Yet for years, the main selling point for any delicate equipment has been the phrase, "German-engineered".
"That was the reason a generation of German engineers after the war quietly stopped building tanks the way they used to build them and started building them the way the Americans had."
"In the spring of 1943, the finest tank engineers in Nazi Germany were handed an American tank captured in the deserts of Tunisia. They spent the next two years trying to understand it. What they wrote in their private reports, in the technical language of men who could not afford to lie to themselves, was something Berlin did not want to hear, and something the American soldiers who had built these tanks and bled inside them would never live to know.
"This is the story of one Sherman and what it did to the engineers of the Third Reich when they finally took it apart. The wind came off the Dorsale Mountains at dusk, carrying grit and the smell of burnt oil. Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, mid-February 1943. The battle was over. What remained was a landscape of dead machines.
American tanks lay everywhere. Some were burned black, hatches thrown open, turrets twisted at angles no factory ever intended. Others sat almost peaceful in the dust, engines silent, tracks intact, as if their crews had simply walked away. Which, in many cases, they had. At Sidi Bouzid and in the days that followed at Kasserine Pass, the US Second Corps had learned what the Afrika Korps already knew, that the desert punished mistakes without mercy, and that green troops paid the highest price. But among the wrecks, a different discovery was being made. German recovery teams moved between the hulks in the early mornings, before the sun turned the metal too hot to touch. They were looking for intelligence, for maps, for anything the retreating Americans had left behind. What they found was a tank, an M4 Sherman, standing upright on its tracks, undamaged, its engine cold, but its interior almost untouched. The crew had bailed out in a panic and run. The machine itself was intact. The men who found it climbed inside. They ran gloved hands over the seats, over the controls, over the strange American labels stamped in English on every gauge. And then, because that was their job, they tried to start it. The engine caught on the first attempt. For a long moment, no one spoke.". . . More...
Inside the Chieftain's Hatch: M4A1 Sherman part 1
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