Did they have guided missiles in World War 2?
Of course they did !
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This isn’t something I was super familiar with, just something I vaguely recalled from some past conversation. It’s clearly more capable than I remembered, but I’d still classify it as janky (IE Awkward or impractical for use).
The most glaring issue with it at wars end was the lack of a proximity fuse, which would have made it very difficult to use, even against lumbering bombers. Sure, there’s estimations the Germans could have come up with one in about 6 months, but they in no way had 6 months. We have to judge the missile as it was at war’s end, which was a useful jumping off point for other projects, but not a functional air to air weapon.
Even if it had the novel frequency based fuse, I can’t help but question a system that only works against a specific kind of aircraft. For instance, what if they were set for B-17s and got sent up against B-24s? Or B-29s? Or Lancasters? The B-17s were workhorses, but other bombers were starting to supercede them later in the war.
I can’t imagine these fuses would be quick to reprogram either, so at best you’d have to hotswap fuses on the ground once you had actual intel on the type of bombers in a raid, which seems impractical, or send up mixed squadrons with the expectation that a decent chunk of them will have unusable missiles. I would also suspect this aspect of the missile would be an exploitable weakness.
And the concept of manually guided a missile by eye and wire alone against escorted bombers seems rather hopeful. MCLOS guided weapons were rarely used against air targets, and the single one that saw usage in combat (The Blowpipe) had a shockingly poor record. Sure, the fixed wing aircraft they were targeting were a lot smaller and faster than a B-17, but they even struggled with helicopters, particularly in Afghanistan when used by the Mujahideen.
It’s hard to believe it would have been much more effective when deployed from a small, cramped cockpit like in the 262s, and then guided by eye while also piloting the plane and avoiding the escort fighters. Even against sitting ducks like a B-17, I kinda doubt it would have been that effective. Additionally, being wire guided may have made it immune to jamming, but it also meant that any hard manuever by the plane (Like, say, to dodge fire) would have likely broken the wire or thrown the missile off course. Which is another mark against it when considering how heavily bomber formations were being escorted late in the war.
Sure, the 262s had a speed advantage over the P-51s, but in order to use this weapon effectively (And thus staying outside the bomber’s defensive fire zone), they’d have to slow down enough to completely guide the missile into it’s target before straying into that zone. They could try an off-boresight shot, guiding the missile in at an angle, but this drastically increases the difficulty of guiding the missile due to parallax, and too much of an offset would surely cause issues with the wire. And add in those 6 months needed by the Germans to get the proxy fuse working (And replace the motor with something less hilariously unstable), and suddenly those B-17s are being escorted by P-80s and Meteors.
Ultimately, we’ll never know just how effective they would have been. However, I can say with certainty that the allied nations that got their hands on the missile didn’t seem all that rushed to put it into service. Only the French actually bothered with the concept of a MCLOS guided air to air weapon, producing the AA20 Nord as a codevelopment of the SS-10 ATGM, but no other nations seemed particularly interested in the concept and even the French knew the MCLOS concept was simply a stepping stone to autonomously guided weapons like the R530s.
The Fritz X and Hs 293 were both German guided bombs used during World War II, but the key difference is that the Fritz X was designed to penetrate heavy armor on battleships, while the Hs 293 was intended for use against lighter, unarmored ships like merchant vessels, making it a more general anti-ship weapon; both were radio-controlled and considered early examples of precision-guided munitions.
Now try feeding the Google AI a prompt about the X-7, see what it comes up with.
While it’s not known for certain if it saw combat (There are some vague references to it being deployed on the Eastern Front in the ending stages of the war, where it supposedly did rather well), it was certainly developed and apparently functional during the war.
I even found an (admittedly dubious) reference to further developments to make it being infrared guided rather than wire guided, having something analogous to SACLOS guidance rather than MCLOS guidance, and even more outrageously, having it’s own optical seeker embeded in the missile, which would somehow communicate with the launcher for a form of semi-automatic guidance, something not dissimilar to the Javelin.
To be frank, I don’t believe these claims as being realistic, given the technology of the time. Similar to other, similarly impractical projects, I feel these are basically just scientific frauds, mere attempts to keep the scientists responsible for them in lavishly funded experimental facilities somewhere safe in central Germany, rather than destitute on the streets or pressed into Volksturm divisions.
X4M missile is a ww2 air to air made by germany
Source for it being used in service?
Mate… Relax!
The fact that i don’t share your view in this specific case (jerky / not usable) does not mean that we have to drag this into eternity :-)
Disagreements makes the life interesting!
Let’s agree on that!
Have a good one!
As the rest is imho off-topic - hidden, just for the sake of completeness:
Summary
Regarding effectiveness:
I mean depending on which sources you want to cite the R4M was already good enough to take out bombers with a limited risk. The sheer numbers were decisive, so it actually doesn’t matter if let’s say 50 (maximum number of combat ready 262s at any given day) jets would have killed 50 bombers without any losses when the attacking force consists of 2.000 bombers and 7-800 escorts.
Regarding P-80s and Meteors as escorts:
Imho misleading as a theoretical approach.
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If you check the old forum threads from 2014 you find out, that some smart guys found out that the A-5 in the game is a 1946 production; the implemented engine was not earlier available whilst the actual produced P-80As had a much weaker engine and was slower than a 262.
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Meteors were always slower and even if we would get a confirmation that the F.3 implemented in wt saw actual combat (imho there is no evidence for that) the plane is way slower.
I mean what do you expect?
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There is no need for a specific weapon to fight large bomber fleets if there is no immanent threat.The A-bomb created an effective deterrence and the USSR had neither nuclear weapons nor suitable aircraft.
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Things changed rather quickly after the USSR presented the Tu-4 in 1947 and had their first A-bombs in 1949…
Imho believes are private things.
If you assemble a hell of very smart scientists and provide them with (almost) unlimited funding, you will get a hell of impractical results, but also a hell of outstanding results, in any country, at any time.
The sole exception might be the former USSR in the Stalin era which had the tendency to assemble them in 5 star Gulags or to kill their best scientists. They handled their foreign scientists (acquired analog to Paperclip) a little bit better, that’s why they got the A-bomb, the MiG 15 (with a GB engine…) or the Sputnik.
I was actually not really surprised to read such things.
You might assess those “dubious” claims as fraud, but that does not necessarily mean that they are not possible.
I mean IR technology (ZG 1229) was produced in 1944 (and used), we have reports about Hs 293s with TV camera guidance (link) and other rather amazing stuff. So excluding something just because there is no de-classified evidence available looks comprehensible but limits you perspective.
Have a good one!
Not trying to be toxic or anything, just justifying my position. This is all supposition at the end of the day, the only people who know exactly what these weapons could do (Or be developed into) are long dead by now, and I suspect any useful remaining sources are rotting away in a military archive somewhere.
There has been a tendency for late war German military developments to be rather overstated, such as the supposed stealth capabilities of the Ho-229. I’ve seen a couple of theories as to why, both the previously stated “I’ll promise anything to stay off the Eastern Front” to “I’ll promise anything to get snatched up by Operation Paperclip and get a nice, well funded job in the US”. Most of the wonder weapons turned out to be a lot like the Maus, hilariously impractical if they even worked in the first place.
And it’s worth mentioning that every time one of these incredible innovations is mentioned, it’s followed by a unconfirmed reports of it being used (At a time when Germany was throwing everything and the kitchen sink on both fronts), or a casual statement that it was never used operationally (Like the TV guidance for the Hs 293/etc). That tells me that the technology wasn’t really practical for usage.
I just find it rather difficult to believe that all of these incredible military innovations had been all but completed by the Germans, and yet in the following decades of rampant military spending to try and outmatch the Soviets, the very best the Allies can cook up is the SS.10 ATGM, which is basically just a lightly modernized X-7. No SACLOS controls or optical tracker, despite all of these things being apparently almost ready to go in 1945.
Hell, the first US development (Who would surely have taken direct advantage of all that research thanks to Operation Paperclip) was the SSM-A-23 Dart, which despite being a basic MCLOS weapon with no outstanding features had such a troubled developmental cycle that it was canned and replaced with the SS.10. It’s hard to believe the US was sitting on all the technology required to leap 20 years ahead of the rest of the world when it came to missile guidance, and did nothing with it. Hell, they only started work on the TOW missile (With it’s SACLOS guidance) in 1961.
It’s just difficult to believe the US was sitting on all of this actionable technology and did nothing with it, instead bending the knee and relying on French missiles for over a decade.
To be clear, I can buy IR guidance. That was known about by all sides, although quickly discarded by the Allies post war as it’s too easily blocked by dust and spoofed by countermeasures. But true SACLOS guidance and especially the optical tracker in something the size of a ATGM seems beyond what is realistic.
Everything fine!
Totatally agree. At least the new US leader promised to shed some light on the JFK assassination. Not really a replacement for documents regarding advanced military hardware, but at least a start :-)
Amongst the most widely known stories about having captured data but either not considering them or being not aware of this data was the inability of US engineers and designers to break through the sound barrier with jet fighter aircraft.
It took them 8 years after WW 2 (1953) to find out that using the area rule (described 43 and used in 1944 prototypes, you guess by whom) would solve their issues to deal with the related compression / shock waves. So they redesigned the F-102 and were finally able produce a fighter prototype breaking Mach 1 - at the end of 1954.
Rest hidden as imho off-opic:
Summary
I actually don’t care if inventions came from German, Finnish or Armenian scientists. As stated earlier, all you need is smart people and funding.
The tendency you describe (dismissing certain facts as overstating or downplaying certain achievements) has political, economic and psychological goals and aspects and is not limited to history 80 years ago.
An example:
If you look a few years back you find a hell of warnings that a certain nation is about to conquer Europe - whilst the same sources described their military capabilities as insufficient and their technology just slightly above armies armed with bow and arrow. So what is it?
It boils down that everything published fulfils multiple purposes in order to create certain narratives.
In general:
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Drawing the conclusion that the later absence of these advanced technologies would prove anything is a large stretch. The main driver of military innovations are always wars, as wars (or lunatic regimes) release all budget limitations whilst being able to create a war economy.
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The Cold War I (until 1991) was actually more a mix of creating areas of influences, spreading certain ideologies, proxy wars and indoctrination of people by their respective governments. Whilst the threat of total nuclear anhiliation of mankind was immanent the risk of a conventional WW 3 was rather limited.
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So introducing superior technology in a rather unlikely conventional warfare is not really tempting as it decreases the sales of way more conventional hardware. I mean if you look at the deal of the US with some European countries to buy and licence produce a totally unsuited aircraft like the F-104 as multi-role fighter might give you a hint that not always the best and most advanced weapon systems were sold and put into service.
Back to WW 2 science:
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There are a lot of examples which proves that some things had priority - and others not - and the allies where simply overwhelmed with the captured stuff. Have in mind that the US was the sole winner of WW 2 - and they were always mainly an air and naval power.
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That’s why rockets, jets and the XXI subs were way more interesting than anything else as the inferiority of their own hardware was most obvious in these 3 areas.
Have a good one!
Is a wire-guided air-to-air missile designed by Germany during World War II. The X-4 did not see operational service and thus was not proven in combat.
it had no service just a prototype it was tested but not in combat
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Germans used X-7 atgm during WW2
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It’s a fire and forget either hit or miss you’re not wired guided they’re not site guided it’s just oh I think I missed and on top of that I don’t think it was ever used in combat it’s a test
yes but also no
So it shouldn’t be added.
i mean yak 141 shouldnt have been added but here we are Plus by that logic just cause its a prototype it shouldnt be added every russian object should be removed every american prototypr should be removed Xp50 Xp55 T20 T29 T25 etc
Yes. And?
Why not ? Only thing wrong with is it’s IRST and lack of R-77