No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

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Politician01
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No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#1

Post by Politician01 » 09 May 2020, 12:35

During Exercise Tiger the Wallies lost 10 American officers with knowledge of the Normandy Invasion, only 9 of these men were found, the tenth was captured by German searching parties. As a result the Normandy landings were cancelled.

In August the Wallies executed Operation Dragoon, the Invasion of Southern France became the substitue for Overlord. Paris was taken by Christmas 1944, the Rhine was reached in early May, by early June when Wallied troops were crossing the Rhine, they allready encountered Soviet Forces.

As such the Allies are denied most of the OTL German scientists they abducted, most of the patents they plundered and most of the equipment they shipped over to the US/Britain to study in order to reverse engineer.

Other effects are things like no Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 (probably) because it was Eisenhowers observation of the German autobahn network during World War II, that convinced him to support construction of the Interstate System when he became president.

How much do the Wallies fall behind in this ATL compared to OTL - how much more do the Soviets advance?
Bonus Question is - how much do the Soviets Benefit from controlling Austria as well as 90% of Germany?

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#2

Post by Mori » 09 May 2020, 13:18

Politician01 wrote:
09 May 2020, 12:35
As such the Allies are denied most of the OTL German scientists they abducted, most of the patents they plundered and most of the equipment they shipped over to the US/Britain to study in order to reverse engineer.
Allies still have the atomic bomb.

On rockets: there was an advanced rocket program in the US, pre-war. It developped the basis technology for long-range rockets, so one can assume it would have continued even without von Braun & co.

On jet aircraft: the British developed the Meteor, first flight in 1943, more or less at par with German Me 262. Again, they mastered the technology without help from German scientists.


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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#3

Post by T. A. Gardner » 09 May 2020, 18:18

Impact for the W. Allies? Next to nil. Von Braun's main contribution in the US was he was one hell of a salesman and was the one who sold the Apollo project for example for NASA to the President at the time.

Some Nazi technology was studied and became the impetus for Allied projects along the same lines, but in many cases, that was before the war ended and the materials captured were often studied rejected and W. Allied engineers basically said "We can do better than this crap."

On rockets that Mori mentioned. Both the Soviets and US were well ahead of Germany on rocket technology to about 1938-39. Then both pretty much let their programs languish. The Soviet one in big part because of internal politics and the death or imprisonment of many of the top figures.

http://mentallandscape.com/S_GIRD.htm

The US program was largely one of civilian initiative. Robert Goddard was very advanced in his work and both the Russians and Germans used his published research pre-war. But, overall his program was secretive and Goddard refused to work with the military or government. The Cal Tech "suicide squad" was another semi-professional group working in California on rockets pre-war. Their contributions were substantial during it.
But, the US military had little interest in a large ballistic missile like the V-2 because of its cost and lack of utility-- until atomic weapons came along.

There were things here and there that the W. Allies could definitely benefit from but it really didn't require the German scientists and engineers to get that benefit. They were more like icing on the cake and being kept out of Soviet hands by being employed in the West.

The Soviets got a big boost early on from their capture of German technology, scientists, and engineers. But, that mostly makes up for their lack of R&D on advanced weapons, etc., during the war rather than boosts them ahead. By the mid 1950's they were back on track for the most part only held up by the overall economic condition in the Soviet Union.

Eisenhower would still likely see the Autobahn system and react the same since the Soviets would have to yield ground per the original Yalta agreements etc. Sure, if they captured more ground, they'd take what they could with them East rather than leave it for the Allies. In a way this is a two-edged sword. For what would be Western Germany (still) the rebuild would modernize the country even further. For the Soviets, their use of older, worn machinery etc., would be a burden. The Soviets really wouldn't get any more of a boost than they did and the W. Allies wouldn't really lose any ground.
The W. Allies would still likely capture many of the scientists and engineers as it is fully likely they'd flee ahead of the Soviets to still surrender to the West.

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#4

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 09 May 2020, 18:29

Mori wrote:
09 May 2020, 13:18

On rockets: there was an advanced rocket program in the US, pre-war. ...
If I recall correctly two civilian rocket programs
Mori wrote:
09 May 2020, 13:18
...

On jet aircraft: the British developed the Meteor, first flight in 1943, more or less at par with German Me 262. Again, they mastered the technology without help from German scientists.
Post war the Soviets had a engineer team working on the German jet engine designs for at least five years. They could not get them to work as well as the Brit derived models & had those in production while the German designs were still failing.

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#5

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 09 May 2020, 18:48

T. A. Gardner wrote:
09 May 2020, 18:18
... Eisenhower would still likely see the Autobahn system ...
A close look at the existing Federal highways system initiated in the 1920s & state of local development shows highway design in the US was headed in the same direction. The obstacle was not concept or engineering but a fiscally conservative federal legislature that was allergic to infrastructure spending. Ike was not part of that crowd. His contribution was the socialist (communist?) idea that the Federal government ought to fund programs that benefitted the nation in general. In this he was backed by the automobile industry, who as in the 1920s lobbied strongly for spending on road improvement. Truman may very well have responded the same way to the automotive/highway lobby. A Taft presidency may have left us with a witches brew of 48 state highway programs following incompatible routes and built to uneven standards.

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#6

Post by T. A. Gardner » 09 May 2020, 18:52

Carl Schwamberger wrote:
09 May 2020, 18:29
If I recall correctly two civilian rocket programs
There were three primary US Army ones during the war:

Ordcit, Galcit, and Goddard Labs. Galcit was the main one and became the JPL at Cal Tech in the 50's. Ordcit became the missile program at Redstone Arsenal. Goddard Labs really didn't have the massive input the other two did. The USAAF also used the University of Michigan.

The US Navy also used Cal Tech / Galcit as well as John Hopkins University, among others to move their program forward semi-separately from the US Army. Both shared data and research pretty freely, but they had different goals in many of their programs based on what they needed operationally.
Post war the Soviets had a engineer team working on the German jet engine designs for at least five years. They could not get them to work as well as the Brit derived models & had those in production while the German designs were still failing.
The Soviets did design two turbojet engines in mid- to late 1944 but these proved failures and the Soviets in the immediate postwar years used captured German designs in their earliest jet aircraft. It was really the British selling them their designs that gave the Soviets their big boost. It was easier to copy British technology that worked than fix German technology built in the last years of the war under execrable conditions.

The Soviets postwar set up research and development institutes like NII-88 which were "closed" facilities the used a combination of German engineers and scientists working alongside their Soviet counterparts. The "closed" designation came from their being sort of a semi-gulag in that those assigned were kept apart from society in a secure setting. Sort of a house arrest thing.

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#7

Post by T. A. Gardner » 09 May 2020, 18:57

Carl Schwamberger wrote:
09 May 2020, 18:48
A close look at the existing Federal highways system initiated in the 1920s & state of local development shows highway design in the US was headed in the same direction. The obstacle was not concept or engineering but a fiscally conservative federal legislature that was allergic to infrastructure spending. Ike was not part of that crowd. His contribution was the socialist (communist?) idea that the Federal government ought to fund programs that benefitted the nation in general. In this he was backed by the automobile industry, who as in the 1920s lobbied strongly for spending on road improvement. Truman may very well have responded the same way to the automotive/highway lobby. A Taft presidency may have left us with a witches brew of 48 state highway programs following incompatible routes and built to uneven standards.
Actually, Eisenhower sold the interstate highway system as a defense need.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_A ... ct_of_1956

That made building these highways a matter of national defense, not just some federal infrastructure program. That was much easier to sell to Congress at the time.

Prior to that projects like the Lincoln Highway were being sold as projects that would "open up the country" to motor vehicle travel and a hard sell due to the cost with little visible return.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_of_ ... ln_Highway

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#8

Post by Ружичасти Слон » 09 May 2020, 19:06

Politician01 wrote:
09 May 2020, 12:35


How much do the Wallies fall behind in this ATL compared to OTL - how much more do the Soviets advance?
Bonus Question is - how much do the Soviets Benefit from controlling Austria as well as 90% of Germany?
In your imagination story Western Union 5 was be in most better position. Not fall behind. For Soviet union was be worstest.

How much was be cost for to rebuild Europe after war? Look for how much was be success on west and how much was on east. Now imagination transfer cost for west Germany and Austria to Soviet cost. East was to get poorest Western Union 5 was to get richer.

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#9

Post by Politician01 » 09 May 2020, 19:31

T. A. Gardner wrote:
09 May 2020, 18:18
Impact for the W. Allies? Next to nil.
Swept Wings
Bell X-5
Space Medicine
AIM-9 SideWinder

Just from the top of my head. Without German contribution these Projects would either never have been successful, or would have taken months or years longer to take shape. So while the contribution was perhaps small - which is open to discussion - "Nil" is just inaccurate.

T. A. Gardner wrote:
09 May 2020, 18:18
since the Soviets would have to yield ground per the original Yalta agreements
I wonder what the original Yalta Agreement would have been, if the Soviets by February stand just 100 Kilometers from Berlin, while in this ATL the Wallies would not even have entered Belgium.

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#10

Post by EKB » 09 May 2020, 21:04

The U.S. guided missiles AIM-9 Sidewinder and AIM-7 Sparrow developed from WWII U.S. rockets, especially HVAR.

The leading edge angle of wing sweep on the Messerschmitt 262 was a mild 18 degrees; little more than the Douglas DC-3 which had a 14 degrees swept leading edge for the same reason. To solve a center of gravity issue. There is disagreement about how much wing sweep research from Germany changed the future of jet aircraft. The Russians say not at all with the MiG-15.

The Me 262 looked like a Westland Whirlwind with turbines. The outboard engine pod eased maintenance, but was a design dead end for jet fighters.

As for turbojets, the General Electric J47 grew from J35 which was based on the NACA 8-stage compressor. Russia was smitten with British engines like the Rolls Royce Nene. One Klimov VK-1 was better than two Jumo 004.

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#11

Post by T. A. Gardner » 09 May 2020, 21:36

Politician01 wrote:
09 May 2020, 19:31

Swept Wings
The US, even the Soviets, had those. The thing neither had, and the Germans had done more research on was high-speed aerodynamics. The Germans had bigger and more supersonic wind tunnels than the US, Britain, or the Russians had. But, the US and Russia caught up quickly. As the Me 262 was designed in 1940 before that research was available, it was simply a fortuitous thing that the aircraft had them. It was really just the wing section design that gave the Me 262 its speed. It was thinner than that on the Meteor for example. The clear example from 1939-40 of this is the US P-38 with a thick wing--like the Hawker Typhoon-- that created a lower critical Mach number and kept the plane's speed down.
Bell X-5
So? Variable swept and forward swept wings were tried in the US before Germany.

George W. Cornelius was the US's leading inventor in these areas. In Russia, it was Boris Cheranovsky and his small design bureau. Cheranovsky and John 'Jack' Northrop were also the US and Russian flying wing experts, with Northrop doing more than the Horton brothers in Germany. See Grumman's XF10F Jaguar for another example of independently developed variable sweep wings.
The US was flying a test plane--well glider-- with forward swept wings before the Ju 287 came along... The wings even had variable camber and could be adjusted on the ground...
Space Medicine
Don't know on this one, but it would have had to be postwar since nobody had gotten into space by 1945 and nobody knew the realities of that yet.
AIM-9 SideWinder


A wholly and totally US invention by William B. McLean at China Lake in what was then known as "McLean's Hobby Shop." Contrary to the Wiki article, McLean used US developed IR technology not relying on anything the Germans did. The IR technology was well known in the US, Russia, and Britain pre-war and developed to one degree or another during it. Germany got their IR technology mostly from prewar Hungarian research rather than German...
It wasn't anything special as McLean's contribution was how he got it to detect and track an object using a rotating disc in the reticle. Another unique, and patented by him, design was the use of "rollerons" to stabilize the missile. The missile design itself follows already extant US AAM missile designs like the Ryan Firebird. The AIM 9 owes nothing to wartime German IR research-- the same goes for the US M3 Sniperscope which was invented and developed before German technology in this area was available to the US.


Just from the top of my head. Without German contribution these Projects would either never have been successful, or would have taken months or years longer to take shape. So while the contribution was perhaps small - which is open to discussion - "Nil" is just inaccurate.
Close to nil. Each one of your examples is taken from common misconceptions and lack of wide knowledge about competing programs in other countries. For example, it is widely assumed that the Germans led in SAM technology with the Wasserfall being the pinnacle of that technology. Looking closely at this, the US went further than the Germans by 1945 in developing a SAM as did the British. The Wasserfall can best be characterized as an unmitigated failure as a missile being rejected in the US after just 3 launches (see Project Hermes). In the Soviet Union they tried to make it work for almost a decade with no real success then abandoned it for a clean design, the S-25 Berkut.
I wonder what the original Yalta Agreement would have been, if the Soviets by February stand just 100 Kilometers from Berlin, while in this ATL the Wallies would not even have entered Belgium.
Hard to say. The W. Allies might still want a similar agreement, while Stalin sees no benefit from angering them. Stalin mostly wanted a buffer between the USSR and potential enemies at that time. Eastern Europe gave it to him.

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#12

Post by Michael Kenny » 09 May 2020, 21:46

Politician01 wrote:
09 May 2020, 19:31

Space Medicine
I do hope that is not a reference to the medical experiments carried out on Concentration Camp inmates.


https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust ... .html#alti

In 1942, Sigmund Rascher and others conducted high-altitude experiments on prisoners at Dachau. Eager to find out how best to save German pilots forced to eject at high altitude, they placed inmates into low-pressure chambers that simulated altitudes as high as 68,000 feet and monitored their physiological response as they succumbed and died. Rascher was said to dissect victims' brains while they were still alive to show that high-altitude sickness resulted from the formation of tiny air bubbles in the blood vessels of a certain part of the brain. Of 200 people subjected to these experiments, 80 died outright and the remainder were executed.
Last edited by Michael Kenny on 09 May 2020, 22:08, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#13

Post by Michael Kenny » 09 May 2020, 22:03

T. A. Gardner wrote:
09 May 2020, 21:36
The IR technology was well known in the US, Russia, and Britain pre-war and developed to one degree or another during it.
Pre-war IR experiments on Russian BT Tanks . Reads like 'Google Translate'
Soviet IR pg 1  ,,_stitch.jpg
Soviet IR G pg 2 _stitch.jpg
Soviet IR WW2 ,89.png
Soviet Russian IR BT-7-IR B.jpg
Soviet Russian IR BT-7-IR B.jpg (34.29 KiB) Viewed 8977 times

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#14

Post by T. A. Gardner » 09 May 2020, 22:05

Michael Kenny wrote:
09 May 2020, 22:03
T. A. Gardner wrote:
09 May 2020, 21:36
The IR technology was well known in the US, Russia, and Britain pre-war and developed to one degree or another during it.
Pre-war IR experiments on Russian BT Tanks . Reads like 'Google Translate'

Soviet IR pg 1 ,,_stitch.jpgSoviet IR G pg 2 _stitch.jpg
Soviet IR WW2 ,89.png
Soviet Russian IR BT-7-IR B.jpg
Yes, I should have included the Russians. They developed IR about the same distance as the US and Germany, on about the same timeline overall. So, they weren't behind the curve in this area at all and certainly didn't need the German technology as they had it on their own.

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Re: No German scientists/technology for the Wallies - impact on the Cold War?

#15

Post by Ружичасти Слон » 09 May 2020, 22:16

Politician01 wrote:
09 May 2020, 12:35
How much do the Wallies fall behind in this ATL compared to OTL - how much more do the Soviets advance?
Bonus Question is - how much do the Soviets Benefit from controlling Austria as well as 90% of Germany?
2 questions what was made to try to mainstream discuss of fake Germany aryan superority.

Read careful words. Questions are biased. Questions wase not write does west fall behind or was get advance. Question was choose already answer and want for to discuss how much fall behind. Same for 2.question. Not question do Soviets benefit but how much benefit.

And behind both questions is idea that German Aryan scientists and workers was superior and when you have them = benefit and when you not have them = fall behind.

Intelligence discuss can for to have about value of German scientists after finish war.

Not can have intelligence discuss what assume Amerika, west Europe and Soviet union must have German scientists and workers for to advance.

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