My understanding is that Germany had technology far ahead of the allies only not the time to roll it out.
WW2 “German technology” gets a great deal of attention, often of the “ah, but those brilliant Nazis were mere weeks away from stealth aircraft / nuclear bombs / flying saucers / shark-mounted laser cannons that would have won the war”.
In fact, most of the “advanced technology” that was being proposed late in the war was illusory, often greatly exaggerated post-war, and sometimes barely existed. For example, the Focke-Wulf Triebflügel was an interesting theoretical concept that never even reached testbed stage, yet pops up from time to time as “what if” artwork of how close Germany was to turning the tide of warfare.
Yet, there’s far less attention paid to Allied efforts that got as far or further – few folk mention how the Armstrong Whitworth A.W.52 might have become a radar-invisible stealth bomber
(because all flying wings became invisible to radar in the late 1980s), yet the British and US versions did actually get built and flown, like the US YP-35 and YB-39, while the German flying wings never got beyond scaled-down concept demonstrators
Or, the British invention of the NOTAR (No Tail Rotor) helicopter concept with the Cierva W.9. or a variety of other advances.
Because the Allies “weren’t losing” by 1944, there was less desperate urgency to produce Magic Weapons to turn the tide. Aircraft like the P-51 Mustang, Hawker Tempest and Grumman Hellcat already dominated the skies; much of the next step of piston-engined aircraft was paused or cancelled, while the Allies worked on jet aircraft at a more measured pace, producing successes like the P-80 Shooting Star, Gloster Meteor and de Havilland Vampire.
Other projects – picking on US fighters, like the Fisher P-75 Eagle or Northrop XP-79 – showed at least as much promise as German wunderwaffe (often getting to prototype and flight test, sometimes showing their problems there – always easy to be an unbeatable fighter when you never finished assembling an aircraft) These were as good or better than anything the Germans were frantically pencilling,
It’s important to separate a few genuine leading technologies, like the V-2 rocket, from the many flights of fantasy penned by designers and draughtsmen in the last year or so as the war, as they combined trying to come up with last-ditch war-winning wonderweapons with not being conscripted to fight: at a point where Germany’s steel production had collapsed, the shipyards has been bombed to rubble and the Allies were advancing on Hamburg and Bremen, the latest plans for the H-44 battleship proposed something twice the size of Japan’s Yamato. (Hey, if it’s that or being sent to fight, I’ll keep drawing battleships!)
Similarly, who, ever, anywhere, seriously imagined that this:-
or this:-
were ever going to produce any useful combat capability? But, again, it’s that or being handed a Panzerfaust and told to die bravely and take an Allied tank with you… and it does help when most of the Nazi leadership are off their faces on methamphetamine and heroin by late war.
More generally, the Germans hit the USSR in the summer of 1941 and went through the large but obsolete Red Army like a knife through hot butter, their tanks and aircraft handily outclassing most of the Soviet inventory then in service. It was a rude shock when T-34 and KV-1 tanks appeared, with guns that overmatched German tanks and armour that bounced the German 37mm and 50mm guns, causing the Germans to hastily upgun their exising tanks and develop a new generation like the Panther.
If Germany waits until 1942, they haven’t had that lesson and are still using “what’s worked to this point” – but their Panzer III and IV are bouncing shells off much larger numbers of T-34s, and their Me109s are discovering that the new Yakovlev and Lavochkin fighters – again, much more numerous in 1942 – are rather harder targets than the obsolescent Polikarpov I-15 and I-16s.
And this does presume that Stalin meekly sits and waits for Hitler to do what he’d always said he was going to do (as clearly described in Chapter 14 of “Mein Kampf”) rather than getting his retaliation in early…
First you’ve got to scrap the Hollywood gets it right mentality. In reality, the battle of France is what put Germany in such a fantastic position, and it was the failures of the French military refusing to build the Maginot line across the Belgium border that was their mistake, everything after that was a scramble. Germany’s tactic of tanks having just air support made them super quick, they all had radios to communicate, and it was a first to let the tanks roll on ahead and to leave the troops behind, but it worked fantastically well.
Other than that the Germans really didn’t have many advantages, the advantage they did keep was a sea between the UK and German territory, it was just as much a struggle for the UK to fight back too but it created a standstill to the war.
Brief Hollywood omitted truthes about WW2:
•Germany never ever had a chance of crossing the channel and invading the UK.
•Germany never ever had a chance of competing with the Royal Navy.
•Germany was very much in economic trouble, Hitler started both the initial war and the Russia offensive war earlier than he wanted as a recession was looming.
•Germany had barely recovered from WW1, and the great depression hit Germany too.
The main point here is Germany did incredibly well with their Blitzkrieg tactic and caught absolutely everyone(even themselves) off guard. They had the same impact in the seas with the U-boats, But looking past short term gains, the Allies figured out how to stop U-boats, Blitzkrieg would no longer work, and Germany really wasn’t that advanced, and Germany was also extremely tired even before the Russian invasion. Don’t forget that more land mass means spread out soldiers and defences in a foreign territory, when the germans held much of western Europe people seem to ignore the difficulties that brings, it’s a vastly more complicated situation. Having to control a native population whilst defending all the borders is an impossibly hard task for even the most advanced rich nation, and Germany certainly wasn’t that in the late 30s or early 40s. They also had an incompetent Italian government to constantly prop up.
So no, I don’t see it as a possibility. Infact there are very few scenarios that would have seen Germany win long term. Their biggest chance was making peace with the British, but that situation was out of their hands as the British has ALWAYS fought European countries over power struggles and not land(like France for example). It was not an option to allow Germany to become the senior power figure in Europe and in that, peace with Britain was never going to be.
