Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The great disadvantages of rockets were their inaccuracy and short range, both of which came from the weak and uneven burning of the propellant. Great improvements were made in the study of propellants by the Germans, especially from the work of Hermann Oberth, Walter Dornberger, and Werner von Braun at Peenemunde Rocket Research Institute on the Baltic Sea. These men, working on the basis of earlier studies by the American professor, Robert H. Goddard ( A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, 1929), and by a Polish high school teacher in Russia, K. E. Ziolkovsky (1857-1935), greatly advanced rocketry during the war and developed the V-2, which devastated London and Antwerp from September 8, 1944 until the war’s end. The English had been expecting this attack, since a German test rocket had gone astray in June 1944, and had exploded over Sweden. The pieces from it, which were handed over to the Allies, made it possible to reconstruct the characteristics of the rocket, but left them in dread that it was being held back until the Germans could perfect an atomic-bomb warhead. From this point of view, the first V-2 on England at 6:43 p.m., September 8, 1944, followed by another, sixteen seconds later, was a relief: they carried warheads of conventional explosives. But that warhead of 1,654 pounds came in on a 46-foot rocket traveling at three times the speed of sound, coming down from an altitude of 60 miles from a launching site 200 miles away. More than 1,100 of these rockets killed 3,000 British before they were stopped.

Just as a rocket reversed the recoil of a gun, directing it forward, so a shaped charge reversed the shape of the projectile. An artillery projectile is bullet-shaped, with its forward end pointed or convex. In 1888 C. E. Munroe had shown that if the explosive charge were made concave, with the cavity at its forward end against the target, the explosive force would be directed forward toward the target (as rays of light go forward from a concave headlight cavity) instead of backward. The American bazooka of 1942 combined this shaped charge with a rocket to provide an infantry weapon with which a single man could knock out a tank. A relatively small charge carried to a tank with an impetus no greater than a well-hit baseball exploded most of its power forward in a narrow pencil of explosive force which sometimes penetrated six inches of armor or six feet of masonry. A hole less than an inch wide on a tank could destroy its crew by spraying them with molten metal forced inward from the shaped charge. In a few cases, this occurred through eight-inch armor without the armor being fully penetrated. Thus the tank, triumphant in 1940, was brought under control, and by 1945 was used largely as mobile artillery.

An even more remarkable advance was the proximity fuse. This was a fuse containing a tiny radar set which measured the distance to the target and could be adjusted to explode at a fixed distance. First used to explode A.A. shells within lethal distance of enemy planes, it soon was adapted to explode just over the heads of ground forces. The latter use, however, was not permitted for more than two years, for fear the enemy would obtain a dud and be able to copy it.

The proximity VT fuse was, after the atom bomb, the second greatest scientific achievement of the war, although the magnetron contributed more than either to an Allied victory. Producing the fuse seemed impossible: It would be necessary to make a radar sending and receiving set to fit in a space smaller than an ice-cream cone; to make it strong enough to withstand 20,000 times the force of gravity in original acceleration and the spin in flight of 475 rotations per minute; to have it detonate at a precise instant in time with no chance of exploding earlier to endanger the gunner; and to be sure that it would explode entirely if it missed its target zone so that there would never be a dud. These problems were solved, and production began in 1942. By the end of the war, Sylvania had made over 130 million minute radio tubes, of which five were needed in each fuse.

First used in action by the U.S.S. Helena against a Japanese dive-bombing plane on January 5, 1943, it destroyed the attacker on the second salvo. An order of the Combined Chiefs of Staff prohibited use of the fuse except over water, where the enemy could not recover duds, but late in 1943 secret intelligence obtained plans of the V-1 robot plane which Hitler was preparing to bomb London. The CCS released proximity fuses to be used over England against this new threat. The first V-1 came over on June 12, 1944, the last, 80 days later, the VT fuses being used only during the final four weeks. In the last week, VT fuses destroyed 79 percent of the V-1’s that came over. On the final day only 4 out of 104 reached London. They were being destroyed by three machines developed by NDRC and made in the United States: detected by SCR-584 radar, their courses predicated by M-9 computers, and shot down by VT fuses. General Sir F. A. Pile, Chief of British A.A. Command, sent Bush a copy of his report on this operation, inscribed, “With my compliments to OSRD who made the victory possible.”

The VT fuse was released by CCS for general use on land at the end of October 1944, and was first used against German ground forces in the Battle of the Bulge. The results were devastating. In thick fog the Germans massed their men together, believing they were safe since the range could not be measured for orthodox artillery time fuses; they were massacred by VT shells exploding over their heads, and even those who crouched in foxholes were hit. On another evening, near Bastogne, German tanks were observed entering a wood for the night. After they were settled, the area was blasted with VT shells. In the morning seventeen German tanks surrounded by their dead crews were found in the area.

One of the greatest victories of science in the war was in the treatment of the wounded. Ninety-seven percent of the casualties who reached the front-line dressing stations were saved, a success which had never been approached in earlier wars. The techniques which made this possible, involving blood transfusions, surgical techniques, and antibiotics, have all been continued and amplified in the postwar world, although the destruction of man’s natural environment by advancing technology has created new hazards and new causes of death by advancing cancer, disintegrating circulatory systems, and increasing mental breakdowns.

The greatest achievement of science during the war, and, indeed, in all human history, was the atom bomb. Its contribution to victory was secondary, since it had nothing to do with the victory over Germany and at most, shortened the war with the Japanese only by weeks. But this greatest example of the power of cooperating human minds has changed the whole environment in which men live. The only human discovery which can compare with it was man’s invention of the techniques of farming almost nine thousand years earlier, but this earlier advance was slow and empirical. The advance to the atom bomb was swift and theoretical, in which men, by mathematical calculations, were able to anticipate, measure, judge, and control events which had never happened previously in human experience. It is not possible to understand the history of the twentieth century without some comprehension of how this almost unbelievable goal was achieved and especially why the Western Powers were able to achieve it, and the Fascist Powers were not.

As late as the fall of France in 1940, all countries were equal in their scientific knowledge, because science was then freely communicable, as it must be, by its very nature. Much of that knowledge, in physical science, rested on the theories of three Nobel Prize winners of 1918-1922. These were Max Planck (185 8-1947), who said that energy did not move in a continuous flow like water but in discrete units, called quanta, like bullets; Albert Einstein (1879-1955), whose theory of relativity indicated that matter and energy were interchangeable according to the formula E = mc2; and Niels Bohr (1885-1962), who offered a picture of the atom as a planetary structure with a heavy, complex nucleus, and circumrotating electrons in fixed orbits established by their energy levels according to Planck’s quantum theory. At that time (1940) all scientists knew that some of the heavier elements naturally disintegrated and were reduced to somewhat lighter elements by radioactive emission of negatively charged electrons or of positively charged alpha particles (helium nuclei, consisting of two positively charged protons with two uncharged neutrons).