the historical reference in question:
I love how westerners need to keep rediscovering the “simpler equipment that you can actually make a bunch of beats the amazing wunderwaffe” idea over and over again, you’d think WW2, you know, literally the largest war ever fought, would teach some lessons, but I guess not
It’s been a huge part of re-writing the history of WWII in the USA. I think as historical memory tried to scrub the reality that the Soviets did most of the fighting, USians needed a story to tell themselves about how it is they beat the Nazis despite fighting on a fraction of them. And I think this narrative that Nazi military technology was so amazing and they had all these brilliant weapons is part of that. It fits with Neoliberal conceptions of war where a small number of expensive toys win wars.
They can tell themselves the Nazis were doing human wave attacks while they were fighting all the cool war-winning super-weapons.
The American military memory of ww2 was heavily influenced by nazi officers writing books about the eastern front for Americans to “learn” about how to fight the soviets, accepted pretty uncritically