Love this answer - not sure it is entirely what a Fritz on the front line was thinking about when being shot at, but it does give a bit of thought to the things that REALLY matter in war - which is not individual weapons or whether the M2 balances the FG42, or how fast the grind is.
The lack of post-grind gameplay and real world economics puts Enlisted firmly into the not-a-serious-wargame pot for me - a bit of fun… and I’ve been RPG-ing and building characters for over 40 years so do enjoy that… but then what?
Originally Answered: What did the Germans think of the .50 Browning machine gun fighting against it?
The Browning was justifiably hated, but perhaps not for the reasons you think.
Look, you’re on a Q&A site in the Weapons category asking a question about one particular model of weapon. I get that fetishizing weapons is fun. I did that too, when I was younger. But weapons don’t win wars. Beans and bullets do, and the M2 was a constant reminder that the Americans had more of both, and that was honestly more important than anything else about it. You have to admit, ‘machinegun but bullet bigger’ is not a hard idea to have, nor was it one unique to the US (the other Axis powers sans Germany did field 12.7mm MGs). Transporting machinegun numbers of bigger bullets is hard to do, though!
Staring down the barrel of a 2cm or 3.7cm cannon - Germany’s ‘slap it on any given halftrack’ direct-fire support weapons, as it had no truly analogous antimateriel MG - was just as deadly and demoralizing.
What made the M2 special was that the Americans
- always had ammunition for them, and
- slapped one on everything, often along with someone explicitly to crew it
I can’t emphasize enough the importance of these two points. In the former case, imagine you’re a German soldier. Your army has weapons as good, but it has to employ them carefully, both because of limited ammo and straight up limited weapons! Meanwhile, everywhere you go, the distinctive BATBATBAT of the M2. Not just at targets, but suspected targets and sometimes just at things that looked fun to shoot. These guys lacked for nothing. Fighting with your hand tied behind your back is frustrating and demoralizing.
The latter point mattered too. Attacking a US tank platoon with a fighter bomber? Guess what, each tank has three MGs including an AA .50! An Armored Rifle platoon fielded something like five .50s, that I believe the infantrymen could dismount from the halftrack if they wanted to. Armored car? .50. Heavy tractor? .50. Tank recovery crane? .50! Mobile artillery, i.e. meant to stay miles from the front? Slap a .50 on there with the might of Zeus, why not? Again, imagine you’re the German soldier - you can’t get replacements for your line infantry unit (that walks everywhere) to bring it up to strength, meanwhile the Americans crew empty transports returning from dropping off their loads with co-drivers and gunners.
Even a Jeep was not too small!
And these are just the officially sanctioned mountings. You couldn’t be guaranteed someone hadn’t bolted one to something else in the field.
tl;dr the Germans resented the M2 for the American logistical capacity its constant use demonstrated that they feared their own side couldn’t match. This is where I think people misunderstand the ‘wonder weapon’ propaganda; it was as much to calm this sort of anxiety as to actually make the Allies feel threatened
