Nuclear Weapons
At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, an American B 29 bomber flew over thecity of Hiroshima, Japan and released something on a parachute. Hiroshima
was a medium-size city, largely untouched by the war because it contained no
military objectives worth touching. The object floating earthward under the
parachute was the first nuclear weapon to be used in war. When the bomber
was far away, but the parachute still above the ground, the bomb exploded.
Between 70,000 and 80,000 people in the city below died instantly or almost
instantly. As many as 125,000 more died later as a result of injuries incurred by
the blast. Three days later, a similar bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing from
40,000 to 70,000 more people at once and 50,000 to 100,000 later from radiation
sickness, cancer, or other illnesses caused by the explosion. Six days later, Japan
surrendered.
The possibility of nuclear weapons had been known in the scientific community
for years. All matter is composed of atoms, which have a nucleus composed
of protons and neutrons around which electrons orbit. The number of
atomic particles in the nucleus of an element’s atom determines its atomic weight,
which is expressed in numbers that have bedeviled generations of high school
chemistry students. When neutrons, protons, deuterons, and other particles
strike a nucleus of high atomic weight, they are absorbed and the nucleus splits
into two, forming two lighter atoms. The process releases a million volts of
energy per atom. This process goes on continually in radioactive material but
causes no trouble, because the released energy simply bypasses the other atoms
in a block of material and passes into space.
The Helicopter
The helicopter,” said the famous pioneer, “does with great labor onlywhat a balloon does without labor.” He concluded: “The helicopter is much
easier to design than the aeroplane but it is worthless when done.” That was
Wilbur Wright in 1906.
Mr. Wright had a point. People had been trying to build helicopters for
centuries, and their efforts had produced hardly any results. In 1935, airplanes
had reached the altitude of 47,352 feet, attained the speed of 440 miles per hour
and had flown non-stop for 5,657 miles. At the same time, the helicopter altitude
record was 518 feet, a chopper had reached the speed of 60 miles per hour
and another had flown 27 miles.
This was in spite of the fact that Europeans had been making toy helicopters
since the 12th century, and the Chinese had been making them even earlier.
The toy helicopter was a stick with rotor blades. The stick fitted into a
cylinder that was wound up with a string. The operator pulled the string, and
the little ’copter flew straight up. Powering the rotor was an early problem. One
bright soul in renaissance times suggested that the helicopter pilot pull a rope
wound around the rotor the way a child pulled the string of the toy. Aside from
the fact that Superman, or his ancestors, was still on the planet Krypton and
rope-pulling propulsion awaited his coming, the author of this idea could not
explain how the pilot would rewind the rope to continue his flight. Leonardo da
Vinci, who did so much futurist thinking, took a shot at helicopter design. His
machine had two counter-rotating rotors and was powered by clockwork. Clockwork
appeared in many inventions of the 15th and 16th centuries—everything
from clocks to wheel lock rifles.
ICBMs and Cruise Missiles
On June 13, 1944, people in London heard a peculiar buzzing sound.When they looked up, they saw a small airplane traveling across the sky at high
speed. Then the plane’s engine stopped and it plunged to the ground. There was
a terrific explosion. People were still wondering where the plane came from and
what happened to it, when another plane just like the first appeared, and as the
first did, crashed into the city and exploded. That was followed by another,
then another, then several of the little planes. All crashed and exploded.
The V 1 attack had been launched.
For the first time, it was possible to bombard a target at distances beyond
the range of even such hopped-up artillery as the 1918 “Paris gun.” The German
were using unpiloted planes—really flying bombs powered by pulse-jet
engines (the only time that type of engine has ever been used in combat). The
Germans called the “buzz bombs” (British nickname) Vergelstungwaffe eins. To
the rest of the world, the flying bomb was the V 1—Hitler’s first “vengeance
weapon.” It was also, although the name had not yet been invented, the world’s
first cruise missile.
The V 1 caught the British public by surprise and inflicted heavy damage at
first. The flying bombs directed at England destroyed 25,000 houses and killed
6,184 people, almost all in London. It was, however, hardly the ultimate weapon.
It had to be launched from a catapult—the only way its pulse-jet engine could
be made to start. It cruised at about 3,000 feet, easily within range of antiaircraft
guns as well as fighter planes. It was fast for a plane of those days—559
miles per hour. It was a jet, after all. But it flew in a straight line and wasn’t so
fast that slightly slower (about 100 mph slower) fighter planes couldn’t shoot it
down. By August 1944, Allied fighters and antiaircraft guns were shooting down
80 percent of the V 1s.
Landing Craft
World War II introduced a long string of firsts. One of these was thefirst modern amphibious war. The American Civil War included a few, very
small-scale landings from seagoing ships or river boats. The ordinary whale
boat, rowed ashore by sailors, was sufficient to get soldiers or marines to the
beach. It also sufficed in the Spanish-American War, especially as most landings
then were made where the enemy was not. In the many U.S. forays into
Caribbean brush fires, including the Vera Cruz expedition in 1914, the overwhelming
gun power of the U.S. Navy discouraged any attempt to bring troopcarrying
rowboats or motor boats under fire. The United States did have some
specialized landing craft, including some rowboats mounting cannister-firing
cannon on the bow.
World War II was different. Japanese strategists envisioned a huge number
of landings on Pacific islands and the southern shores of East Asia. They prepared
for it by building scores of flat-bottomed boats that could be run right up
on the beach, or at least to where the water was shallow enough for men to
wade ashore. Some of the boats could carry small tanks and light artillery. They
had ramps to allow vehicles to be run right off the boat.
The Japanese used these boats all over the far (from the United States) end
of the Pacific following their attack on Pearl Harbor. They landed on the Philippines
and the Dutch East Indies in several places. In Malaya, Japanese troops
outflanked stronger British forces continually by landing behind their lines.
They drove the British back to Singapore, then landed on that British fortress
and added it to their explosively growing empire.
The Parachute and the Glider
The Belgian government was resolved that 1914 would not be repeated.Overlooking the Albert Canal, a little north of Liege, the Belgians built Fort
Eben-Emael. Eben-Emael incorporated all of the technology used in the famous
French Maginot Line. It had armored rotating gun cupolas whose low,
curved shape made a direct hit impossible, and that could be lowered beneath
the surface of the Earth. These cupolas mounted five 60 mm, 16 75 mm, and two
120 mm guns—all quick-firers. The fort was surrounded by an antitank wall and
barbed wire. It had armored positions for searchlights, grenade throwers and
many, many machine guns. Everything was underground, protected by a thickness
of reinforced concrete that would have defied Big Bertha. Some 700 trained
soldiers made up its garrison.
At 5:20 a.m.,on May 10, 1940, seven gliders landed on the top of Eben-
Emael. The Belgian stronghold had practically no antiaircraft defenses. Out of
the gliders climbed 55 Germans equipped with flamethrowers and shaped demolition
charges as well as the usual infantry arms. They used the shaped charges
to blast the cupolas and other armored positions or they burned the defenders
out of them with flamethrowers. They tossed explosive charges down the air
vents. The defenders fought from tunnel to tunnel when the Germans entered
the underground fortress. Some of them even managed to fire on the regular
German troops who were trying to cross the canal. The Germans got across,
however, and when they brought up reinforcements the next day, the garrison
surrendered. The garrison commander shot himself.
While glider troops were attacking Eben-Emael, paratroopers dropped into
Holland and seized bridges, making the vaunted Dutch water-defenses useless.
Even earlier, during the German invasion of Norway, a long narrow country
broken up by fjords and mountains, the Germans dropped paratroops to seize
key airfields. They were quickly reinforced by troops arriving on transport planes.
These attacks of troops from the sky seemed to many at that time like something
from a science-fiction tale. For years, there had been reports of paratroopers
of the Soviet Union’s Red Army and how they would change warfare.
But the publications that printed these stories also had articles on how the
Japanese-owned fishing boats in Los Angeles Harbor would cover that immense
body of water with oil and ignite it, roasting everyone in the Pacific Fleet. Then
came the Soviet Union’s fumbling effort against Finland in the Winter War of
1939-1940. No paratroopers appeared, and the Red Army’s campaign was distinguished
mostly by its ineptitude. The paratroop threat seemed on a par with
the martian threat.
Thermite, Napalm, and Other Incendiaries
On the night of March 9, 1945, as the B 29s took off from Guam, war wasraging everywhere. In Europe that day, American forces had taken the Ludendorff
Bridge at Remagen, crossing the border of Germany for the first time. The Red
Army had entered Germany and had trapped half a million German troops in a
pocket against the Baltic Sea, but there were still months of fighting ahead. In
the United States, the American Office of War Information was desperately
trying to perpetuate the myth, based on Roosevelt’s promise to Churchill, that
American forces were concentrating on defeating Germany first, after which
they would turn to Japan.
Actually, there was no such concentration on Germany by American forces.
That propaganda line, politically correct at the time, has unfortunately been
accepted by some later writers. That makes it sound as if Japan was a paper
tiger that collapsed like a punctured balloon as soon as we were able to turn
away from Germany. And that supposition ignores all the toil, blood, and heroism
of the American forces that pushed Japan almost to the breaking point
while their contemporaries were helping to defeat Germany. The British forces
did concentrate on Germany, certainly. Germany was a near, clear-and-present
danger. But, although the largest part of the U.S. Army was in the European
and Mediterranean theaters, almost all of the major ships of the U.S. Navy—
aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, and submarines, and most of the Marine
Corps—were in the Pacific and had been for three years. Guam itself, the base
of these super-heavy B 29 bombers, had been retaken from the Japanese less
than a year before this. At the same time, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea
(also known as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot), the U.S. Navy had broken
the back of Japanese naval air forces and dealt a heavy blow to the Imperial
Navy. A few months later, on October 24 and 25, 1944, the United States struck
an even heavier blow at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Japan lost four aircraft carriers,
three battleships, 10 cruisers, and nine destroyers as well as 500 planes, and
U.S. forces began the reconquest of the Philippines. They had gone from there
to Iwo Jima on the doorstep of Japan—almost, in fact, one of the Japanese
home islands. By this time, Japan had no airframe factories, almost no shipping,
hardly any oil, and hardly any planes on the home islands.
Sonar and Radar
In the early years of the submarine, it seemed that the only problems theundersea craft would have would be its own mechanical deficiencies. There was
no way anyone on the surface could detect the presence of a submerged boat.
In the first part of World War I, the object of the British Navy was to catch
German U boats on the surface. The main anti-submarine weapons were the
destroyer and the “Q ship,” a converted merchant ship, often carrying a cargo
of lumber to inhibit sinking, with hidden deck guns. The former cruised the
waters haunted by submarines and tried to catch one on the surface. Because
the early subs had to spend most of their time on the surface, that task is not as
hopeless as it sounds. The latter was a seagoing booby trap. To save on torpedoes
and to comply with accepted standards of decency, subs in the early days
of the war often approached freighters on the surface, told the crews to abandon
ship and then sank them with gunfire. The Q ships aimed to attract these
surfaced submarines and sink them with its guns. But after a few Q ship mishaps,
submarine commanders just torpedoed all ships while submerged.
The first step toward the detection of a submerged U boat was the hydrophone.
Hydrophones could pick up the sound of a submarine’s engines, but
there were two big drawbacks. First, the hunter ship had to shut down its own
engines so it could hear the subs. Second, one ship could not locate the sub by
itself. Several ships working together were needed to get a rough approximation
of the sub’s location. Once that was found, the navy ships would attack
with depth charges.
The best anti-submarine measure in the First World War was the convoy
system, but not because convoys made it easier to locate or destroy U boats. It
was because the convoy system bunched freighters up. Previously, the U boats
waited for a freighter to come along. If its torpedoes missed, another ship would
be along soon. A submerged submarine was about the slowest craft at sea. It
couldn’t catch up with or even keep up with the slowest freighter. Convoys
eliminated the steady stream of ships steaming across the Atlantic. U boats had
to wait a long time between targets, and when a convoy appeared, it was guarded
by naval ships. If the U boat were not positioned just right, it might miss all the
ships in the convoy, and it was too slow to make up for poor positioning.
Rifle:Recoilless Guns
In the armies of Napoleon and Gustavus Adolphus, cannoneers and theirguns fought right up in the front lines as the infantry. That had many advantages.
Front line commanders didn’t have any trouble getting fire support from
50 Weapons That Changed Warfare
202
the artillery. But when rifles were adopted, standing up in the front line loading
a cannon meant that you probably would not get a chance to tell your grandchildren
any war stories.
There were some attempts to rectify the situation. Until World War II, the
most successful was the trench mortar. In the First World War, French and
American infantry troops used a light, low-power 37 mm gun. It was good for
knocking out machine gun nests, but very little else. In the Second World War,
the American Army experimented with “cannon companies,” artillerymen who
dragged a 105 mm howitzer up to the front and used it to give direct fire support.
The trouble was that the gun was a magnet for enemy fire, and life in a
cannon company tended to be short.
The greatest disadvantages of modern artillery pieces is their weight and
bulk. The carriage has to be massive and heavy to withstand the stress of recoil,
even though the guns are equipped with a recoil-absorbing mechanism, which
artillerymen call a recuperater. The recuperator also adds weight and bulk. If
recoil could be eliminated, the gun could be smaller and lighter. The first man
to eliminate recoil from a cannon was a U.S. Navy officer —a Commander
Davis. A gun recoils because, as Isaac Newton stated, every action has an opposite
and equal reaction. A shell is much lighter than the gun that fires it, so it
travels at high speed and goes a great distance. The gun does not recoil at the
same speed and, even without a recuperater, it doesn’t travel anything like the
distance the shell goes. If the gun fired a missile of the same weight from each
end of the barrel, there would be no recoil at all. That’s what Davis did. The
missile from the rear end of his gun was mixture of lead shot and grease so,
unlike the shell fired from the front end, it quickly dispersed. Davis sold his gun
to the British, who used some of them on naval aircraft during World War I.
Small Rockets
The rocket is one of the oldest of explosive weapons. The Chinese wereusing rockets before they—or anyone else—had guns. Rockets appeared in
Europe around 1250—again, before any Europeans had guns. Rockets may have
been even more useful than guns for scaring horses (the chief effect of the
earliest guns). They could also set fires. But rockets weren’t worth a hoot for
knocking down stone walls, which was what interested most belligerents at that
time, so they were soon dropped by most armies.
They came back into fashion in the early 19th century when an Englishman
named William Congreve, impressed by rockets the Indians were using, invented
an improvement. Congreve’s rockets were iron and carried a warhead of
either gunpowder or incendiary material. He built several sizes, and all were
stabilized by a long pole fastened to the body of the rocket. They were launched
from a long ramp and used by both armies and navies. Ships using rockets had
sails set back from the front of the ship, which was reserved for rocket launching,
and some had chains, instead of rope, for rigging. The rocket’s back blast
as always been a factor that must be reckoned with. During the Napoleonic
Wars, British ships used rockets to burn down Copenhagen, and in the War of
1812, they used rockets in the unsuccessful bombardment of Fort McHenry.
The Shaped Charge
Back in 1883, an American engineer named Monroe exploded a slab ofexplosive against a steel plate. The explosive had letters impressed on it showing
that it was the property of the U.S. Navy. After the explosion, Monroe was
amazed to find that the impressions on the explosive had been reproduced on
the plate. He published a paper describing the phenomenon, then everybody
forgot about it. There were much easier ways to engrave inscriptions on steel
plates.
Actually, Monroe didn’t discover the effect named after him. The earliest
reference to the fact that a depression in an explosive concentrates its force
goes back to 1792. Further, there are indications that mining engineers had
been using this phenomenon for 150 years without telling anybody about it. But
the scientific community put the “Monroe effect” in the space reserved for
useless knowledge and went on about its business. Von Neumann rediscovered
the effect in 1911, but there still seemed to be no practical use for it.
In 1935, a Swiss chemical engineer, Henry Mohaupt, was on duty as a machine
gunner in the Swiss Army. All men in Switzerland serve in the armed
forces, take periodic military training and are active reservists until age 45. The
tensions that would culminate in World War II were building up, and Mohaupt
was disturbed at the ineffectiveness of antitank weapons available to the infantry.
Switzerland, for example, was relying on the Solothurn antitank rifle—a
semiautomatic 20 mm weapon that would have made hash of the tanks of World
War I, but would not even dent such vehicles as Germany’s Pzkw IV medium
tank. When his active duty term was up, Mohaupt established a laboratory to
develop an antitank weapon for the infantry soldier. He took the Monroe effect
as a starting point. At first, he used hollowed-out explosive charges to propel
metal disks against a steel target. That led him to line the hole in the explosive
with a metal cone. That, he learned, multiplied the penetration of the steel—
especially if he moved the charge back from the target for a short distance. At
the optimum distance, the shaped explosive charge would drill a small hole in
the steel about seven and a half times deeper than the diameter of the cone.
Through that hole, a stream of fire and molten metal would cause horrible
damage to people and machinery.
No comments:
Post a Comment