The Dogs of War
By George Coppinger, Mechanical Engineering

A few weeks ago I made a pilgrimage to the Imperial War Museum in London. For a student of the military history of World War II, it ranks as the most spectacular museum I have ever visited. There is enough information in the basement on the two great wars to keep someone from his or her studies for a good day or two. Far more impressive than the displays of rifles and descriptions of the specific engagements is the assortment of machines that are contained on the ground floor. Even before entering the building, I was greeted by a pair of 15-in. naval cannons capable of firing a one-ton shell over 18 miles. And once in, the collection is much more impressive.

There is a sort of beauty of its own that belongs to the well-executed war; Sun Tzu’s famous work was not entitled "The Art of War" without a reason. Yet despite the allure of the crushing efficiency of the blitzkrieg and strategies that make chess look like a child’s game, I will readily admit that this beauty is a siren’s call. War is a tragedy, and the lives lost to the martial beast cannot be dismissed. However, it does have its redeeming aspects. Adversity being the mother of all invention, war efforts have always been good for technical innovation and engineering.

Looking around the room, almost all of the developments of the 20^th century seem to be captured within those walls. While it was the machine gun that dominated the World War I, it was the tank that played king of the battlefield in WWII. The Imperial War Museum contains actual tanks dating from the first attempt to put armored vehicles on the field to the best tanks of the 1940s, such as the T34. The T34 was the Russian medium tank that first put into production in 1939, before they entered WWII. It was fast, mobile, and powerful with well-sloped protective armor and good range. An example of a well-engineered design, it seemed to have set the standard for tanks and, for its size, would not be outclassed for a long time. The T34 was, in fact, so effective that it remained in service in the Russian army until 1973, and over 52,000 were built in total.

But if the tank provided the epitome of the war in its power and mobility, it did not rule the war alone. Artillery and big guns played an integral part of any war effort. The best known and most feared of the big guns was the "88." The Germans designed the 88 in 1931 as an anti-aircraft gun; this was in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. With a diameter of 88mm, it was able to lob 20-pound shells almost five miles into the atmosphere. During the course of the war it was discovered that, in addition to being a superb anti-aircraft gun, the 88 was useful for coastal defense, long-range field artillery, and as an anti-tank gun, for which it would be best remembered. By leveling the barrel, the Germans found the 88 had two advantages over most other guns. First, because of the high velocity and subsequently flat trajectory, it was very simple to aim at the target. Second, the kinetic energy of a shell travelling that fast meant it would cut through the front armor of even the heaviest tank and sometimes the rear armor too. This was also easily transported and simple to load. All in all, the 88 is arguably the most versatile gun of the entire war.

While these are very much impressive in their own right, it is among the other displays that the most important and influential discoveries were made. The museum currently has a display up on Germany’s famous "enigma" machine. This machine was used to encode secret messages by the German army during the war. Essentially, the machine was controlled by a set of four or five dials, each from one to 30. Each day the initial setting would be changed according to a schedule. In addition the enigma machine had two built-in typewriter keyboards and a lot of electrical wiring. As each letter was typed, a complicated circuit would light up a corresponding letter on the other keyboard based on the dial settings, and the dial would automatically be advanced so that one letter would not always come out the same. Much of today’s cryptography is based on this system, and the enigma machine itself is a precursor to the computer.

One of Germany’s greatest technological advancements in WWII, and also one of the most terrifying, was the invention of the rocket. By the end of the war, Germany had actually developed more than one jet fighter. Some were actually in use at the very end, but mostly it was still in the development testing stage. One example, the Heinkel HE 162, is on display at the museum. This particular jet went from conception to test flight in just 90 days. By the end of the war, 300 had been completed and another 800 were almost finished despite the production setbacks caused by Allied bombing. The HE 162, which was code named "Salamander," was able to reach speeds of over 500 mph, almost Mach one. Just imagine the implications of the first test runs, the cutting edge of aerospace technology, the forerunners to all of our modern jets.

But perhaps the aspect that was even more definitive of the next few decades was their application of jet technology to create rocketry. The Germans used the V1 "Doodlebug" and later the V2 rockets for long-range bombardment of London, a technique which has survived the decades as is witnessed by the current missile attacks of Chechnya by the Russian military. The V comes from the German "Vergeltungswaffe," which means a weapon of retaliation, and to this end, over 3,000 V2 rockets were launched into England and Belgium during the war. Each of these terrible weapons could deliver a ton of high explosives up to 186 miles away at a speed of 3,500 feet per second. But it was after the war that the potential of rocket technology was harnessed for a much better purpose – the creation of the space program. The United States and the Soviet Union both took what the Germans had made and continued the research back home, usually with the aid of German scientists who had been offered asylum. My grandfather was one of the American engineers to work on the V2 project after the war in White Sands, New Mexico.

The Imperial War Museum has an example of a V2 rocket prominently displayed. It dwarfed the other exhibits, stretching from the ground floor up two or three stories, a rather unassuming design; it looks almost like it was modeled after a comic book when it was more probable to have been the inspiration for so many comic book space ships. It was such advancements born out of the fever of a wartime effort and paid for in millions of lives that set the stage for the rest of the century. The significance of the Imperial War Museum’s awe-inspiring collection should be at least as apparent for the engineers of our society as for the historians.

George Coppinger participated in the Fall 1999 London Program.