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February 2, 2023

One of the hazards of war is the likelihood that at some point, one country’s most advanced weapon will inadvertently fall into the hands of its enemy, revealing all its secrets and enabling the adversary to build its own superior weapon, thereby tipping the battlefield advantage in the enemy’s favor.

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Throughout history, this has happened many times.  Here are two notable examples from World War II:

The German Focke Wulf Fw-190

World War II began in Europe in September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.  In 1940, Germany defeated France, pushed the Allied armies off the Continent at Dunkirk, and then began an air assault against Britain that came to be known as the Battle of Britain.

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Britain survived the German air attacks, fighting them to a costly stalemate, but as 1940 came to an end, Germany still held all of continental Europe, and Britain stood alone against Germany, bottled up on its home island.

As a way of fighting back before the Allies were actually strong enough to invade Europe in 1944, Britain conducted a campaign of night aerial bombing attacks and daytime “fighter sweeps” against German targets.  The Brits would send their excellent Spitfire fighter planes over France and rouse the Germans into air battles in the hopes of inflicting losses on the Luftwaffe (German Air Force).

But in the summer of 1941, things went bad for the British.  A new German fighter plane made its appearance: the Focke Wulf Fw 190.  It was so stunningly superior to the Spitfire (which had generally been regarded as the world’s best fighter plane up until then) that the British were aghast, shocked into thinking that this one new German plane could derail all their plans for winning the war.  Noted aviation historian William Green called the Fw 190 “as close to perfect [at the time of its debut] as any warplane has ever been.”

It went on like this for a full year.  The British suffered huge Spitfire losses, with no answer to the Fw 190.

But on June 23, 1942, a Luftwaffe pilot became disoriented after combat and accidentally landed his Fw 190 on a British airfield, perfectly intact.  The Brits, amazed at their good fortune, quickly analyzed the German fighter.  They incorporated some of its technology into future versions of the Spitfire and devised new tactics for combating the plane based on their evaluation.  This was a perfect example of a wartime stroke of good fortune that turned history around.

Here’s another example of wartime weapon-stealing, completely different from the Fw 190 scenario, but no less astounding: