[Rocketfan]

Meet the "wonder weapon" that could have won the war for Hitler.

Called the Horten 229, the radical "flying wing" fighter-bomber looked and acted a lot like the U.S. Air Force's current B-2 — right down to the "stealth" radar-evading characteristics.

Fortunately for the world, the Ho 229 wasn't put into mass production before Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,529 ... test=faces

[4everfsu]

One of cable show this past sunday ran the hour special on the engineers building and testing this aircraft. It was interesting.

[ATrain]

That is one cool looking plane. I want one!!!

Oh...and thank God the Nazis never got the chance to use it effectively.

[LUconn]

As devastating as this thing would have been, saying that it would have won the war for them is a little bit of hyperbole. Heck WW2 is the first war where radar was even used anyway. All planes previous to that were "stealth". And on top of that since jet engines were only being implemented towards the end of the war it was too late for that to do anything but kill some extra civilians in England.

[4everfsu]

If they had mass produced that jet fighter earlier, it may have turned the Battle of Britian. But even bigger then that would have meant those jets could have stopped the bombing of Germany by B17s. Our fighters would not have been able to stop them from destroying the formations.

[LUconn]

Something that "looked and acted a lot like the U.S. Air Force's current B-2" is not going to stop our bombers.

[RubberMallet]

some of the stuff they were working on that we will never know about or at least the gvt will never release is what i'm really interested in...

[ALUmnus]

some of the stuff they were working on that we will never know about or at least the gvt will never release is what i'm really interested in...

You keep listening to Coast-to-Coast and reading about strange alien super-races inhabiting the earth, and one day you'll find out.

[kel varson]

some of the stuff they were working on that we will never know about or at least the gvt will never release is what i'm really interested in...

Sunday at 2 pm (I think it is nat. Geo. Channel) there is documentary about the plane.

[phoenix]

Hitler had a lot of really awesome weapons that could have turned the tide of the war. Unfortunately, many of them were developed by Jewish scientists, and were ignored because of that.

If they had mass produced that jet fighter earlier, it may have turned the Battle of Britian.

The British actually had the first jet concept back in 1929. The RAF didn't think much of it at the time. The Luftwaffe had one in 1939,
but Goering liked piston-engine planes better. If Germany had adopted it's jet early on, the British would have had something to answer it -- they had a prototype flying in 1941, and the US had one by September of 1942. Of course, US P-51s had some success against the ME262s toward the end of the war, so German jets were not unbeatable. Early jets were notoriously clumsy in the sky, making it easy for good pilots in slower aircraft to outmaneuver them.

[ToTheLeft]

From what I've read in WWII books, if the Germans knew how to use what they HAD, they would have been much, much tougher to defeat. The Tiger tank was a ridiculous weapon, but it wasn't used to it's potential.