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[Jopax]

That was true at the start of the war. But as it dragged on the Luftwaffe couldn't really keep up with the Allied production or designs. The Bf 109 was superior at first but it got upgraded over time, when, after a certain point it needed to be redisgned completely to match some of the newer stuff. Ju 87 was in the same boat, it was advanced early on, but quickly became outmatched by pretty much everything.
And the jets were cool and all but came far too late and were far too demanding logistically to make any sort of notable impact.

[mainiac]

German airplanes didn't ever secure a quality edge over their French, British or American contemporaries.  They had the advantage of numbers of modern craft which they used to great effect in the early war.  They also had an early willingness to heavily commit their air force to crucial battles even if it resulted in losses which made their airforce vastly more useful.  The Soviets did send out huge numbers of poorly trained pilots in bad airplanes so the Germans definitely had a quality edge there.

German tanks however were in fact better in many key regards for quite a while.  The Panzer III and Panzer IV had five man crews and decent ergonomics.  The Soviets didn't have a 5 man crew on the T-34 until the T-34/85 turret and even then the ergonomics on the tank was horrible.  While the western allies had a small quality edge over the current Panzer IV variants at the start of 1943, the Panzer IV was in no way outclassed at this time and the Panzer IV continued to be improved.  The two sides had figured out that current technology meant that the logical design was for a 30 ton tank with a 75mm gun and both were making it.  The differences between a latewar Panzer IV and a Sherman weren't as important as the similarities.  So the Germans were looking pretty good there.  Then they decided to throw it away and make the horrible design that was the Panther.  Now the Soviets could just slap their T-43 turret on a T-34 tank and suddenly have the same quality disparity as before but have the production cost difference move decisively in the soviet's favor.

[Lord Shonus]

But Germany would fare a lot better in airplanes comparison

This is quite true. It wasn't until late war that the primary German fighters lost technical parity with Allied ones to an important extant (other than the complete lack of a proper strategic bomber that might have made the difference between victory and defeat in the Battle Of Britain and possibly BARBAROSSA (had the Germans taken Moscow, the constituent "Soviet Socialist Republics" of the Soviet Union (which were chained to Moscow as much by fear of Stalin as anything else) might well have decided that the time for independence was now) as well), and the replacement aircraft were almost all (save for the Me 163, which was a clever idea but wouldn't have been practical even if it had time to mature) genuinely better than the previous generation. In the air the German techology was neck-and-neck with the Allies for most of the war, getting jet aircraft into service first (although this WAS only because the British ignored the jet engine for several years) and introducing guided missiles not long after the Americans did.

[Rolan7]

I got distracted parsing your parentheses.  I wonder if the forum has a syntax-highlighting theme
Interesting point about Stalin, I wonder if his assassination would have been more game-changing than a Hitler assassination.

Also were jets a big deal?  I got the impression they came too late, though come to think of it, that should mean they were more important in the Pacific theater island-hopping.

[Kot]

Also were jets a big deal?  I got the impression they came too late, though come to think of it, that should mean they were more important in the Pacific theater island-hopping.

Japanese had very little resources so they didin't really field them in meaningful numbers and Americans didin't really want to field them because they would have to think of a way to cram them on CVs.

[Lord Shonus]

I got distracted parsing your parentheses.  I wonder if the forum has a syntax-highlighting theme
Interesting point about Stalin, I wonder if his assassination would have been more game-changing than a Hitler assassination.

Also were jets a big deal?  I got the impression they came too late, though come to think of it, that should mean they were more important in the Pacific theater island-hopping.

The British jets were a very big deal because they were fast enough to easily intercept inbound cruise missiles - some pistion-engined planes could do it but it was a lot trickier. The German jets would have been a huge game changer if they'd shown up in combat as little as six months earlier - not only were they very fast and very well armed, but the use of simple kerosene as fuel instead of high-octane gasoline would have stressed Germany's limited petroleum resources far, far less, freeing up more fuel for the Wehrmacht and (especially) the Kriegsmarine as well as allowing much more flight time even though they were more maintenance-intensive, so bombing raids would have been much more heavily pressed. Not to mention that the second-generation jet fighters (the only prototypes of which were captured on the ground) would have had a rather low Radar Cross Section (although they were not true stealth aircraft, and stealth wasn't an intended design feature, flying wing designs lack the fuselage and vertical stabilizer that send back strong radar reflections, and radar was fairly primitive at the time) allowing for a much greater degree of surprise.

If they'd been able to make the American daylight bombing raids much costlier even as the "knockout" raids on oil industries became vastly less effective, German industry might have been granted a much-needed reprieve that would allow the worst defects of the Tiger and Panther designs (the unreliable drivetrains, which were not only incapable of handling the weight of the vehicle to begin with, but were generally of poor construction quality due to the bombed-out state of German industry at the time) to be minimized and far, far more vehicles to be built, making OVERLORD much more difficult than it already was, and it is debateable how fast or deeply the Red Army could have pushed into Germany without Hitler having to send large forces to the Western Front to drive back the Ango-American army. Victory would still have been impossible, but peace short of annihilation might well have been possible.

[Kot]

Victory would still have been impossible, but peace short of annihilation might well have been possible.

Nukes. On either side.

[mainiac]

This is quite true. It wasn't until late war that the primary German fighters lost technical parity with Allied ones to an important extant

I think "late in the war" is pushing it.  In 1943 the technical capacity of the Americans and British is so much greater that it completely changes the German strategic situation.  They are so busy trying to defend airfields at home that they cant keep increasing their strength on the eastern front.  Long range offensive fighter projection was a game changing edge in the way that radar or monoplane fighters were.  So it's pretty much an even split, the first half the Germans have technical parity but sometimes numerical advantage.  The second half they lose technical parity and numerical competitiveness.

And of course in bombing there was no comparison like you said.  Getting in 1944 the western allies were dropping more bombs in a week then the Germans had dropped in the entire Blitz.  This strategic warfare was a whole other ballgame from what came before, they had developed a completely new technology that the Germans simply did not possess.

The German jets would have been a huge game changer if they'd shown up in combat as little as six months earlier

Or they would have gotten bombed on the ground six months sooner and been lauded for inflated kill claims in the air.

[Lord Shonus]

This is quite true. It wasn't until late war that the primary German fighters lost technical parity with Allied ones to an important extant

I think "late in the war" is pushing it.  In 1943 the technical capacity of the Americans and British is so much greater that it completely changes the German strategic situation.  They are so busy trying to defend airfields at home that they cant keep increasing their strength on the eastern front.  Long range offensive fighter projection was a game changing edge in the way that radar or monoplane fighters were.  So it's pretty much an even split, the first half the Germans have technical parity but sometimes numerical advantage.  The second half they lose technical parity and numerical competitiveness.

On a tactical level, the German fighters were still pretty even (unlike the Japanese, which were equal to the top of the line fighters in service at the start of the war, and rapidly became outclassed) with their US and UK counterparts on a 1:1 level - the big disadvantage was that they were fighting fighters at all, and that there were so many Anglo-American* fighters to deal with. It wasn't until the very late models of P-51 and Spitfire (among others) that the Luftwaffe's piston-engined planes were totally outclassed, and even then a good pilot (which the Germans were nearly out of) would have made the difference.



*Note: in case it wasn't clear, I use Anglo-American to describe the Allied forces on the Western Front because of the united command - the American and British forces operated under the same overall command and operations were so closely coordinated that they were essentially a single army, navy, and air force. The US and UK forces in Europe were, in fact, more closely coordinated than the USN and USMC were in the Pacific.

[WealthyRadish]

I remember writing a research paper a couple years ago for a basic history class in uni, about the effect strategic bombing had in WWII. I argued that the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan had done little to shorten the war (or rather very little compared to what commanders thought at the time) with a minor exception for the effect it had on German oil, and that it was more or less a waste of material and civilian lives. Since this thread's on the topic of aircraft, I'm kind of curious what you guys think about it.

[EnigmaticHat]

I love how detailed the discussion gets, down to tiny mechanical parts of huge machines.  And yet my general takeaway is "you shouldn't have waged war on everyone at the same time Hitler".  Since in the end it seems like this all came down to application of resources.

[Baffler]

I love how detailed the discussion gets, down to tiny mechanical parts of huge machines.  And yet my general takeaway is "you shouldn't have waged war on everyone at the same time Hitler".  Since in the end it seems like this all came down to application of resources.

That's Hitler for you, always biting off more than he can chew. No wonder nobody likes him.

[ChairmanPoo]

Well, nazis do.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

I remember writing a research paper a couple years ago for a basic history class in uni, about the effect strategic bombing had in WWII. I argued that the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan had done little to shorten the war (or rather very little compared to what commanders thought at the time) with a minor exception for the effect it had on German oil, and that it was more or less a waste of material and civilian lives. Since this thread's on the topic of aircraft, I'm kind of curious what you guys think about it.

I'm guessing this didn't include the two nuclear strikes on japan that brought them to surrender or at least have them that little nudge towards surrendering that they needed?

[Lord Shonus]

I remember writing a research paper a couple years ago for a basic history class in uni, about the effect strategic bombing had in WWII. I argued that the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan had done little to shorten the war (or rather very little compared to what commanders thought at the time) with a minor exception for the effect it had on German oil, and that it was more or less a waste of material and civilian lives. Since this thread's on the topic of aircraft, I'm kind of curious what you guys think about it.

I'm guessing this didn't include the two nuclear strikes on japan that brought them to surrender or at least have them that little nudge towards surrendering that they needed?

Or the fact that both German and Japanese production output dropped to almost nothing by late war, and what they did produce was shoddy as fuck because the working conditions were so bad and supply of power and materials was so chancy. Strategic Bombing was almost unquestionably the single most important military cause of Germany's defeat, and the second most important cause of Japan's (#1 being the submarine campaign).