If I remember right, this was basically the reasoning behind Sherman tanks. We had a huge number of them, and Germany had a much smaller number of much better tanks. But the best tank to have is the one’s that are on the scene, and the US could field so many more tanks it made a huge difference for a broader number of missions. So the head-to-head question wasn’t as important as the overall impact.
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Holy hell. That is more awesome then any picture of the F-35 I’ve ever seen.
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If anyone’s got $2.5MM burning a hole in their pocket…
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“Quantity has a quality all its own.” - Stalin
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Why the F&*k is “Death” censored in the title shot?
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I don’t know about one shark, but if I had 200 lobsters I could take them. I’d need a bunch of friends, some lemon, bay leaves, all-spice, a case of white wine, and about 50 sticks of butter.
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Oops, sorry. Was the linked article.
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I don’t think that was the intention per se but that was the effect of both poor doctrine (the American idea was that it wasn’t the job of tanks to fight other tanks, so they weren’t especially motivated to make their tanks better tank killers) and the fact that it took a long time between the time better German tanks were encountered and new American tanks could be developed. And it was rather demoralizing for the crews.
ISTR a story about a GI talking to a captured German officer. The GI was giving the German shit about the quality of German equipment and the German said something like: “I was in charge of an 88 gun. American tanks kept coming over the hill. We ran out of shells before the Americans ran out of tanks.”
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It was more an example of shitty design being covered up with good manufacturing and logistics than any deliberate choice with the Shermans.
American and British tank design was bafflingly poor for how creative the Allies were in other areas of the war (like the navy, who were incredible at learning their lessons and adapting rather than insisting on conservative views).
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Don’t forget that the German tanks were really overengineered and suffered from reliability problems, too. Can’t fend off all those Shermans if you can’t get the thing started.
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Probably to avoid demonetization by Youtube.
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Poor Hellcat, just because its wings look normal and didn’t get its own tv show it will always be underrated in the american WWII imagination.
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They didn’t even get mentioned in this movie, which is about submarines.
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Unfortunately I can’t find an online copy of Dean McLaughlin’s 1968 Hawk Among the Sparrows, in which a supersonic fighter falls back in time to WWI and is not particularly useful against cloth covered biplanes.
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Also, I can’t quite remember the details of the anecdote but in Sloan Wilson’s Ice Brothers there is a scene in which a small ski plane defeats a P-38, thanks to being slower and more maneuverable.
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And it’s all natural, not like those sirens the Germans put on the Stukas.
I believe that I have that in an old Analog magazine somewhere.
The Piper Cub was used for reconnaissance in WWII. I remember reading somewhere that one of its strong points was its speed. It was so slow that the relative speed between it and enemy fighters was great enough to make shooting it down a real problem.
Considering that strafing fixed ground targets at speed is a real thing, and the delta Vs between a WWII fighter and a modern fighter and a WWII fighter and a Cub is ~1000 mph vs 300 mph, I can’t say how much I believe the claim, but it makes for a nice story.
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Do go on.
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According to Wikipedia, the Soviet “Night Witches” made use of the slow speed of their antiquated biplanes to evade German fighters.
“The regiment flew in wood-and-canvas Polikarpov U-2 biplanes, a 1928 design intended for use as training aircraft and for crop dusting. Although the aircraft was obsolete and slow, the pilots took advantage of its exceptional maneuverability; it also had a maximum speed that was lower than the stall speed of both the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, which made it very difficult for German pilots to shoot down…”
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