Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

MASS, GENERALSHIP and the institutional effectiveness of armies chiefly influence battlefield outcomes, and so they did in Normandy. But the quality of rival weapons systems, especially tanks, also played an important role. The British and U.S. armies had excellent artillery. The Americans equipped their infantry with a good automatic rifle, the M‑1 Garand, but a poor light machine gun, the BAR. Their 2.36-inch handheld “bazooka” antitank rocket—named for a weird wind instrument invented by American comic Bob Burns—lacked adequate penetration. The British Army boasted a reliable rifle, the .303 Mk IV single-shot Lee-Enfield, and the much-loved Bren light machine gun. The Germans had better weapons; in particular, they could generate extraordinary violence with their belt-fed MG‑42 machine gun, known to the Allies as the “spandau,” of which some 750,000 were produced. On the battlefield, the MG‑42’s rasping 1,200-rounds-per-minute (rpm) rate of fire sounded far more lethal than the slow hammer of the Bren’s or BAR’s 500 rpm. The British and Americans also had Vickers and Browning heavy machine guns, but the MG‑42, easily manufactured from metal stampings and capable of changing barrels in five seconds, was a key factor in the German army’s tactical performance. So too was the Panzerfaust handheld antitank projector: deadly at close range—much more so than the U.S. bazooka or British PIAT—and produced at the rate of 200,000 a month, the Faust played an important part in chec...