Really? Surely 1912-vintage Maxim knockoffs, 1911-vintage light machine guns, an LMG derived from a 1920s Czech design and a tarted-up 1904 18-punder aren’t as complicated to build as an aircraft cannon?
Amusingly enough, if wikipedia is correct, the US couldn’t build a reliable copy, which I find staggering. Would certainly explain why the US stuck to .50 for such a long time though, which has always puzzled me.
Those Sentinels would have given the Japanese a hard time - everything I’ve ever read says that Japanese tanks were pretty puny. And only an Australian could have come up with the concept of a sawn-off howitzer :eek:. How much did the components weigh? Humping those things through the jungle must have been hell.
Certainly. The axis nations didn’t have enough muscle to attempt multiple objectives in the way the US could. My argument is that if the Japanese had stayed focused on it as a sole objective, I think they could have pulled off an invasion of Australia.
With a million regular troops in China, their other forces sprinkled the whole way from the Russian border to Burma to the middle of the Pacific, and decisions regarding strategy and policy being made by rival factions assassinating each other, the Japanese empire would possibly have fallen apart under internal strain even without launching further expansionism or attacking the most powerful country on the planet (F- for strategic planning there).
Fortunately, making peace in China in order to pursue adventures in South-East Asia was never very likely - the Japanese preferred bleeding themselves to death trying to win a war of attrition with China rather than going for less-contested prizes.
Odd how the authoritarian regimes seemed totally unable to stay focused on achieving a single objective, but it certainly made things simpler for the allies.
