thesun.co.uk

Needless to say, the aircraft in question, a Dornier 17, is not a jet.

A GERMAN bomber shot down in World War II has been found 50ft below the sea, it emerged yesterday.

The twin-engined Dornier 17, buried in a sandbank, is the last of its kind in the world.

It was discovered when a fishing boat snagged its nets on the wreckage off the coast of Deal, Kent.

The plane, known as a Flying Pencil, was blasted out of the sky during Nazi attacks on Britain in August 1940.

The RAF Museum plans to raise it from the water next year and put it on display in London.

It said the plane was in “remarkable” condition. Museum director Air Vice-Marshal Peter Dye added: “It is a unique survivor from the Battle of Britain.”

Yesterday, during a discussion of early television, someone stated that TV had been weaponized during World War 2. The poster included a link to a site about German guided missiles, HS-293 etc.. The Germans experimented with TV guidance but apparently didn’t get very far, since all their operational missile used other systems.

This would probably come as a surprise to those who assume that any advanced development during that period would have been the work of the Germans. The US, not the Germans, developed several television guided weapons that actually flew during World War 2, and one that was actually operational, the BQ-4/TDL. If this device had been German, you would have a whole History Channel series devoted to it, along with model kits in every scale and books of every kind. As it is, nobody but a few specialists has ever heard of it. The same is true of the Bat glide bomb, which used active radar homing and was operational before the end of the war.

Similarly, during their lengthy paen to the Horten brothers and their Nazi era flying wing design, the National Geographic channel failed to mention that American Jack Northrop and many others had built and flown flying wings many years earlier, or that Northrop’s giant XB-35 flying wing was in advanced development during the war and flew in 1946.

They did mention that Northrop engineers had examined the Smithsonian’s Horten flying wing during the development of the B-2 stealth bomber in the early 1980s. They didn’t actually say it was copied from the Horten, but they did invite that inference (“Nazis had it first!”). As a result, idiotic statements like “the stealth (sic) is a rip-off of a Nazi plane!” are commonplace on the net. The Horten Ho-229 was a wooden toy compared to the XB-35, and equating it to the B-2 would take Joseph Goebbels’s breath away. Nat-Geo’s reckless claim that the Horten could have won the war for the Nazis is one of the most ridiculous examples of hyperbole and ignorance ever broadcast. The Ho-229 was the first aircraft to deliberately employ features designed to reduce radar signature but this alone is not enough to win a war, especially when it is applied to a machine of very limited payload and range.

The Germans did get jet fighters into operation first, but by less than a year. By the time the war in the Pacific ended, the Meteor IV and P-80 were ready for combat. History channel and other claims that these aircraft were inferior to the German ME-262 are just not supported by fact. The Meteor III (as opposed to the IV) was operational before VE day but I am willing to concede its inferiority, at least in speed, to the German jets. This was not the case with the Meteor IV however, which had 80% more thrust.
Both the P-80 and the Meteor IV had better measured speed and lower wing-loading (hence better maneuverability) than the Me-262. The allied jets’ biggest advantage though was a simple one: they could actually be flown on a routine basis because their engine overhaul life was more than 10 times as great.

Other facts the Aryan technology cult would like to ignore (and often does):
-It was the Dutch, rather than the German, navy that invented and first deployed the submarine snorkel.
-The Germans did not deploy a usable radar proximity fuse before the end of the war, more than 2 years after the allies had started using this crucial technology.

I frankly do not understand the motivation behind this Germanophile technology cult. Give them credit where it is due (V-2 rocket, nerve gas, etc.), but the constant distortions of fact and the over-emphasis on their achievements relative to those of the allies point to a different and rather disturbing motivation.

Btw, the Germans lost the war.