Topics Blog

The massive research and development involved in the Manhattan Project in order to quickly achieve a working nuclear weapon design greatly impacted the scientific community, among other things creating a network of national laboratories in the United States. In addition, the pressing for numerous calculations for various things like code breaking and ballistics tables kick-started the development of electronic computer technology. While the war stimulated many technologies: radio development accelerated, and radar developed; it retarded others, most notably popular television which the BBC had been developing, but which was shelved, as it also was in Germany and the United States, until the end of the war.
The Jet aircraft age began during the war with the development of the Heinkel He 178, the first true turbojet, the Messerschmitt 262—the first jet in combat, and the Gloster Meteor, the first reliable and useful jet fighter. The Nazi terror weapon, the V-2 rocket, was the first step into the space age as its trajectory took it through the stratosphere, higher than any aircraft. It led directly to the development of the ICBM. Wernher Von Braun led the V2 development team and later immigrated to the United States where he developed the Saturn 5 rocket, which took men to the moon in 1969.
All military technology progressed at faster pace even than modern computers, and over six years there was a disorientating rate of change in combat in everything from aircraft to Small Arms. The best jet fighters at the end of the war could have effectively combatted twenty Spitfire Mark Is, the best early war fighters. The best late war tank, the JS-3, may well have defeated thirty of the best tanks of 1939, Panzer IVDs. The early war bombers that caused such carnage would almost all have been shot down in 1945, many with one shot, 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 "Turkey shoot". This future shock was capped by the atomic bomb.
The chaotic impotence of opposed amphibious landings typical of WWI disasters was overcome; the DUKW, a six-wheel-drive amphibious truck, and amphibious tanks were developed by the United States to support beach landing attacks, and the organization and coordination of amphibious assaults became a science; laying the foundations for the methodology of Project Management used to organize most modern, large-scale technological and engineering development.