Weapons That Fought the Second World War

The Bf 109 entered Luftwaffe service in 1937 and first saw combat in the Spanish Civil War. With 34,248 airframes built it was the most-produced fighter in history, and Erich Hartmann, credited with 352 victories, flew it.

The Spitfire was the British answer to the Bf 109. Its elliptical wing gave it exceptional maneuverability, and over twenty thousand were built, making it the longest continuously produced British fighter of the era.

The Panzer IV was adopted on September 27, 1939, and stayed in production for the whole war. At 8,553 vehicles it became the most numerous German tank, kept current by up-armoring and up-gunning successive variants.

The first T-34 production examples were completed in September 1940. Its combination of firepower, armor and mobility shaped fighting on the Eastern Front and led on to the T-44, T-54 and T-55 series.

The B-17 entered service in April 1938 and dropped over 640,000 tons of bombs on Germany and occupied Europe. Crews flew massed daylight formations and took heavy losses before long-range escorts arrived.

The Mustang, fitted with a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, gained the range to escort bombers deep into Germany and back. Its pilots were credited with 4,950 enemy aircraft, and from 1944 it helped break the German fighter defense of daylight raids.

The Sten entered service in 1941 as a cheap British 9 millimeter submachine gun, costing roughly eleven dollars against about two hundred for the American Thompson. Several million were made, including drops to European resistance movements.

First used in combat in 1941, the Katyusha fired a rapid salvo of unguided rockets from a truck. German troops nicknamed it Stalin's Organ, and it became a signature weapon of Red Army offensives from Stalingrad onward.

The bazooka entered United States service in 1942 and gave individual infantrymen a practical anti-tank capability for the first time. Eisenhower later named it one of four tools of victory, alongside the atomic bomb, the Jeep and the C-47.

The MG 42 entered German army service in 1942 and fired about 1,200 rounds per minute, nearly double comparable Allied guns. It needed about 75 man-hours to build against 150 for the MG 34, and its descendant, the MG3, is still in service.

Produced from 1942 in numbers exceeding forty-nine thousand, the Sherman was reliable and easy to build, maintain and transport. It was often outmatched by later German tanks, but the Allies could replace losses far faster than Germany could.

First launched operationally against London and Antwerp in September 1944, the V-2 was the first long-range guided ballistic missile. It struck without warning, and captured V-2 technology and personnel seeded postwar American and Soviet rocket programs.

Developed under the Manhattan Project, atomic bombs were used in war only in August 1945, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered days later, and the weapon then drove the Cold War arms race and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.