Daydream Notes

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favour of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. -Abraham Lincoln

Last time on Amerika Bombers, we briefly reviewed why the Nazis had large problems building a strategic bomber. Germany lacked the resources and industrial capacity to build a fleet of strategic bombers. In an attempt to get around their material difficulties, they commissioned a heavy-ish bomber of supreme technological ambition, the Heinkel (He) 177. This bomber would turn into a disaster while in development, and it would, along with the lack of strategic bombers, would cause caused large problems for the Nazis during the Second World War. This post will be about the prewar Amerika bomber plans, such as they were, and anything related that crops up during 1939 and 1940. The first formal interest the RLM paid to trans-Atlantic warplanes was in early 1939, when Hermann Goering himself inquired what could be done in the way of a bomber for 'nuisance raids' against the US East coast. This inquiry was met with gentle skepticism for obvious reasons, though it appears some sta...

The Germans in some ways did very well with aircraft engines in the Second World War. Despite having less aero engine experience than the  British and Americans, they none the less managed to stay at rough parity with the Allies through the Second World War, with the Jumo 213 and the BMW 801 seeing constant development until war's end. The use of fuel injection rather than carburetors was an advancement over Allied designs, and the use of methanol as an aviation fuel additive was a clever fix to poor quality Axis fuel. At the same time, aero engines were yet another area where Germany was at a material disadvantage. The engines with the greatest performance couldn't be produced in anything like the numbers demanded, and metallurgy - especially in the creation of turbo and superchargers - was something that Germany's limited access to rarer metals couldn't help but suffer from. Both types of chargers cram extra air into engine cylinders to increase combustion, or at high...