Battle Stations
The
technology of war
Technology was a dominant and determining theme of World War II. The conflict began with Polish horse-mounted cavalry – symbol of a technology thousands of years old – charging German tanks, the embodiment of mobile 20th-century warfare. It ended with the destruction of two Japanese cities by atomic bombs, harbingers of a new era of superpower confrontation.
All the key technological developments made in 1939-45 stemmed from pre-war science and research. However, the demands of mid-20th-century warfare gave them a new urgency and accelerated their arrival on the battlefield.
The term 'battlefield' itself required a new definition, as it was sometimes remote from clashing armies. Bletchley Park – where British cryptanalysts cracked the German Enigma code, a key triumph of Allied technology – lay deep in the British countryside.
Innovation and obsolescence lie at the heart of the technology war. The moment when weapons are introduced, the speed with which they are countered and the often small performance margins that ensure victory or lead to defeat are factors that bear heavily on military history. This leaves the historian to ponder a number of intriguing 'might have beens':
• If the Germans had developed an effective four-engine bomber in the 1930s, might the outcome of the Blitz have been very different?
• Without the development of radar and the Supermarine Spitfire fighter, would the RAF have won the Battle of Britain?
• The introduction of the German Me262 jet fighter in 1943, rather than 1944, would have inflicted crippling losses on American daylight bombing formations and would have prolonged the war. As it was, the groundbreaking Me262 arrived too late to change the course of the conflict. It could not save the Third Reich, but it was a signpost to the future.
