Honestly it’s something that should be solved by tactics not engineering. The Germans in WW2 seemed hyperfixated on engineering to chase some sort of ever shifting ideal instead of settling for a “good enough” in terms of a standard design or baseline and running with it in production. Excellent academic video on the subject.
Directional charges mounted on armor as an anti-infantry defense measure have never really been anything I’m aware of having been institutionally adopted. It’s the kind of equipment that armor crews shouldn’t be putting themselves in positions to use. (Yes, I’m aware of the M113 MCCM carrier- totally different application than defense of the vehicle in combat.)
I suppose they were hyperfixated on engineering perfection as part of their whole master race ideology. They were supposed to seek perfection in everything they did. That’s one thing they had in common with the Japanese.
The impression I’ve gotten from both past reading, and the video is that they had not at that time shifted to a modern assembly line industrialized kind of mindset. America had things like it’s automotive industry, which had pushed that earlier than in Germany.
Everything Germans made had a larger amount of handcrafting in it as a necessity of the workflow, and because of that handcrafting there was pride by the individual workers to make really fine quality. The “IDGAF, it meets spec, send it.” mentality of an American lineworker who was running more automated systems or compartmentalized parts of the work was more suitable.
On top of that, in the Nazi government, individual military leaders were jockying and sending all their own requests for modifications right to the factories. The US had a centralized system for modification requests that prevented that. I don’t think that was an intended feature by the Germans, but a situation that rose organically out of their lack of experience with production at scale.
That’s wild if they didn’t have modern assembly systems in place, because they had tons of tanks, airplanes, and other machines of war. They dominated the battlefield with their abundance of mechanization. From what I’ve read, they still had a lot of supplies and machines by the end of the war, but they ran out of people.
Watch the video, it goes in depth on their tank production methods, and specifically the inefficiencies within it.
They dominated the battlefield with their abundance of mechanization.
Germany strongly pushed that exact propaganda, especially at the beginning of the war. They wanted their military to be perceived as bleeding edge. That perception has stuck, but it simply wasn’t true. Germany was not nearly as mechanized as it wanted to be perceived as. Any early advantage it had from stockpiles of pre-war production (of early war designs which were often outdated by mid or late war) were absolutely crushed by allied numbers, and America alone vastly outproduced for almost every year of the war.
Honestly it’s something that should be solved by tactics not engineering. The Germans in WW2 seemed hyperfixated on engineering to chase some sort of ever shifting ideal instead of settling for a “good enough” in terms of a standard design or baseline and running with it in production. Excellent academic video on the subject.
Directional charges mounted on armor as an anti-infantry defense measure have never really been anything I’m aware of having been institutionally adopted. It’s the kind of equipment that armor crews shouldn’t be putting themselves in positions to use. (Yes, I’m aware of the M113 MCCM carrier- totally different application than defense of the vehicle in combat.)
I suppose they were hyperfixated on engineering perfection as part of their whole master race ideology. They were supposed to seek perfection in everything they did. That’s one thing they had in common with the Japanese.
The impression I’ve gotten from both past reading, and the video is that they had not at that time shifted to a modern assembly line industrialized kind of mindset. America had things like it’s automotive industry, which had pushed that earlier than in Germany.
Everything Germans made had a larger amount of handcrafting in it as a necessity of the workflow, and because of that handcrafting there was pride by the individual workers to make really fine quality. The “IDGAF, it meets spec, send it.” mentality of an American lineworker who was running more automated systems or compartmentalized parts of the work was more suitable.
On top of that, in the Nazi government, individual military leaders were jockying and sending all their own requests for modifications right to the factories. The US had a centralized system for modification requests that prevented that. I don’t think that was an intended feature by the Germans, but a situation that rose organically out of their lack of experience with production at scale.
That’s wild if they didn’t have modern assembly systems in place, because they had tons of tanks, airplanes, and other machines of war. They dominated the battlefield with their abundance of mechanization. From what I’ve read, they still had a lot of supplies and machines by the end of the war, but they ran out of people.
Watch the video, it goes in depth on their tank production methods, and specifically the inefficiencies within it.
Germany strongly pushed that exact propaganda, especially at the beginning of the war. They wanted their military to be perceived as bleeding edge. That perception has stuck, but it simply wasn’t true. Germany was not nearly as mechanized as it wanted to be perceived as. Any early advantage it had from stockpiles of pre-war production (of early war designs which were often outdated by mid or late war) were absolutely crushed by allied numbers, and America alone vastly outproduced for almost every year of the war.
Wow, the USA and Russia combined made over 50,000 tanks in a single year.
Nazis: “We have tanks at home”
USA and USSR: “TANKS, TANKS, TANKS”
Oh hey look at that special M3 in the photo. Neat.
Imagine what society would be like if we could all band together to build improvements like we were able to do to build war machines.