We did have the Mark 13 torpedo, in the “disaster” category.
Germany had her own torpedo problems, but the Mark 13 went out the door in abysmal form, and we were extremely slow to get the problems fixed. And we were fighting a war with more naval focus than was Germany.
And while we had work on the VT fuse and would have eventually gotten there, that was really the Brits. They gave us their work and we finished the work to put it into a shell.
And some of our concepts, though we ultimately made use of them in some way, failed in their original form.
The idea that ships would be a sitting duck for high-altitude level bombers was just wrong. Down the road, yes, but not in WW2. Billy Mitchell really oversold the state of things. And while it wasn’t catastrophic for us, it did hurt our initial ability to respond to naval forces.
The B-17 concept that massive interlocked fields of fire from defensive guns would permit bombers to sail past fighters didn’t really work. It was in a stronger position than the Lancaster for daylight bombing, but we took horrendous losses; ultimately long-range fighter escort was still required.
We initially drastically overestimated what our early radars could do for us in naval night-fighting, and it led to things like the Battle of Savo Island. The Brits seriously bailed us out here with the cavity magnetron.
Germany also had some significant wins. Yeah, they didn’t have the semi-auto rifle as a standard issue, whereas we had the M1 Garand. But they did have the assault rifle, in the form of the StG 44. They had the general machine gun in the form of the MG 34.
This is missing the manned surface-to-air missile, one of the most batshit concepts of WW2 imo:
“The primary role of the relatively untrained pilot was to aim the aircraft at its target bomber and fire its armament of rockets. The pilot and the fuselage containing the rocket engine would then land using separate parachutes, while the nose section was disposable.”
I was picturing something more like a Kamikaze.
rocket planehuman-guided missile
You’re thinking of the Reichenberg-Gerät, although the Nazis were crazy they weren’t crazy enough to actually use it.
IDK the reason they didn’t deploy that thing, but it certainly wasn’t prudence or concern for pilot safety because the Me163 rocket plane was used.
The Me163 was supposed to be reusable, including the pilot, the Reichenberg was one time use only, including the pilot.
Wow! I was just watching the anime, Saga of Tanya the Evil, and it had these in it. I assumed it was anime craziness.
I will not hear sass directed at my best boy Schwerer Gustav
Nonshitpost comment: A video I like to recommend on tank production illustrates the differences in mindset for industrial production.
Summary is that the US had mastered assembly line production and the use of subassembly parts to minimize production time. The US military had a centralized body to evaluate and approve different variants, which meant production stayed smooth.
The Soviets lacked experience with this kind of mass production by they quickly caught on and adapted in a logical way. They used assembly line production, but didn’t use subassemblies from different factories, as that would clog up their rail lines and spread out the factories needed to be defended. Instead they centralized so that trains brought raw materials to factories and left with finished tanks.
The Germans built tanks with a team of people who would continually work on one tank, crafting it. This was much slower. There was also too much of a direct line between many different military commanders and the tank production, allowing commanders to constantly put in their own personal special requests, further slowing down production as so many tanks had to have special modifications (that weren’t important to the big picture).
I’ve seen (what I think is) a different video that made a similar point. I wish I could remember it well enough to find it again.
PING!
Also, let’s not forget “Tank that doesn’t murder the crew when it’s mission-killed” and “Jeep”
Is “engine life of five hours” correct? Would the engine need replacement after five hours of flight time? Damn, that sucks.
It was more like 10-35, but it appears to be a reference to the Junkers Jumo 004.
Anyone have a guess as to what the bottom left picture might be? Just looks like some weird stairs.
That’s the Kanone V-3, a super long range artillery gun intended to shoot at London.
There is another: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistel
Leave it to the Germans to name their weapon after what was used to kill the diety, EVERYONE liked. (Balder)
The Germans were notorious for using on-the-nose naming conventions. For example a radio-homing system was called “Odin”, which the British correctly guessed was using one transmitter rather than the usual two because Odin only had one eye.
Great point, especially towards fans of nazi overfucked tech
I wouldn’t mind a fighter with the range of a bomber. I end up never using fighters unless I’m being invaded because of its short range, but the initial biplanes can only be remodeled into fighters so I’ll end up having a couple of them every time. I still need to give the P-51 mustang a try, they seem to have a slightly better range.
Tank destroyers with rotating turrets.
There were really two different groups of tank destroyers in WW2.
The US and UK wanted something that would prevent a situation akin to what came up in the Battle of France, where fast-moving German armor penetrated lines and performed a successful massive exploration through that breach.
They had fast vehicles that were intended to fight from concealed, defensive positions. But those vehicles had to be able to get out in front of an armored breakthrough in time to parry the thrust. What was critical was speed.
Germany and the Soviet Union, out on the Eastern Front, needed heavily-armored vehicles with big guns to slug it out over open fields with long fields of fire.
While, yes, both were aimed at fighting armor, they weren’t really aimed at the same role, and I kind of wish that the two groups of vehicles had gotten different names, rather than “tank destroyer” being applied to both.
But also topless, because what are mortars and hand grenades?
Cue !MilitaryMoe NSFW in 3…2…1…
