Markup View

Author: AgProv

Mar 8th 2013 at 12:03:57 PM

Real Life: owing to short-sighted defence cuts between the wars, the Royal Navy entered WW2 with only obsolete ''biplane'' fighter-bombers to equip its aircraft carriers.  Yet the Swordfish, a biplane more suited to 1914-18, managed to catch most of the Italian Navy in its home port of Taranto, causing widespread destruction in an attack the Japanese studied and emulated at Pearl Harbor. A year or so later, it was a carrier-launched Swordfish biplane which fired the torpedo that crippled the Bismarck, leaving Germany's most modern battleship wide open for the surface fleet to catch up with her.

Both Great Britain and Russia had obselete heavy machine guns left over from WW1. The Russian Maxim and the British Vickers were effectively the same weapon, but one which required two or three men to transport, emplace and fire. Water-cooled, if no water was available,  the weapon would overheat and become unworkable.  The German MG42  was air-cooled with a faster rate of fire, could be emplaced in seconds as opposed to fifteen minutes, and used by one man.  Both Britain and Russia eventually hit on massing these weapons together to minimise these weaknesses and to provide saturation firepower    - effectively using them almost as emplaced artillery and not as tactical infantry MG's. British machine-gun battalions proved destructively efficient in Italy, where multiples of 64 Vickers MG's fired together at one section of German front to soften it up for an attack, allowing the attacking infantry to get as close as they could whilst returning fire was suppressed.