Re: So, what would have happened if Hitler had sent off a dreadnought to New York to shell the Empire State building?
Meanwhile: Hitler also plotted to bomb New York
John K. Cooley IHT
Friday, October 24, 2003
ATHENS I was a kid of 12 in Mount Vernon, New York, on that December Sunday in 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. My Dad and I got the news by radio, in the middle of a broadcast football game. Immediately both of us wondered, what about Hitler? What would he do now?
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At school the next day, Dec. 8, 1941, we were all herded into the assembly hall. We heard President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaim that the United States was "at war with the Empire of Japan." The day's drama was heightened by the eerie wail of air raid sirens in our Westchester neighborhood, and others in the metropolitan and suburban New York areas. "Must be a test," said Mom. The steady note of the all-clear followed in a few minutes. The radio assured us, yes, it was a test. Two days later, we heard the Führer declare war on the United States - radio carried most of the news, live, in those days. Our neighborhood sirens were forgotten - until New Year's Eve, when family friends from Flushing, Long Island, repeated to my parents a second-hand rumor: all the Army Air Corps fighter planes at Mitchel Field, New York's main air defense center, had taken off when the sirens sounded on Dec. 8. Part of the test, perhaps.
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We summered in 1942 on the Massachusetts North Shore, near Rockport. We heard the U.S. planes and the booming echoes of depth charges within earshot offshore. Submarines, yes. But could Hitler's Luftwaffe ever reach our East Coast? Nobody really thought so. Conventional wisdom was that Nazi Germany's fliers not only lacked trans-Atlantic range, but that no German, from Hitler on down, gave this any real thought.
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A rude awakening has gradually come for those who held that complacent theory.
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Strong evidence to the contrary has come in articles in the respected German weekly newspaper Die Zeit. One, about the Hitler period, was published Sept. 17, 2001, just after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, titled "Bombs On Manhattan: how Hitler and his military wished to rain destruction on New York."
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The German author Jochen Thies has now turned his article in Die Zeit on Hitler's Luftwaffe into a book soon to be published in English as "Target New York: Nazi Germany's Plans to Attack the United States."
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Thies cites passages in the diaries of convicted Nazi war criminal Albert Speer, Hitler's favorite architect, describing how Hitler watched films of Warsaw and London burning after Luftwaffe raids. Hitler excitedly shrieked his wish to see New York's skyscrapers "blazing like torches" under attack by a long-range bomber, which he wanted Willy Messerschmidt and other German aircraft manufacturers to develop.
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As early as 1938, Thies discovered, Luftwaffe chief Herman Göring told aircraft industrialists that he expected them to produce a plane "that with five tons of bombs could fly to and from New York." It would make him "extraordinarily happy to shut up the arrogant mouths over there," Göring said. The plane Hitler and Göring conceived was to be the four-engine Messerschmidt 264 bomber, for which there were several designs .
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Two prototype Me-264s were actually built. Each apparently did have enough range for round-trip bombing missions to the United States that they never flew. Their design was inspired partly by experimental trans-Atlantic flights by German four-engine civilian Focke-Wulf courier planes during the 1930's.
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As for Hitler's plans, the Allies' wartime carpet bombing of Germany's aircraft industries led to the permanent shelving of the Amerikabomber. Nazi aircraft plants concentrated instead on production, late in the war, of the first-ever jet fighter, and on the V-1 and V-2 missiles, in desperate efforts to halt the massive bombing of Germany's cities and to strike the Allies in England.
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So New York was spared. It took the suicidal and murderous air pirates of Sept. 11 to make Hitler's twisted dreams come true. The writer is a foreign correspondent and author.
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