@Zhukov_2011:
Um, the Germans lost the war and in the process perpetrated the most evil, disgusting and unforgettable atrocities in all the long and brutal history of mankind. Who cares if someone “slams” the German Army? Good God, man. You don’t wish the Nazis had won the war, do you?
Like Zhukov, I’m wondering what larger point – if any – is being made in what might otherwise simply be a discussion of the state of German technology during the Second World War. Since this is Stanley Cup playoff season, let me use a hockey analogy to explain (in abstract terms) what’s puzzling me. Assume that Team X has just defeated Team Y in the last game of the playoffs and has won the Stanley Cup. The coach of Team Y is being interviewed after the game, and he tells the sports reporters something along these lines:
"Yes, well, it’s true that the other team won…but that’s an overly simplistic way of looking at the situation. Just look at the hockey equipment that our side was using, or was developing, and you’ll see that we were way ahead of the other team.
"For instance, we invented special high-impact helmets and shoulder pads. Those would have given our guys a huge advantage in body-checking: we could hit the other players much harder and dislocate their shoulders without being injured ourselves. It’s too bad that the development problems we ran into meant that they never advanced beyond the prototype stage because, by golly, if we’d ever gotten them into use on the ice we’d have flattened the opposition.
"Then there’s the super-advanced skate blades we produced. They gave our guys 10% more speed than the other team could manage on their old-fashioned conventional skates – or at least they did for the three players we were able to equip with them, because we only had time to manufacture three pairs before the playoffs ended. Think of the difference they would have made if all of our players had had them! It’s unfortunate that their production was delayed by the fact that our suppliers also had to work on all those other Advanced Hockey Equipment Initiative projects that didn’t turn out to be quite so useful – like the one to develop light-amplifying helmet visors, which would have allowed our guys to keep playing if the hockey arena lighting had failed, or the system to encrypt the player numbers on the back of their hockey jerseys, so that our guys would be able to decode the numbers of their team-mates while leaving the opposition unable to recognize anyone from behind.
"And we especially outclassed the other team with our hyper-polymer composite hockey sticks. Those were by far our greatest technological triumph! They could fire the puck faster and straighter than any normal wooden stick the opposition had. We would have gotten them on the ice long before the playoffs started, of course, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the owner of our team insisted that these sticks should also have the capability to shoot pucks along curved trajectories as well as shooting them straight. Our players thought that this additional capability was a waste of time and effort, when what they really wanted was just a simple straighter-shooting stick, but the owner firmly believed that a curve-shooting stick would fool the other side’s goalie a lot better.
"Anyway, we did manage to equip most of our players with these super-sticks in time for the final three games, so that was a big plus on our side. It’s only at that point, however, that we discovered how easily the super-sticks broke. They were a real headache to replace because they were so expensive and took so long to manufacture. But that’s the price you have to pay for quality. Just look at Team X’s equipment if you don’t believe me! Their old wooden sticks were so cheap that they broke even more often than our super-sticks! Okay, it’s true that for every stick they broke they had two dozen new ones ready to replace it, but that’s just because they were so cheap to manufacture. And anyway, that’s also partly because Team X had ten hockey-stick factories working for them, in contrast to our single factory – so that was a grossly unfair advantage on their part, and if you ask me it shouldn’t really count in the final analysis.
“I just wish the playoffs had lasted longer because we were really on our way to solving those problems. Our general manager got the owner to drop his requirement that our super-sticks shoot curves, so the second-generation models would have been a lot simpler to produce. We also persuaded our owner not to launch a brand-new program to develop a new dual-function stick which could be used both by our goaltenders and our skaters. And as coach, I was starting to put much more emphasis on coming up with a solid game plan for a change. I’ve always believed that my priority should be training the guys physically, to make sure they were the fastest and strongest players on the ice, and I’ve always felt that as long as my boys were well-trained physically they didn’t need a game plan any more complicated than ‘Put the puck in their net and keep it out of ours’. My assistant coach got me to try to be a bit better-organized at tonight’s final game, however, and I must say it did seem to make a difference, so that goes to show that we could have turned things around in that department too if we’d just had a little longer to make use of all our terrific technological advantages.”
This little imaginary monologue is exaggerated, of course, but it’s not fundamentally different from what sports teams (and sports fans) sometimes say when they’ve been knocked out of their game’s playoff series. I’m just curious about the fact that essentially the same thing is being argued in this thread about Germany’s technological developments during the Second World War.
