No doubt it was, but they had something even better in the type 21, so why not go with it? It was exactly what they needed in '42, '43, it could stay underwater many times longer, go much faster underwater, had the snorkel, that thing could have done some serious damage to a convoy. Speaking of the snorkel, why wasn't it put to widespread use much earlier?
The U-Boat war wasn't definitively lost until May of '43 (and they'd actually done extremely well two months before). Black May was the result of many cumulative processes taking hold at once, not really predictable. The Type XXI and XXVI electro-boote were both in active development by '42, well before then mind you, but they used so many new technologies at one time that systems integration and the like delayed their introduction to 1945. The Allied incremental improvement process, adding one new system at a time, was ultimately a better model for this reason.
Good point. So who is to blame for that?
Some of it must fall on Donitz, and his BdU, for not pushing the technical establishment harder and for remaining oburate on certain points expressed in patrol reports, like shipboard HFDF. Some of it must fall on the technical establishment, for lacking the imagination to design things like submarine-based radar or failing to realize HFDF installations could be shrunk down small enough to fit on an escort vessel, for lacking the urgency to inform the interested parties rapidly of their discoveries about Allied gear or realize its implications and the need for rapid counters themselves. They managed some great successes, like the rapid development and deployment of the metric-radar search reciever, on their own.
From what I read by 1944 it was getting somewhat outclassed, also based on what I read the FW-190 was a much better design. Of course feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any of this. The point is if they had something that was clearly better, why not build more of it?
There is truth to this, in that by 1944 the 109's airframe was pretty close to played out. The G-6 and G-10 were not bad aircraft, however. They could carry their own weight. That simply wasn't good enough by then, they needed a truly exceptional aircraft, but that's the way it breaks down. The -190
was a superior aircraft in many, many ways, but actually this is all somewhat deceptive since by the time the difference became an issue, the battle was lost.
Over gasoline. German avgas had a low octane (about 50) rating and didn't burn well at high altitudes, costing engine power. Allied gasoline had about a 150 rating and so burned three times as well at altitude.
From what I understand, they also had working prototypes of guided AAMs and SAMs, but they didn't start looking into those until '42 and '41. What if they started researching them earlier (and actually adopting them before it was too late)? Personally I think that a massive V-2 barrage (instead of launching 10 per day, launching 1000 all at once) could devastate a large part of London, is that possible? Instead of having the Battle of Britain, just these a bunch of these and smash them with a "rain of steel"?
A V2 launch site was actually a fairly involved thing. Part of the reason for the slow launch rate is a slow production rate. They never had very many V-2s at one time. It wouldn't have been practical to assemble a large number and launch them all at once, lack of launch sites and the delays in doing so.
As for the guided weapons, there's an issue with them. They were guided yes, beam-riders, and so easily spoofed even with WW2 technology. Electronic warfare was a doorway German never opened, but the Allies commited to heavily, so in practice it wouldn't have ended well.
Never heard of that one.
Few people do. You have to be a real fanatic, or own a copy of Steel Panthers: World At War. They only built two of them. One was destroyed in combat, the other retired from service in mid-1943.
What else did they frak up?
Basic intelligence on just about every level. Their assumed order of battle for the Red Army was a joke. The chief of the general staff commented on it on the 47th day of the campaign. "When we invaded Russian we counted on an enemy force of only 150 large formations. To date, we have engaged 247." Their assumptions about the Russian officer corps were nonsense. They had no real conception of what it would take to cripple Russian industry. Basically just about every intelligence failure you could have, they had.
