70 years ago today...

[riggerrob 643]

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I am sure that was lost on all the Sherman crews who went up in flames when going up against Panzers, Panzer2's or Tiger's .......

I will not dispute for a second that any armor we fielded was junk, particularly the vaunted M4 Sherman (which was to armored warfare what the Big Mac is to food). The low velocity 75mm gun was at best annoying to the Germans, it ran on gasoline so it tended to explode when hit, it had a high profile so it was easy to hit, and its armor was barely sufficient to decelerate the round when it was hit .
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British Operations Research teams concluded that large numbers of Sherman's succumbed to ammunition fires. M4A2E8 reduced ammo fires with wet storage, which surrounded ammo with water jackets.

[riggerrob 643]

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A lot of our technology in weaponry has a starting point right back to German weapons .......... or the thousands of GI's who had to deal with MG-42's in front of them with higher rates of fire than our outdated Browning 30 cals.

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Germany started the war with a vastly superior machine gun called the MG-34. MG-34 was better because it was light enough to carry all day and was versatile enough to be fired from bipod or tripod. MG-34 could fill both light and medium MG rolls because it weighed about the same as a British Bren gun, but was only 2/3 the weight of a Browning .30 cal.

MG-42 was developed for 2 reasons: human wave tactics on the eastern front and reduced cost of manufacture. MG-42 responded to human wave tactics by almost doubling its rate of fire from the usual 600 rounds per minute to almost double. MG-42 was also more tolerant of dirt and burnt powder fouling. MG-42 is positively brilliant in how fast you can replace a barrel. After 5 seconds, the old barrel is laying on the ground and after 15 seconds the new barrel putting rounds down-range.
In comparison, replacing the barrel in a Browning .30 cal requires gutting the gun of all working parts. May-42 reduced production cost by minimizing the number of machined components and replaced the chassis with pressed sheet steel.

While MG-42 was a clear improvement we can see the error of Hitler's management style and weapons procurement processes in the way he developed new infantry rifles. By 1942, it was clear that the old bolt-action Mauser 98 rifle had to be replaced by a self-loading rifle. Hitler wasted resources on three simultaneous rifle development projects.
The first was the Garand-like Gwehr 43 firing full-sized 7.92 x 50 ammunition. Gwehr 43s were available in moderate numbers by late war.
Simultaneously, Hitler's best buddy: Herman Goering order a new rifle for his beloved paratroopers. The brilliant Fallschirmjager 42 was only a meter long, but still fired full-sized rifle cartridges (7.92 x 59mm) semi or full-automatic. Even better, the FG-42 had half the felt recoil of a Garand. While the FG-42 Mark 1 was a bit flimsy, that was not what for ed development of the FG-42 Mark 2. A shortage a specialized steel alloys forced Rheinmetal to redesign the FG-42 with a pressed steel receiver. The FG-42 corrected most of the short-comings of the FG -42 Mark 1, but was never available to re-equip all paratroopers before the end of the war.
Meanwhile the German Army wanted to develop a new intermediate cartridge (larger than Amrrican M-1 carbine, but smaller than M-1Garand). Hitler delayed that project by insisting on only sub-machine gun production, so the German Army dutifully started issuing "Machine Pistole 42s!"
Hah!
Hah!
By late war, Sturmgwehr 42 assault rifles proved their worth and set the pattern for all future infantry assault rifles. (M-16, AK-47, etc.)

So Germany led the Alllies in small arms innovation, but lagged in production because they wasted scarce resources on too many different weapons projects. The other disadvantage of fielding too many types of weapons was that they needed 2.5 distinct supply lines just when the RAF and USAAF were bombing German railways and canals into rubble.

[kallend 2,150]

Iago

No kidding. Our greatest weapon against Hitler was Hitler himself.

The amount of resources wasted on his 'pet projects' like the V2 would have won Germany the war if they were properly applied.

According to Dornberger, Hitler withheld resources from V2 development for years, only releasing them when it was too late and the allies had already identified and bombed Peenemunde.

D-Day would have been impossible if the V1 and V2 had been operational a few months earlier.

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.