What's the most famous single weapon of WWII?

Coca-Cola brought us Stallone's M-60...Well, technically, they only distributed it.

 

Don't go blaming Coca-Cola for this train wreck. Hollywood and it's idiots inflicted it upon us.

 

If we count warships as weapons, I'm going for USS Enterprise.

 

While not per se a weapon, the Jeep is another possible choice. Everybody knows what a jeep is.

 

still selling them [ Jeep brand ] ..you see them all over .....popular......I bet a lot of owners do not know their car's history connections..........

 

I like the idea of the jeep, though it's hardly a weapon. I wish I could recall the book, but I read a wonderful passage by a French gear-head who first encountered a jeep coming into Paris on the day of liberation. Even though the entire city was jubilant about the liberation, he was more interested in this vehicle. It had a couple of Americans in it, not LeClerc's forces, and one of the Yanks was also a gear-head and so right in the middle of this madness with machine bursts still ringing down the streets and the resistance men running around shooting back, thousands of Parisians going mad with joy drinking and singing, this driver jumped out and lifted the hood and went over the whole thing with his fellow car enthusiast. Two gear-heads discussing piston displacement and four wheel drive in the middle of one of the great moments of the war.

 

I suppose Enola Gay wins, following the strict guidelines of the thread.

 

By that measure Little Boy is probably more famous although whether or not more recognize the name is an open question.

 

Triton may have hit on this-
Aren't battleships and aircraft delivery systems, not weapons?
The Spitfire carried bombs and cannon/MG. Battleships carried 15 inch guns, the B29 carried the nuclear bombs.
Which was the most famous ww2 weapon most people on earth know- nuclear bomb.
Maybe the machine gun.

 

I am old enough to remember when WWII was a fairly recent event (just 14 years before I was born). I am trying to recall the weapons which penetrated my little kid-who-played-with-army-men consciousness; if they seeped down to me, I think that is a pretty good indicator of how famous they were among adults. When I was about six or seven I knew about the Garand, the Luger, the Tiger tank, the Spitfire, the Stuka, the Zero, the PT Boat, the Bazooka, and of course the Atom Bomb. Pretty sure I knew the Tommy Gun also, and maybe the Me109 and the B17. I knew the Jeep, too; plenty of wartime models were around, and my summer day camp had a couple of them. I started watching Combat! when I was about seven, and that made me conscious of the BAR; The Dirty Dozen introduced me to the Grease Gun (M3 SMG). I was pretty technically ignorant, really, until I started reading the Ballantine WWII Illustrated series when I was about nine. Those introduced me to a whole trove of stuff, a process which continues today.

 

the three stooges cartoons taught me about the '88. comic books about the war always seemed to depict a plane that looks like the stuka. others older people recall are the tiger, flying forts, and the luger. the garand, 45, thompson and grease gun are well-known because they're still around.

but our mother can only recall one plane named enola gay.

 

In regards to the OP specifications though the request was not for weapons but a specific weapon. I.e. not B-29's but Enola Gay. That cuts a lot of famous weapons out of the list. Ships have something of an advantage as they carried specific names. Given the initial parameters though it almost has to be Little man. Since only 3 atomic bombs were detonated during the war and most know of the one dropped on Hiroshima although perhaps not by name.

 

Spitfire's a decent candidate isn't it. Certainly still pervades something in the national consciousness here. P51 maybe a similar place in the US?

Trying to switch my head off and just listing first things that come to mind:
Spitfire, Bren, Sten, MP40, Tiger, Sherman, Thompson, Fairburn Sykes, Lancaster, B17, Atom bombs, Me109, Luger.

 

Was the Garand an awesome weapon because of the .30 caliber bullet. Maybe...Was the Spitfire excellent because of its .303-no.
Thinking a battle ship is not a weapon, rather a weapons platform.
Chicken or egg

 

Well a ship can certainly be used as a weapon as the Captain and crew of the Hipper would attest. Is a tank a weapon or a weapon carrier? How about a jeep or a plane? The lines get awfully murky as one could argue that ships, at least WWII ones, weren't really designed to ram opposing vessels nor were aircraft and so weren't weapons yet the Japanese did design planes, boats, and subs to do just that.