Technology during World War II
The massive research and development demands of the war included the Manhattan Project, the effort to quickly develop an atomic bomb, or nuclear fission warhead. It was perhaps the most profound military development of the war, and had a great impact on the scientific community, among other things creating a network of national laboratories in the United States.
Development was completed too late for use in the European Theater of World War II. Its invention meant that a single bomber aircraft could carry a weapon sufficiently powerful to devastate entire cities, making conventional warfare against a nation with an arsenal of them suicidal.
The strategic importance of the bomb, and its even more powerful fusion-based successors, did not become fully apparent until the United States lost its monopoly on the weapon in the post-war era. The Soviet Union developed and tested their first nuclear weapon in 1949, based partially on information obtained from Soviet espionage in the United States. The competition between the two superpowers would lead to the Cold War. The strategic implications of such a massively destructive weapon still reverberate in the 21st century.
There was also a German project to develop an atomic weapon. This failed for a variety of reasons, most notably German anti-Semitism. The first tier of continental high energy physicists (Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, and Oppenheimer), were either Jewish or, in the case of Enrico Fermi, married to a Jew. When they left Germany, the only significant atomic physicist left in Germany was Heisenberg, who dragged his feet on the project. He made some faulty calculations suggesting that the Germans would need significantly more heavy water than was necessary. The project was then doomed due to insufficient resources.
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Electronics, Communications and Intelligence
Electronics rose to prominence quickly in World War II. While prior to the war few electronic devices were seen as important pieces of equipment, by the middle of the war such instruments as radar and ASDIC (sonar) had proven their value. Additionally, equipment designed for communications and the interception of those communications was becoming critical.
Digital electronics, particularly, were also given a massive boost by war-related research. The pressing need for numerous time-critical calculations for various projects like code-breaking and ballistics tables accentuated the need for the development of electronic computer technology. The semi-secret ENIAC and the super-secret Colossus demonstrated that devices using thousands of valves (vacuum tubes) could be reliable enough to be useful, paving the way for the post-war development of stored program computers.
The United Kingdom and the United States were the leaders in electronics. The US center for basic radar development was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory. The British developed the magnetron which is now used in microwave ovens.
Electronic and optical countermeasures such as jamming and radar absorbing material were developed.
While the war stimulated many technologies, such as radio and radar development, it slowed down related yet non-critical fields such as television and radio.
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Industrial technology
While the development of new equipment was rapid, it was also important to be able to produce these tools and get them to the troops in appropriate quantity. Those nations that were able to maximize their industrial capacity and mobilize it for the war effort were most successful at equipping their troops in a timely way with adequate material. An outstanding German innovation was the Jerrycan which carries by its name a tribute to its success.
One of the biggest developments was the ability to produce synthetic rubber. Natural rubber was mainly harvested in the South Pacific, and the Allies were cut off from a large quantity of it due to Japanese expansion. Thus the development of synthetic rubber allowed for the Allied war machine to continue growing, giving the US a significant technical edge as World War II continued.
For the Germans it was the development of alternative fuels as in hydrogen peroxide - which would be a forerunner to the development of fuel-cell technology and synthetic fuel technology.
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New Medicines
One of the most dramatic single medical advance was probably the wide spread use of penicillin to treat wounds and bacterial diseases.
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See also
- Military funding of science
- Military production during World War II
- Technology during World War I
- Technological escalation during World War II
- List of equipment used in World War II
- Operation Paperclip
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References
Anderson, J. (2005). Ludwig Prandtl's boundary layer. Physics Today.
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