Why do Nazi weapons seem to have a near mythical status?
Discussion
as above - I've noticed that a lot of Nazi weapons seem to be mythologised and I've wondered about why?
Top of the list seem to be the Tiger and Panther (his is despite the Panzer V and VI having quite severe shortcomings which made them, arguably less capable in many situations than an up-gunned Panzer IV might have been)but even the 'humble' Panzer IV and Sturmgeschütz seem to be more 'popular'/interesting than the Sherman/Crusader/Grant/T34/Churchill (for example).
Weirdly though this doesn't seem to extend to the aircraft (the Spitfire and Mustang, along with the B17 seem to be the 'halo' craft for airplane fans with the Me109/FW190 very poor relations and soviet aircraft nowhere)
I can understand the interest in the Me262 and V2 for obvious reasons - but again the Meteor seems to be ignored...
Thoughts?
Top of the list seem to be the Tiger and Panther (his is despite the Panzer V and VI having quite severe shortcomings which made them, arguably less capable in many situations than an up-gunned Panzer IV might have been)but even the 'humble' Panzer IV and Sturmgeschütz seem to be more 'popular'/interesting than the Sherman/Crusader/Grant/T34/Churchill (for example).
Weirdly though this doesn't seem to extend to the aircraft (the Spitfire and Mustang, along with the B17 seem to be the 'halo' craft for airplane fans with the Me109/FW190 very poor relations and soviet aircraft nowhere)
I can understand the interest in the Me262 and V2 for obvious reasons - but again the Meteor seems to be ignored...
Thoughts?
DodgyGeezer said:
as above - I've noticed that a lot of Nazi weapons seem to be mythologised and I've wondered about why?
Top of the list seem to be the Tiger and Panther (his is despite the Panzer V and VI having quite severe shortcomings which made them, arguably less capable in many situations than an up-gunned Panzer IV might have been)but even the 'humble' Panzer IV and Sturmgeschütz seem to be more 'popular'/interesting than the Sherman/Crusader/Grant/T34/Churchill (for example).
Weirdly though this doesn't seem to extend to the aircraft (the Spitfire and Mustang, along with the B17 seem to be the 'halo' craft for airplane fans with the Me109/FW190 very poor relations and soviet aircraft nowhere)
I can understand the interest in the Me262 and V2 for obvious reasons - but again the Meteor seems to be ignored...
Thoughts?
Because of the combination of first-hand accounts from soldiers that are often influenced by chat and rumours, and also because of modern media which has depicted them as a superior enemy, overcome by Allied bravery and grit.Top of the list seem to be the Tiger and Panther (his is despite the Panzer V and VI having quite severe shortcomings which made them, arguably less capable in many situations than an up-gunned Panzer IV might have been)but even the 'humble' Panzer IV and Sturmgeschütz seem to be more 'popular'/interesting than the Sherman/Crusader/Grant/T34/Churchill (for example).
Weirdly though this doesn't seem to extend to the aircraft (the Spitfire and Mustang, along with the B17 seem to be the 'halo' craft for airplane fans with the Me109/FW190 very poor relations and soviet aircraft nowhere)
I can understand the interest in the Me262 and V2 for obvious reasons - but again the Meteor seems to be ignored...
Thoughts?
As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
And didn't the ME-109 have fuel injection meaning it could fly upside down without the fuel falling out the carbs? Something the Spitfire had a problem with??
It also shot it's bullets from the nose rather than the wings, with them slotting neatly between the propellors as they rotated as the guns were linked to the crank.....
Some clever stuff!!!!
It also shot it's bullets from the nose rather than the wings, with them slotting neatly between the propellors as they rotated as the guns were linked to the crank.....
Some clever stuff!!!!
A lot of it is lingering wartime propaganda - from both sides. For instance, the Bismarck was touted by both the Germans (before it was sunk) and the Allies (after it was sunk) as 'the most powerful battleship in the world'. It wasn't. It was a serious strategic and tactical thread to Allied naval operations in the Atlantic and was rightly chased down and destroyed once it broke out, but it was an overweight, under-armed ship built on very outdated principles and some flawed structural engineering designed to a specification riddled with compromises that made it not as good at being either a battle-wagon or a merchant raider as it could have been if they'd not tried to make it both those things.
Equally, some of it comes from Allied excuse-making from the early war years when they were routinely getting their butts kicked. It's not years of underinvestment in our armed forces coming back to bite us, it's not woolly strategy, flawed leadership or political weakness, it's because the Bf109, the Panzer III are so much better than anything we have. A bit like the whole concept of 'Blitzkrieg' being a creation of the Allies, not the Germans. The idea of fast-moving mechanised ground forces punching through weak spots in the enemy front or quickly bypassing strong-points and encircling them goes right back to the closing years of WW1, and the basic concept of manoeuvre warfare goes back even further than that. But it suited the Allies to say that the Germans had come up with some dastardly new way of fighting wars to explain why France, theoretically the strongest ground army in the world, was defeated in six weeks.
There's also the aspect that you could call the 'Top Trumps Factor' - German war machines and weapons, especially of the late war period, tended to be individually superior to Allied ones. This was deliberate, since the Germans knew that they didn't have the industrial or logistical capacity to match the Allies and so tried to design stuff that was superior in capability to make up for the lack of numbers. So if you're just comparing the stats between, say, a Tiger tank and a Sherman, the Tiger seems like an unbeatable titan. Except that for every Tiger tank the Allies could field five fully-equipped Shermans, and the Tiger's operations were crippled by shortages of fuel, ammunition and rations, the Tiger crew were increasingly badly-trained and inexperienced, the Tiger was riddled with both design and manufacturing flaws which made it impossible for it to use its theoretical abilities to the full, and regardless of how good the Tiger was versus the Sherman, the Tiger was going to get pounded by artillery or air power as soon as it showed up if it somehow managed to avoid the swarms of Shermans.
Being on the back foot forced the Germans to come up with some very innovative and impressive machines which were at the cutting edge of their time - stuff like the Me262, the V2 rocket and the Type XXI U-boat. But it simply didn't matter how a 262 could trounce a P-51 in a dogfight because the Me-262 would be shot down by a Typhoon or a P-47 as it tried to land, and if it did make it back to base its engines needed rebuilding every few hours because Germany didn't have the metallurgy needed to make operationally useful jet engines. Germany 'built' over 100 Type XXI subs, but only four were ever declared operational because it was beyond the abilities of German industry of the time to construct them to proper standards and the ones which were complete never passed acceptance trials because they were so riddled with both design and manufacturing faults. But on paper the XXI seemed like it would be capable of winning the war single-handed. The V2 was a hypersonic ballistic missile in the 1940s - a remarkable technical achievement - but strategically useless because it consumed something like a third of Germany's dwindling stocks of fuel alcohol and huge amounts of labour and resources that Germany couldn't waste for zero gain. It was a psychological and political project more than anything else.
TL:DR - A tendency to only consider individual technical factors, not wider military ones when assessing a weapon's value, plus a natural human desire to not admit that you've been defeated by (or spent six years and millions of lives bringing to defeat) an adversary with entirely average equipment and massively inferior industrial and logistical abilities.
Edit:
Yes the Bf109E had direct petrol injection while the contemporary Merlin-engined Spitfires and Hurricanes used carburettors. Yes, this meant that the Bf109 pilot could gain an advantage by 'bunting' - pushing the nose down into a neg-G maneuver which would cause a British plane trying to follow to momentarily lose power.
But the fuel injection had several key downsides - it was difficult and expensive to mass-produce, it led to higher fuel consumption per horsepower and it forced a lower limit on the maximum boost pressure that could be applied to the engine before knock and pre-detonation began. Rolls-Royce weren't stupid - they knew about the benefits of fuel injection and investigated them. They concluded that the significant drop in the intake charge caused by the fuel atomising through the carburettor's venturi allowed them to run higher boost pressures which is why the Merlin III (27 litres) made more power than the 34-litre DB601 engine. They could also mass-produce the carburettors at a rate far in excess of what could be done with fuel injection. The neg-G problems with the early Merlin could be easily negated by both tactics (pilots rolling inverted and pulling 'up' into the dive) and a field fix in the form of the restrictor in the fuel line and a redesigned carb needle valve. R-R later designed a pressure carburettor which was essentially a half-way stage to 'proper' fuel injection which worked under all G-conditions.
The Bf109's cowl-mounted machine guns with synchronising gear were a symptom of its design origins in the early 1930s and were one of the ways in which the Messerschmitt was already showing its age by 1939. Two rifle-calibre guns firing through the propeller arc were the standard fighter armament since WW1. The RAF specifically rejected this proven arrangement when speccing its new fighters because it was thought that, with modern fighters capable of 300+ mph there simply wouldn't be time to shoot enough lead down-range to bring down a target with two guns . The Gloster Gladiator had four guns while the Spitfire and Hurricane had eight. Mounting the guns in the wings provided a faster rate of fire (not having to synch with the propeller blades), a greater quantity of ammo being fired per burst, and with the guns set to converge their lines of fire at a set distance, either delivered a hail of .303 to one specific point or, if the target was slightly ahead or behind the convergence point, a 'shotgun' effect that splattered a large area of the target. The Bf109E's twin rifle-calibre guns were decidedly weak in comparison, but the Messerschmitt did have the advantage of a 20mm cannon in each wing, which proved devastatingly effective against bombers, whereas even eight .303s did not deliver enough 'punch' to reliably bring down an all-metal bomber, hence why the RAF moved to cannon armament.
Equally, some of it comes from Allied excuse-making from the early war years when they were routinely getting their butts kicked. It's not years of underinvestment in our armed forces coming back to bite us, it's not woolly strategy, flawed leadership or political weakness, it's because the Bf109, the Panzer III are so much better than anything we have. A bit like the whole concept of 'Blitzkrieg' being a creation of the Allies, not the Germans. The idea of fast-moving mechanised ground forces punching through weak spots in the enemy front or quickly bypassing strong-points and encircling them goes right back to the closing years of WW1, and the basic concept of manoeuvre warfare goes back even further than that. But it suited the Allies to say that the Germans had come up with some dastardly new way of fighting wars to explain why France, theoretically the strongest ground army in the world, was defeated in six weeks.
There's also the aspect that you could call the 'Top Trumps Factor' - German war machines and weapons, especially of the late war period, tended to be individually superior to Allied ones. This was deliberate, since the Germans knew that they didn't have the industrial or logistical capacity to match the Allies and so tried to design stuff that was superior in capability to make up for the lack of numbers. So if you're just comparing the stats between, say, a Tiger tank and a Sherman, the Tiger seems like an unbeatable titan. Except that for every Tiger tank the Allies could field five fully-equipped Shermans, and the Tiger's operations were crippled by shortages of fuel, ammunition and rations, the Tiger crew were increasingly badly-trained and inexperienced, the Tiger was riddled with both design and manufacturing flaws which made it impossible for it to use its theoretical abilities to the full, and regardless of how good the Tiger was versus the Sherman, the Tiger was going to get pounded by artillery or air power as soon as it showed up if it somehow managed to avoid the swarms of Shermans.
Being on the back foot forced the Germans to come up with some very innovative and impressive machines which were at the cutting edge of their time - stuff like the Me262, the V2 rocket and the Type XXI U-boat. But it simply didn't matter how a 262 could trounce a P-51 in a dogfight because the Me-262 would be shot down by a Typhoon or a P-47 as it tried to land, and if it did make it back to base its engines needed rebuilding every few hours because Germany didn't have the metallurgy needed to make operationally useful jet engines. Germany 'built' over 100 Type XXI subs, but only four were ever declared operational because it was beyond the abilities of German industry of the time to construct them to proper standards and the ones which were complete never passed acceptance trials because they were so riddled with both design and manufacturing faults. But on paper the XXI seemed like it would be capable of winning the war single-handed. The V2 was a hypersonic ballistic missile in the 1940s - a remarkable technical achievement - but strategically useless because it consumed something like a third of Germany's dwindling stocks of fuel alcohol and huge amounts of labour and resources that Germany couldn't waste for zero gain. It was a psychological and political project more than anything else.
TL:DR - A tendency to only consider individual technical factors, not wider military ones when assessing a weapon's value, plus a natural human desire to not admit that you've been defeated by (or spent six years and millions of lives bringing to defeat) an adversary with entirely average equipment and massively inferior industrial and logistical abilities.
Edit:
super7 said:
And didn't the ME-109 have fuel injection meaning it could fly upside down without the fuel falling out the carbs? Something the Spitfire had a problem with??
It also shot it's bullets from the nose rather than the wings, with them slotting neatly between the propellors as they rotated as the guns were linked to the crank.....
Some clever stuff!!!!
This is a good example of how the 'pop culture' narrative gets laid down. It also shot it's bullets from the nose rather than the wings, with them slotting neatly between the propellors as they rotated as the guns were linked to the crank.....
Some clever stuff!!!!
Yes the Bf109E had direct petrol injection while the contemporary Merlin-engined Spitfires and Hurricanes used carburettors. Yes, this meant that the Bf109 pilot could gain an advantage by 'bunting' - pushing the nose down into a neg-G maneuver which would cause a British plane trying to follow to momentarily lose power.
But the fuel injection had several key downsides - it was difficult and expensive to mass-produce, it led to higher fuel consumption per horsepower and it forced a lower limit on the maximum boost pressure that could be applied to the engine before knock and pre-detonation began. Rolls-Royce weren't stupid - they knew about the benefits of fuel injection and investigated them. They concluded that the significant drop in the intake charge caused by the fuel atomising through the carburettor's venturi allowed them to run higher boost pressures which is why the Merlin III (27 litres) made more power than the 34-litre DB601 engine. They could also mass-produce the carburettors at a rate far in excess of what could be done with fuel injection. The neg-G problems with the early Merlin could be easily negated by both tactics (pilots rolling inverted and pulling 'up' into the dive) and a field fix in the form of the restrictor in the fuel line and a redesigned carb needle valve. R-R later designed a pressure carburettor which was essentially a half-way stage to 'proper' fuel injection which worked under all G-conditions.
The Bf109's cowl-mounted machine guns with synchronising gear were a symptom of its design origins in the early 1930s and were one of the ways in which the Messerschmitt was already showing its age by 1939. Two rifle-calibre guns firing through the propeller arc were the standard fighter armament since WW1. The RAF specifically rejected this proven arrangement when speccing its new fighters because it was thought that, with modern fighters capable of 300+ mph there simply wouldn't be time to shoot enough lead down-range to bring down a target with two guns . The Gloster Gladiator had four guns while the Spitfire and Hurricane had eight. Mounting the guns in the wings provided a faster rate of fire (not having to synch with the propeller blades), a greater quantity of ammo being fired per burst, and with the guns set to converge their lines of fire at a set distance, either delivered a hail of .303 to one specific point or, if the target was slightly ahead or behind the convergence point, a 'shotgun' effect that splattered a large area of the target. The Bf109E's twin rifle-calibre guns were decidedly weak in comparison, but the Messerschmitt did have the advantage of a 20mm cannon in each wing, which proved devastatingly effective against bombers, whereas even eight .303s did not deliver enough 'punch' to reliably bring down an all-metal bomber, hence why the RAF moved to cannon armament.
Edited by 2xChevrons on Wednesday 20th April 12:25
Movie/Hollywood effect?
Say 1 movie the allies are underdog fighting those “mighty” evil third reich machine, got beat down but never give up and eventually triumphant like David and Goliath
Or
Allied beating the evil third reich from the beginning of the movie all the way till the end, seal clubbing the whole movie
We can certainly tell which one will sell
I am certain in alternate history like “Man in the high castle” they will be making movie about how Bf109E or Fw190A fight the Goliath of P-51D/Griffon Spitfire. Or how their short barrel Pz III overcome the Matilda
Say 1 movie the allies are underdog fighting those “mighty” evil third reich machine, got beat down but never give up and eventually triumphant like David and Goliath
Or
Allied beating the evil third reich from the beginning of the movie all the way till the end, seal clubbing the whole movie
We can certainly tell which one will sell
I am certain in alternate history like “Man in the high castle” they will be making movie about how Bf109E or Fw190A fight the Goliath of P-51D/Griffon Spitfire. Or how their short barrel Pz III overcome the Matilda
Edited by kurokawa on Wednesday 20th April 12:11
slopes said:
Because some of their kit was interesting, the FW-190 for example had an inverted V12 Turbocharged engine.
The Horton Brothers were going down the stealth route back then.
Allegedly, there is stuff that has never been recovered that was decades ahead of it's time
Err no the FW190 didn't it had a radial air-cooled, 14-cylinder BMW 139 that's why the cowl was round. The Horton Brothers were going down the stealth route back then.
Allegedly, there is stuff that has never been recovered that was decades ahead of it's time
The ME109 had a inverted fuel injected V12
slopes said:
Because some of their kit was interesting, the FW-190 for example had an inverted V12 Turbocharged engine.
Most 190s had a supercharged BMW air cooled radial engine (the BMW801).The Fw190D and the Ta152 derivative had the Daimler Benz 605 liquid cooled engine, the same as the 109G.
Many American aircraft were fitted with turbochargers - such as the P-38, the P47 and the B-17.
2xChevrons said:
........................ But it simply didn't matter how a 262 could trounce a P-51 in a dogfight.................................
Which it probably wouldn't if the 262 pilot was silly enough to get into one. The point about the 262 was that the speed would allow it to get out of range of the P51's guns then come back for another attack, or preferably ignore the P51s altogether and concentrate on the bombers.super7 said:
And didn't the ME-109 have fuel injection meaning it could fly upside down without the fuel falling out the carbs? Something the Spitfire had a problem with??
Miss Shilling's orificeShe should be sanctified in PH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Shilling
For anyone seeking peak nerd (in the best possible way 
) on WWII aero engines then the book The Secret Horsepower Race: Western Fighter Engine Development is superb.
It helps if you've a technical bone in or two in your body but can equally be read as a cracking how-dunnit factual novel.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through
IIRC it has a +ve mention in other PH threads on the subject.
) on WWII aero engines then the book The Secret Horsepower Race: Western Fighter Engine Development is superb.It helps if you've a technical bone in or two in your body but can equally be read as a cracking how-dunnit factual novel.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through
IIRC it has a +ve mention in other PH threads on the subject.
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