If everything could be equaled, what was the better tank? The M1 of today or the German Tiger of WW 2?
The B-52 is a poor analogy. Almost no part of any B-52 flying today was made 50 years ago. All of those aircraft still in service have been totally gutted and rebuilt many times. Even then, their roles are far more restricted today than in say the 1960's. The B-52 can only operate in conditions of total American air superiority and limited to non-existent enemy air defenses - like Afghanistan. The B-52 only remains in service because it is too expensive to replace them. The Tiger was not even a good tank in WW2. It was too heavy making it difficult to transport and limiting the terrain it could cross. It was too expensive and time consuming to build. It was too complex making it difficult to keep in service. It was unreliable - these last two factors contributing to appallingly low serviceability rates. And finally, it was built to a requirement which was no longer valid by the time the vehicle was ready for production. Really the whole program was a waste of resources. The WW2 equivalent to the modern M1 in the German army was really the Panther, intended to be the mass-production standard tank of the Panzer divisions where the Tiger was a limited production vehicle intended for issue to specialist independent battalions held at Corps or Army Group level. Unfortunately the Panther had most of the same problems the Tiger did. No tank from WW2 of course comes anywhere close to a modern tank in terms of mobility, protection or firepower.
The Allies were outgunned by the German 88 mm anti-tank and Flak guns during WWII so why didn’t they just reverse-engineer it?
This is a false assumption based on the unintended narrative built by the winning side’s experience in world war 2. All the major nations involved in the war had equivalent weapons systems. In WW2 the Germans were the first to turn their medium AA guns toward the ground to shoot at advancing armor as a desperate move to stop the French tanks at Arras (21 May 1940.) At the time they were the only guns that could penetrate some of the heavier tanks’ armor. This event started the legendary mystique of the German 88. Which to be fair, the Germans made better use of these weapons during some very important defensive operations which just added to the weapon’s fame.USA had the 90mm M1/M2/M3 AA gun (ever have one of those G.I. Joe AA guns?) The soviets had the 85mm M1939 AA gun (which they later adapted for use on the T-34/85’s), and the UK had the QF 3.7in AA gun.All these weapons eventually found use on tanks and not even in such a wide time frame. The Germans and the Soviets were first to market, but they had a lot of pressure to innovate given the intensity and scale of their fight.The short answer is this: They didn’t have to reverse engineer anything, because they all already had it.
Why was the German's military technology the best during WW2?
As an earlier poster pointed out the Germans often invested in quality over quantity, they were also blessed with several world class designers and engineers, men such as Willy Messerschmitt and Ferdinand Porsche, and they were good at incorporating combat experience into design improvements. However, their overall record is patchier than you might think. For example, it is often assumed that the Germans early war victories were due to better equipment, but in fact in was usually due to better training and tactics. Their equipment was sometimes inferior in critical areas. Read any account of the early fighting on the Eastern front to see just how shocked the Germans were by the T-34. Also their equipment tended to be complex and early versions were often plagued by teething troubles. Areas where the Germans were clearly superior included optics (their gun sights were suberb), jet engine technology, missile design (the V2), and submarines. Areas were they were very good but not necessarily better than the Allies included single engine fighter design (Me-109 and FW-190), anti-tank weaponry, particularly high velocity anti-tank guns, heavy tank design (though the Panther was much influenced by the Soviet T-34) and warship design. Areas that they lagged the Allies would include radar, long range, multi-engine bombers and anti-submarine warfare. And of course, their ultimate technological failure was to take completely the wrong path toward engineering an atomic bomb.
Is it true that fifty T-34s lost a battle against one Tiger I tank?
Yes.On July 8th, 1943, a Tiger tank commanded by Franz Staudegger took on fifty attacking T-34 tanks as the only armored vehicle on its side (though it did have infantry support), destroying twenty-seven enemy tanks and forcing the remainder to break off their attack and fall back. Staudegger's Tiger then itself ran out of armor-piercing ammunition and retreated behind the lines, but it had stopped the Soviet attack.The Soviets had their own share of these victories against heroic odds, of course - at one point early in the German invasion of the USSR, a single KV-2 heavy tank held off the spearhead of an entire division on its own for more than a day, destroying over two dozen tanks and several anti-tank guns before it was itself destroyed.Similarly, at the Battle of Krasnogvardeysk, Soviet commander Zinoviy Kolobanov used five KV-1 heavy tanks attacking one at a time against a much larger German armored force - once each KV-1 ran out of ammo, he would send in another. None of the Soviet tanks were knocked out, and they destroyed over 40 German tanks. After the battle, Kolobanov and his crew found that their tank had sustained 156 hits - none of which were able to penetrate the heavy armor!All in all, in the early to middle periods of World War II heavy tanks (when used properly, which they were often not) were able to defeat many times their number of lighter vehicles. By 1944, however, improvements in tactics, weapons, and ammunition meant that heavy tanks were far more vulnerable, even when facing "only" medium or light tanks.