George Patten described the M1 rifle as a super weapon. Despite all the noise about B29s, aircraft carriers and atom bombs, the rifle is still the most basic weapon of war and any major advantage in that is gigantic.
Kids growing up playing baseball were able to throw hand grenades further than kids growing up with karate. Imagine that....
The most major weapon you see in those films of island invasions appears to be the flame thrower; the most common way Japanese died in WW-II likewise appears to be having been burned to death.
The Germans never had any sort of a counterpart to the Browning heavy machinegun. Again something basic. The only real German advantage seems to have been in tanks.
There were a dozen or so very simple things which Hitler did wrong; doing any two of them right would probably have won for him. The simplest would have been simply not invading Russia. I've had Russians tell me the soviet state would have collapsed within another five or six years and Hitler could have picked up the pieces.
I think you help make Dan Fuji’s point.
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The German MG42 was so good that evolved models are still in use today. One of its iterations was the US M60 of the VN era and beyond.
