Amerika Bombers I: Black Gay Hitler

The Me 264.

 'Black Gay Hitler' is a term used on the somethingawful.com forums; it means any history counterfactual so far removed from the actual history as to cease to be a meaningful what-if. For instance, given how World War 2 went down, the Nazis winning the battle of the Atlantic (IE imposing an effective blockade against Britain) is something that could have happened, given not very many changes on the Allied and Axis sides. It is not Black Gay Hitler. The Germans never declaring war on the Soviet Union on the first place, and, say, using at least some of those resources to secure Mideast oil instead is very black gay Hitler, since you are changing not only history, but in a large part the reasons and mentality of the Nazis in the first place

The German transocean aircraft projects, collectively lumped under the label "Amerika bombers" is definitely Black Gay Hitler. While a few prototype Amerika bombers did actually exist, none of them could have accomplished a trans-continental air raid. Furthermore, even if a viable design existed, the Nazis utterly lacked the resources, fuel, and industrial capacity to build a fleet, or even a bombing wing of such aircraft. If you've read some of the Luftwaffe posts on this blog, you can guess the reasons why. Even if you can't do that, you can look at the only design that ever entered service that was "transocean" as the Nazis envisioned: the B-36. That airplane took the USA until the end of the Second World War to engineer. This long build time was despite that the USA had 1) vastly greater experience in strategic bombers, 2) aero engines that could actually power a sky-leviathan, and 3) overwhelming material and industrial might compared to - well - anyone. A quick perusal through the B-36's development will give you a handy list of things the German aircraft industry just couldn't do.

I recently read a book on the Third Reich's Amerika bomber projects, The Luftwaffe Over America, by Manfred Griel. Griel in his introduction too marks the whole thing as Black Gay Hitler (he may have used a different term) by setting the base condition for Amerika bombers being: control of the caucuses oil fields by Germany and the Soviet Union knocked out of the war. This is a little series of posts sharing what I've learned.

I remember Roger Ebert writing about the movie Metropolis, and noting that Metropolis' villains are easily recognizable to modern audiences: they cackle as they pull levers to enforce their will. Villains in James Bond and Batman are very similar, as they often use the artifice of technology for sinister ends. The Nazis were the real world organizational analog of these fictional tropes, and were open in their love of any sort of conceivable technological lever to accomplish their twisted goals.  The Nazis - Hitler especially - also had a love for the huge, the grandiose, and the out-sized that created a fascinating parade of projects that only ever existed on paper. The tank with the pocket battleship turrets never existed, but it is well known enough that you can buy models of it today. The Nazis' menagerie of wunder-waffen is usually great comedy, and occasionally historically important, either predating ideas that would be used later, or trailblazing technology important today, both inside and outside the military. This weird tension of the plausible and the lunatic, often existing side by side, still has a pull on people.

The Nazis had other things going on with technology, too: as on a material basis their war became hopeless, they fervently believed technology could be the great equalizer; allowing them to come back and win the Second World War. So in may ways, the hope of victory was hung, not subtly, on new weapon developments. This was a human impulse, not just a Nazi one: if your choice is thinking all is lost or working on a flying wing transoceanic jet bomber, well, *most* people would get to work on the bomber. Hope after all is fundamentally irrational; if you had reason to think you could win, why would you need hope?

At the same time, the Amerika bomber projects became a excellent example of how hope (or delusion, depending on your point of view) can have seriously toxic effect on an organization. Reading Griel's book, even I, an obsessive nerd on these sorta things, find it shocking how deep the disconnect from reality was among senior Reich Luft Ministurum (RLM) heads. At some point in 1943, the RLM's production projections themselves take wing, even as hypothetical Amerika bombers remain grounded. Projected runs of models sometimes are on a per month basis greater than their entire historical run, with no real plans as to how to achieve those numbers. The Amerika bomber project - particularly the existing prototypes - also were allowed to suck up oxygen that could have went toward  more useful projects. There was a great reluctance to give up on demonstratively inadequate ideas, simply because they worried there was no time to develop proper alternatives. This was combined with an aversion of doing a bespoke version of an Amerika bomber (positively the only way for 1940s technology to do it) because Nazi resources were stretched too thin to justify it; therefore, such a aircraft had to bomb America, and do any number of other things.  Despite this, the Nazis and the RLM persisted, even in 1944 when the roof was caving in. In the end, the Nazis retreated into an obsession of historical hypotheticals: what if we had a bomber that could cross the ocean, and a fleet of these burned America's eastern seaboard with atomic fire? Would that be enough to knock America out of the war?

So the Amerika bomber projects are kind of a Nazi industrial id: reflecting unfulfilled desires, and also surrealistically tangled with other desires involving big airplanes. It also (and this is very Nazi) demonstrated how very badly the Nazis could mismanage things thanks to delusion, a lack of focus, and an inability to face facts.

Derp Background

Our journey starts, regrettably, with a stop off at the spooky, anti-Semitic batcave that was Adolf Hitler's mind. Hitler's thinking obviously had a large impact on World War 2; what I perhaps didn't fully realize until now what a significant influence it had on the economic structure of the Third Reich. Far from being a secondary concern for Hitler, Germany's relative economic weakness was the central concern when Hitler thought internationally.

This is going to be a very weird management seminar.

When he first assumed power, Hitler already had drawn up a to-do list for the Thousand Year Reich. The first was security of the German people against the sinister hand of world Jewry, which Germany would achieve by making Germany great again; a power of the first rank. This meant massively expanding Germany's economy, not only so Germany could afford a massive military budget, but also to raise the standard of living among racially-pure Germans. Why Hitler and the Nazis settled on lebenstraum in the east, IE colonizing Eastern Europe and the Ukraine is very deep in the batshit: a gordian knot of Nazism and Germany's backward agriculture and the deaths of millions of utermenchen, but suffice it to say the creation of a Greater German Reich was what the Nazis settled on. (#1) While aforementioned untermenchen were no threat militarily, France, Britain and the United States obviously were. Hitler hoped that the British Empire had no more desire to be eclipsed by America than Germany did, and would support (or at the very least, not interfere) with the establishment of this new empire. France would have to be defeated militarily. While Britain and France were obviously a problem, the thing Hitler really feared was the involvement of the United States. He was acutely conscious of the enormous material boost France and Britain had received throughout the First World War by buying from America, and the American military's critical contribution to Germany's defeat.

The American Colossus could not be fought hand to hand until Germany had gained enormously in size and strength. In fact, Hitler's definition of security and being a World Power seems be being able to do exactly that. So, Germany had to seize the initiative and act quickly. Furthermore, she had to rearm as quickly as possible; in the long run any gains in military strength could be outmatched by France, Britain, and the USA, especially if they worked as allies.

So, German rearmament had to happen at a breakneck pace, with production ultimately taking a higher priority than expanding Germany's industrial capacity. (#2) This was true even in aircraft production, where the Nazis accomplished something close to a miracle in expanding the industrial base. In 1932, the German Aviation industry employed 3500 workers; by 1939, some 250,000 were employed in aircraft manufacturing, with similarly large numbers of workers trained in aircraft maintenance. (#3) Junkers, the largest aviation firm at the start of this expansion was now one of the 20 largest corporations in Germany. While this was a titanic achievement in state-funded industry, the results were still was not enough for the insatiable Nazi war machine. The bottleneck was aircraft engines: all modern designs were earmarked for production aircraft. Even getting engines released for military RnD projects was surprisingly difficult. Despite the enormous expansion in the manufacturing base, aircraft production was still running into the material limits of the German economy.

Dead Horse Beating Time

Case in point: strategic bombers. Nazi analysis had come to the conclusion that Germany simply couldn't afford a strategic bomber fleet. The manufacturing capacity was needed elsewhere, and more acutely, Germany didn't have the fuel capacity for a large fleet of bombers. This was a point of contention inside the RLM, with a pro-strategic bomber camp and anti-strategic bomber camp forming. The Pro faction was lead by General Walter Wever, whose death in a plane crash in 1936 was the end of this factionalism; the anti faction believed (not without reason) that strategic bombers were something that the Reich could ultimately do without. The Luftwaffe was instead being built into an air-superiority and close support force for the German army. It was also anticipated (not just by the Nazis) that wars would be short and sharp, not long and grinding, raising the question of how necessary interfering with enemy industry would be. While these assumptions were wrong, they were at least logical; but in the midst of this a large mistake was made: it was decided to forego even the development of a strategic bomber. [I've talked about this before in relation to the Ju 290.]

On the very day General Wever died, the RLM proposed a new strategic bomber more amicable to Germany's material constraints. This new bomber's specification was incredibly ambitious: in a way, what the RLM was thinking about was a medium bomber, with a medium bomber's crew, with the speed of daytime fighters of the day, but with a heavy bomber's capabilities, range, and defenses. Add on top of all these extra rich procurement demands was the ability to dive bomb targets for greater accuracy. Somewhat worse is that these demands were not all specified right away. Some of these demands, such as a greater range, were a result of changes in the political situation. The Munich crisis of 1938 made Hitler and friends aware that Britain was not, in fact, on board with Germany carving an empire out of the backs of Eastern Europeans. This meant that in the yet-hypothetical war with Britain, strategic bombers were back on the table as a need. While this new "Bomber A" project would be able to have the pick of current aircraft engines, it soon became clear that the bomber would be limited to a maximum of two propellers, to limit drag and increase stability while diving, and this was yet another problem. There was no aircraft engine either being made, or soon to be operational, with the required power for the new aircraft. The solution was to create a "power-pack" out of two engines, running out of a common gearbox. Oh, and good short field performance, a light weight, and remote-control turrets so we can limit the crew to three?

The simple lines of the initial prototype gave no hint of the madness to come.

  In abstract, all this made sense. Strategic bombing in the 1930s and '40s was very much a numbers game; your ability to damage or destroy a particular target was partially a function of how many aircraft you could throw at the problem. This is why the Nazis gave up on conventional strategic bombers: they figured simply getting the numbers for effective attacks was beyond their capacity to build and fuel them. Dive bombing, however, was an entirely different beast. By diving at the target, a airplane could release its bombs with much greater accuracy, which is why bombers attacking ships and tanks were frequently dive bombers. It was hoped that Germany could deploy these more accurate heavy bombers, and get the same results with far fewer air-frames. The remote turrets and the linked engines were dictated by the dive bombing requirement. Remote turrets required (in theory anyway,) far fewer crew than manned positions, and didn't require armor either: all this was to save weight in an aircraft that needed to be light if it was going to be effective. The linked engines were simply the only way for the German aero engine industry to power the beast in a reasonable time-frame.

 Heinkel won the contract, and set about designing what would be known as the He 177 'Grief' (Griffon in English, though the phonetic German would prove eerily appropriate.) Considering all the new and unproven technologies the imagined He 177 relied on, the whole venture was extremely high risk; Heinkel had gotten the contract by promising to fill the RLM's extraordinarily tall order. I've talked about the essential conservative nature of the RLM in this post on the He 219; here is the opposite trend. This seems to have happened quite a bit in the Luftwaffe: aircraft makers could win contracts by promising technological go-arounds to Germany's material constrains. This big risk strategy paid off sometimes, as well. The Junkers 88 medium bomber, after a rocky model rollout, became an outstanding all-rounder aircraft, exactly what Nazi Germany needed. The Me 262, the first jet fighter, can also be seen as a win for the big risk strategy. Then you have the He 177: in some ways the most valuable German aircraft in the Allied arsenal. Heinkel was no fool; having won the contract by promising the moon, he now wanted to hedge some of the He 177's technological risks. In particular, he wanted to start design work on a conventional four engine bomber version. This proposal was refused by the RLM, who didn't want the Big Bomber's dive bombing ability compromised.

Two cutaways of the He 177's interior. The front has a good view but is also very, very small; just the sort of space you want to cram yourself into with three other people when the engines have a tendency to spontaneously catch fire.  

  
The tail gunner was pretty much stuck in the position you see him in now; at least a ball turret gunner could get out of the ball turret.

 And so, when basically all of the RLM's big bets came back as losses, the program became a disaster.  The remote turrets were a wash, as Germany's manufacturer's couldn't make a reliable model; this lead to the introduction of manned turrets, which increased weight, especially after it was decided the gunners should have their own armor protection. Dive bombing proved dangerous, with the now very heavy bomber sometimes cracking its own wing spars in dives. Strengthening the wings to withstand diving increased their weight, sapping range. The power packs proved horribly unreliable, given to breaking down and often catching fire.The engine fires had a few causes, one of which was inadequate ventilation from the engine cowl. The engine cowl had to be kept remarkably tight to reduce drag and keep the He 177 stable while in a dive; allowing the engine cowl to draw more air reduced the engine fires but spoiled the bomber's stability, and thus its ability to bomb accurately, which was the reason for all this malarkey in the first place. Weight, meanwhile, had increased to the point that the He 177 was a heavy bomber rather than a long range one: while it had the capacity to strike anywhere in the UK, it's lack of range spoiled it for bombing missions against the Urals and reconnaissance/attack far out into the Atlantic. And so on. In Luftwaffe service, it was used mostly by maritime bomber units in the west, with most He 177s serving as day and night bombers on the eastern front. Sources vary as to how reliable the He 177 eventually became, but its reliability more or less forbade the extremely long distance operations the Luftwaffe wanted to use them for.

They did get some cool camo patterns, though. This captured He 177 has blue painted sides with white oversprays to make it sorta look like clouds.

 After the Second World War,  the He 177 became a popular target of blame for the failure of the  Luftwaffe by its former commanders, and you can understand why. 1000 or so were produced, and the Germans figured every He 177 equaled, in resources at least, five single engine fighters. 5000 Fighters, (especially remembering the grand total of Luftwaffe air-frame strength peaked at around 5000 machines) is obviously nothing to sneeze at. What's perhaps more damning about this number is that only half of the He 177s produced were ever used operationally, so about 2500 of those hypothetical fighters were completely wasted.

The point here is simple: when it came to strategic bombers, Germany didn't so much screw up as light itself on fire. They managed to get the worst of both worlds: they used lots of resources on an airplane that often couldn't do the strategic bomber role. This puts Germany behind other Axis nations when it came to strategic bombers, not just other nations; both Italy and Japan produced four engine strategic bombers, admittedly in modest numbers. Any discussion of German Amerika bombers should be prefaced by this fact.

It's worth mentioning as well that while Germany struggled with the He 177, the airplanes that would eventually do so much to destroy the Third Reich were really not all that sophisticated. There's three aircraft I'd like to highlight: the B-24 Liberator, the Short Stirling, and the Avro Manchester.

All three started development later than the He 177, in 1938. The Stirling and the Manchester were British built, and it is notable that Britain was in many ways economically similar to Germany, and had followed a surprisingly similar line of thinking in bombers, at least in the 1930s. The RAF had initially disdained four engine bombers as uneconomical, and thought the future was twin engine bombers using next-generation aircraft engines. The Manchester, in fact, was a continuation of that theory - it was to use twin Rolls-Royce Vulture engines, which were two V12 mashed into a X-24 combination.

The Short Stirling: sorta obscure...

...but not small.

 Britain started mulling a different direction thanks to the success of the American B-17. The British were impressed with the Flying Fortress, as it was a capable machine that used older, lower output engines: Wright Cyclone radials making 1200 hp. The RAF issued new design competitions in 1938 for four engine heavy bombers; aircraft that would compose its later war strategic bomber fleet. The Short Stirling was the first four engine model to appear, as Short took a rather brilliant production shortcut: it simply took the already existing wing of the Short Sunderland and built a new fuselage around it. The Stirling was the first "heavy" to see service in the RAF in 1941, and while it saw lots of action, it was withdrawn by 1943, seeing a production number by war's end of over 2000. What's perhaps more pertinent when talking about the He 177 is that the Stirling was developed, deployed operationally, then retired and replaced by two improved models all in the time the He 177 was greifing its hapless aircrews flight testing it. The Stirling also proved adaptable, having a long second-line career as a glider tug and transport.

The Avro Manchester is even closer to the He 177. Like the Greif, its aforementioned linked engines proved to be dogs. Under powered and with terrible reliability, the Manchester saw a modest production of 200.  Still, what happened next was perhaps a key difference between the British and German aircraft industries. Even as the Manchester was being developed, a four engine version was being studied. The much smaller Merlin V12 had a similar output to the overly-complex Vulture, and when the Vulture proved to be a pig, the Manchester was recast with four engines, boosting power and reliability. The four engine Manchester was soon renamed to Lancaster, and would become the cornerstone of RAF bomber command, with variants having a long post war service.

The B-24 also deserves a mention. In America's 1938 bomber revision, it was decided that America (and Britain and other Allies) were going to need heavy bombers in great numbers. They would need an air frame that was adaptable, too, capable of ocean patrol and transport duties if need be. The aircraft in question would also have to be eminently mass produce-able. To save time, like the Stirling, some of the design was cribbed from a flying boat, in this case the Consolidated Corregidor prototype. The result was the B-24 Liberator, whose only real technical innovation in was the use of a high mounted wing using the recently developed "Davis" airfoil. None the less, the B-24 was a aircraft critical to Allied victory. In its ocean patrol form, it closed the mid-atlantic air gap, a essential step in defeating the U-boats. As a bomber, it saw service in every theater of war, and was built in such numbers it remains the most produced four engine aircraft in history.

Also, while we are talking about B-24s, some of the paint jobs were pretty good, too.

None of these aircraft were perfect. The Stirling became obsolete rather quickly in the bomber role as it couldn't fly high enough, and the Lancaster and the B-24 were deathtraps when crashing; evidently economy in production had ruled over "getting out of the aircraft easily." The B-24 was also a handful to fly. While obviously, these bombers were all produced in numbers that the Third Reich could only fantasize about, Germany was eminently capable of producing the same sort of aircraft, if only in limited numbers. That it didn't was due to the Nazis making dumb decisions early on, and then not admitting said dumb decisions thanks to the sunken costs fallacy.

As for the He 177, Heinkel, despite not getting official permission from the RLM, started work on four engine variants. The He 177B was a conventional four engine version of the 177, and the He 274 was a further evolution of the design. Freed from malfunctioning engines and the dive bombing requirement, the He 274 had its fuselage redesigned for high altitude operations. The results were quite impressive - the He 274 retained its high speed and could now fly in higher altitudes with ease - at least that's what the Allies discovered in their flight testing, after they captured the He 274 at the end of the war. Both designs came too late to be used, and too late to be even flight tested properly by the Germans.

And here we get to the Amerika bomber program. The Germans had failed, totally tripped and fell on their faces in their attempts to make a strategic bomber. Despite this pratfall in the background, this didn't stop the Nazis from dreaming of even more marvelous and improbable aircraft with which to fight America.

Part of the Amerika Bomber series. 

Part 2: Vague Plans and Flying Boats

 Part 3: Walkin' on Sunshine

Part 4: Stuffing arrogant mouths

Part 5: Eris is Goddess

Part 6: Ragnarocky Road 
 
Part 7: Look Busy and Hope Americans Capture You

Part 8: Rocket-Powered Daydream Death Notes

Appendix: A4 Guidance 

Notes

#1) Another factor in this decision was Hitler seems to have thought prosperity was a zero-sum game: in order for Germany to win, others had to lose. Therefore, if Germany's standard of living was to rise, other people's standards must fall. You can see how this sort of thinking rapidly leads to genocide as a logical end.

#2)  Once Hitler's government came to power, it adopted protectionist trade policies, while at the same time starting the biggest re-armament program up in modern history. Germany was constrained not by spending, but by the balance of trade. The balance of trade, along with certain economic inputs like steel and coal, were the intractable hard limits on the expansion of the Nazi war machine. The Third Reich, [once again] was in many ways like Britain: it was reliant on trade for basic economic inputs. In addition to more mundane things like high protein animal feed, it also needed things like copper and rubber for re-armament efforts, without which, Germany's rearmament effort and its economy in general would shudder to a halt. Trading steel gave Germany the foreign currency it needed to purchase foreign goods. This trade balance was so critical that steel was actually marked for foreign trade over military uses.

Despite the overwhelming push for expanded capacity and more arms and armaments, the push for military expansion often was deemed more critical, to the point that it weakened Germany's economic base. This was ultimately deemed necessary, as Nazi Germany's increasingly belligerent stance against other nations was resulting in other nations being more belligerent against the Nazis, and this (in the mind of Hitler, anyway) was more evidence of the sinister Jewish cabal manipulating world events. As an example of this industrial degradation in action, German rail was given almost none of the precious steel allocation pre war, and thus had most of its rolling stock degrade. That this was a problem in a land where most industrial inputs had to go by rail is obvious; but it is even worse when you consider that the Third Reich ran on coal, which obviously requires lots of coal cars. When the Second World War eventually started, there was a 1)  crushing demand for coal, and 2) mountains of coal growing at pit-heads, simply because the rail deliveries of coal were so far behind thanks to diminished capacity on the part of German railways. Coal is also a critical input in steel making, creating a nasty feedback loop where the Nazis least wanted it.

Anyway, my point here is that German re-armament was shaped very specifically by Hitler's assumptions about the Lurking Jewish menace, and by the absolute material constraints of Nazi Germany's economy.

#3) These and other economic facts come from The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, which I believe is now the standard book on the economy of the Third Reich. If you ever wanted to see a few myths shattered about the economics of the Third Reich (like how Nazi Germany never mobilized its women) or find the surprising connection between Germany's backwards agriculture and its war economy, this is the book for you. Two vignettes from it:

First, in 1938 the Nazis had completely tapped out Germany's labor market. The Nazi response was to extend government control over the labor market via bureaucracy.  People had to keep official 'job books' and in high demand positions needed government permission to quit. (Nobody tell Canada this, it seems like they'd be into it.) Anyway, Berlin was a particularly hot job market; the sum total of unemployed people was 35,000, of which only 6000 or so were fully fit.

Of these, at least a third were 'artistic professionals', would-be actors and musicians, who as paid up members of the Reich's corporation of artistic workers enjoyed a protected status. Dealing with the bohemian residuum posed a special problem for the officials of the Berlin labor exchanges, who faced 'fits of temper' and 'time consuming complaints' , if a change of profession was 'even suggested.' At a time of national emergency, the Berlin trustee of labor was moved to the philistine observation that it was surely unacceptable that 'such a large number of fully fit Volksgenossen should be exempt from...radical occupational redirection'.

Tooze also has an extremely annoyed Hermann Goering a few days after the Krystalnacht complaining how he was the real victim of the Jewish Pogrom (aside from the Jews I guess:)

"Three days after the pogrom, on 12th November, Goering asserted his authora-taugh with a major conference on the Jewish question. As head of the Four Year Plan [take two on making the German economy produce the 'uuugest, most luxurious military] Goering was indignant at the wanton damage to property over the previous days. 'I have had enough of these demonstrations! They don't harm the Jew, but me, who am in the last authority for coordinating the German economy.' Goering was incensed by the furs and the jewels looted in Berlin and issued special orders for the arrest of the persons responsible. More seriously, Germany's streets were littered with debris of thousands of smashed shop windows. The Jews would pay the bill for cleaning up the mess, but replacing the high quality Belgian plate glass would cost 3 million Reich marks in precious foreign exchange. As Goering put it: 'I wish you had killed 200 Jews, and not destroyed such values.'"

So, for the doubters: Hemann Goring? Bad person.