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Beginning_Brick7845 t1_jcywcr7 wrote

WWII Counterfactual Question.

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I've been trying to work through a question I came up with and haven't been able to resolve it to my satisfaction. My question centers around the resources put toward the Manhattan Project. As we all know, the program to develop the atomic bomb was a miracle of modern science that consumed vast amounts of time and resources while the world was at war. Although the Allies could not have known it then, the Nazis weren't close to producing a bomb. Meanwhile, the Nazis were busy perfecting jet airplanes while American designs were advancing but not ready for production. So, my inarticulate counterfactual question is this: with the benefit of hindsight, would the Allies have been better off not investing in the Manhattan Project and instead devoting those resources to developing jets? Would it have ended the war faster if the Allies had developed operational jets in time for major combat operations?

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quantdave t1_jd64bg4 wrote

Remarkably the Project cost only nine days' worth of Federal spending of the period, such was the scale of the country's wartime mobilisation. In the event, the bomb wasn't needed against Germany, but could the US take the risk of foregoing its development?

Would US jets have changed the outcome? Germany's various projects didn't, and even with a major US development effort it seems unlikely that successful fighters would have entered service in large numbers before aerial superiority was achieved anyway.

The controversy surrounding the bomb's eventual use may make us question the desirability of its development, but the outcome wasn't so clear in 1942 or 1943 when a major diversion of effort into other weapons would have to have been initiated. But it's an interesting question. Might other avenues have been more useful? That inter-Allied bugbear of landing-craft springs to mind.

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Doctor_Impossible_ t1_jcz151d wrote

>Would it have ended the war faster if the Allies had developed operational jets in time for major combat operations?

I don't see how. While jet aircraft were often more capable, pioneering them is one thing, getting the massive production lines ready during wartime when airframes are needed is another. Without interrupting production, you would need an enormous duplication of effort to bring in jet aircraft in sufficient numbers to make a substantial difference, and that difference still pales next to the leap forward in destructive power nuclear weapons offered. The first nuclear weapons offered 15-20 kt blast yields, which is 15,000-20,000 tons of TNT. In order to drop that much conventional explosive, you would need hundreds of B-52s, which takes more time, effort, fuel, organisation, maintenance, spares, etc.

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jrhooo t1_jdk6eo8 wrote

I don’t see how TBH.

By late in the war, the Allies had air superiority.

Even WITH a few German jets in the air, the Allies owned the skies.

The big issue was German production and logistics. It was bad.

Sure WWII Germany knew how to build a jet, but they couldn’t build them or deploy them at any relevant scale.

They can no longer produce precision parts or high quality steel needed to build any serious numbers of jets or even quality traditional planes.

The can no longer get high quality fuel. The lack of good fuel means the plabes they do have can’t run as fast/hard. So allied planes are outperforming them.

Put all this together and its easy to see how allied air power took control of the skies late in the war.

So could the allies have gotten jets? Maybe. But so what?

If they’ve already taken control of the skies, getting a wonder plane that gives them more control of the skies doesn’t really change much.

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