Nitpick: the Firefly had an English 76mm gun, longer in the barrel than the standard weapon. (The Pershing had a 90mm IIRC).
No, the Tempest was gorgeous. It was the Typhoon that was a failure as a fighter (but was reborn as a fantastic ground-attack aircraft). It’s interesting that even Rolls-Royce had their bad days: both the Peregrine and the Vulture underperformed badly, and did for the Whirlwind and the Manchester respectively; but the Merlin and Griffon more than made up for little glitches like these. (Too bad that sticking Merlins in the Whirlwind would have done it no favours. It was a lovely plane for something that was flying in 1938.)
We did copy them in various ways, just not directly.
“did any of the allies even get close to feilding a gun as effective as the 88 ? Let alone a tank to carry it).”
The West already had perfectly good antitank guns, there just wasnt the same emphasis on mounting them on tanks until later on.
The 88 was an AA gun put onto a tank. We basically did the same thing with the Jackson using a 90mm AA gun, and the Firefly tank just used a heavy Antitank gun instead, ie the 17 pounder.
Generally you only have to copy the idea, not the entire blueprint. The huge armour that the heaviest german tanks had was the least useful from an offensive perspective, resulting in the engine problems already outlined.
The earlier versions of the Tiger MkI and the Panther were unreliable, but later models of the same tanks were far better, however by the time the Tiger I had been reworked, it was being outclassed by the T85, however the Russians didn’t tend to rework their tanks so they slowly but surely fell behind as the Axis regunned their tanks.
Both the Russians and Germans made extensive use of captured armour, especially the Stugs and other tank chassis, upon which they would mount whatever guns they had available.
The King Tiger would have been formidable, except that it was underpowered enginewise, which meant slow progress at maximum revs and a huge thirst for fuel, and even then the transmission was not really up to it, they had been in the process of reworking them, but the damage to production infrastructure and the war’s end came too fast.
The Germans often got it wrong on the first couple of versions of their armour, I believe that on some tank or other, the Panzer MkIV ? they originally did not mount a machine gun, and crews resorted to opening the main gun breech and firing ad hoc machine guns down the barrel, as putting heads out of turrets with enemy infantry about is not a great idea.
The Panzer I and II were undergunned and underarmoured, and the earlier British tanks were actually their equal, don’t forget that the MkI & II are the tanks the Germans relied upon very heavily for their conquest of France.
I, too, am a bit confused by this comment. The Tempest was a magnificent aircraft, a huge success in every respect and a devastating fighter. They used to shoot down V-1s, for God’s sake.
Fortunately for the Russians, the T-34 was miles ahead of everything else when it was introduced: fast, reliable, excellent armor, good cross-country mobility. There’s an excellent case to be made for it being the best tank of the war.
I think the German tank you’re talking about is the Ferdinand, a gargantuan turretless gun built on surplus Tiger chassis.
<nitpick> Stuka is an abbreviation for Sturtzkampfflugzeug. Any dive bomber could be classified as a “Stuka”. On one hand, the term is usually reserved for the Junker 87. On the other hand, since Ernst Udet was fascinated with dive bombers, while he was in charge of the Luftwaffe technical office, he insisted that all bombers developed for the Luftwaffe had dive bombing capability. </nitpick>
“however the Russians didn’t tend to rework their tanks so they slowly but surely fell behind as the Axis regunned their tanks.”
They more made a decision not to do it as the priority was on huge production. They knew it had shortcomings but the advantage in production numbers basically offset the technological superiority of german designs.
Then they got a fright at Kursk where the Germans turned up with a ton of Panthers and Tigers, and prioritised heavy tanks but it took time to get up to speed.
The JS 2 came out in 1943 did ok against Royal Tigers in one engagement, and the JS3 just missed the wars end making the Berlin victory parade and was considered to be pretty formidable. So they fell behind midwar but had pretty much caught up by the end.
Also, the Allies did tend to capture enemy equipment and play with them to figure out the best ways to kill them. IIRC, the F6F Hellcat and the F4U Corsair both included design elements inspired by American tests with a captured mostly-intact (the plane crash-landed, killing the pilot) Japanese A6M Zero captured in the Aleutians after the Battle of Midway. These planes were designed essentially to ruthlessly exploit every weakness the Zero had (weak armament, weak armor, slow speed) and thus were very fast, very heavily armed, very well protected aircraft with relatively limited maneuverability.
Can’t think off the top of my head of any weapons designed specifically to kill any German equivilants, in the air war over Europe, the key tended to be to employ large numbers of long-range fighters very aggressively against German fighters before they had a chance to attack the bombers (on more than one occasion, groups of disorganized German fighters found themselves being attacked by well-organized groups of Allied fighters while they were still trying to sort themselves out after takeoff).
And of course, General Doolittle decided to allow fighter pilots to claim kills for German aircraft destroyed on the ground. As Londo Mollari would hapily point out to a former business partner of his, even the most deadly and advanced aircraft are naught but targets when they are on the ground.
Yes, otherwise known as the Elefant. It was meant as a tank-destroyer, and it was a good one, with a super-long-barrelled 88mm, and should have been deployed a thousand yards from the nearest T-34 which it could destroy with some ease. But at Kursk they ended up being used too close to enemy infantry, who had some fun once they noticed the lack of MG armament.
AFIAK all PzKwIV had at least two machine-guns, a forward-firing one near the driver’s seat and a turret-mounted one alongside the main armament. Several marks also had one in an AA mounting, which (like most such weapons) had to be operated by the commander via the open hatch. (But in the absence of nearby enemy infantry, this was an effective way to command a tank anyway.)
I believe I remember that the Germans did ‘reverse engineer’ one Allied weapon, in that they produced a version of the bazooka after seeing captured U.S. ones. I put reverse engineer in quotes because the engineering is pretty simple for a bazooka launcher if you already have single-shot antitank rockets (which the Germans did). So they didn’t so much steal engineering secrets as copy the general idea.
Interestingly, most of them didn’t have radios in them until 1945, and even then it was far from universal!
One can only imagine a Soviet Tank Commander trying to direct a legion of T-34s with Very Pistol flares…
They also reverse-engineered and copied the Sten Gun in 1945, as something to arm the Volkssturm with. The end result- the MP-3008- differed only from the Sten Gun in that it had a vertical magazine (instead of a horizontal one) and a wooden stock (instead of a metal one).
As others have said, the reality was the German stuff wasn’t that much better than the Allied stuff in a practical sense, and in most cases any deficiencies on the Allied side (such as the Sherman tank- nicknamed the “Ronson” for its proclivity for catching fire at inopportune moments, like when it was hit by enemy fire) could be made up for by sheer weight of numbers.
It’s been said that the only three things that the Germans did noticeably better than the Allies was the submachine gun (the MP-40 was highly sought after by Allied troops), the Jerry Can (already mentioned), and the Esbit cooker…
The British issued the Firefly on a basis of 1 per 4-tank troop, as the 75mm gun on the standard Sherman was more effective for the most common use of shelling infantry and anti-tank guns, a task at which the Firefly’s 17-pounder was almost useless. This is one of the reasons why there was such strong resistance to replacing the 75mm gun, which was adequate for dealing with the Panzer IIIs and IVs which made up the majority of the German tanks. The 76mm fitted to later US Shermans had a better HE shell (although still not as good as the 75), and was backed up by a sprinkling of Shermans fitted with a 105mm howitzer.
The early Sherman often caught fire when the ammunition bins in the upper hull were penetrated. This was dealt with on later models first by welding extra armour over the vulnerable areas, then by surrounding the ammo bins with a “wet stowage” outer shell which reduced the danger of fire.
The Elefant was actually an updated Ferdinand, with one of the improvements being a defensive MG mount in the front plate.
Granted the King Tiger was a failure overall from a cost of manufacture/logistical support/reliability aspect. While not minimizing those issues as they are hugely important it should be noted that when the King Tiger did work it scared the crap outta the Russians. I have read stories where in the Battle of Kursk (I think) Russian tankers took to ramming Tigers because they couldn’t otherwise seem to stop them. Another story told of a Tiger wheeling out of some woods, nuking a Sherman and then getting hit three or four times by other Shermans at which point the Tiger just drove back into hiding seemingly none the worse for wear.
If the Tiger ever got its issues sorted it would have been a formidable machine.
A lot of people are poo-pooing German tech during WWII but it seems to me with a bit more time/resources they had war winning (or at the least war extending) stuff coming out.
The Me262 was too little too late and not deployed effectively but it was leaps ahead of anything else in the sky. A bit more time and more numbers and allies would have had a hard time answering that threat. They could have stopped or severly curtailed allied bombing of Germany (they achieved a 4:1 ratio in kills which would have been enough to answer the quantity vs. quality issue).
Tiger/King Tiger. Maybe it was just too expensive and as mentioned definitely had some serious deficiencies but if those had been worked out in later versions it was a helluva tank. Again it could answer the quantity vs. quality issue versus Shermans and even T34s. When stories of 4 or 5 Shermans utterly failing to take one down despite hitting one several times at fairly close range the math starts looking bleak for the Allies.
V2 was maybe too far ahead of its time. The tech needed to make a long range rocket hit with any precision necessary to be of tactical use and not more than a terror weapon was probably long off.
Type XXI “Elektroboote” U-Boat. This thing was far ahead of anything the Allies had and was a huge jump in submarine performance. Its performance statistics were off the charts for subs of that day. By the end of the war the Allies had the U-Boats’ number and were sinking them left and right but this sub might have turned that around. At the least it would have set back the Allies a good bit. IIRC only one ever made it into active service but a bunch were nearly ready to be deployed by war’s end. Allies relied on logistics and this would have been a serious dent.
As mentioned the germans had to make do with a lot of the equipment that they started the war with. The ME-109 was a good plane in 1940-but it was hopelessly outclassed by 1945. The Germans also never were able to standardize production-they always had a maintainence and spare parts problems. The tanks in particular were a big problem, and when the Tigers broke down many could not be fixed. The V2 was a big unguided missile-it wasn’t worth the effort expended in making it. had it had a guidance system, it might have been worthwhile. I think the only german weapon developed during the war (that might have made a big difference0 was the ME-262 jet fighter. it was produced in too-limited numbers, and at a time when aviation fuel was carce. In a word, too little and too late.
The other thing you realize is that tanks are built on assembly lines. To make a new type of tank you have to create an entirely new assembly line. It’s all very well to design a new worldbeating tank, but you have to take resources–raw materials, skilled workers, machine tools–away from existing production to build the new tank. And what if the new tank is a failure? A new design might look good on paper but be a failure in the field.
I believe Stalin ordered that any design change to the T-34 had to be personally approved by him, because changing the design meant stopping the factories. Any upgrade had to be a major improvement to be worth stopping production. And this was a correct decision, the Germans were plagued by dozens of models of the same equipment. Ten T-34s could share spare parts, ammo and crews, a group of 10 different German AFVs couldn’t.
It’s often claimed that a German Tiger tank was worth 5 Sherman tanks, but that the allies produced 10 Shermans for every Tiger. But that’s not the whole story, because the Shermans were fast, reliable and ubiquitous while the Tigers were slow, cranky, and rare. Shermans had much greater strategic mobility, which means that even if you have only 10 times as many Shermans in the theater, at any given fight you’re likely to have 20 times as many Shermans…because your Shermans aren’t broken down sitting 100 miles back of the front, and have plenty of fuel and ammo.
