Originally Posted By: ecotourist
Agree. Hitler was a terrible strategist. But his early gambles often worked out.
Pretty much, and an even worse overall war leader. His gambles were not only his and only worked because he still had generals standing up to his dumber ideas - like attacking France in October 1939 in absence of a real war plan...
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The western countries initially felt sorry for the Germans because they had treated them so badly in the Treaty of Versailles that they let them get away with a lot of stuff.
The didn't feel sorry for the Germans and if they did they could have revoked Versailles a lot earlier. Economically they were [censored] to the end. But the Great Depression was devastating to everyone and it limited the options the French and the British had to deal with Germany renouncing their treaty obligations. The Depression also ended US efforts to effectively boost Germany and slowly roll back the Treaty's harsher measures. There was also a fear that Germany wasn't strong enough with a very limited Reichswehr, in the end the "Allies" rationalized the expansion in the face of growing Soviet military power and the continued belligerence between Germany and Poland. In the end, no one wanted a severally militarily weakened Germany any longer. Unfortunately having a small elite army able to move quickly like firemen from point to point helped the Wehrmacht later on
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In about mid 1941 the war would have been unlose-able if Hitler had let his general staff manage the military strategy.
I doubt that based on the state of the economies of the belligerents alone, where the West and the USSR collectively had a massive advantage. And it isn't anywhere near plausible that a dictator will cede his power to the military as Hitler took credit for the victory over France. In any case, it wasn't just strategy that Germany lacked, it was a coherent organization for running the war from production to any strategic coherence...
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And guess who wouldn't let the Germans develop their jet interceptor, literally for years, until the engineers slyly put bomb racks under the wings so it "could be a dive bomber". Hitler really really wanted a dive bomber (the original demand was for a 4-engine heavy dive bomber) and said no more new plane development until I get one.
It didn't really matter what Hitler wanted. They just told him "okay, it's a bomber, then". The issue was the chronic lack of organization and the limited capabilities of German industry. Germany was still producing venerable and capable, but obsolete, Me109's until the end of the war. They couldn't even really develop and produce a piston engined successor and they certainly could not produce highly complex jets in sufficient quantity. And even if they did, they didn't have the pilots as the Luftwaffe had been beaten down by years of a two front air war and fighting off a strategic bomber onslaught from the west.
It wasn't Hitler that wanted everything to be a dive-bomber, that was Ernst Udet (who would later shoot himself after realizing the hopeless situation of aircraft production early on) - probably in a position he never should have been put in due to Herman Goering replacing his rivals and better air generals with a more pliable, less threatening Udet...
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The Germans weren't that far behind the allies in developing nukes either
They weren't even close to the "bomb". Several German scientists even claim they stalled research intentionally out of moral qualms over Hitler's regime and his treatment of Jews and slave laborers. Off the top of my head, it might have been 1950 by the time Germany had a bomb...
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and even had an unstoppable delivery vehicle (the V2). With a second stage they might have been able to reach New York. The odd nuclear bomb on London or New York, and a negotiated peace might start to sound like a reasonable idea.
Or with a third stage to the moon! But they didn't and the V2 program might as well have been white elephants in rockets stuck up their arseholes! Because that's pretty much what it was, a largely useless rabbit hole where resources were dumped that could have been better used elsewhere...
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The eastern front might have worked out differently with a better and more consistent strategy (and ongoing air superiority wouldn't have hurt either).
Or for the Allies in France in 1940 it would have worked out better if they had had a more coherent strategy, but they didn't! And the increasing Allied strategic bomber campaigns drew fighters of the Jagdwaffe away from the Soviet battlefront, helping the Red Air Force gain air supremacy...
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With jets keeping the bombers away from Germany and occupied Europe, who knows what might have happened.
Probably not much. The Allies probably would have just deployed their jets, like the P-80 Shooting Star which debuted at the tale end of things. The British RAF also had the Meteor. German jet engines actually weren't that great, they had a short life span and lacked power when taking off and landing before and after they had been spooled up. The USAAF simply put Mustangs around Luftwaffe aerodromes and cherrypicked Me262's before they could reach optimal performance on takeoff and landing. Plus, as I mentioned, most of the best of the overall excellent German pilots were dead or wounded by 1944...
As for the OP, one aircraft and one mission would have done nothing. Not in the beginning of 1943...
