Weapons and Inventions

Its been said that World War Two was the first high-tech war, and a passing look at many of the military tools used between 1939 and 1945 will bare that out to be true. It was not only th the first war in which jet engines and atomic bombs were used, but also the first war to deploy walkie-talkie radios, rockets, and radar. This article concerns what the U.S. Department of War classified as a weapons system just as revolutionary as the atomic bomb: the VT fuse artillery shell (a.k.a. the time proximity fuse). It was used with great success in various theaters: anti-Kamikaze in the Pacific, anti-personnel in the Ardennes and anti V-1 in defense of Britain.

This is a short article that goes into greater detail outlining the successes listed above and explains how the system worked; it also is accompanied by a diagram of the shell.

Click here to learn about the timing fuses designed for W.W. I shrapnel shells.

To the American G.I.s serving along the Italian Front, the presence of rockets was like a page out of a Buck Rogers comic book. They had grown accustomed to seeing them mounted on the wings of quickly speeding American fighter aircraft, but to see and hear them up close and personal when fixed to the turret of a Sherman tank (pictured) seemed altogether too bizarre. This article, Rockets in Italy, will allow you to learn about the use and deployment of the U.S. Army’s ground rocket-gun and how it amazed all the men who ever came near enough to see one.

Click here to read about one of the greatest innovations by 20th Century chemists: plastic.

No doubt about it: for the fashionable, young Deutchen Soldaten on the go, the preferred choice in pillboxes is the portable variety! And you’d best believe that when those slide-rule jockeys back in Berlin lent their lobes to what the trendy book-burning crowed in Italy and Russia were saying, they jumped to it and created this dandy, 6,955 pound mobile pillbox that was capable of being planted almost anywhere. Better living through modern design!

Four pictures and few well-chosen words concerning a German command and reconnaissance car as well as two Nazi half-tracks (one capable of carrying ten men, the other twelve).

Click here to read about the American Army half-tracks.

Here is the skinny on the Ford Motor Company’s M8 Greyhound Armored Car as it was presented to the olive-clad readers of YANK MAGAZINE in the summer of 1944:

Armored Car, M8, 6×6: the Army’s latest combat vehicle, is a six-wheeled, eight-ton armored job that can hit high speeds over practically any type of terrain. It mounts a 37-mm cannon and a .30-caliber machine gun in a hand-operated traversable turret…

All global tensions aside, the U.S. Army could not find any faults at all with the motorcycles that BMW was making for Adolf Hitler during World War II. After having spent much time testing and re-testing the thing, they reluctantly concluded, This is as good as any motorcycle in the world (it was probably a bit better…).

Click here to read about the firm belief held by the German Army concerning the use of motorcycles in modern war.

This posting remarks about a number of concerns: assorted factoids about the German PZKW II tank and it’s 1944 down-graded status as an offensive weapon to a reconnaissance car; tips for GIs as to how to drive German vehicles and, finally, the German interest in salvaging tank parts from captured enemy armor:

This YANK MAGAZINEarticle was written shortly after the U.S. Army’s triumphant performance during the Battle of El Guettar in Tunisia (March 23 – April 7, 1943) and rambles on with much enthusiasm regarding the admirable performance of the M2 Half Tracks. Half Tracks were used on many fronts throughout the war and in many ways, yet as this article makes clear these armored vehicles at El Guettar were mounted with a field gun and used to devastating effect as tank-destroyers against the German 10th Panzer Division.

The writer, Ralph G. Martin

went on in later years to become a prolific historian and biographer.

Click here to read an article about German half-tracks.