Strategic bombing did absolutely nothing that the air power proponents claimed it would. It did not destroy enemy morale. It did not destroy their will or ability to fight. Factories continued to crank out arms and munitions until the very end. New weapon systems continued coming online. And both Japan and Germany continued fighting bitterly despite the Allied incendiary terror bombings.

It wasn’t until the very end when the Luftwaffe had been ground to dust through attrition and the Allies could bomb at will during the day that things really began to break down in Germany. The Japanese were still building new fighters faster than they could train pilots to fly them when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atom bombed.

If half the resources put into the B-29 program had gone into PacFleet’s submarine force the war would have ended years earlier with the total destruction of Japans merchant fleet. We could have left them to starve on their islands without throwing away tens of thousands of lives for nothing. But air power was new and sexy and the submariners weren’t nearly as glamorous (or expensive) as carrier battle groups and air wings.

There were certainly tactical successes with bombing, but strategically it was resources that would have been spent better elsewhere.

No disrespect, but that's like asking what if the germans had sharks with fricken laser beams.



sharks with fricken laser beams

See the Documentary Helicopters on the beach scenes of "Edge of Tomorrow"...

Don't forget the fast firing 37mm.  

That was a Thunderbolt Killer (much more punch than the 20mm), so against something so slow & "squishy" as a Flying Banana or other 50's helicopters...

Well Eisenhower may have had to go on the radio with "the Other D-Day Speech"...

Damn Straight!!

OP I thought this thread was gonna be cool, with like, pictures of Apaches, Cobras, Little Birds, Tigers, Hinds, and Kamovs.  Modern attack helicopters would be able to put antitank missiles right through the windows of bunkers and pillboxes. That shit would have been something. But a bunch fugly 1950's blah helicopters in their infancy, mannn that is weak!!

This thread is now an attack helicopter thread!
Hiiiiiiijaccccccck!!!!!

Darn I wasn't the first

Chinooks on sling load would make things spicy

Fewer would have drown, more would have been shot out of the sky.
We had gliders.

Something like this set up like a Specter gunship. Escorting several formations of troop carriers?

Ooh yeah!

Woulda been ugly.

Helicopters of the 1950s could very well have been in WWII.

This is not crazy talk.

The H-34 Choctaw had a single R-1830 radial powering it -- the same engine that powered the:

DC-3/C-47
B-17
SBD Dauntless

Biggest issue is that helicopters were very much in the "Experimental" stage.

The R-4 was in limited use; with the R-5 coming along in 1945 when the war ended:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_H-5

That one had a single 450 hp R-985 radial.



The Germans had the Fa-223 Drache; which had a single 1,000 hp engine powering twin rotors. It oculd carry cargo loads up to 2,200 lb.

The Drache was to be developed in five versions originally:

Fa-223A ASW helicopter with two 250 kg bombs or depth charges.
Fa-223B observation/reconnaissance helicopter.
Fa-223C search and rescue helicopter.
Fa-223D transport helicopter.
Fa-223E dual control pilot training helicopter.

In the end, it was decided to make just one multi-purpose variant with different attachments.

The first Laupheim built Fa-223E-0 (V11) flew on June 21, 1943. The V11 exhibited its carrying ability by lifting such items as Fieseler Storch observation aircraft, an Me-109 fuselage, a one ton engine, and a Volkswagen military staff car.

Only about 20 Fa-223s were built; and one of the prototypes V16, was used by the German Mountain Warfare school over 83 flights, with a flying time of 20 hours to transport artillery guns and mountain troops.



Basically, during these tests; it:

A.) Lifted 1,100 pounds to a remote site at 6,500 ft elevation after a seven minute flight -- something that would need 20 men and nearly two days of strenuous climbing to accomplish conventinoally

B.) Lifted a mountain howitzer and ammunition via cable to a mountain peak.

C.) Carried as many as 12 men (4 inside cabin and 8 on tractor seats on outriggers)

When the tests ended on 5 October 1944, the Mountain Warfare school enthuastically endorsed the Fa-223.

On 11 October 1944, the RLM ordered all work to stop, in order to transfer all Focke-Achgelis personnel to Messerschmitt to assist in Me-262 production.

In December 1944, the RLM changed it's miund and decided that 400 a month were to be built at a new factory in Tempelhof Airport at Berlin. This, despite all tooling had been previously blown up by the USAAF in bombing raids.

Tempelhof actually did build one Fa-233E and it's story was pretty crazy.

It was delivered to the Luftwaffe and by "Order of the Fuhrer" on February 25, 1945, ordered to fly to Danzig.

It took off from Tempelhof the next morning to proceed on its mission. Due to dodging storms, Allied bombing attacks, advancing allied forces, and having to search for fuel, the helicopter did not arrive on the outskirts of Danzing until the evening of March 5th.

There, because of advancing Soviet forces, it was now impossible to fly into the center of Danzing as ordered. While awaiting orders on where to proceed, the crew got word that a fighter pilot had gotten lost in a snowstorm and had made a crash landing. Lt. Gerstenhauer took off in the Fa-223 and proceeded to search the area. The helicopter crew spotted the downed Me-109 with the injured pilot still in the cockpit. They rescued him and flew him back to the base for medical attention. By this time, Danzing was falling to the Russians, and the Fa-223's crew took off to try to reach a safer haven. Fuel was still a problem and when they did find a fuel stockpile, they realized that the Allies push had captured or destroyed all the friendly airfields along their projected route. After topping the tanks off, they loaded a 55 gallon drum of gasoline and a hand pump on board, took off and overflew the Soviet forces.

When they finally put down at the German base at Werder, they had flown a total of 1,041 mile on this escape mission. After a rest the ship was flown to Ainring to join Transportstaffel 40, only to be captured by American troops.

One of the survivors was actually flown across the English Channel post-war in September 1945, becoming the first helicopter to cross the channel.

Think I heard somewhere the Germans planned to use a helicopter to rescue Mussolini. But it broke down the night before and they used a Fisesler Storch instead.

Basically, there was nothing technically preventing a 10-man helicopter from being developed in WWII; the engines were available -- 1,000 hp radial engines and construction techniques of the time were up to making the helicopters.

They'd basically have been developed using the glider production manufacturing base in WWII nations, albeit bleeding off some engines from aircraft programs as well as some aluminum.

Probably would have been more effective than gliders, in that you don't need a huge C-47 transport fleet to carry gliders; and they can self-remove themselves from the area, as well as carry out liason and observation / local cargo tasks once in the drop zone, unlike gliders which are a "crash once and out" thing.

I always thought if you had a time machine with space limited you could bring back a case of NVGs and shake things up quite a bit.

second thought:  they wouldn't be flying directly over cities protected by AA?

Fvck it! 10 squadrons of these, we would have cleaned up, South Pacific would have been a turkey shoot.