German Bomber modified for A Bomb Delivery

[ewest89]

Simon,

I cannot recall the Peter Brill account and I thank you for posting this information. Wolfram (tungsten) was also imported by the Germans from neutral Spain.

Best,
Ed

[Simon Gunson]

Simon,

The weight of Fat Man is given as 4,670 kg while Little Boy comes in at 4,400 kg. Why the great weight? Critical mass is far below that, and even adding a detonator would not add much, especially in a "gun-type" design.

Because on the earliest US nuclear weapons there was a heavy armored shell placed around the device to make the bomb flak damage proof. This amounted to about half the weight of the weapon.

source please?

[T. A. Gardner]

The case provided an aerodynamic envelope for the bomb. To stabilize it during free fall, the case is equipped with a 58-inch, 500 pound box tail.
It is made of 3/8 inch thick steel armor so it also provided protection to the bomb-core from anti-aircraft fire. Almost half of the weight of the bomb is in this case---about 5,000 pounds.

https://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/wuaws/Pag ... MKIII.aspx

[Simon Gunson]

The case provided an aerodynamic envelope for the bomb. To stabilize it during free fall, the case is equipped with a 58-inch, 500 pound box tail.
It is made of 3/8 inch thick steel armor so it also provided protection to the bomb-core from anti-aircraft fire. Almost half of the weight of the bomb is in this case---about 5,000 pounds.

https://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/wuaws/Pag ... MKIII.aspx

Your reference is to the Fat Man Plutonium bomb released over Nagasaki at an altitude of 31,000 ft.

Please provide some examples of B-29 hit by flak at 31,000ft altitude?

Out of interest do you know what role a Tungsten Tamper plays in a nuclear warhead?

[Simon Gunson]

Simon,

I cannot recall the Peter Brill account and I thank you for posting this information. Wolfram (tungsten) was also imported by the Germans from neutral Spain.

Best,
Ed

I first noticed the article in 2005, but now most online references to Peter Brill are pay to view, or published in Spanish. His adopted home after the war was Barcelona. Brill was born 1924 and died 2013

An article here in German

https://www.mallorcamagazin.com/nachri ... ollte.html

translated:

In the Nazi research institute in Peenemünde, rockets were tested which, according to the drawing board strategy, should reach the American continent. The project failed due to the lack of sufficient propulsion power and controllability of the missile.

The Nazi technicians and engineers also thought about crossing the Atlantic by air. Hitler is said to have been enthusiastic about the idea of ​​an "America bomber". But the endeavor turned out to be difficult. After all, at least 12,000 kilometers for the return flight had to be calculated for such an attack. Such a project was not feasible under the technical conditions at the time without refueling.

Nevertheless, the planners were quite active in overcoming the hurdles. As it now turned out, there was a secret project to send a long-range bomber on its way. Ten handpicked pilots were selected for this suicide mission and specially trained in occupied Poland. One of these men was Peter Brill, then 19 years old. His recorded memoirs were recently published as a book in Spain. What is special: The work was created on Mallorca, where the former air force pilot had spent the last five years of his life as a frail pensioner until his death in 2013. Brill's final resting place is in the Llucmajor cemetery. The avid aviator had a stylized fighter plane, a Messerschmitt 109, affixed to his tombstone next to his name.

But back to 1943. In autumn Peter Brill is in Thorn, halfway between Poznan and Danzig. There he and five other comrades are trained in courses to fly a Heinkel He 177 machine. The model, also known as the "Greif", was a four-engine heavy bomber. With a range of 6500 kilometers, the machine from Nazi production was what came closest to a long-range bomber.

Brill and the other men did not know for what purpose they should be trained on the machine. The main focus of the curriculum was navigating according to the position of the sun or the stars. In addition, there was flying at unusually great heights. The "griffin" turned out to be extremely vulnerable. Its four coupled motors were supposed to drive two propellers, so that the massive airplane, 30 meters long with a wingspan of 20 meters, looked like a twin-engine machine from a distance. The coordination of the twin engines was obviously problematic, so that one of the four was still hot on the ground and caught fire. Ultimately, the pilots trained on smaller Heinkel He 111 machines as an alternative. "But we never got around to flying the He 177."

It was only when the company was closed in late 1943 that the men learned that their destination should have been New York. Among other things, the strategists had come up with the idea of ​​flying the bomb load in the "Griffin" to the Big Apple and dropping it there. The aircraft should then be abandoned over the sea and the crew taken on board a waiting submarine.

Other considerations allegedly hatched by Italian strategists provided for the "Griffin" to fly south with the remaining aviation fuel after the attack on New York and to land wherever. Then the pilots should make their way on bicycles to Mexico and from there return to Europe.

Peter Brill was obviously glad that none of these military castles in the air came to be. An attack on New York? "Jochen, that would have been pure madness," the former Wehrmacht pilot is said to have said to his son later at the age of over 80.


Daughter-in-law Rosa Grijalba advised the senior: "Write down your experiences!" In the end, it was she who helped the elderly: he told her his life and she typed the material into the typewriter. Later, two Spanish journalists who were still able to interview Brill on the mainland published the book "El diario de Peter Brill" in Spanish.

"The whole story was new to us," admits Jochen Brill. His father hadn't spoken about his past for decades. Only towards the end of his life did the locks of memory open.

Brill, born in 1924, came from Offenbach. Right from the start, the young Hessian only wanted one thing: to fly. In addition to the Hitler Youth, which he had to join like everyone in his class, he was mainly active in glider clubs in his free time. Then he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and trained as a pilot. At 19, the young man was already piloting various combat aircraft.

After the Manhattan Project was canceled, Peter was deployed on the Eastern Front. At the end of the war he was taken prisoner by Russia until he was released from a camp in Ukraine in 1948, seriously ill. In Germany, Brill received technical training in a tannery, as there were many around Offenbach at the time. Two years later the chance to go to Spain, where a leather goods factory was looking for a German director.

From then on, Brill lived with his German wife in the Valencia area and later in Barcelona. His two sons were born on the east coast. Both have lived and worked in Mallorca for a long time. In 2007 Jochen Brill brought his parents to the island.

"My father was adventurous. He went to war to be able to fly. However, the Nazis were not his world," says Jochen Brill.

Flying, that's what Peter Brill did all his life. He was active in the aviation clubs in Valencia and Barcelona until he was 80, later on Mallorca he let his son transport him through the blue in a rented small plane. "With this father I had no choice, I had to get my pilot's license," Jochen Brill smiles.

(The book is available in the Savoy bookstore in Palma, Carrer Joan de Cremona 3. Price: 23 euros.)

[T. A. Gardner]

Your reference is to the Fat Man Plutonium bomb released over Nagasaki at an altitude of 31,000 ft.

Please provide some examples of B-29 hit by flak at 31,000ft altitude?

There wasn't any. The US simply added the armored case out of abundance of caution to ensure if the plane did take damage, the bomb would remain intact. That's why the armored shell was later dispensed with.

Out of interest do you know what role a Tungsten Tamper plays in a nuclear warhead?

A tamper, tungsten or otherwise, is used to initially contain the reaction as the bomb detonates and makes for a more complete fission of the fissile material. It obviously doesn't last for long, but it does increase the amount of fission that occurs before the bomb detonates.

[Simon Gunson]

From the 2005 description of the AK177 by Peter Brill it suggests that the final version of the He177 with contra rotating propellers may have looked like this:





The standard He 177's bomb bay was divided in three segments, overall 7.56m long, 1.75m wide, and 0.9m deep. The specially enlarged bomb bay of the V38 prototype provided an unrestricted length of 4.6 metres, or in other words, the umobstructed length of the two forward bomb bays combined [source William Green's Bombers and Reconnaissance Aircraft Volume Nine, 1967]. We also know from POW interrogation SRA.4394.

Powering the He177 with the DB603N would have furnished 2500HP/engine, or the DB603E (in 1943) would have offered 1700-1800hp.
Swiss company Brown Boverie & Cie were developing gas turbine turboprop engines in WW2.

On 11 January 1944 there was a meeting in Vienna convened by RLM between Heinkel, Junkers & Messerschmitt at which Heinkel proposed a hybrid long range He177 with wings from the Me.264 permitting extra fuel to allow a 56,000kg gross take off weight with a range of 12,500km.(6,750nm) [ source Manfred Griehl's & Joachim Dressler's Heinkel: He 177,277,274 ]



Messerschmitt were working on a swept wing version of the Me.263 (proposed by Junkers , called the Me.247. This Variant bore uncanny resemblence to the Tupelov Tu95 Bear which it undoubtedly inspired

[ewest89]

It is difficult to manage all of the information regarding some German projects. In the United States, a Ground Observer Corps made up of 1.5 million civilians at 14,000 coastal observations posts were there to look for overflights of German and Japanese aircraft, plus Allied and Italian. Anything observed was telephoned to 'filter centers,' who then passed reports on to the Aircraft Warning Service. Reports were also sent in from Army radar stations. I think a records search focused on the AWS might yield some interesting information. The observers were provided with illustrated booklets.

Identification of Aircraft for Army Air Forces Ground Observer Corps Prepared in the Headquarters, Army Air Forces, expressly for use by the A.A.F. Ground Observer Corps. Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1942. Octavo, saddle stitch binding, 146 p.p., profusely illustrated.

As an aside, the first Russian bomber to be seen as a threat was a copy of the B-29 of which the Russians had three on hand at the end of the war. Aside from a red star, and different defensive weapons, Americans pilots might have been a little confused upon seeing drawings of the Tupolev Tu-4.

[Simon Gunson]

Sometimes I trawl the internet using German or Russian search terms and once on a German forum discussion I found an Austrian veteran of a Flak crew who recalled observing a B-29 overflying Austria in WW2 in the same period when YB-29 #41-36963 ‘Hobo Queen‘ visited the UK.

[T. A. Gardner]

Hobo Queen was sent to Europe as a propaganda device. The plane was there mostly to show it off and deceive the Germans into thinking that the US was deploying the B-29 to Europe even though they weren't.

The aircraft never flew over enemy territory while there. That's a known fact.

[Simon Gunson]

Hobo Queen was sent to Europe as a propaganda device. The plane was there mostly to show it off and deceive the Germans into thinking that the US was deploying the B-29 to Europe even though they weren't.

The aircraft never flew over enemy territory while there. That's a known fact.

That is a claim made contradicted by an Austrian FLAK gunner.

At Farm Hall in 1945 a conversation alluded, “During July 1944 Heisenberg was visited in Berlin by Major Bernd von Brauchitisch, Goering’s adjutant, with a report that the German legation in Lisbon had learned of an American threat to drop an Atomic Bomb on Dresden during the next six weeks if Germany did not sue for peace in some way before then.”

See Operation “Epsilon”( 6-7 August 1945) National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, RG 77, Entry 22, Box 164 (“Farm Hall Transcripts”).

source Germany and the Second World War” by Bernhard R. Kroener, Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans Umbreit, Oxford University Press, 2003, page 798

The visit of Hobo Queen was part of a giant ruse to intimidate Hitler. Hobo Queen skipped around the UK , visiting different airfields. Her exact movements are not established.

[Michael Kenny]

The aircraft never flew over enemy territory while there. That's a known fact.

officially- however those pre-disposed to the 'Conspiracy Theory of Everything' will have a mountain of innuendo to 'prove' that you are (possibly, could be, might be) wrong

[T. A. Gardner]

The aircraft never flew over enemy territory while there. That's a known fact.

officially- however those pre-disposed to the 'Conspiracy Theory of everything' will have a mountain of innuendo to 'prove' that you are (possibly, could be, might be) wrong

Yes, that's how conspiracy theories work. 1000 things point at "The Truth." The conspiracy theorist finds 2 or 3 things that point somewhere else, rejects the 1000 things, and proclaims that the conspiracy is real based on those 2 or 3 claims. Here we have an "Austrian flak gunner" of unknown reliability and providence providing all the evidence necessary that a B-29 or B-29's flew over Germany.

[Michael Kenny]

that's how conspiracy theories work. 1000 things point at "The Truth." The conspiracy theorist finds 2 or 3 things that point somewhere else, rejects the 1000 things, and proclaims that the conspiracy is real based on those 2 or 3 claims. Here we have an "Austrian flak gunner" of unknown reliability and providence providing all the evidence necessary that a B-29 or B-29's flew over Germany.

I believe the official version is that 95% of all experts/papers in/on any subject broadly agree but that a steady 5% are outliers/dissenting opinions. The tin-foil hat brigade get all their information exclusively from that 5%.

[Ironmachine]

That is a claim made contradicted by an Austrian FLAK gunner.

Actually, that is a claim (not) contradicted by your unsubstantianted claim that in an unknown internet forum a guy claiming that he had been a FLAK gunner also claimed that he had seen a (clearly identified) B-29 overflying Austria in WW2. That's a level of evidence so below minimum standard requirements in research that it would go in the same category as something like "there is extraterrestrial life in the universe because I have seen aliens in the Star Wars films!"