Technology played a significant role in World War II. Some of the technologies used during the war were developed during the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s. Many were developed in response to needs and lessons learned during the war, and others were beginning their development as the war ended. Wars often have major effects on peacetime technologies, but World War II had a profound and lasting effect on many everyday technologies and devices that are used today. Technology played an unprecedented role in the conduct of World War II and had a critical impact on its outcome.
Many types of technology were customized for military use, and major developments occurred across several fields including: Weaponry: ships, vehicles, submarines, aircraft, tanks, artillery, small arms; and biological, chemical, and atomic weapons Logistical support: vehicles necessary for transporting soldiers and supplies, such as trains, trucks, tanks, ships, and aircraft Communications and intelligence: devices used for remote sensing, navigation, communication, cryptography and espionage Medicine: surgical innovations, chemical medicines, and techniques Rocketry: guided missiles, medium-range ballistic missiles, and unmanned combat aerial vehicles Military weapons technology experienced rapid advances during World War II, and over six years there was a disorientating rate of change in combat in everything from aircraft to small arms. Indeed, the war began with most armies using some technology that had changed little from that of World War I, and in some cases, had remained unchanged since the 19th century. For instance cavalry, trenches, and World War I-era battleships were normal in 1940, but six years later, armies around the world had developed jet aircraft, ballistic missiles, and even atomic weapons in the case of the United States.
World War II was the first war where military operations often targeted the research efforts of the enemy. This included the exfiltration of Niels Bohr from German-occupied Denmark to Britain in 1943; the sabotage of Norwegian heavy water production; and the bombing of Peenemunde. Military operations were also conducted to obtain intelligence on the enemy's technology; for example, the Bruneval Raid for German radar and Operation Most III for the German V-2.
Interwar Period
In August 1919 the British Ten Year Rule declared the government should not expect another war within ten years. Consequently, they conducted very little military R&D. In contrast, Germany and the Soviet Union were dissatisfied powers who, for different reasons, cooperated with each other on military R&D. The Soviets offered Weimar Germany facilities deep inside the USSR for building and testing arms and for military training, well away from Treaty inspectors' eyes. In return, they asked for access to German technical developments, and for assistance in creating the Red Army General Staff.
The great artillery manufacturer Krupp was soon active in the south of the USSR, near Rostov-on-Don. In 1925, the Lipetsk fighter-pilot school was established near Lipetsk to train the first pilots for the future Luftwaffe.Gasiorowski, Zygmunt J. (1958). The Russian Overture to Germany of December 1924. The Journal of Modern History 30 (2), 99–117. Since 1926, the Reichswehr used the Kama tank school in Kazan, and tested chemical weapons at the Tomka gas test site in Saratov Oblast. In turn, the Red Army gained access to these training facilities, as well as military technology and theory from Weimar Germany.Dyakov, Yu. L. & T. S. Bushueva. The Red Army and the Wehrmacht. How the Soviets Militarized Germany, 1922–1933, and Paved the Way for Fascism. New York: Prometheus Books, 1995.
In the late 1920s, Germany helped the Soviet industry begin to modernize and to assist in the establishment of tank production facilities at the Leningrad Bolshevik Factory and the Kharkiv Locomotive Factory. This cooperation would break down when Hitler rose to power in 1933. The failure of the World Disarmament Conference marked the beginnings of the arms race leading to war.
In France the lesson of World War I was translated into the Maginot Line which was supposed to hold a line at the border with Germany. The Maginot Line did achieve its political objective of ensuring that any German invasion had to go through Belgium, ensuring that France would have Britain as a military ally. France and Russia had more, and much better, tanks than Germany at the outbreak of their hostilities in 1940. As in World War I, the French generals expected that armour would mostly serve to help infantry break the static trench lines and storm machine gun nests. They thus spread the armour among their infantry divisions, ignoring the new German doctrine of blitzkrieg based on fast, coordinated movement using concentrated armour attacks, against which the only effective defense was mobile anti-tank guns, as the old infantry antitank rifles were ineffective against the new medium and heavy tanks.
Air power was a major concern of Germany and Britain between the wars. The trade in aircraft engines continued, with Britain selling hundreds of its best to German firms – which used them in the first generation of aircraft and much improved them for use in later German aircraft. These new inventions led the way to major success for the Germans in World War II.
Germany was at the forefront of internal combustion engine development. The laboratory of Ludwig Prandtl at University of Göttingen was the world center of aerodynamics and fluid dynamics in general, until its dispersal after the Allied victory. This contributed to the German development of jet aircraft and of submarines with improved underwater performance. Meanwhile, the RAF secretly developed the Chain Home radar and Dowding system for defending against enemy planes.
Induced nuclear fission was discovered in Germany in 1939 by Otto Hahn (and expatriate Jews in Sweden), but many of the scientists needed to develop nuclear power had already been lost, due to Nazi anti-Jewish and anti-intellectual policies.
Science has long been relevant to military technology and scientific contributions have often been decisive. As Ian Jacob, the wartime military secretary of Winston Churchill, famously remarked on the influx of refugee scientists (including 19 Nobel laureates), "the Allies won the [Second World] War because our German scientists were better than their German scientists".
Allied cooperation
The Allies of World War II cooperated extensively in the development and manufacture of existing and new technologies to support military operations and intelligence gathering during the Second World War. There were various ways in which the allies cooperated, including the American Lend-Lease scheme and hybrid weapons such as the Sherman Firefly as well as the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons research project which was absorbed into the American-led Manhattan Project. Several technologies invented in Britain proved critical to the military and were widely manufactured by the Allies during the Second World War.Paul Kennedy, Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War (2013)James W. Brennan, "The Proximity Fuze: Whose Brainchild?," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (1968) 94#9 pp 72–78.
The origin of the cooperation stemmed from a 1940 visit by the Aeronautical Research Committee chairman Henry Tizard that arranged to transfer U.K. military technology to the U.S. in case of the successful invasion of the U.K. that Hitler was planning as Operation Sea Lion. Tizard led a British technical mission, known as the Tizard Mission, containing details and examples of British technological developments in fields such as radar, jet propulsion and also the early British research into the atomic bomb. One of the devices brought to the U.S. by the Mission, the resonant cavity magnetron, was later described as "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores".James Phinney Baxter III (Official Historian of the Office of Scientific Research and Development), Scientists Against Time (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1946), page 142.
Vehicles
The best jet fighters at the end of the war easily outflew any of the leading aircraft of 1939, such as the Spitfire Mark I. The early war bombers that caused such carnage would almost all have been shot down in 1945, many by radar-aimed, proximity fuse-detonated anti-aircraft fire, just as the 1941 "invincible fighter", the Zero, had by 1944 become the "turkey" of the "Marianas Turkey Shoot". The best late-war tanks, such as the Soviet JS-3 heavy tank or the German Panther medium tank, handily outclassed the best tanks of 1939 such as Panzer IIIs. In the navy the battleship, long seen as the dominant element of sea power, was displaced by the greater range and striking power of the aircraft carrier. The chaotic importance of amphibious landings stimulated the Western Allies to develop the Higgins boat, a primary troop landing craft; the DUKW, a six-wheel-drive amphibious truck, amphibious tanks to enable beach landing attacks and Landing Ship, Tanks to land tanks on beaches. Increased organization and coordination of amphibious assaults coupled with the resources necessary to sustain them caused the complexity of planning to increase by orders of magnitude, thus requiring formal systematization giving rise to what has become the modern management methodology of project management by which almost all modern engineering, construction and software developments are organized.
Aircraft
In the Western European Theatre of World War II, air power became crucial throughout the war, both in tactical and strategic operations (respectively, battlefield and long-range). Superior German aircraft, aided by ongoing introduction of design and technology innovations, allowed the German armies to overrun Western Europe with great speed in 1940, assisted by lack of Allied aircraft, which in any case lagged in design and technical development during the slump in research investment after the Great Depression.
Since the end of World War I, the French Air Force had been badly neglected, as military leaders preferred to spend money on ground armies and static fortifications to fight another World War I-style war. As a result, by 1940, the French Air Force had only 1562 planes and was together with 1070 RAF planes facing 5,638 Luftwaffe fighters and fighter-bombers. Most French airfields were located in north-east France, and were quickly overrun in the early stages of the campaign. The Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom possessed some very advanced fighter planes, such as Spitfires and Hurricanes, but these were not useful for attacking ground troops on a battlefield, and the small number of planes dispatched to France with the British Expeditionary Force were destroyed fairly quickly. Subsequently, the Luftwaffe was able to achieve air superiority over France in 1940, giving the German military an immense advantage in terms of reconnaissance and intelligence.
German aircraft rapidly achieved air superiority over France in early 1940, allowing the Luftwaffe to begin a campaign of strategic bombing against British cities. Utilizing France's airfields near the English Channel the Germans were able to launch raids on London and other cities during the Blitz, with varying degrees of success.
After World War I, the concept of massed aerial bombing—"The bomber will always get through"—had become very popular with politicians and military leaders seeking an alternative to the carnage of trench warfare, and as a result, the air forces of Britain, France, and Germany had developed fleets of bomber planes to enable this (France's bomber wing was severely neglected, whilst Germany's bombers were developed in secret as they were explicitly forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles).