Malign and defend weapons of the wars.

[SimpleSimon]

Pick a gun, ship, airplane, ration kit, piece of equipment, whatever that you want to criticize and another that you want to defend with some short commentary. Try to provide informed, objective commentary about why the given weapon is your example or even just things you think most don't know and feel free to disagree and reverse a previous post's selection. I'll start with two to get the topic going. 

M1 Garand: War's best rifle and also its most overrated. Proved difficult to adapt for multi-role use especially as a marksman rifle. Grenade launcher setup for the weapon was so despised it was frequently discarded in the field and M1903 Springfield used for it instead. Complicated mechanism for loading 8 round clip made it difficult to extract partially loaded clip and reload weapon and exposed weapon's internals to dust and fouling. Rumors proved untrue, but existed nonetheless, that the weapon's "ping" was giving GIs away. 

Also, Garand thumb. 

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The Tiger I tank: Much maligned interleaved road wheels in fact effective solution for keeping vehicle's volume and size lower than other heavy tanks (if not its weight) which was important for shipping it via rail. True most bridges could not bear the tank's weight but the Tiger could ford most rivers with minimal preparation (less than an hour when properly equipped). Attacks based on the vehicle's expense are true but ignore that manpower was a greater expense and the Tiger promised to and did cut losses down of precious tank crews. 

2nd Example

FG42: War's other best rifle was also its most expensive. In fact prototyping proved to be so difficult because the original design used too many valuable metals like chrome nickel steel and then manganese and then when manganese got too valuable simple sheet metal was used. The sheet metal proved too weak and failures resulted in early production models. Ingenious design of gas-operation system also needlessly complicated by desire for select-fire operation. In the end only around 6,000 were built. 

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Brandt (M2) Mortar: Greater effective range and accuracy than most light mortars even if heavier. Uncomplicated to setup and use. Light weight and small round meant weapon could be fired from almost anywhere with minimal preparation, entirely man portable.