The most secret weapon of the Luftwaffe

[johnniewc68]

Amazing! I share with you a lot of pictures, some of them previously unreleased, rare and never before seen by me, referring to one of the secret weapons of the Luftwaffe. We are talking about the Horten flying wing. Perhaps, the aircraft of the Second World War the most ahead of its time than any other, went into production too late to be put into service. Do you think if he had gone into production would have changed the course of the war and history? Visit the link below and give us your opinion about it.


http://aviacaoemfloripa.blogspot.com.br/2011/01/a-mais-secreta-arma-da-luftwaffe.html


Best Regards,

John W. Calvert

[Moliere]

1. Looks like the B-2 stealth bomber

Just ~50 years apart

[MillennialDem]

2. No, the war was already over after the Germans failed to take Moscow in 1941. At that point the

Soviets were going to ground them down.

That said some of the wunderwaffe were cool.

[Old Codger]

3. It wasn't planes

That were a problem towards the end of the war they did not have any ammunition for the planes they had. A book is out there "The Last flight of the Luftwaffe" the tells about the planes ramming into our bombers to knock them out of the air rather that shoot them down... they actually had jet that was way ahead of any of our stuff..

[eppur_se_muova]

4. The Nazis designed all manner of advanced bombers, but couldn't build them.

They couldn't even maintain production of basic fighters once Allied bombers started taking out their factories. They designed four- and six- engine intercontinental bombers -- more advanced than the best the Americans had at the time, including a four-engine jet bomber -- but couldn't even finish testing them because there so few places sufficiently far from Allied air strikes. (ETA: prototype four-engine long-range bombers were tested before the war -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dornier_Do_19 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_89 -- but the Luftwaffe abandoned these efforts, and focused on dive bombers instead, at least partly because production involved less materiel and resources.)

Hitler had plans for all kinds of advanced weaponry, but couldn't wait for it to be developed before starting a war. Once Germany was at war, development became enormously more difficult. Remember, the Nazis had the V-2 before anyone else had big rockets, and they built thousands of them, but the tide of war was already against Germany. All the V-1 and V-2 accomplished was a big increase in civilian casualties. (ETA: Hitler had all kinds of secret weapons besides the flying wing -- including the only production model rocket-propelled fighter, remote-controlled robot mines, the first smart bombs, and the first assault rifle. With all those brilliantly engineered weapons, the Nazis still lost. One more secret weapon wasn't going to do it.)

NatGeo Channel and Northrup collaborated on a construction project to build a model Horten flying wing "stealth fighter" ... see the slideshow here: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/galleries/episode-hitlers-stealth-fighter/at/3942_hitlers_stealth_fighter-29_04700300-3742/