Meet the Drone from WW2 That Time Forgot (Video of testing it included. WOW In 1944)

Conservative Tribune ^ | December 10, 2017 | Steven Beyer

[rlmorel]

I know your statement was a rhetorical tool...:)

One of the major problems faced by Germany was the nature of its industrial processes.

Sure, they had mass production, but their mass production was different in a key way from American mass production.

Using the industrial mass production principles of Henry Ford, American industry was able to make parts with a uniform tolerance that made interchangability of parts a reality. You could take a manifold off a radial engine on a B-24 and bolt it onto another B-24 that whose manifold needed replacing.

The Germans produced fine machinery, but they were largely using craftsman techniques to construct them, where individual parts could not always be taken from one device and used interchangeably on another with a degree of modification, filing, hammering, drilling, etc. (I heard it characterized as making custom timepieces on a grand scale)

A good example of this is the German tank industry. Their tanks are widely regarded as having been superior machines in most respects, but one area they were far less capable was maintainability. When their tanks needed maintenance and repair, it took longer to perform the actual maintenance and repair simply because cannibalizing a piece of equipment off of one tank was not a slam dunk that it would fit in the same type of machine without a degree of modification.

And this subtle difference was apparently endemic to many of the pieces of warfighting equipment they used.

Add onto that the fact they used slave labor in many areas, which decreased the quality even further, intentionally in some respects.

This is contrasted with the American policy of largely allowing the capitalist mechanisms to take effect, primarily the profit motive. FDR resisted mightily the impulse to allow this, but he was convinced by William Knudsen (who learned his mass production techniques largely from Henry Ford, and refined them into what we have today) that to achieve the production goals as we led up to, and entered WWII, we had to allow the manufacturers of war materials to make money doing it. FDR opposed this on many levels, but to his credit, he eventually agreed to the howls of protest from his New Deal disciples.

Germany had no such discussion or understanding of these things.

[Bshaw]

Ping or later viewing.

[Former Proud Canadian]

The Americans were also developing "robot" planes during and after WW I.

Query wiki for "Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane" and the "Kettering Bug".

[bert]

It was Joe Kennedy who led the development project for a remote controlled B 17

[ealgeone]

The Me-262 could have been in service earlier but the story is told Hitler wanted it to be a bomber. Debate insued and finally it was allowed to produce as a fighter if some were made to carry bombs.

They delayed the introduction enough to make the 262's contribution the War minimal.

If it had been introduced in say, 1943, then the air war in Europe is a different game.

The Allies would did have jet technology....not as advanced as the Germans.

The Allies philosophy in the War was to bury the Axis powers through production. The amount of war material we produced was staggering.

When you're in the position of the Germans it forces you to think a bit differently.

[sparklite2]

Over the years there has been much conjecture about what the Kugelpanzer was designed for. The most common beliefs are that it meant to be a cable layer, artillery spotter, or scout vehicle. No one even knows whether it’s a pre/early war design, or a late war design.

It is this author’s theory, however, that it is a pre-war design for an infantry support weapon, that could traverse a no-man’s land kind of environment. The “Tumble-weed tank” design of the same era, was also of the same purpose. An armored vehicle, not as heavy or cumbersome as a tank, that would move at the same speed as the infantry while giving fire support. In the Kugelpanzer’s case, this fire support would’ve been given by a single machine gun. Its armor would’ve stood against small arms fire, but anythin

[archy]

When most people think of the military using drones, they think of the remote controlled “pilot-less” terrors from the skies that are currently wreaking havoc on ISIS. However, the U.S. military drone attacks can trace their genesis all the way back to World War II.

No. They go all the way back to just after WWI:

Unmanned Drones Have Been Around Since World War I

They have recently been the subject of a lot of scrutiny, but the American military first began developing similar aerial vehicles during World War I

Recently, the United States’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been the subject of much debate and scrutiny. But their history dates back a lot further than the war on terror. The first true UAVs, which are technically defined by their capability to return successfully after a mission, were developed in the late 1950s, but the American military actually began designing and developing unmanned aircraft during the first World War.

Military aviation was born during the years preceding the World War I, but once the war began, the industry exploded. Barely more than a decade after Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully completed the first documented flight in history –achieving only 12 seconds of air time and traveling 120 feet– hundreds of different airplanes could be seen dogfighting the skies above Europe. Mastering the sky had changed the face of war. Perhaps due to their distance from the fighting, the United States trailed behind Europe in producing military fliers but by the end of the War, the U.S. Army and Navy had designed and built an entirely new type of aircraft: a plane that didn’t require a pilot.

The first functioning unmanned aerial vehicle was developed in 1918 as a secret project supervised by Orville Wright and Charles F. Kettering. Kettering was an electrical engineer and founder of the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, known as Delco, which pioneered electric ignition systems for automobiles and was soon bought out by General Motors. At GM, Kettering continued to invent and develop improvements to the automobile, as well as portable lighting systems, refrigeration coolants, and he even experimented with harnessing solar energy. When the U.S. entered World War I, his engineering prowess was applied to the war effort and, under Kettering’s direction, the government developed the world’s first “self-flying aerial torpedo,” which eventually came to be known as the “Kettering Bug”.

-more-

[RinaseaofDs]

Tesla was doing it even earlier than that. The Navy turned down the original concept for the torpedo and self-guided boat from Tesla.

[archy]

Tesla was doing it even earlier than that. The Navy turned down the original concept for the torpedo and self-guided boat from Tesla.

Just so. My maternal grandda was employed for a while with the E. W. Bliss company that produced the Whitehead Steam Torpeado, first developed just after the American Civil War. Bliss provided the warheads and bodies for some of Tesla's versions, which moved on- not surprisingly- to electric propulsion.

By the end of Tesla's life, the follow-on versions were in service sinking ships, but not by the US Navy. The German G7e *Falke* torpedo was among the tools that the German navy's U-boat arm pout to effective, deadly use.

[cpdiii]

How we got the A Bomb before the Germans did is beyond me

The answer is very simple. Hitler persecuted the Jews. Many of the finest physicists and mathamatecians fled Europe, most were Jews. They gave us the bomb.

Ironic is the fact that German Jews fought for the Kaiser in WWI as loyal German citizens. If they had not been persecuted by Hitler, they would have built the bomb for Germany. Hitler was an evil charismatic leader. Thank God he was an idiot in relationship to military tactics and did not realize the loyalty of the German Jew to a nation that would not persecute them. Otherwise, he would have won.

[cpdiii]

How we got the A Bomb before the Germans did is beyond me

The answer is very simple. Hitler persecuted the Jews. Many of the finest physicists and mathamatecians fled Europe, most were Jews. They gave us the bomb.

Ironic is the fact that German Jews fought for the Kaiser in WWI as loyal German citizens. If they had not been persecuted by Hitler, they would have built the bomb for Germany. Hitler was an evil charismatic leader. Thank God he was an idiot in relationship to military tactics and did not realize the loyalty of the German Jew to a nation that would not persecute them. Otherwise, he would have won.