5 Nazi Plans That Prove They Were Dumber Than You Think

[Webb]

5 Nazi Plans That Prove They Were Dumber Than You Think

Think "Hogan's Heroes".

[Strategic Retreat]

#5. Operation Pope Kill

New to me. Quite dumb. And for ego reasons too. Would have had the rest of the world after his jugular in by far faster time he did already.

The ego of rulers is the ruination of their empires.

#4. The V-Weapons: Big, Scary Missiles That Couldn't Hit Anything

...beside targets the size of London, yeah, and being extremely costly... then again, they didn't have the GPS satellite system and the miniaturized integrated circuitry today we can boast about and had to make due with miniaturized thermoionic tubes and gyroscopes...

Just think about the simple Commodore C64 made in such a backward way and the sheer amount of power and space it would need, not to talk about more modern computers and the worldwide net we commonly use today...

And to justify the cost of every V1 and V2 was the desperate hope to awe into submission the allies with their wonder weapons...

That they only made the Allies angrier and more determined to tear them another one... I guess came as a complete surprise to them.

#3. Hitler's Obsession With Invading Switzerland

Again, new to me, but hardly surprising. I reckon that had things gone differently on the other two fronts, he could have diverted enough Wehrmacht divisions to take Switzerland too.

The by far dumbest thing he did was to open a second war front after his Luftwaffe had their communal butts handed to them by the RAF... just weeks away from the entering of the USA in the conflict... ONLY TO TOP IT ALL OFF BY DECLARING WAR TO USA AFTER PEARL HARBOR, making a huge favor to Roosevelt along the way.

Sometimes I stop thinking about it and feel awestruck at the sheer idiocy and bad timing. Then I can't help but feel so good Hitler was such a dunce that his assassination by allies forces commandos was rejected on the basis that his death would surely hand the control of the Reich to someone who actually knew what he was doing. Until he remained there, final victory would be easier.

#2. Boasting About Their Censorship of Art (By Showing It Off)

ALL censorship is stupid. Full stop.

The greater hypocrisy of it was that he tried to sell the "degenerate art", as he, a failed painter, called it, for money for his Reich anyway.

#1. Nuremberg Jones and the Temple of Stone Age Technology

That was for their propaganda machine. For them and the people following them it was a way to... feel better about their way too much humble origins they could stand, we could say (I am offending no one nor unveiling any state secret saying that ancient Germanic people in the millenniums past were rather backwards if compared to Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and all the other voices in that list... and their Reich could not accept that), like some people nowadays squanders good money in the hope to find some ancestor that was noble and other somesuch idiocy.

They did squander a lot of money fabricating false "proofs" that even to my eyes when I was thirteen would have looked phony. Sometimes I cannot help but wonder who were they trying to fool... beside themselves, that is.

No real surprise, really. After all, True History tells that power and intelligence rarely, VERY RARELY have gone hand to hand, and most of the times it was the other way around.

And still is. This is the sadder part. Still is.

[andy190]

#3. Hitler's Obsession With Invading Switzerland

That would have been even more difficult than Cracked.com think. The only easy way to get to Switzerland would have been through the Railway Tunnels & at the beginning of the war the Swiss lined them it explosives so if the Germans ever invaded, Boom.

Also Cracked call The V-2 a Useless weapon. The same person who invented the V-2 went on to be one of NASA's top engineers. So the V-2 can't have been that bad.

[Strategic Retreat]

#3. Hitler's Obsession With Invading Switzerland

That would have been even more difficult than Cracked.com think. The only easy way to get to Switzerland would have been through the Railway Tunnels & at the beginning of the war the Swiss lined them it explosives so if the Germans ever invaded, Boom.

Hitler was allied with Baldy in Italy and caved tunnels cannot deliver food and materials, especially war materials. Had Hitler had the time and the leeway, he'd had Switzerland hemmed in and it would have been easy to take the time to take them out by starvation thanks to the the continuous Luftwaffe bombardments while searching for other inserting points for the infantry.

It was a matter of time for the Germans to crack that nut. Time they didn't have, fortunately.

Also Cracked call The V-2 a Useless weapon. The same person who invented the V-2 went on to be one of NASA's top engineers. So the V-2 can't have been that bad.

With the outlook and the wisdom of nowadays they were only little better than junk, but for the times they were cutting edge technology. They had the main problems of being imprecise, like the only attempt to destroy a bridge on the Rhine which name I've forgot to stop the Allies from entering German land clearly showed, and extremely costly.

Developed in the mad hope of scaring the Allies and with the intent in mind to use fortunately never employed "alternative" kind of warheads ever since the first pencil had to touch the first design paper, there are those who believe that had the resources used to build them been used on the battlefields, on proved war technologies of the times, Germany could have resisted longer and given a tougher job to the Allies.

Anyway, you're comparing what were in all effects the first experiments of Wernher von Braun with his greatest achievements reached 25 years later under the flag of the willingness to sacrifice tax income for the victory in the war of prestige the USA government of the time engaged with Russia on who would have been the first to make a short walk on our rocky satellite. Though from that the ICBM's and all the other more useful rocketry were born (thanks to which nowadays we can use the GPS Nav even in our cars, to say only one), so it was not a waste of resources like in WWII Germany. It is like comparing a DH106 Comet with a 787.

[andy190]

They had the main problems of being imprecise, like the only attempt to destroy a bridge on the Rhine which name I've forgot to stop the Allies from entering German land clearly showed, and extremely costly.

Do you mean the Ludendorff Bridge, also known as the Bridge at Remagen?

Although I doubt many modern Ballistic Missiles could hit a bridge either.

[Hagar]

They had the main problems of being imprecise, like the only attempt to destroy a bridge on the Rhine which name I've forgot to stop the Allies from entering German land clearly showed, and extremely costly.

Do you mean the Ludendorff Bridge, also known as the Bridge at Remagen?

Although I doubt many modern Ballistic Missiles could hit a bridge either.

A bridge is one of the most difficult targets to destroy from the air. The fact that the eleven launched at it landed anywhere near such a small target, one within 300 metres, proves the V2 was not as inaccurate as people make out.

[pete]

I think if you start looking for dumb military plans -- you will never stop finding them right up to this year.

Human stupidity and military activity go hand in hand.

[Strategic Retreat]

They had the main problems of being imprecise, like the only attempt to destroy a bridge on the Rhine which name I've forgot to stop the Allies from entering German land clearly showed, and extremely costly.

Do you mean the Ludendorff Bridge, also known as the Bridge at Remagen?

A bridge is one of the most difficult targets to destroy from the air. The fact that the eleven launched at it landed anywhere near such a small target, one within 300 metres, proves the V2 was not as inaccurate as people make out.

I may have forgot the name of the bridge, and I could have sworn it was one on the Rhine while it wasn't. I just ask you not to give me a bad vote or my mum will ground me, please.

But everything considered, I beg to differ. The fact that the warhead struck at a distance of 300 meters (taking your word for it, as I cannot remember) shows that it was possibly even more imprecise than the contemporary high altitude bombing, which boasted, with the use of the Norden Bombsight, better precision than that. And we're talking ONE warhead on ONE missile against multiple bombs to reduce the imprecisions further by adding more bang, here.

The V2 was never intended as a precision weapon.

Indeed. And the fact that it was used as such that time shows stellar levels of incompetence at best, if not even bigger levels of idiocy at worst. Those ballistic suppositories were extremely expensive, and to use them for a job not suited was akin to burn Reichmarks on an open fire.

Although I doubt many modern Ballistic Missiles could hit a bridge either.

Nowadays, modern GPS guided ballistic or cruise missiles, beside being extremely less expensive per unit, can boast precision of 3 meters at worst on target. It may still be hard, but they can crack the the job if needed, while their ancestors couldn't, and those who built them KNEW it too.

At least some of the failures would have been due to sabotage at the factory. One of the problems of using slave labour. Also, the failure of many to hit London was due to false intelligence reports from double agents that they were overshooting the target. This led to the guidance systems being recalibrated & the rockets falling short in Kent, not always harmlessly.

Leaving aside the nonetheless intriguing British intelligence network and their counter-espionage, of what failures are you talking about? If your Wonder Weapon isn't able to center the side of a barn, and it ultimately doesn't, it's hardly a failure, but simply limitation of the design.

[andy190]

Leaving aside the nonetheless intriguing British intelligence network and their counter-espionage, of what failures are you talking about?

I think Hagar

[Hagar]

Leaving aside the nonetheless intriguing British intelligence network and their counter-espionage, of what failures are you talking about?

I think Hagar

[Strategic Retreat]

Leaving aside the nonetheless intriguing British intelligence network and their counter-espionage, of what failures are you talking about?

I think Hagar

[C]

#4. The V-Weapons: Big, Scary Missiles That Couldn't Hit Anything

A map of V2 hits in SE England. Could destroy a complete block fairly easily, and arrived without any warning. unlike the V-1. 9000 civilians killed. The first one landed a bit short, about a mile from where I went to school.

http://londonist.com/2009/01/london_v2_rocket_sitesmapped.php

Hardly dumb. Rather hit the spot, so to speak.

[Webb]

I think the point is that it was tremendously expensive for the damage inflicted.

More money than the Manhattan Project to kill 9000 civilians and no military targets.

The Allies inflicted more damage in a single conventional air attack.

Hamburg, Cologne, Hannover, Kassel, Mainz, Stuttgart, Berlin and, of course, Dresden.

Allied conventional bombing in WW2 killed 500,000 Germans.

[H]

A bridge is one of the most difficult targets to destroy from the air. The fact that the eleven launched at it landed anywhere near such a small target, one within 300 metres, proves the V2 was not as inaccurate as people make out.

The fact that the warhead struck at a distance of 300 meters (taking your word for it, as I cannot remember) shows that it was possibly even more imprecise than the contemporary high altitude bombing, which boasted, with the use of the Norden Bombsight, better precision than that. And we're talking ONE warhead on ONE missile against multiple bombs to reduce the imprecisions further by adding more bang, here.

[color=#003300]Our bomb and missile effect plotting wasn't so different from the other. I don't know the current criteria but, less than

[C]

I think the point is that it was tremendously expensive for the damage inflicted.

Allied conventional bombing in WW2 killed 500,000 Germans.

It did, but they kind of knew it was coming, and when it came, you certainly knew it was coming.

With the V2, it was completely random, completely unannounced and an equally horrific death.

Had the war lasted longer, the weapons been of higher reliability and build quality, or been allowed into the frontline sooner, things could have been far worse. It's worth remembering a hell of a lot of tonnage of allied bombs (and aircrew lives) went into the disruption of the V weapons, both in their development and construction, and their operation.