Technology has completely changed the way weapons work.
Somebody mentioned massed artillery. The reason you saw massed artillery in WWII was because the artillery was so poor. You fire several hundred rounds off in the general direction of your target in the hopes that one of those rounds might hit your target at random.
Same thing with aerial bombardment. German military intelligence had a division that analyzed where allied bombs landed in an attempt to figure out what city they were aiming at. There were times when the bombers didn’t even hit the right country.
Nowadays we have smart weapons. The principle now is hit the target. Modern armed forces are smaller than WWII armed forces but they’re a lot more lethal because they don’t waste ninety percent of their firepower.
By then though the question wasn’t so much as to whether Shermans could beat Tigers and Panthers on level terms (they couldn’t) but as to whether the German heavies were going to show up at all in the face of chronic shortages of fuel, spares and ammunition and the omnipresent threat of Allied close-support aircraft. While the Pershing would have given you the cozy feeling of beating the best German tanks in a fair fight, strategically the problem was already solved by not having to get into a fair fight in the first place.
The 105 fellated as an anti-tank weapon though. It wasn’t intended as one, but to deliver some serious HE against hard points.
And then the Battle of the Bulge turned up and they turned out to have a few more tanks left than expected, ie 400 Panthers and the like. The outcome of the war was never in doubt, but a lot more tanks were lost and people killed than might have otherwise been.
The Wiki article on the Pershing has a good rundown of the timeline involved, the active resistance to its earlier introduction and how said resistance disappeared rather quickly after that battle.
Quite true, although the Battle turned out to be of dubious value for the Germans - it cost them rather higher in casualties than it did the Allies, and plenty of hardware that might have lasted longer if they’d remained in a defensive posture. As to the deployment of the thoroughly admirable Pershing, since only twenty of them saw an angry German, this seems to have been an excellent example of closing the stable door.
what’s the question again? can ww2-vintage weapons be used today on a stand-alone basis or as part of an otherwise modern armed force?
if its the latter, then i will say that many infantry hardware back in ww2 are still useful: the 1911 .45 is still in actual use, so is the browning .50 caliber MG. the 81mm mortar and various howitzers can still be made useful.
in the navy, an iowa-class battleship on its own can withstand missile and torpedo attack better than any modern navy vessel. if part of a task force with air and submarine support, it can certainly reach an enemy coast and pulverize any near-shore installation.
The question was more how would a modern military force (ie: The early 21st century US military) fare against one of our enemies from the 1940s (ie: Japan and Germany. Maybe for a bonus round we can go up against the Soviets).
As for dealing with modern weapons, my understanding is that Battleships (and indeed, most surface vessels) are poorly equipped to deal with modern torpedoes, which basically are designed to make the maximum use of various physical properties of ships and water. A modern torpedo, rather than impacting the hull of a warship, will detonate immediately under it, causing a hole (well, technically, a very brief crater) to appear in the water beneath the ship. Once the ship is no longer in the water, due to the explosion forcing the water away, its own unsupported weight will cause it to collapse.
Of course, I’m sure the actual explosion immediately beneath the ship does the structural integrity no favors. As far as WWII style torpedoes go, the Iowas will probably fare about as well as any other late-war battleship, assuming an enemy somehow got close enough to launch torpedoes at them (the torpedoes of the time being very short ranged weapons)
A WW2 era battleship would not withstand a torpedo attack.
Torpedoes detonate beneath the target creating a void. This leaves that section of the ship momentarily unsupported and the ship’s own weight then breaks its back.
AFAIK the French army still uses rifle grenades. This lets anyone in the squad use them, rather than mandating a designated grenadier to carry a special weapon+ammo. Since they’re quite larger than 40mm thumpers I’d also guess they pack more boom and/or produce more shrapnel, especially considering the propulsion part presumably comes from the rifle instead of having to fit inside the grenade itself.
If the wiki is to be believed, the Israeli army is moving back to them as well.
WWII era subs had cruise missiles? Why not? I guess all the technology existed for it back then.
Fun pointless trivia: The first cruise missiles were developed during World War I, by the Americans. They couldn’t get the bugs worked out early enough to make any use of them though. They were basically built as airplanes without pilots. The hard part was getting them to take off and fly to their targets reliably.
The Iowa class was only useful more recently because it had already been built and could be kept for shore bombardment, so doesnt really directly compare to weapons like a Browning .50, which are still being made today. It was also heavily modified, so doesnt really compare to its 1940’s state at all, its more of a frankenstein.
Sometimes the only way to tell two pictures were of the same ship were to look at where the main battery was (the guns and their support equipment being way too big to move around, unlike pretty much everything else on the ship)
So yeah, to make a long story short (Too late!), it was generally cheaper to take an existing warship and retool her to fit the changing face of war, rather than to scrap her and build a new ship to replace her. I imagine it’d be interesting to compare the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) when she was commissioned in 1961 to the same ship in 2011 just to see how much she may have changed due to advancing technology.
the davy crocket is actually post-war but close enough. some say the only dumber weapon is a nuclear hand grenade but i see several merits to a short-range rocket-propelled nuclear grenade: easily transportable and concealable, can’t be stopped once fired (just look for a suicidal operator as he is likely to die.)
Does that matter, though? My understanding is that the primary use of modern American subs is to either carry nukes, track (and potentially engage) other subs carrying nukes, track/engage enemy warships, and to launch cruise missiles. We don’t really do merchant raiding any more.
You may want to rethink that - your Iowa is never even going to see a modern carrier. It’ll see very fast, very heavily-armed planes, sure - but the carrier is never going to be in gunnery range. Why would it?
Sure, if a carrier were so foolish as to stray within range of a BB’s guns, it wouldn’t last long. But the carrier can strike from hundreds of miles away, and can outrun almost any modern surface ship, let alone a 70-year-old clunker.
A related question here: How much more powerful are the military explosives now than in WWII? Apart from the accuracy issue, that is. If one were comparing a 500 pound iron bomb from WWII and an identical bomb casing filled with modern stuff, how much more BOOM would the new one have?
My point is that noone is building them anymore when they wear out, unlike aircraft carriers.
Sherman tanks were still being used decades after WW2 as well, but again noone was building them from scratch. Their value lay in them already existing and being better than nothing, rather than being inherently still considered useful enough to keep manufacturing them.
The maximum speed of nuclear aircraft carriers is classified, but AFAIK is generally estimated at slightly above 30 knots. IIRC, they’re reputation as the fastest ships around is due to 2 factors:
The reactors can produce a huge amount of steam in a short time; this allows them to accelerate better than standard ships, which had to build their steam pressure over time. (though I don’t know if that’s still the case with more modern propulsion systems)
They can sustain high average speeds for very long times; while ships with conventional propulsion can reach and sustain 30 knots, they usually don’t do it because the fuel consumption increases exponentially with the speed and going fast would reduce considerably their range.
I heard a story from the 60’s, when US Navy still had nuclear powered cruisers. One of them had the reputation of being the fastest ship in the fleet, though probably this was not strictly true. But its captain was very careful to race other ships only in sprint races (where he had the advantage of better acceleration) or in very long distance races (where he could maintain high speeds without running out of fuel).
And WW2 ships were not slower than the modern ones. Iowa was good for 32 knots and AFAIK there was a class of French destroyers able to reach 40 knots. Probably the biggest advantage a modern ship has is its ability to detect and strike from huge distances. True, it may not be able to penetrate the armour of an old-style battleship, but it doesn’t have to. It can destroy the radars and range finders of a battleship, thus mission killing it. I wonder if, with modern weaponry, would it be possible to put a bomb through the smoke stack of a WW2 era ship…
