Industrial Warfare IntensifiesIn the Second World War, there's nowhere to hide. Bombs rain down from the sky from a thousand bombers, arriving in waves. Most create harmless craters some distance from their targets, but some hit home. On the sea, the era of dueling battle fleets is over. All the destruction now comes from the skies, as anti-aircraft batteries become a warship's most valuable weapons. Some pilots intentionally crash into vessels. On the battlefield, almost everything is motorized. The tanks and artillery of armored divisions move rapidly across borders, usually preceded by tactical aircraft to create chaos and confusion, just before the onslaught. |
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Faster is Better The key to modern warfare is mobility. Advancing soldiers no longer trudge forward on foot, but instead are transported in motorized vehicles. Artillery is no longer pulled by horse teams, but hitched to half-track vehicles. This speeds up everything. When an attack is led with tank divisions, preceded by low-level aircraft, defensive positions are quickly overrun unless they also include artillery and tanks. All you need is fuel. The photo at lower right shows what an advancing army used to look like, with men walking beside horses. But this is a supply convoy heading towards Stalingrad in 1943, pulled by horses because the Germans are short of fuel. They are trying to get past Stalingrad to oil fields just beyond, which were Hitler's real goal from the beginning. | |||||||||
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Bigger Tanks Tanks lead the attack. During the First World War, early tanks can only advance at walking speed. By the time Hitler unleashed his first assault on Poland, his Panzer tanks can travel at twice that speed over fields, and triple on roads. Hitler has been building his tanks in secret, and is able to overwhelm the few Polish tanks of similar size (top left). By the time they turn on Russia, however, the Germans ae surprised to find that the Soviet tanks are better. This prompts them to produce true monsters (top right). The Germans build 50,000 tanks during the war, most of which are lost in titanic battles with the Soviets. The largest battle involves 10,000 tanks and 50,000 artillery pieces, a quarter of which are put out of action. | |||||||||
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War in the Sky Tanks and artillery command the battlefield, but aircraft rule the skies. Hitler launches his savage bombing attack on London early in the war, but ruins his air force in the attempt. Afterwards, the Allies gradually improve their ability to bomb the big German industrial cities near the border with France, which supply Hitler's great war machine. The British bomb by night, while Americans flying from both England and (later) Italy attack by day. Fighters are needed to protect the bombers, but can't stop the appalling losses caused by highly-effective German anti-aircraft fire, aided by radar tracking. In the Pacific, America gains a crucial early victory when it's able to destroy all the big Japanese aircraft carriers in a single lucky engagement. | |||||||||
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Aircraft Rule the Pacific In the Pacific war against the Japanese, aircraft are vital to every operation. Both sides quickly learn that battleships and cruisers are far less effective than aircraft carriers, which can attack a fleet too far away to be even visible. America and Japan each lose several fleet carriers early on, but Japan is never able to recover from its catastrophic losses at Midway. From that point forward, the Pacific war is led by American air superiority, which softens up isolated Japanese-held islands used as steppingstones to the Japanese homeland. It's a long haul, but the end is never really in doubt. Near the end, with almost all its planes and pilots gone, a desperate Japan sends barely-trained Kamikaze pilots to crash their planes, with bombs still attached, into American vessels. | |||||||||
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Futuristic Weapons The most important new technology to be adapted to war is radar. The British build an array of high radar towers along the southern coast (top left), to detect incoming bombers. The Germans also deploy a coastal radar system, sometimes capable of actually managing anti-aircraft fire. Both sides use portable radar to help searchlights find planes in the sky at night. The Germans mount antler-like radar antennas on night fighters (top right), to find and destroy British bombers, and also develop the first guided missile. The Norden bombsight (middle left) is an early mechanical computer that improves bombing accuracy. A new electronic fuse (lower right) makes artillery shells much more deadly, by detecting nearby objects (like planes) to trigger the explosion. | |||||||||