Posted on 10/17/2014 7:08:11 AM PDT by C19fan
Last year, the German armed forces announced they would purchase Heckler and Koch’s MG-5 machine gun to finally replace a World War II-era weapon. The new machine gun should put the Bundeswehr’s existing weapons to shame—and make up for past failures.
“Its main feature is that it is much more accurate than its predecessor,” German army colonel Christian Brandes told U.S. Army reporters at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona during testing of the new gun on Oct. 14.
The predecessor Brandes was referring to is the MG-3. That aging weapon is essentially just an upgrade of a machine gun Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht started using in 1942. The MG-5 will replace the MG-3 as well as some of the German army’s less aged, but somewhat inadequate, MG-4s.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
They could have taken the UK and Ireland easily with what they had. That would leave the US without a toehold anywhere in Europe. Then Hitler would only have had to sit tight and hold parades and rallies.
However, that is not the sort of thing that megalomaniacs tend to do....
IIRC, the M-60 was influenced more by the FG-42.
I doubt anyone could find a combat vet of the ETO who would question the effectiveness of the MG-42, so I would imagine any replacement which is truly superior - as opposed to being a more convenient expedient or more a politically palatable purchase - would be formidable indeed.
Mr. niteowl77
Hitler didn’t understand warfare from either a strategic or a tactical sense. ................................ You can’t make an E-4 into a Field Marshall, and give him the maps and armies to play with. Had Von Rundsted, Manstein, Heinrici, Rommel etc. been allowed to fight the war their way it would have been a different story. OMG, we got a leader who would shy away from touching a rifle, and we are discussing this? OK, remember, its the Politicians that start the wars, but they have to let the military to the job their way without interference.
The Germans ran out of gas.
Now I have a machine gun, ho-ho-ho.
No gas, no war. When the Germans ran out of gasoline, the entire machine ground to a halt. Food, ammo, replacements, ability to maneuver, etc. etc. The Russians had overrun the oilfields and the 8th Air Force had hammered the refineries. Game, set, match.
Not to mention the Germans were vastly outnumbered by the Allies. Similar problems the US had in Vietnam and Korea.
http://efour4ever.com/88.htm
I often heard Germans blame poor production output for their defeat in WWII; at the same time they claimed the Americans didn’t outmaneuver them on the battlefield, but just kept throwing Shermans at them until they ran out of ammo.
“You Amis didn’t defeat us, you outproduced us.”
Didn’t lose one battle though either ;-)
Like any German product, it’s a badass machine when it actually runs ;-)
Maybe they measure success based on the length of time the weapon has been in service.
Letting the Allies escape from Dunkirk was Hitler’s first big strategic mistake. Their Navy would have had trouble getting an invasion force across the Channel (basically, it would had to have been D-Day in reverse). Instead of building up their capability in that area, Hitler listened to Goering who claimed that England could be bombed into submission. But his biggest mistake was invading Russia.
Now that sounds very familiar, anyone like that today that we know?
Yes and no. The U.S. army had the M-I semiautomatic rifle which was superior to the bolt action models used by other armies. We also had the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) which was a little on the heavy side. Then the Germans came up with the sturmgewehr which was the first fully automatic assault rifle and the model the Russkies took for the AK-47. They also had the 88 mm gun which was superior to anything we had. Their fighter planes, the Messerschmidts, not so much. We had better prop planes by the end of the war.
But the Germans then came out with their ME-262 jet fighter for which we had no answer. Then there was the Tiger tank. We came out with the Pershing heavy tank by the end of the war. The panzerfaust was a superior hand-held anti-tank weapon. But we had the .50 cal machine gun.
WWII was a race by both sides to develop better weapons. The only weapon we had virtually no answer for was the the V-2 rocket. Fortunately, Hitler did not have enough Tiger tanks, V-2 rockets, jet planes, and sturmgewehrs. And by the end of the war we had the ultimate weapon the atomic bomb. Of course, the Germans were beaten by that time.
Thanks Bruce.
The MG42, the 88s, and the Tiger tanks were the winning weapons for Germany - but the panzerfaust was the killer. I don’t understand why we just didn’t make knockoffs, it wasn’t like Hitler would sue us for patent infringement.
The Panzerfaust was a good weapon but it had a very short range. In the end the Germans copied our Bazooka and called it the Panzerschreck.
Interestingly, the 82nd Airborne captured a large number of them at an ammo dump during Market-Garden and used them for the rest of the war.
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