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.
This is missing a picture of an American shipyard and an ice cream barge. The Japanese really didn’t have a hope of winning. We were adding multiple aircraft carriers per year to the fleet, and more each year than the last. So they’d sink one and it would be replaced by 3 more.
I will not hear sass directed at my best boy Schwerer Gustav
Which was nothing compared to the Paris Gun from WWI anyway.
The wunderwaffe was a last ditch propaganda attempt to boost morale of the Germans. Which kind of worked because many Germans still believed in the “final victory” with wunderwaffes along the way to save them, in spite of the Allies being at the gates of Berlin.
To be fair, I might stick it out if I thought wonder waffles were coming.
PING!
Also, let’s not forget “Tank that doesn’t murder the crew when it’s mission-killed” and “Jeep”
Also long lance VS buords shit-baby.
The “Long Lance” was Japanese, though. And FWIW it was never called that during the war by either side. “Long Lance” was a postwar invention by an author, and a frankly dumb one - all lances are long, that’s kind of their thing.
I didn’t remember the name of either offhand, just that we had a supposed wunderwaffen that completely failed to detonate while the Japanese torpedo was fairly deadly.
Looked around a little, the type 93 managed to take down a bunch of ships including the cv8 hornet.
They were mean fuckers.
The Type 93 was the most potent torpedo of the war, by an enormous margin. In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that the other combatants mostly abandoned the concept of running torpedo engines off of compressed pure oxygen, given how much doing that added to range, speed and payload (the British did a little bit of oxygen enhancement for the torpedoes aboard the Nelsons, which of course were never used except for trying to finish off the already-destroyed Bismarck). I guess their tendency to explode on startup dampened everybody’s enthusiasm a little bit. I don’t think Hornet was sunk by one, though, since she was sunk by a submarine and Japanese subs didn’t carry them (too dangerous and heavy to have oxygen generators aboard submarines).
People tend to poo-poo Japanese military technology from WWII, but without question they had by far the most deadly torpedoes and the most deadly guided missiles. Also the Yamatos would have beaten any battleships they encountered in a one-on-one duel, so arguably they had the best battleships, too.
and the most deadly guided missiles.
I see what you did there.
Also:
The Japanese destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo finally finished off Hornet with 4 24-inch (610 mm) Long Lance torpedoes.
The subs crippled her, her own mates tried to scuttle and sink her but the ijn finished her with 93s.
Oh, and the yamato/musashi were insane, crazily over built and over gunned, they could probably have taken the iowas in a fair fight, which the iowas would never have given them and won by dint of their incredible fire control and hopefully unneeded incredible damage control and resilience, coupled with better sea keeping and ludicrous speed straight to plaid.
The iowas could have crippled the Yamato, trying to sink her was another question.
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.
The lesson here is that when picking code names, pick random words from the dictionary.
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.
Great point, especially towards fans of nazi overfucked tech
Of course the pic of the long-range fighter is a P-51, which always gets all the credit for that shit. But the P-47N was built to escort B-29s all the way from the Marshall Islands to Japan and back, and had a range in the neighborhood of 3000 miles - simply astonishing when you consider how short-legged fighters were at the beginning of the war (Battle of Britain Bf109s could barely make 400 miles).
people will be like “but project paperclip!” and it’s like nah, that was basically just a way to pay them off so they didn’t work for the Soviets, we didn’t actually need the tech. Von Braun was a fucking office manager.
Tank destroyers with rotating turrets.
