Stardate 20020812.1249

(On Screen): Colby Cosh quotes a comment from a novel by Neal Stephenson, where a character says that we won the Second World War because be "built better stuff than the Germans" and asks my opinion.

It's impossible to characterize that briefly (not that I ever do anything briefly, in any case). The only short answer would be "Yes and no." There were a lot of cases where German equipment was superior to ours, but many critical ones where ours was superior. On balance, what we were better at was also more important, but it was much less glamorous. By the way, absent any reason to think otherwise, I consider his use of "we" to refer to the combination of the UK and the United States. That's actually important because there was a great deal of engineering collaboration between the two. For instance, the British invented radar and had more experience with it than the Americans, but there were a couple of cases where advanced British designs were sent to the US for manufacturing both because we had more capacity and because we were better than anyone else in the world at making high quality precision electronics. High frequency electronics (these were millimeter-wavelength radars) are extremely tricky; it's not just a matter of wiring everything together. We could produce them, and did.

In huge quantities: one kind of shell for naval 5" guns had a radar set built in, which was of course destroyed when the shell went off. It was a proximity fuse for an antiaircraft round and was very valuable in fighting against the Kamikazes. Thousands of them were made and expended. Without that, the shell either had to make a direct hit on the plane to destroy it, or the gunners had to guess a time delay. Both were much more difficult. The proximity fuse would convert a near miss into a destroyed enemy plane.

One of the best examples of an engineering collaboration between the Americans and Brits was the legendary P-51 Mustang. The airframe was an American design, and it incorporated several quite radical design innovations (most notably the laminar flow wing, which decreased turbulence and drag which helped make the plane very fast) but the original version of it used a pretty nondescript American engine which didn't generate as much power as the aircraft really deserved. The British looked at the first units shipped to them and decided that it needed to use the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, one of the finest aircraft engines ever designed. It was a match made in heaven (or, from the point of view of the Germans, in Hell) and the result was what many consider the single finest and most versatile fighter of the war (though others would hotly debate that). It was more than a match for any German propeller-driven fighter. It wasn't until the Germans introduced the Me-262 jet fighter, which Colby mentions as an example of German superiority, that they had anything capable of matching the P-51 in the air.

But the 262 was a mixed bag. It was a lot faster than the allied planes, but it also drank fuel like a sewer and had a severely limited time in the air. When it was at altitude and on the attack, it was extremely difficult to fight. But when it was low on fuel and going home, it was very vulnerable. What the Americans ended up doing was to use their fighters to hang around German airfields, and when they saw 262's returning to land, they'd go down and hunt them. That gave the 262 pilot a major dilemma: if he continued his approach and flew low and slow and straight, he was a sitting duck and would be shot down. But if he reacted, he'd run out of fuel and crash anyway. The American P-47 Thunderbolt was a favorite for this mission because it could dive faster than any other plane at the time, so it could hang out high over a German airfield and get down to the deck very rapidly when the opportunity presented itself. Its 8 .50 caliber machine guns (more than any other fighter, the Mustang carried 6) were more than sufficient to shoot the jets up.

The 262 also had really serious problems with maintenance and readiness, and spare parts were always in short supply. The entire engine had to be replaced quite often. So while it's true that the 262 had better performance than the P-51 or P-38 or P-47 (the best American fighters it faced) it was worse in nearly every other way.

Going into the war, the standard American infantry rifle was the M-1 Garand. It was a semi-automatic weapon which used a 8-round clip, and the soldier could fire it as fast as he could pull the trigger. At the same time, the Germans used a bolt-action rifle, which meant that an American could, for brief intervals, fire far more rounds. This can be critical, and the Garand was a major advantage. Some Americans also carried the Browning Automatic Rifle, the much-beloved BAR. As a result of that, American infantry generally had much better firepower than German infantry until the Germans began to widely use the MP-43, which we'd now consider an "assault rifle". The BAR wasn't, really, because it fired the same .30 caliber round as the Garand. The MP-43 used a smaller pistol round, which meant more could be carried and there was less recoil, and it could have a higher fire rate than the BAR. But it also had less stopping power. Still, its high fire rate more than made up for the smaller bullet, since the vast majority of rounds fired by everyone were mainly intended to keep the other guy's head down so they couldn't fire back effectively.

The Germans had what