maritime96 wrote:Stuff like that has got to make you wonder: If Adolph had been patient and waited till say 1946 or 47 to start his blitzkrieg rolling, would there have been any real way to stop it? I mean an Air Force loaded with Me262's - Ho 229's and little guys like this. An army filled with King Tigers, Panther II's, every soldier armed with a sturmgewehr 44 - not to mention the possibility he would have had more advanced submarines, THE bomb, V-2's to deliver them and maybe even have put a man in space long before us or the Russians. I know there have been lots of "what if" stories on this but the reality of what could have been can be very sobering.
Actually, this logic is a bit flawed... Yes, the Germans did have long-range plans to develop the army, air force and navy, but were not for the war, this would have occurred at a slow pace to be completed in the late 1940s and without the innovation that later characterized German machines of war. That logic also fails to take into account Hitler himself. A lot of the less-practical innovations like the King Tiger, V-2, and other super-weapons were only made because Hitler wanted them to be made and they tied up resources that could have gone towards more practical measures to help the Germans win the war.
Warfare also drives necessity and innovation. German wonder weapons like the ME-262, V1, V2, their heavy tanks, advanced weapons, all were not part of the initial mindset of the German high command at the start of the war. Yes, they were developing rockets prior to 1939 and yes they even had flying jet aircraft before the start of the war, but the German high command - and Hitler - did not give priority to these projects, and didn't need to, when the Germans were winning and on top.
When the war started to turn against Germany and became a defensive war (really after Stalingrad in 1942 and the entry of the USA into the war) then they started to see the need for innovations to counter allied weaponry. Hitler was able to act impulsively on his delusions. Heavier tanks like the Tiger and Panther came about to counter Soviet armor like the T-34, but were in some ways taken too far as the King Tiger design shows. Aircraft that could fly faster and higher, like the ME-262, came about as they were needed to intercept the endless streams of allied bombers and fighters, but Hitler's meddling in the project caused delays and the plane was never exploited as it could have been. Better artillery and small-arms weapons for their troops came about based on what the Germans encountered on the battlefield fighting against namely the Russians. The famous V1 and V2 were weapons of last resort and particularly in the case of the V-2, not really very practical to winning a total war...
As a result of the German's initial organizational mindset - that they were on top and didn't need to innovate - their most advanced weapons and vehicles didn't receive priority until it was too late. Hitler didn't help either by tying up resources into projects that became dead ends. Many, if not the majority, of the German's technical innovations during the war came about because there was a need for them once the focus of the war shifted from offensive, to defensive, to desperation.
Sorry for the long rant, but at one time, I was a professional historian that studied this era (in part), and I'm not too fond simple generalizations
There are way too many "what if" moments in WWII history that could have changed the outcome in Germany's favor (i.e. winning the Battle of Britain and invading England; capturing Moscow, seizing the Suez Canal, etc) or at least prolonged the war (pushing back the Kursk salient, repelling the first waves of the D-Day invasion, reaching their objectives in the Ardennes in 1945, and so on) but these thankfully didn't happen!