You have no idea how infuriating it is that the sources that turned my attitude around on many of these issues are now buried under a Google mountain of Call of Duty hits over the last eight years or so. Back when WW2 was cool.
Aesop wrote:Everything?
Certainly not.
Just the Pzkw V, the Me262, the V-1 and V-2 rockets, the MG-42, the StG44, the Flak 88, the wolfpack concept, the combined arms blitzkrieg...
4 of those were bad jokes passed off as wunderwaffe, 3 were legit, and others are tactics rather than tech.
The Pzkw V?
Seriously? The Panther sounds impressive until you realize it's awfully heavy for a medium tank with a tendency to
set itself on fire. The much-maligned Sherman managed to actually
be a medium tank and require some kind of action on the part of the enemy to achieve that feat. It was so unreliable nearly a quarter of the 184 deployed to Kursk were withdrawn due to mechanical failure. It was a tank that couldn't handle off-road conditions. It's best summed up as a 45-ton vehicle trying to run on a 25-ton chassis; the fact that it knocked itself out far too often for the enemy to even get a crack at it says all that needs to be said about that non-starter. The Tiger heavies were far, far worse though. None of them could be produced in numbers that'd matter worth a damn even if the US sat out the war.
The Me-262? Okay, fine, they managed to field a jet fighter when it was far too late to matter and everyone else in a much better position in the war were already developing their own. Had such a negligible impact on the war it hardly counts as a "non-zero" factor. Spoken of in hushed tones by people who think Germany's nuclear program is worth more than an amusing, Pratchett-esque footnote.
If the V-1 and V-2 are examples of superior tech, so are box cutters. Neither could be used as anything other than a terror weapon, against a population that was already used to the idea of possibly being blown the fuck up at any moment with little or no warning. Couldn't be used with any accuracy beyond "minute of British Isles" and the V-2 was an especially inefficient platform with which to deliver its payload. Impressive rocketry for the time, but by any other rubric a complete waste of resources.
The StG-44 was a decent shot at an idea everyone had had since the end of WW1. If anything, it was desperation that caused Germany to ignore the conventional attitude towards logistics (we've got all this 8mm lying around, might as well keep the K98 and chamber machine guns in it). Not that Hitler didn't do his level best to stop it from happening; they originally called it the MP-43 just so they could get the project off the ground because Hitler ordered all new rifle development halted in favor of submachine guns. Arguably the best manifestation of an idea that the Americans and Russians had both tackled, except for the fact that if you fire a whole magazine through it, you need leather gloves to hold on to the goddamn thing. Thermal conduction sucks. However, unlike most German wunderwaffe, it mostly deserves its reputation.
The MG-42 was bar-none the best MG of its day. There's just no arguing that. One of the few examples of superior German tech to actually deserve its rep.
The FlaK 88 was good, but as with every Sherman crew somehow encountering "Tigers,"* their reputation is exaggerated by mistaken identity on the part of those on the receiving end.
*I'm serious about German propaganda being that good; it wasn't unheard-of for green Sherman crews to panic at the sight of German tanks and report that they were being attacked by Tigers. In any case, far more results were achieved by the 75mm KwK 40.
So yeah, just maybe there's something to some of that. You can only attribute so much success to the French being pussies before there has to be some fire to explain the smoke.
Or perhaps that the Germans had very clever tacticians, terrible strategists, mixed engineers, and peerless propagandists.
I don't attribute anything to the French beyond putting all their eggs in one basket and having absolutely no plan B. Or, even worse, ignoring plans B through Z that their military immediately coughed up and thus never got to put to use.
As noted in Normandy in June 1944, a German 88 crew in the hedgerows took out 8 Shermans in a row before they were captured, because basically "we ran out of ammunition, and your air corps had cut off our escape route".
And then you have Sherman commanders with over 200 kills in the European theater. Some crews and leaders are just that good.
