“ From an early stage there existed – at least hypothetically – a threat to the United States of America. Imperial Germany believed that war against the USA was a strong possibility and, consequently, provisional plans to attack were drawn up by the naval lieutenant Eberhard von Mantey. In a bold scenario, presented in March 1889, von Mantey reckoned that New York would fall to three battalions of infantry and one of engineers! The invasion force would require twenty-five days for the Atlantic crossing. Up to sixty colliers would be attached to the naval squadron. The young lieutenant thought it could definitely be done. The Secretary of State Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz concurred and ordered the plans to be drawn up. But General von Schlieffen had his doubts. He thought that such an expedition would require at least 200,000 troops for any hope of success. Imperial Germany still lacked the means to achieve its purposes. Ultimately, these ideas did at least provide the impetus for a rapid expansion of the German High Seas Fleet. Further plans followed von Mantey’s, with a proposal in 1903 that the German Reich could take over control of the Panama Canal and use it to break down Washington’s domination of the entire continent. Besides plans for an attack by German naval forces, from about 1917 the idea of using long-range bombers or large dirigibles began to blossom. The latter easily had the range to drop up to 1,800 kg of explosives along the US eastern seaboard, but the planned bomber, with a maximum range of 8,000 km, could not have managed the homeward leg. The fascination for attacking the United States, which had developed in the late nineteenth century, lasted well into the 1940s. The German plan to use trans-oceanic aircraft, such as the six-engined Ju 390, Me 264 or Ta 400, for global air war failed because the capacity to produce such machines in great numbers, as was possible in the USA and Britain, did not exist. Not even a limited colonial enterprise could be undertaken. Yet these great plans would have become reality if it had been possible to overcome the Soviet Union by the beginning of 1943. With the seizure of Grozny and the Caucasian oilfields, the Wehrmacht would have had more fuel available than they knew what to do with. Victory in the East would have provided German industry with the material to mass-produce giant bomber aircraft. Equipped with a range exceeding 14,000 km, they would certainly have been the starting point for a strategic air war. The defeat at Stalingrad, inflicted by a Soviet Army supplied and armed by the United States, and a Wehrmacht hemmed in between two fronts in a ‘Europe without a roof’ sealed Germany’s fate. Besides the gradual collapse of the whole infrastructure and its transport system, the lack of fuel and raw materials for the construction of aircraft and rockets from 1943 onwards became increasingly apparent. From 1944, drastic cuts followed in the huge aircraft development and production programmes, and at the end of it all the projected Thousand Year Reich caved in. Numerous small groups seem to have worked in parallel in the quest for nuclear power and explosives. What level of collaboration existed between them remains uncertain. Whether, as seems possible, they were close to perfecting small explo-sives with great destructive effect built on the atomic principle, only the still-classified files in British, French and American archives can prove. That Germany was far more advanced by the end of 1944 in armaments technology than is widely believed today is confirmed by the intensity with which Allied scientific teams rounded up German scientists and confiscated their research work. The switch to building the flying-wing jet bomber in the last year of the war, and the search for airframe surfaces and paints able to deflect radar beams, points in this direction. From the beginning of 1945 a properly directed exploration of such possibilities had become as impossible of achievement as a programme to develop weapons of mass destruction or their carrier systems. ” --Extracted from Manfred Griehl’s Luftwaffe over America, published later this year. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 129 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com