Technology and Homeland Security in WWII

By: Orlin Zlatarski, Max Utner, and Max Schock

ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY

Blitzkrieg (lightning war)

• Highly-mechanized

• Penetration + Overpowering

• Ideas from Germans, British, and French

Radar and Sonar

• Originally called RDF (radio direction finder)

• Developed by British

• Enabled a decisive British victory in the Battle of Britain (1940)

Rocket Propulsion

• Enabled first long ranged missiles• Randomly fell after certain number of

rotations of propeller• By end of WWII, ± 1.5 km off target• Amazingly accurate• Computer programmed (4 bits program)• Called Doodlebugs by British because of their

buzz sound

Jet Planes

• Germans developed it first

• Came late in the war (1944 – mass production)

• Not perfected, hardly strategically advantageous

Norden Bombsight

• Developed by the US (little prior to WWII)

• German spy Herbert Lang leaked information to German Luftwaffe officials

• Used widely by German Luftwaffe by 1942

Proximity Fuze• Developed by: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, US

• Enabled detonation of explosive device after it reached a predetermined radius

• Very effective

• Substantial influence on the outcome of WWII due to its accuracy and effectively

• Used in Battle of the Bulge against enemy personnel, and against Kamikazis

Atomic Bomb

• Little Boy (Hiroshima) and Fat Man (Nagasaki)

• Caused Japanese to exit from war

• Major implications in following Cold War

• Developed by the American: Robert Oppenheimer under direction of Leslie Groves