Most Important Technology for Allies in WW2

catsmate1 said:
Ah! Submarine aircraft carriers, like multi-turret tanks, another military fad of the thirties that didn't pan out.
While they could have had some military utility, early war attacks on the Panama Canal or biological strikes on US west coast cities are popular in AHs, they were basically white elephants. Huge white elephants.
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The problem is, whenever you combine functions, each function is weakened. The Swiss army knife is useful because you can't carry a small tool-box with you, but it is only at best mediocre for each of its funtions.

A submarine aircraft carrier is a lumbering submarine, an unrealistically small and slow aircraft carrier, and the aircraft it can serve have to be inferior.

Hans
 
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MRC_Hans said:
A lot of interesting points here, but I think the important things to look at are those that the Allies could do better than the Axis.

For instance RADAR: While RADAR was, obviously, essential to the conduct of the war, the German's RADAR equipment was more advanced than that of the Allies during most of the war.
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This is wrong German Radar was stuck in the multi meter band. It was simple and crude compared with German and British Centimetric and Millimetric equipment.

During the Battle of Brittain, the Germans had quite efficient navigation systems, bringing the bombers right to the target, and their bomb sights, while not advanced at all, had quite adequate precision for the circumstances. What they didn't have was heavy bombers, and fighter superiority.

Hans
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German Radio guidance wasn't that advanced, once the British worked out how they were doing it they put in countermeasures that 'bent' the German beamns and put them off target without the Germans even realising it was being done. British Oboe was a more sophisticated development that allowed a Pathfinder aircraft to be targeted amost onto an individual building rather than a whole city. H2S Navigation Radar meant that it was obsolete as the Pathfinder aircraft had a moving 'Radar Map' of their location
 
catsmate1 said:
A quite possible better design than many that entered production, stifled by politics.
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Not really true, like all flying wings before fly by wire technology, it was grossly unstable in flight, and tended to sudden inexplicable death spirals, which is indeed what killed the only test pilot of the Ho 229. Had it been mass produced and flown by pilots less skilled than elite test pilots, it would have been as bad as the Komet.

Britain and the US were equally creative, often with less tendency to try an render workable as fundamentally flawed design.
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Depends on what you mean by fundamentally flawed. Take the He-177, a classic example of a Nazi technological boondoggle, compared with the American B-29. Throw enough money at a project and it suddenly becomes a technological tour de force. Of course, the Allies had a far more realistic understanding of their own resources for technological development.
 
Skwinty said:
The Japanese planned these attacks but did not execute them as the war was all but over.


As the war turned against the Japanese and their fleet no longer had free rein in the Pacific, the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, devised a daring plan to attack the cities of New York, Washington D.C., and other large American cities.

From the Wiki link.
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Highly "wishful thinking" factor in those plans, if they did indeed exist. (Reserving judgment on that.) Also unrealistic as there were quite enough targets between Japan and the West Coast without having to do any "stunts" in the Atlantic.
 
Gawdzilla said:
Highly "wishful thinking" factor in those plans, if they did indeed exist. (Reserving judgment on that.) Also unrealistic as there were quite enough targets between Japan and the West Coast without having to do any "stunts" in the Atlantic.
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Very true, however there is lots of evidence to suggest that their purpose was for long distance stealth attacks.

Here is some more on the subject.

http://ww2db.com/ship_spec.php?ship_id=452
 
Captain_Swoop said:
It's a lesson that seems to have been forgotten by the current British Govt. Scrapping the current Ark Royal and retiring the Sea Harriers. It will be 4 years before the first of the new carriers is launched and nearly 10 before the JSF cdomes into service to fly from them.
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2 years for version B (the one that can independently launch & land anywhere like a Harrier), 4 for version C (the one that uses a carrier with catapults & cables). All three versions are in production now; the only delay is because the production rate isn't as fast at the beginning as it becomes later, and so that what gets delivered is not individual planes with no support but complete squadrons and the maintenance/repair tools for them and training for mechanics to use them.

Gawdzilla said:
As neither the Germans nor the Italians had developed the carrier the British clearly had a lead in that technology.
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One could think that a ship-class is just an idea for what to do with existing technology, rather than actually different technology, like a pickup truck uses the same technology as a car. But, presuming that aircraft of the time needed runways more than several hundred feet long to launch or land under their own power, an aircraft carrier does need a couple of specific inventions that other ships don't need: the catapult and the arresting cable. Are those what kept Germany & Italy from making the ships, or did they know how to make those and just not decide to follow through with the idea?

akenlon said:
The problem is that the Flying wing is a very stable platform. Stability, while wonderful for bombers, transport, observation and re-fueling craft is not so great for fighters as they need to walk the fine line between stable and unstable to be able to maneuver quickly. The F-22 in fact is so unstable that it requires computer assistance to maintain level flight.
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All fighters since at least as long ago as F-16 have been deliberately unstable and used computer control to compensate in straight flight. So do B-2 and F-117, which are rendered unstable due to early stealth shaping, whether the overall flying-wing format reduced that tendency or not.
 
Skwinty said:
Very true, however there is lots of evidence to suggest that their purpose was for long distance stealth attacks.

Here is some more on the subject.

http://ww2db.com/ship_spec.php?ship_id=452
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Yeah, but on Pearl and the Canal, not on a pie-in-the-sky target like NYC. The German "New York Bomber" was at least slightly practical because a long-range bomber was needed.
 
Gawdzilla said:
Yeah, but on Pearl and the Canal, not on a pie-in-the-sky target like NYC. The German "New York Bomber" was at least slightly practical because a long-range bomber was needed.
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Everything about war, including the targets, is all political pie in the sky in any event.
So, I would not be surprised if the Japanese made these plans.
 
MRC_Hans said:
The problem is, whenever you combine functions, each function is weakened. The Swiss army knife is useful because you can't carry a small tool-box with you, but it is only at best mediocre for each of its funtions.

A submarine aircraft carrier is a lumbering submarine, an unrealistically small and slow aircraft carrier, and the aircraft it can serve have to be inferior.

Hans
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To be fair, in the vast expanses of open ocean that make up the Pacific, having a search plane on a submarine could be useful. But they would have been most effective if the submarines operated in groups, with one or two in each group carrying the planes that scouted for the whole group.
 
What I find amazing is this sub held the record of being the largest until 1965. Pretty impressive technology for its time.:)
 
Delvo said:
. . . an aircraft carrier does need a couple of specific inventions that other ships don't need: the catapult and the arresting cable. Are those what kept Germany & Italy from making the ships, or did they know how to make those and just not decide to follow through with the idea?
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I think there was a real question of carrier utility for both Germany and Italy. For Italy, their naval operations were pretty much confined to the Med, and Italian land-based aircraft could cover a lot of the Med, so what use CVs? If they'd ventured into the Atlantic more, then a CV would have been much more practical (though getting it past Gibraltar would have been problematic).

For the Germans: First, north Atlantic weather sucks. While bad weather may reduce the effectiveness of a battleship or cruiser, it completely shuts down carrier operations, so carriers were simply less useful in the European theater than the Pacific theater. Second, what would the CV's mission be? The German navy was almost exclusively focused on blockading England and Russia; would a carrier have been useful for that? Arguably, the real benefit that Germany got from her BBs was that they tied down a lot of British resources (and it's not clear that that outweighed the substantial cost). A carrier or two would have also been very expensive but wouldn't have survived long in the face of the sort of ongoing raids that the British launched against the German BBs.

So, technology issues aside, I think that both Germany and Italy were justified in not spending any more than they did on the Graf Zeppelin and Aquila, respectively. The Allies would have been better off if the Axis had invested more on CVs, because that would have pulled resources from tanks, subs, or other more practical areas.

Just my opinion. YMMV. And, of course, if Plan Z had gone forward . . well, things would be different. Not that I think that Plan Z was ever a realistic option.
 
WW2 was also interesting in that there were quite a few technological 'dead ends' that were still actually used. Sometimes it was just a case of one side imitating the other. Some examples:

Tank Destroyers: These were put to good use by the Germans who made a decent variety of them.They were an economical way to get a decent fighting machine out of the old Panzer hulls: Just don't bother with the turret, put a huge gun on the thing (for the size of the frame) and point the tank manually. It worked well for the Germans as it meant they could have more vehicles out there by using old designs. Since they were often on the defensive the Tank Destroyers could be used in ambushes where their disadvantages didn't come into play as much. Some on the US Army though TD's were a swell idea and made their own versions. These were mostly a waste of resources and manpower that could have been used to produce and man actually tanks, which is what the US needed to fight.

Halftracks The bastard child of tank and truck. They were popular during the war and then pretty much disappeared from the world's armories. They were more expensive pound per pound than tanks and a fully tracked infantry vehicle might have made more sense.


Anti-Tank Rifles These were all but obsolete when the war started, yet they were still extensively used through the middle of the war and the Soviets were even using them at the end of the war. Interestingly the US never produced an ATR, probably because they got into the war later and partly because the 50 cal machine gun actually filled a lot of that limited role and more.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. They are some biggies, though.
 
dasmiller said:
Is "lack of insane leaders" a technology?
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I submit one, Joseph Stalin.

In terms of insanity, we're as close to a push as you can get with Adolph.

Stalin's insanity was less devastating to the war effort than Hitler's issues, but he was crazy.
 
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