Historians have generally thought of the Type XXI [submarine] — along with other systems like the Me 262, V-1 and V-2 rockets, and the Tiger tank — as an example of Wunderwaffen, wonder weapons. Since 1945 many have fixated on the revolutionary military technologies that the Third Reich developed in the last two years of the war. The cultural impetus behind the concept, as implicitly or explicitly acknowledged by historians in the uneven and largely enthusiastic literature on the subject, was an irrational faith in technology to prevail in operationally or strategically complex and desperate situations — a conviction amounting to a disease, to which many in the Third Reich were prone in the latter years of the Second World War. To the extent that it shaped decision making, faith in the Wunderwaffen was a special, superficial kind of technological determinism, a confidence in the power of technology to prevail over the country’s strategic, operational, and doctrinal shortcomings. To the extent that leaders, officers, engineers, and scientists after 1943 believed innovation to be the answer to Germany’s strategic dilemmas, they displayed a naive ignorance of how technology interacts with cultural and other factors to influence the course of events. In particular, they reflected a willful ignorance of the extent to which even substantial technological superiority has proved indecisive in human conflict throughout history.
Marcus Jones, “Innovation For Its Own Sake: The Type XXI U-boat”, Naval War College Review, 2014-04.
