Comment by mtdewcmu

I have a theory that even though the bombers didn't necessarily always hit what they were aiming at, the bombing campaign was important in tying up the Luftwaffe and degrading its capabilities through attrition, thereby hastening achieving air superiority, which provided a major advantage in the later ground war. I'm not sure that better tanks would have made as much difference; and, furthermore, I suspect that the US was able to absorb the costs of the air war without much difficulty, so it wasn't really siphoning resources away from things like tanks.

I'm not sure what to make of the Sherman tank. On the one hand, it was famously under-armored and under-gunned; on the other hand, it was fast, maneuverable, reliable, fuel efficient, cheap to produce, and perhaps easier to ship across the ocean than heavier German-style tanks would have been. So, in the final accounting, I'm not sure if it was really a bad tank or if its shortcomings were justified in the big picture.

I'm not any kind of WWII expert, so please fill me in on what I don't know.