Tales and legends of all kinds have grown up since World War II: stories of super-bombs, deadly ray-guns and covert deals. Some sources say that the Nazis had flying saucers ready to roll and had even exploded an atomic bomb. The saga of secret science during those vital years has intrigued me since childhood — indeed the first book I wrote on the subject was published in my twenties. Yet there are still dramatic new lessons to be learned. Although we think of the United States as the home of atomic power, we should also recognize how far it developed in Germany, Britain, Russia and Japan — all of these nations had their own atomic bomb projects. ‘Shock and awe’ did not begin in the war with Iraq, but was born back in World War II. We will find that many of the greatest war criminals of all time were secretly pardoned and illicitly given sanctuary in exchange for continuing their work on secret weapons, but this time for the other side. Although the devastating raid on Pearl Harbor by Japan is so often spoken of as unprovoked and unexpected, it is surprising to discover that neither is true; while many daring deeds by British heroes would now be classed as war crimes. Did you know that Americans were killed by secret weapons launched from Japan during World War II? Probably not — they were secret then, and they remain secret now. Were you aware that an astronaut (as well as a satellite) was launched with V-2 rockets? Would you ever suspect that huge stocks of phosgene, the corrosive, blinding, suffocating gas that was stockpiled in World War II, are now available in industrial cities across the world? Calder Hall in Britain is famous as the world’s first nuclear power station, but there was another that existed years earlier, about which few people have ever heard. Did you know that lethal secret weapons from World War II are currently threatening residential areas of the United States, or that a sound cannon developed by the Nazis was recently used to stop pirates from boarding a cruise ship? America is famous for its first nuclear reactor, but the biggest by the war’s end was actually in Canada; and a form of radar, one of the most celebrated secret technologies of World War II, was in fact in use before 1914. You will have heard of the British ‘bouncing bomb’, but you probably don’t know that the Germans also had a bouncing bomb of their own — or that The Dam Busters movie had a direct line of inspiration to Star Wars.
Books on secret weapons are traditionally seen as quirky, backward-looking, specialist volumes that appeal to historians, in the same way that strange aircraft attract plane-spotters. The subject is closer to the present day than we think. In reality, World War II gave us the science on which our modern world depends. Nothing like that pace of progress had occurred before, or has been seen since. War is a more powerful stimulus to progress than peace. The demands of the Napoleonic wars gave us canned food. It was India fighting the British that bequeathed to us the first steel rocket (invented by the Indians, not the British). The Wright brothers had military aircraft in mind when they started their experiments with flying machines. But World War II — above all — led to an unprecedented upsurge in inventiveness and innovation. After World War I, Europe and America were in a post-Victorian era where progress was steady and the major preoccupation was the preservation of social stability and the maintenance of wealth. Engineers were gentle innovators, rather than the brash adventurers of the previous century. The progress of pure science was slow and methodical, and technology proceeded at a steady pace, interspersed with revolutionary new notions in fields like radio, television, aircraft and ocean-going liners. The rocket enthusiasts were hobbyists; pioneers of jet engines were widely ignored. Development proceeded logically and progress was a methodical unravelling of realities.
With the dark clouds of war approaching, science and technology took on a new and terrifying urgency. Now the pace of progress was unprecedented — and yet it was different, depending on whose side you stood. The Japanese, intent on territorial acquisition of the relatively undeveloped nations of South-East Asia, put much emphasis on planes, guns and bombs. They saw the subjects of these nations as inherently inferior, hardly worth rating as civilized humans at all. The Americans, arriving late in the battle, rushed to produce innovative aircraft and state-of-the-art shipping, and gathered together experts who were harnessing the atom to produce the most terrible and destructive weapons ever used in warfare. The French were content for decades with their Maginot line, and carried on with domestic developments without paying much heed to the international perspective. The Italians, Spanish and Russians were all developing weapons of war and stockpiling ideas as much as materiel.
Germany was different. The sole aim of her leaders following Hitler’s ascension to power was the domination of Europe and, with time and good fortune, the world. Germany was surrounded by highly developed countries with a shared sense of strength and a belief in progress towards a future free from warfare, and the Nazis were well aware that they needed to overcome nations just as ingenious and as civilized as Germany herself. With the exception of Italy, whose leader Benito Mussolini had grandiose ideas of his own, all the other European nations lacked one thing, however: fanaticism. For Germany, domination was increasingly painted as a right, a destiny. And the scientific developments leading up to the war were aimed squarely at preparing for the long-term occupation of nearby nations. As war began, Hitler was emboldened by the capitulation of Czechoslovakia’s allies over the Sudentenland in 1938; and when Britain declared war in 1939 as a result of the German attacks on the narrow corridor of land towards the Baltic port of Danzig, Hitler was stunned. He had never imagined that Britain would declare war in this way, and for such a small piece of territory. Then, with the bit between his teeth, he ordered the rate of progress to roar into top gear and yet — as German victory seemed assured, in the early years at least — he was just as quick to withdraw support from many revolutionary and highly innovative fields of research and development, so that progress in these was nipped in the bud. At the time, Hitler optimistically concluded that these new technologies would not be required after all. Victory, he felt, would easily be his.
The situation in Britain was utterly unlike that in Germany. Britain was looking to a future without war, for the bloody lessons of World War I were vividly imprinted on the nation’s collective memory. During the 1920s and ’30s there was a steady decline in military expenditure, even at the risk of being unable to defend overseas territories. The large military machine was seen as a thing of the past: war was viewed as inhuman and consigned to history. The British were wrestling with a turbulent empire and the emerging mood was increasingly one of interdependence, rather than colonial domination. Whereas the focus of Germany’s priorities was the development of futuristic weapons of aggression, Britain’s energies during the war were primarily invested in defending herself against attack, resisting occupation and preventing Germany from producing yet more terrifying weapons of mass destruction. British scientists were intent on finding out where the German planes might be, and soon perfected radar; they wanted to follow the intimate conversations that the Nazis conducted, and so also perfected the means of cracking the codes of the Enigma encryption machines.[1] The British secret war began as one of defence against aggression. When Britain came up with the penetration bomb, it was not primarily to attack Germany but to demolish the Nazi fortifications within which lay their weapons; similarly, when the bouncing bomb was introduced it was to take out the factories where the munitions were manufactured. But let’s keep this in proportion — the flooding of the Ruhr valley by the ‘Dambusters’ was seen at the time as heroic; yet it would now be considered a war crime, for thousands of innocent civilians and captured slave workers were drowned. Yet the legacy lives on. The Dambusters inspired more modern movie producers; the early computers pointed the way to today’s desktop giants; our cruise missiles and guided bombs all emerged from the science and technology developed in the war.[2]
1
These were based on using a spinning rotor to select letters in writing a secret code. Although we think of the Enigma machine as being of German origin, their story was more complex and indeed the first design for a rotor encryption machine was invented by two Dutch naval engineers, Theo van Hengel and R. P. C. Spengler, in 1915.
2
The United States was then (as now) by far the world’s richest nation, and she was quick to capitalize on the financial implications of the war. From the start, she was covertly concentrating on the possibility of building warplanes, ships and guns. In general, however, there was far less emphasis on quirky secret weaponry; America wanted to build hardware. For the United States, the major focus of secret weapons research soon became nuclear research. Crucial new developments in atomic science had arisen just at the beginning of World War II, and although the key developments took place in Europe, it was in the United States that the money was made available.