German Concept Aircraft Volume Four: CIRCULAR WINGS 1941 - 1945

When the balance of military power began to slope in favor of the Allies, during the last months of 1942, the Axis powers had to replace their ‘conquer and consolidation’ strategy by another of ‘defense of the metropolitan territory’.
However, the industrial reorganization caused by this sudden change in political objectives proved to be of such a magnitude that Germany could only partially comply with it.
They buried whole factories under armored tunnels, scattered industry’s locations to make enemy bombardments more difficult and developed new chemical technologies to compensate the scarcity of raw materials like rubber and oil. They also explored Physics in all directions, hoping to find alternative industrial procedures, detection systems, new materials for engineering or…. the final weapon.
Geographical imperatives forced the Allies to depend on aviation to ‘carry the war’ to the German metropolitan territory. Bombing raids had a devastating effect among population. This was the reason why the anti-aircraft defense - i.e., artillery, missiles, radars, and high performance fighters - was given top priority.
That was the background on which German scientists and engineers, working under high pressure and having the right motivation, created a huge dossier of projects equal to no other in the history of aeronautical technology, both in terms of variety and ingenuity of designs, as well as for the limited human resources and short span of time they had to produce these amazing scientific and technological achievements.
Fantasy of contemporary engineers may be strongly determined by such conservative terms such as profit or safety, very reasonable during peace times. Exotic ideas not turned down on the phase of computer design, may be discarded 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 during the post-war years.