>>64034576
How do you look at Americans being perfectly happy with the bazooka, Russia requesting tons of them, and the Germans, copying them with the shrek, and conclude that the German design was better, and Americans should’ve copied it. The normal Wheraboo playbook here would be to call the LAW a panzerfaust copy and take credit for it or something. The panzerfaust was a menace to tanks, but was much harder to use because of its significantly shorter range. If you had an overabundance of operators, it was probably the better weapon to hand out to conscripts or Volksstrum, but America and Britain were both very “steel over flesh,” and a design that kept the operator safer would have been more appealing. A longer range weapon is also going to be more tactically flexible, and is going to allow more firepower to be available to one user, because not only was it reloadable, but it could more often be fired from a range in which the operator could safely reload it. We know that there was fairly significant research and development, going into infantry anti-tank weapons throughout the war, since the bazooka was updated multiple times, so it’s not like it was an area where America was simply not paying attention. They clearly cared a lot, but they clearly liked their design better. In fact, late and postwar development of recoiless rifles took infantry anti-tank capability in the opposite direction of the panzerfaust, being even more focused on range and reloadability than the bazooka.