The Silbervogel Air Tunnel Test Model
Photo Source: Public Domain

When World War II ended and Germany lay in ruins, most people didn't think about technology. What they thought about was the family and friends they lost in the war and how glad they were that it was finally over. What most of those people failed to realize was that we were fighting a country that somehow had gotten so far ahead of us in technology that the difference was far more than the difference between the weapons of World War I and World War II. There is no yardstick that can be applied to how far ahead in years they were, because when we and the Russians picked up where they left off and finally achieved what they already had, they would have been much further ahead and could have been traveling to the moon and further by then. How does one country get so far ahead of the rest of the world in technology?

When the experts looked at the situation in Germany before and during World War II, they expressed several reasons for this:
1. Germany was a dictatorship and could apply funds into any project in any amounts it wanted without checks and balances from other branches of the government.
2. They had massive amounts of slave labor that could be applied to any project and they didn't worry about any of them dying when they overworked them.
3. They were able to pool almost all their scientists and engineers into one area known as Peenemünde where they could all share any discoveries they made.
4. In the same vein, the discoveries were not compartmentalized as they are today in our country, where the only people that have access to some of them must be on a need to know basis.
5. Unlimited funds were available at times because of the gold and riches confiscated from conquered countries.

It becomes chilling when we realize how far ahead of us in technology the Germans were and what their plans were for some of their new devices. If it wasn't for the fact that the United States had the greatest manufacturing ability of any nation on earth and the greatest the world had ever seen, things might have turned out different in the war. While we were not as advanced, although we did have some advanced devices, we just over produced the Germans by so much it became impossible to overcome. It was impossible for Germany to compete with the 50,000 airplanes we were producing a year. Look at things this way, if a soldier is attacking with a rifle and his enemy has only rocks, but there are thousands of them, he will die if the enemy doesn't run, but attacks him. There is always some ratio that can't be overcome. If an advanced German jet was as good as 20 allied planes and we sent 40 against it, eventually it would be destroyed.

One of the plans that the Third Reich had was to use a rocket plane to nuke the U.S. City of New York and to do it from near orbit. Any plane that would have achieved near orbit in those days would have been untouchable. The plane that was planned was called the Silbervogel, of course this plan was contingent on building a nuclear bomb and perfecting the Silbervogel. The scary thing about all this is that Germany had the talent to do it and the only reason that they didn't succeed was because many brave people from all different countries did everything that they could to delay their nuclear program by destroying supplies and even in one case, sinking a ferry with their own citizens on it, because it contained heavy water for the German nuclear program. The Germans just ran out of time in the race to perfect the bomb and were defeated before that could happen, but their hate was such for this country that they packed up all their nuclear material and sent it by submarine to Japan, who was still in the war in the hope that it would be used against the west coast of the United States in a dirty bomb. A dirty bomb is not a nuclear bomb but a contaminating bomb. It is a conventional bomb wrapped in nuclear material that is blown all over a wide area when the bomb goes off, thus making that large area uninhabitable.

The concept of the Silbervogel was the brainchild of a man named Eugen Sanger. Goring felt that the United States was too powerful a future enemy and had to be destroyed, but the Atlantic Ocean stood in his way, because of this a new project was launched and it was called the American Bomber. Sanger had written a book in 1933 outlining rocket technology and expanded on this in 1944. To him, the only way to go was to use a rocket bomber and not a beefed up conventional bomber that could be shot down. The Silbervogel was a rocket plane that employed a lifting body. It was so far ahead of everything else it was as if aliens had come to earth and gave us their technology, but this is not what happened, it was the work of a genius.

The idea was to launch the Silbervogel using a long track and a rocket sled type device to get the plane up to 1200 mph, at which time it would fire its own rocket motors. It was designed to reach Mach 30, which is 30 times the speed of sound or about 19,500 mph or so depending on altitude, since sound travels at different speeds depending on the density of the atmosphere. Because the plane had a lifting body, it was designed to bounce off of the atmosphere and skip like a stone on a pond. Even though the skips would get shorter each time it was calculated that it could not only reach the U.S. and drop its payload, but be able to land in the Pacific in Japanese territory. We would have had no defense against this weapon. Even today it is iffy if we could protect ourselves from a Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, which was basically what the plane was.

Project Dyna-Soar
Photo Source: NASA

Do not think that this concept died with the end of the war. It was started up again in the United States in the 1960s and became Project Dyna-Soar, which was later canceled. The reason stated for the cancellation was that it was too expensive. Another problem was said to have been discovered about the Silbervogel, that was it built-up far more heat on reentry than expected. This meant that the heat shield would have had to become bulkier, reducing the payload. The Russians tried to develop this concept using ram jets and the project was called the Keldysh Bomber. It was never produced and had many problems of its own.