A quote attributed to Eisenhower (I’ve seen several different versions of it, but containing the same elements) states that he considered the following four items to be the key war-winning weapons of the Allies: The bazooka, the jeep, the atom bomb and the C-47 Dakota transport plane. The jeep and the C-47 might seem surprising choices at first glance – and indeed might not even be considered weapons in the strict sense – but they gave the Allies tremendous battlefield mobility and logistical capacity. Both these things are critical in modern warfare. Richard Overy, in his book Why The Allies Won, makes the same point. He notes that during the war, Germany produced highly advanced next-generation weapon systems like cruise missiles (the V1), ballistic missiles (the V2) and jet fighters (the Me262), but neglected to pay much attention to such unglamorous basics as providing its army with enough trucks to break free of its continued large-scale use of horses.
Another factor Overy mentions is the technical fussiness of the Wehrmacht. Its weapon specifications and quality-control standards were so exacting that they got in the way of efficient mass production. The Panther, for example, was an adaptation of (an in some respects an improvement over) the T-34, but it was more complex and time-consuming to build, so the Germans never had enough of them. The Russians stuck to the philosophy of “make it simple, make it work, and make more of it.” The British applied the same approach to manufacturing the early versions of the Sten gun, which was intended to be a simple, cheap weapon which could be produced in vast quantities to meet the emergency Britain faced after Dunkirk. The Sten Mark III, which looked like a piece of scrap iron, was probably the ugliest gun ever used by the British Army, but it got the job done, and the British were sensible enough to realize that the second half of 1940 was not the time to get sentimental about having to give up finely polished walnut rifle stocks and carefully blued gun barrels.
People interested in this general topic might like to read a sci-fi short story by Arthur C. Clarke called “Superiority,” the inspiration of which he said would be clear to anyone familiar with the Second World War. It describes how a galactic war takes an unexpected turn when one side becomes obsessed with developing fancy new high-tech weapons, while the other side sticks to producing huge numbers of good old-fashioned “primitive” ones.
