This is one of the more insightful things I've read this week: "By the late 1930s [the Germans] had developed the weapons that would in the main be used to fight the Second World War.....When the war came they tried to speed the process of development up, to win the war with the weapons of the 1950s. The result was a technical disaster: shortages of resources, constant political interference, the inherent difficulty of accelerating research work at the forefront of science, all meant that German forces got little in terms of performance from the new weapons to match the great expense of producing them. The Allies...stuck with the weapons of the late 1930s, and pushed them successfully to their limits, in most cases overtaking the performance of Germany's most conventional weaponry. When after the war they came to develop missiles, jets, advanced submarine technology, and a host of other vanguard equipment, they simply took German scientists and blueprints." Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, 243.