingly hadn't picked up on). So disrupting the heavy water supply was an important part of disrupting German progress towards a nuclear weapon.

Which is why the West is currently a bit freaked out by certain countries trying to develop nuclear reactors.

And as far as I know heavy water, which is hard to extract from water, has no other use.

 

[Wolf359]

True enough. But "Fat Man", the second nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was a plutonium implosion bomb.

Plutonium is produced in a nuclear reactor. And a nuclear reactor needs a moderator like heavy water (or carbon, which the German scientists seemingly hadn't picked up on). So disrupting the heavy water supply was an important part of disrupting German progress towards a nuclear weapon.

Which is why the West is currently a bit freaked out by certain countries trying to develop nuclear reactors.

And as far as I know heavy water, which is hard to extract from water, has no other use.

They basically needed more people besides Werner Heisenberg to develop a bomb. After the war Einstein was said to have regretted writing the letter to Roosevelt which was basically his only involvement with the bomb, the US considered him a security risk.

Basically it was a matter of scale, the US had 250k people working on the bomb and spent 2 billion. The Germans, about 100 and spent about a million. After the loss of their heavy water equipment from the allied sinking of a ferry, they didn't make much progress at all after that.

Kind of reminds me about that old story about the race between an American Corvette and a Russian Trabant. The Russians would report it as their car came in second and the Corvette as next to last. In reality the race for the bomb between the US and Germany wasn't even close.

 

[tbm3fan]

Wow, not a lot on fast piston engine planes despite the topic title. Here are some of the fastest group.