There is a certain group of people who are dead certain that if the Germans got lucky and held on for at least a year then they would get a second chance. The only reaction to this opinion can be a smile. These day-dreamers should understand the state of German industry and what their opponents were doing in the same fields in order to realize the potential Germany had in late 1945 and early 1946.





One of the fan favourites among the "second chance" theorists are the military vehicle projects. Allegedly, if they had the time, these could be built. The reason for this hope is that information about German military projects became available several decades earlier than Allied ones. The first information (or rather, digests) became available towards the mid-60s. This was typically not original German documents, but Allied intelligence reports, which contained a ton of mistakes. The same can be seen in Soviet reports. The first documents to be declassified were ones related to aircraft. Aviation developed at a breakneck pace, and various napkinwaffe were only interesting in the years immediately following the war. The situation with tanks was much more complicated. There were fewer of them and little information remains regarding prospective projects.



