Word: weaponeering
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...advantage in weapons remained. By the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, the economic weight of the U.S. had been thrown into the scales, thereby giving potential weapon superiority to Hitler's enemies. But the actual weapon advantage was still his. The Wehrmacht rode that advantage for 15 months, but the ride was no longer easy. The Wehrmacht now had to skimp. The results showed clearly in the Mediterranean: the Afrika Korps recovered Italian Cyrenaica but lacked enough power to crush beseiged Tobruk; then lost Cyrenaica again to Auchinleck; finally, reinforced, overran the British army...
Before 1943 ended the Germans lost Sicily, southern Italy, the Donetz basin. With 1944 the Germans lost White Russia, the remainder of the Ukraine, half of Poland, most of the Balkans. Their aircraft plants and oil refineries were progressively reduced by the vast new weapon of the Allies: air power. Last week, captive Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt named Allied air superiority as the biggest single reason for Germany's final defeat...
Although Allied generalship did not create the vast advantages in manpower and in potential weapon power which won the war, it did exploit those advantages decisively, converting potential victory into actual victory...
Apparently an adaption of German designs, the new Japanese weapon was a 20-ft., two-ton, wood-and-metal airplane launched from a conventional bomber. Carried to about 15,000 feet by the mother plane, the baka would be cast loose by its pilot to ride on the 40-second "whoosh" from three powerful rockets. Since the nose was simply a ton of TNT, the "Kamikaze" suicide pilot had only to aim himself at his objective, then prepare to meet his ancestors. There was no landing gear; the pilot was doomed from the moment he stepped into the cockpit...
...Reconversion, intends to short-change the armed services. But the sudden cutback in planes has made both WPB and OWMR wary. From now on, Army demands will be currycombed as never before. Said one OWMRster: "If just one kid is killed in the Pacific for lack of any weapon, then we've failed in our jobs. But we don't see any sense in arming every doughfoot with five machine guns if he can shoot only one. That might wreck our chances of orderly reconversion-and his -of coming back...