SONDERWAFFEN: Experimental Guns, Rockets and Missiles used by the Luftwaffe

During the last months of 1942, the balance of military power began to swing in favor of the Allies. The Axis was then forced to change their ‘conquer and consolidate’ strategy into another of ‘defense of metropolitan territory’. The industrial reorganization derived from this sudden change of political objectives proved to be of such magnitude that Germany could only partially comply with it. They made it happen by burying entire factories under armored tunnels, scattering industrial plants to make any enemy bombardment plants more difficult, developing new chemical technologies to compensate for the lack of raw materials, such as rubber and oil, and exploring all possible directions of physics, hoping to find alternative industrial procedures, direction systems, new engineering materials, or the final weapon.Geographical imperatives forced the Allies to depend on aviation to ‘take the war’ to German metropolitan territory. Although bombing raids did little damage to the Reich industry, they were devastating for the population. For this reason, top priority was given to anti-aircraft defense: artillery, missiles, radar, and high-performance fighters.And so was how German scientists and engineers, working under high pressure and having the right motivation and resources, created a huge range of unique projects in the history of aeronautical technology, both in terms of their variety and ingenuity of design and in the limited human resources and short time (five years) at their disposal, to produce such amazing scientific and technological achievements.Nowadays, engineers’ fantasy is heavily determined by such conservative terms as profit or safety, all very reasonable in peaceful times. Exotic ideas that are not let down in the computer may be eliminated in the wind tunnel. However, their German colleagues of 1943 had nothing to lose: they tested everything and succeeded many times, as confirmed by the winning powers in post-war years.

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