• SSTF@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    The impression I’ve gotten from both past reading, and the video is that they had not at that time shifted to a modern assembly line industrialized kind of mindset. America had things like it’s automotive industry, which had pushed that earlier than in Germany.

    Everything Germans made had a larger amount of handcrafting in it as a necessity of the workflow, and because of that handcrafting there was pride by the individual workers to make really fine quality. The “IDGAF, it meets spec, send it.” mentality of an American lineworker who was running more automated systems or compartmentalized parts of the work was more suitable.

    On top of that, in the Nazi government, individual military leaders were jockying and sending all their own requests for modifications right to the factories. The US had a centralized system for modification requests that prevented that. I don’t think that was an intended feature by the Germans, but a situation that rose organically out of their lack of experience with production at scale.