Most Important Technology for Allies in WW2

WW2 Aircraft did have Catapults they weren't steam powered though. As aircraft got heavier and the takeoff speeds got higher more powerful cats were needed and the pneumatic technology being used was replaced by the steam power.

Royal Navy Cruisers and Battleships used burning cordite charges to generate gas to power their catapults.
 
There were alternatives to catapults as well. (Image post-war, but illustrative.)
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I wouldn't mind all this conjecture about German tech, specifically jet aircraft, if it didn't ignore the small matter of a small man, Sir Frank Whittle. That patent would be a little matter of six years before Ohain?

If you're going to 'what if?' over a few more Me-262s with a little more investment a little earlier, then by the same logic surely you figure in the RAF entirely equipped with Meteors and Vampires in 1939 or '40.

WW2 never gets beyond the Battle of France (aka The Fortnight War) before Hitler sues for peace and Goering is publically executed in Berlin for his failure.
 
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Captain_Swoop said:
Again I will recommend The Great Tank Scandal: Part 1: British Armour in the Second World War by David Fletcher (Curator of the Bovington Tank Museum)
It tells the sotry of British Armour from immediately pre war up to the Dieppe Raid. A sorry story it is as well.
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QUICK OFF TOPIC
I have this series. He is a pretty damn good historian and has a sense of humour.

You may enjoy downloading this reproduction of the 1944 German Instruction book on how to command a Panther. What is unique about these instruction "cards" is that they are intended to be funny and cartoon of little german panzer crew doing all the tasks. What is weird is that in 1967 Japanese company Tamiya launched its first 1/35 scale Panther and for the next 30 years Tamiya instruction manuals had little cartoon german panzer crews showing you how to glue things together. I assume Tamiya had a copy of these "real Panther" instruction cards in 1967 ( Where on earth did they get those from and when is a funny question? Tamiya made wooden boat models until the late 60s as a side business of the Tamiya lumberyards in Japan)

http://www.archive.org/details/Panther-fibel-BetriebUndKampfanleitung

My most useful book on German armour is the 1959, Frido von Senger und Etterlin's "Die Deutschen Panzer". The Bovington Tank museum carry an English translation. It was this book that delved heavily into the E-series in public first and the english tranlation first carries a photo of the E-100 hull taken to Britain. However it is the text that is fascinating.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
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.
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Early British was in the metre band, while Germans had meter and centimeter. During the war, both developed their thechnology fast, but the Allies only advanced past the Germans in the last year or so, when the Germans were too bombed out to hang in.

German Radio guidance wasn't that advanced,
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Not very advanced, but better than any the British had in 1940.

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.
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You cannot bend a radio wave. What they did was mainly to jam it (transmit noise to drown it out), but they also managed to spoof it (send a false signal for the bombers to follow).

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.
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More sophisitated and later. There was a mad race for ever better measures and countermeasures. You cannot compare "Knickebein" with "Oboe", because a huge amount of feeverish developement had gone on in the meantime.

However, the 'individual building' precision was never obtainable during WW2. That came much later.

H2S Navigation Radar meant that it was obsolete as the Pathfinder aircraft had a moving 'Radar Map' of their location
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Only provided there were sufficiently distinct features on the ground, like rivers, mountain slopes, and such. It was a very primitive system, seen with modern eyes, and the equipment was hightly unreliable.

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
Early British was in the metre band, while Germans had meter and centimeter. During the war, both developed their thechnology fast, but the Allies only advanced past the Germans in the last year or so, when the Germans were too bombed out to hang in.
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A link to more on this would be great, if you know of one.

My daughter asked my mother about her wartime recollections for a school project, and one thing she vividly recalls is collecting handfuls of chaff on the way to school on mornings after bombing raids (this was in Glasgow). She and her friends had no idea what it was at the time, but she describes aluminium foil strips about the size of a 1 foot ruler. I had been unaware until then that the Germans had used chaff against radar. The Wiki reference is brief, and only mentions their using 80cm strips.
 
Did the German bombers manage to fly all the way to Glasgow?

I thought the operation were pretty much limited to Manchester and South?
 
Simon39759 said:
Did the German bombers manage to fly all the way to Glasgow?

I thought the operation were pretty much limited to Manchester and South?
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Oh, yes. Kids left homeless by the Clydebank blitzWP were put up in spare classrooms of my mum's school on the southside, left empty by evacuees. The rumour was that the Germans may have mistaken the rain-wetted Dumbarton Road for the river Clyde and bombed the town instead of the shipyards. I don't know if there's anything in that, but the town was virtually levelled.

My grandfather worked in Dalmarnock power station throughout the war. It was never put out of action, but he particularly remembered the bitter winter cold as they eventually gave up on replacing doors and windows blasted out by repeated bombing.
 
Well, coincidentally, my wife's parents live in a house in rural Yorkshire which was partially rebuilt after it was struck by one of a stick of bombs jettisoned apparently at random by a lost bomber. (The previous-but-one owner of the house was killed).
 
As the range increased the 'beams' became less accurate. For targets like Manchester and Glasgow they weren't realy needed, the targets were massive.

A lot of bobms missed the targets and huge decoys were set up to trick the Germans into bombing the wrong place.

They were called 'Starfish' Decoys. There are two sites on the moors near where I live, one was to decoy planes away from Redcar Steelworks the other to decoy away from Teesside. They consisted of a control bunker and a network of pipes that contained petrol, they could be lit to simulate towns on fire giving the impression of rows of buring buildings or larger factories.

http://www.hidden-teesside.co.uk/2007/12/10/starfish-decoy-site-guisborough-moor/
http://www.hidden-teesside.co.uk/2010/04/20/starfish-decoy-site-new-marske/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_site
 
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MRC_Hans said:
Early British was in the metre band, while Germans had meter and centimeter. During the war, both developed their thechnology fast, but the Allies only advanced past the Germans in the last year or so, when the Germans were too bombed out to hang in.
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What in the world are you talking about? The Germans most definitely did not have centimetric radar early war. They got a handful (and by that, I mean less than 100) 10cm sets produced by the end of the war, but they came too late and in too few numbers to achieve anything, not to mention already obsolete by allied standards by that time. The Allies, on the other hand, were mass producing 10cm or better radar by 1941 as a result of the Anglo-American cooperation.

However, the 'individual building' precision was never obtainable during WW2. That came much later.
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It in fact, was obtainable by 1944...with sufficiently large buildings like major factories, rail yards, hydrogenation plants, and the like. Something, Bomber Command did regularly by late 44.
 
Shangrila said:
It in fact, was obtainable by 1944...with sufficiently large buildings like major factories, rail yards, hydrogenation plants, and the like. Something, Bomber Command did regularly by late 44.
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It was, but note that in order to ensure hits on the specific complex it meant devastating the area around it. By early 1945 Bomber Command was able to put nearly 90% of the bombs dropped within three miles of the aiming point (with a high proportion of that within one mile). Of course, a circle one mile in radius around the aiming point is quite a bit of real estate, let alone a circle with a radius of three miles.

The USAAF for its part after the war estimated that, bombing visually in clear weather, half the bombs dropped fell within one-third of a mile of the aiming point (which naturally means the other half is more than one-third of a mile away from the aiming point). Bombing non-visually (i.e. by radar) through heavy cloud, accuracy dropped way off, with half the bombs falling within 3.9 miles of the aiming point (in effect, little more than area bombing).

As a general note, while Bomber Command had the capability to bomb with some degree of accuracy late in the war, operations were rarely conducted with that in mind since Harris obstinately refused to believe 'precision' attacks would yield any meaningful results, even when presented with evidence they did, and followed the policy of area bombing 'til the end.

While Harris was undoubtedly crucial in forging Bomber Command into a potent striking force, by the beginning of 1945 he should have been replaced by a more forward-thinking commander.
 
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