World Wars of the Twentieth Century 359
became well and truly industrialized as industry became no less well
and truly militarized.
More spectacular and perhaps more important were new devices
that came into being before and during World War II. At the begin
ning, radar was the most notable such innovation. British scientists
and engineers discovered how to use reflections of short radio waves
to locate airplanes at sufficient distances to allow their interception by
fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain. Radar continued to develop
very rapidly during the war and found new uses in navigation and gun
laying; but other technologies—jet airplanes, proximity fuses, am
phibious vehicles, guided missiles, rockets, and, most complicated of
all, atomic warheads—soon rivaled radar’s early importance.
Decisions about how to exploit these new technologies, as well as
less bizarre choices between new designs for tanks, guns, and air
planes, played a very important role in determining the course and
outcome of military operations. If Hitler had not refused to put his
full support behind the V-2 rocket until July 1943, for example, it is
hard to believe that the Allied landings in Normandy could have taken
place,^96 since the harbors of southern England where the cross
channel flotillas assembled presented excellent targets for V-2 rockets.
On the other hand, if European refugee scientists had not persuaded
the British and American governments to mount the enormous effort
of research and development required to produce the first atomic
bomb,^97 not only would the final stages of the Japanese war have taken
a different turn, but postwar international relations would have been
profoundly different, since it is hard to believe that any government
would have undertaken the enormous expenses of such a risky project
in time of peace. (When the Manhattan Project was at its peak,
120,000 persons worked at it, including an extraordinary proportion
of the world’s leading physicists. The cost was over two billion dollars;
and until the final tests, no one could be absolutely sure that atomic
theory could be embodied in the engineering of an explodable
warhead.)
In these and innumerable other cases, some famous and others
presumably buried in some forgotten file among the might-have-beens
- Cf. Walter Dornberger, V2 (London, 1954), pp. 93, 100; Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Crusade in Europe (New York, 1948), p. 260.
- Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alli
ance (New York, 1975) is a recent and readable as well as judicious account.
Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945 (London, 1964) is a fine
official history.
