Jackson_Slugger
$50 Site Donor 2022
The Luftwaffe was founded as a strategic air arm that loved the idea of four engined massive bombers. But as reality set in, they simply did not have the industrial capacity to manufacture enough engines, and their greatest existential enemies (France and Poland) were a stone's throw away. So why bother? So, as the original Luftwaffe architect and commander died prematurely (in a plane crash) it was realized that making 10 twin engined bombers was probably better that 2 or 3 four engined ones. I think Ernst Udet was the German flying ace (from WWI) that took over and he had been bedazzled by the US Navy's use of dive bombing as a precision air attack weapon (against ships but equally effective against land targets) in an age of ugly dumb bombs that would impact miles from their intended targets, when he was German military attache in the United States in the 20's. So he pushed for strike aircraft like the Stuka and its predecessors as excellent dive bombers.
General Udet eventually became one of the key Luftwaffe commanders in charge of planning and strove for dive bombers and four engined strategic level bombers as well. But he had to serve under a fat drug addicted lying **** named Hermann Goering that lied so much one could almost peg him as a British agent or something. In any case Udet realized soon prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union that German production was so woeful that the outcome was at best a strategic deadlock, if not outright defeat, and he began to drink heavily and eventually committed suicide under the strain as Goering lied to his stupid Nazi overlords like Hitler with boasts and completely unrealistic projections (see Dunkirk) while exerting all kinds of pressure on Ernst and used him as a scapegoat. The Luftwaffe had many outstanding twin-engined bombers like the He-111 and the Dornier, but it was not practical to make a true long range four engine bomber in any serious numbers though several interesting Luftwaffe prototypes were made. Germany was essentially an agrarian economy with some sexy names in the industrial sector after WWI, so it just wasn't possible.
In the end, bombing NYC with a few bombers would have done little but anger the American people to an even more vindictive end of the Third Reich. However, one can argue that a large and sustained fleet of four engined Luftwaffe strategic bombers might have had a more significant impact on the war against the Soviet Union as they could have bombed the Siberian and western Russian transplanted factories such as Tankograd that were beyond reach as they churned out tens of thousands of great weapons like the T-34 tank. We'll never know...
