I saw a documentary on the battle of El Alamein.
They interviewed a large number of British and German veterans. Both sides put up with extreme hardships but the main one for the Germans was lack of water.
One of the German tankers said that after the British got American Grant and Lee tanks, the Germans were out gunned.
The one advantage the Germans had was the 88mm cannon. It was rapid fire, accurate, high velocity and extremely effective. One British tanker told of an 88 just knocking their tanks out one after another. One of their tanks finally got it but not until they had lost 6 or 7 tanks to it.
In North Africa, they would send the American soldiers into machine gun fire where soldier after soldier was chopped in half. This is what the Afghanistan thing feels like. Total screw up.