German Wonder Weapons One of the things I wonder about is where is our standing in the world and is China catching up in some areas that can really cause us concern. Many of the weapons the Chinese have created look an awful lot like ours. Since the Chinese are known for blatant copyright violations and espionage it probably stands to reason that at least some of their weapons are close copies and others have parts resembling parts made in the U.S. I saw a commercial the other day for the Pocket Hose, you may have seen this one. It states Chinese companies have stolen all or many of the patents and to please not buy the Chinese knock offs. It is pretty sad that this company was put in such a position because of the criminal activity against their company by the Chinese companies. The Chinese have a huge advantage against us because we have many more patents and inventions they want to take from us, than we would ever want to take from them. In World War 2, the Germans were creating some incredible inventions we and our allies tried to acquire. This was different since we were at war at the time with them. They actually started making advanced weapons in World War 1 and before. One of the most notable was a giant gun that could shoot about 80 miles named The Paris Gun, but also known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Geschutz. It scared the heck out of the citizens of Paris as it fired upon the city and at the start it is said the French had no idea where the shells were coming from. The gun was so huge it had to be mounted on a train carriage so it could be moved around by train. Another super weapon the Germans had was airships. They were used as bombers and begam to bomb Britian in 1915 until the end of the war. The airships had several early advantages. The airships had a relatively long range and could hold far more bombs than a plane. They could transport troops long distances and Zeppelins could reach higher than 10,000 feet in altitude and at the beginning of the war they were unreachable. At the time they were very hard to detect at night because they were so quiet. They made great reconnaissance platforms. As the war progressed, they lost most of these advantages because plane started to fly higher and became faster. Then incendiary bullets were invented. The hydrogen gas which was used in the airships was highly flammable and one incendiary bullet in the right place could explode the entire airship. One really horrible weapon which was used first by the Germans was poison gas. The Germans were not the first to use gas however because the French had used tear gas grenades. I always felt World War 2 was almost an extension of World War 1 with a break in the middle to rearm the Germans. The Germans liked big weapons and improved upon their railway gun. The new gun shot a shell which weighed 7 tons, versus the 360-pound shell of the Paris Gun. The range was reduced to 20 miles, but the damage caused was incredible. The new guns were named Schwerer Gustav and Schwerer Dora. Huge tanks were imagined but it is thought only one or two were built. These tanks dwarfed the Panzers but were impractical due to their tremendous weight causing problems. It is said the first wonder weapon used by Germany in World War 2 was the V-1 flying bomb. I guess today we would call it a cruise missile. It is said it came online in June 1944. It was not very accurate, but its target was cities. When it ran out of fuel it would just drop and crash exploding its bomb. The Japanese had something similar but with one exception. Their flying bomb had a pilot. I wouldn’t have wanted to be that guy, and they also had a torpedo which was piloted. One wonder weapon which nobody is sure actually existed was a saucer like flying craft. Some believe a couple of prototypes were built and the Germans got to a third reiteration. It is also thought the craft while being saucer shaped was more like a helicopter,the because it was said to have rotary blades underneath it, which powered it. It was thought the Germans were trying to build a craft which could fight several planes at the same time. One of the wonder weapons which was never built was a huge mirror which would have been attached to a circular space station, with the idea being to create a weapon which could reflect and magnify the sun’s rays and burn down a target on earth. As I said before the space station never got off the drawing board and there was no way a V-2 rocket could have launched anything into orbit. That had to wait until bigger and better rockets were developed. Lastly, the Germans started to build two stationary giant cannons which were permanently aimed at London. They would have been very high powered and unusual because they launched shells that had additional propellant stages along the barrel of the gun to give the shells an additional boost. Solid rocket fuel boosters were used. When the allies found out about the construction, the just kept bombing the heck out of the site and the guns remained unfinished by the time the war ended. You can bet we did everything we could to steal these wonder weapon secrets.
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