Between Flesh and Steel (5 page)

The first operational battle tank was a revolutionary development. Early tanks were terribly unreliable. Engines and suspensions frequently broke down, and temperatures in the crew compartments often reached a hundred degrees from the heat of the engine. By 1917, the British introduced a much improved Mark IV tank at the Battle of Cambrai and waged history's first massed tank attack involving more than 476 tanks. In the spring of 1918, the French introduced the lighter and faster Renault FT, the first tank equipped with a revolving turret. By the end of the war, the Allies had built and deployed more than 6,000 battle tanks. The age of armor had begun.

The war at sea, meanwhile, remained deadlocked. The British countered the German submarine threat by inventing the ship convoy. Of the 16,070 ships that sailed in British convoys, only 96 were lost to submarine attack. In 1915, the first use of the hydrophone made it possible to detect submarines by sound. A year later, another deadly invention, the depth charge, was first used successfully to destroy a submarine. By that time, naval forces routinely used the seaplane, and in 1917 HMS
Furious
added the world's first flight deck to its forward superstructure. In the same year, HMS
Argus
became the first naval vessel built with both a takeoff and landing deck. With the incorporation of the deck catapult and arresting gear, the prototype of the modern aircraft carrier was born.

The war quickened the development of the first aircraft designed for military use. The interrupter gear made machine guns mounted on aircraft more effective by allowing the guns to fire through a turning propeller. Improvements in design, materials, and structure of aircraft manufacture made it possible for aircraft to fly 140 miles per hour at altitudes of twenty thousand feet. The first bombers capable of two-thousand-pound bomb loads appeared. For the most part, however, antagonists used their aircraft for reconnaissance, fire direction, trench strafing, and fighting one another.

Europe emerged from World War I almost bankrupt. While research and development into new and improved weapons continued, it did so on a much smaller scale than before the war. Overall expenditures on military equipment and manpower declined as the nations of Europe tried to find the money to repair their devastated domestic infrastructures. The war's lingering effects left the political and social institutions of the European powers badly shaken. The war produced a revolution in Russia, leading to the establishment of a Soviet state. Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) deposed the Italian monarchy and produced the first fascist state in Italy. A weak
republican government replaced Germany's monarchy but proved unable to handle the increasing social and economic instability. Both the Left and the Right attacked France's republican institutions from within, sapping the national political will of the citizenry. In England, an assault mounted from the Left weakened the hold of the traditional ruling classes. Only America, which had suffered light losses and no material damage in the war, seemed immune from the its social, political, and economic aftershocks.

Most of the European powers could no longer sustain large military establishments. In 1918, the dictate of the victorious powers at Versailles reduced the military forces of Germany, which spent almost nothing on military development until 1932. England reduced its air and ground forces significantly. By 1939, the British Navy was a shell of its former self. France reduced its expenditures as well, choosing to concentrate on ground forces and leaving its naval, air, and armor forces too small to counter the German threat. The U.S. government rescinded military conscription and reduced military expenditures across the board. U.S. ground forces shrunk to fewer than 200,000 men, armor was nonexistent, and the air force could deploy only a handful of obsolete machines. Famine, political terror, and civil war crippled any Soviet attempts at military growth. Although by the early 1930s the Red Army had the largest artillery and tank forces in the world, in 1937 Joseph Stalin purged the Red Army's officer corps, killing more than 90 percent of its members. The army disbanded its new tank units and assigned the vehicles as adjuncts to infantry formations. When the Soviets came to blows with tiny Finland in 1939, they were barely able to achieve victory.

Only in Japan and Italy did military expenditures and weapons development increase significantly in the interwar years, but after 1932 Germany also embarked on a major rearmament program under the Nazis. Japan's need to build an industrial base sufficient to maintain a modern military establishment led to its creation of a military society whose every effort went toward increasing the state's military power. The Japanese reliance on overseas sources for critical raw materials forced it to wage wars of conquest in Asia to gain control of oil fields, steel deposits, and other raw materials needed for the sinews of war. Mussolini's attempt to make Italy a great power foundered on the insufficient resource base of Italy itself, as he never obtained sufficient coal, steel, and oil supplies required for a first-rate military machine. By 1939, when Italian military prestige was at its highest and Italian airplanes, ships, and small arms were among the best quality in the world, the fact remained that Italy's industrial base was never adequate to sustain a large military for very long.

Meanwhile, weapons development continued apace. The tank design improved with the appearance of the low-profile hull, the revolving turret, better gun sights, and better tracks and suspension. By the 1930s, the Russians had developed the famed T-34, the best tank of its day. Tank cannon grew to 90 millimeters, and new propellants and shot—particularly the sabot round—made them even more accurate and deadlier. The tank called into existence the first antitank guns. The German Gerlich gun fired a 28mm round of tungsten carbide at four thousand feet per second that was capable of penetrating any known tank armor. A later German invention, the 88mm gun, was originally developed as an antitank weapon but doubled as both an antiaircraft and direct fire gun. The “eighty-eight” is generally adjudged the best weapon of its kind in World War II.

Developments in aircraft design—the stressed metal skin and the monoplane— made the introduction of the modern fighter aircraft possible. Engines producing more than a thousand horsepower made speeds greater than 350 miles per hour commonplace. Companies developed the long-range bomber, capable of flying at altitudes of more than forty thousand feet and at ranges of five thousand miles. For the navies, the light and fast destroyer was built to protect the larger battleships at sea. Submarines could remain at sea for sixty days at a time. The Japanese developed a new torpedo, the Type 93 Long Lance, that was propelled by oxygen, left no track, and had a range of twenty-five miles at thirty-six knots. Torpedoes typically carried warheads of four hundred pounds of high explosive. During this period the aircraft carrier also came into its own. The Japanese carrier
Kaga
, built in the 1920s, carried sixty aircraft and displaced thirty-nine thousand tons. The American carrier USS
Lexington
, of World War II fame, displaced thirty-six thousand tons and carried ninety aircraft. The integration of naval and air forces was almost complete.

The destructive power of infantry, armor, and artillery forces highly increased in World War II. Armed in large numbers with the new, all-metal submachine gun, infantry delivered firepower at rates five times greater than the World War I infantryman could. Infantry carried its own antitank weapons in the form of the American 3.5-inch bazooka rocket launcher or the German Panzerfaust. Dependable motorized transport, such as the Jeep, the “deuce and a half” truck, and the armored personnel carrier—fully tracked, half-tracked, or pneumatic tire vehicles—increased infantry mobility twenty-fold and enabled it to keep pace with the rapid armor advance that characterized combat in World War II.

The tank saw a remarkable increase in its combat capability, and for the first time in almost seven hundred years, cavalry again dominated the battlefield. The Russian
T-34, originally produced in 1935, proved the best battle tank of the war. Mounting an 85mm gun with a new muzzle-brake to reduce recoil, the T-34 could travel at 32 miles per hour with a range of 180 miles. It introduced the sloped armored glacis in front to deflect antitank rounds and had a ground pressure of only ten pounds per square inch, and on its Christie suspension, it could traverse terrain that most other Allied or Axis tanks found impassable. The American Sherman tank introduced cast armor to replace welded armor, the volute spring bogie suspension, and rubber block treads that increased track life by 500 percent. The Sherman also used a revolutionary hydroelectric gun stabilizing system and improved triangle sights. As their engines grew more powerful and more reliable, tanks quickly became the centerpiece of the striking forces for all armies except that of the Japanese.

Responding to the need to defend itself against armor and air attack, artillery's developments resulted in the self-propelled artillery gun. These 8-inch, or 122mm caliber, guns were mobile artillery mounted on tank chassis. Self-propelled artillery came in two forms—the assault gun, which was designed for firepower, and the light assault gun, designed for mobility. The appearance of the dive-bomber and the ground attack fighter required improvements in antiaircraft guns. The Bofors 40mm cannon was capable of firing two rounds per second over a slant range of four miles. The American M-2 90mm gun fired twenty-five rounds per minute to a height of nine miles. The introduction of reliable electronic fire control systems coupled with radar detectors and trackers linked to primitive computers provided great advances in the accuracy and lethality of these guns.

The U.S. 90mm gun and the German eighty-eight were the best antitank guns of the war. Unguided rocket artillery, which the Chinese first used a thousand years earlier, reappeared in the form of the German 15cm Nebelwerfer (“fog thrower” rocket launcher) that could fire six seventy-pound rocket rounds in less than three seconds. The Soviet Katyusha, first at 90 millimeters and then at 122 millimeters, fired more than forty rockets at once while the American T34 Calliope fired sixty rockets at a time. Used as area saturation weapons, these rockets caused large numbers of psychiatric as well as physical casualties.
³⁰
The variable timed fuse, which the U.S. Navy used against attacking planes in January 1943, significantly increased the lethality of artillery fire against ground troops. Each shell contained a tiny radio transceiver that could be set so that the round exploded at a precise distance above the ground. This innovation increased the killing power of artillery by a factor of ten over shells fitted with conventional fuses.

The war at sea saw the final demise of the battleship as it became increasingly vulnerable to air and undersea attack. The aircraft carrier became the major naval weapon. Carriers of the Essex and Midway class were 820 feet long with beams of 147 feet, moved at speeds of thirty-two knots, and carried more than a hundred strike aircraft. Carrier-based aircraft carried two thousand pounds of bombs; flew at 350 miles per hour; attacked with rockets, torpedoes, and machine guns; and ranged more than three hundred miles. Although submarines operated with new electric motors to make them increasingly difficult to detect, antisubmarine technology improved markedly. Radar and radio sets allowed antisubmarine aircraft to detect submarines at night, for instance, and new depth charges provided surface vessels with another means of submarine destruction. By 1944, the submarine was no longer a significant naval threat.

The air war saw the emergence of tremendously improved strike aircraft. The British Spitfire, among other fighter aircraft on both sides, could range outward for a thousand miles at speeds greater than four hundred miles per hour. These aircraft were equipped with 20mm and 37mm cannon, heavy machine guns, and two thousand pounds of bombs. Ground support tactics developed rapidly as strike aircraft made heavy firepower at close ranges available to advancing infantry. Meanwhile, the heavy strategic bomber appeared. The American B-24 Liberator carried 12,800 pounds of bombs at 290 miles per hour for a range of 2,100 miles, and the B-29 Superfortress carried 20,000 pounds of bombs for 3,250 miles at an altitude of 31,850 feet. By war's end the Germans (Messerschmitt Me-262), the British (Vampire), and the Americans (P-59 Aircomet) had produced prototypes of jet-powered aircraft. In August 1945, the United States unveiled the most awesome weapon of war yet invented by man, the atomic bomb, and devastated the civilian population centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The debut of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II made it necessary to distinguish clearly between nuclear and conventional weapons. Only eight years after the attack on Hiroshima nuclear artillery shells made their appearance, and three years later nuclear artillery shells were small enough to be fired from a 155mm howitzer. By 1970, U.S. and Soviet navies had deployed nuclear torpedoes capable of sinking the largest aircraft carriers with a single shot. Nuclear bombs, which in the 1950s weighed many tons and were in the thirty-five-megaton range, became much smaller
so that by the 1980s they could be placed on air-breathing cruise missiles or carried under the wings of fighter aircraft. In the 1950s, the U.S. Navy used nuclear reactors for the first time to power a strike carrier, the USS
Forrestal
. Within a decade, nuclear-powered guided-missile frigates and cruisers appeared. Nuclear missiles mounted on nuclear-powered submarines capable of staying submerged for months were developed by the 1960s. The USS
George Washington
was the first nuclear submarine that could fire its missiles while still submerged. It soon became possible to place several multiple independent reentry vehicles or warheads on a single missile. By 1985, the Trident II submarine carried twenty-four missiles, each mounting twenty separate warheads of almost a half megaton each. Firing submerged, the Trident's missiles have a range of more than eight thousand miles, while land-based strategic missiles are capable of destroying cities from ten thousand miles away. By 1980, the United States and the Soviet Union had acquired enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems of various kinds to destroy each other several hundred times.