OT: German vs Allied Tech in WW2

[Sanjuro]

This thread was inspired by a post in the thread "In defence of the Red Army" by 95th Rifleman, which I partly disagree with:

WW2 is a good point.

Every allied nation was behind Germany in terms of tech and yet Germany still lost.

Compare the M4 Sherman to the later model Panzer IV's let alone the Panther and Tiger. The German Panzerfaust and Panzerschrek were superior to both the Bazooka and the joke (sorry, by joke I mean the british PIAT). The Germans had the jet aircraft which were superior in every way to the allied fighters.

The problem Germany had was numbers and fuel. In a WW3 scenario the Russians have a massive numerical advantage and this could prove as telling as it was in WW2.

If it takes ten T72's to kill an Abrams and the Russians have those tanks to spare, the Abrams will die. It's how the American shermans killed Tigers.

Germany's tech lead was nothing like as clear cut as that; in a few sectors they had a clear lead, but failed to exploit it. In other areas they were completely left behind.
In the example of aircraft: Germany began WW2 with what appeared to be an unbeatable air force, yet within a year was beaten comprehensively by a smaller opponent. On paper Germany had superior aircraft, yet a combination of rapid technical innovation (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling's_orifice ) and greatly superior command and control completely negated their advantages.
Later in the war, both Germany and Britain built jet fighters. The ME262 suffered from 2 problems- the first was Hitler's asinine idea that it should be a bomber. The second, lesser known, was that the engines kept failing- for many months in service over 50% of missions had to be aborted because of (non-combat) engine failures. The British jet engine, on the other hand, was a lower-tech device with a centrifugal compressor- which at the time was a much more practical engine because there was one large casting, instead of dozens of fragile compressor blades.
The Panzerfaust and Panzerschrek were based (with improvements) on Bazookas captured from the Soviets [source: Modern Small Arms, by Frederick Myatt MC]: fair point about the joke though!