Scientific Research In World War II

What scientists did in the war

Ad Maas, Hans Hooijmaijers, Ad Maas, Hans Hooijmaijers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780710313409
• eBook ISBN: 9781135784577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book seeks to explore how scientists across a number of countries managed to cope with the challenging circumstances created by World War II.

No scientist remained unaffected by the outbreak of WWII. As the book shows, there were basically two opposite ways in which the war encroached on the life of a scientific researcher. In some cases, the outbreak of the war led to engagement in research in support of a war-waging country; in the other extreme, it resulted in their marginalisation. The book, starting with the most marginalised scientist and ending with those fully engaged in the war-effort, covers the whole spectrum of enormously varying scientific fates. Distinctive features of the volume include:

• a focus on the experiences of 'ordinary' scientists, rather than on figureheads like Oppenheimer or Otto Hahn
• contributions from a range of renowned academics including Mark Walker, an authority in the field of science in World War II
• a detailed study of the Netherlands during the German Occupation

This richly illustrated volume will be of major interest to researchers of the history of science, World War II, and Modern History.

1 The mobilisation of science and science-based technology during the Second World War

A comparative history

Mark Walker

Science during the Second World War is a large topic that has received a lot of attention from historians, but the coverage has been uneven.¹ While some subjects have been studied in detail, others have barely been touched, and there is still much to discover or reinterpret. This essay will try to use as broad a brush as possible in order to set the stage for other chapters in this book as well as to give the reader a sense of the scope of the subject.

My overview will emphasise certain countries and developments in science and technology over others, and does not claim to be a definitive account. As Roy Macleod has noted in the introduction to a collection of essays on science and World War II in the Pacific theatre:

many Western historians of science see the emerging relationship between science and war as a … regrettable interruption in the normal flow of scientific discovery, rather than as an expected ‘norm’ of practice. In this perspective, such relationships are seen as unwarranted intrusions – their existence revealing a dark, unnatural side of the Enlightenment project that viewed reason and science as agencies of universal improvement … military connections were a necessary evil, in the long run detrimental to the ethics and interests of science, and possibly of civilisation itself … We are now encouraged to read the history of science and war as parallel, often intersecting, and mutually dependent activities, rather than opposing narratives.²

In a similar vein, David Edgerton has recently published a revisionist account of science in Britain during the Second World War, arguing that Britain was a ‘warfare state’ between 1920 and 1970, and that historians and scientists alike have overlooked a great deal of the science because it was not located in the usual academic places: ‘… important state and industrial military laboratories, design centers and workshops were responsible for most of the major [British] innovations in military technology of the Second World War’.³

The literature on the other winners of the Second World War is not satisfying. There are several good recent works on Soviet science, but with surprisingly little coverage of science in service of the Second World War.⁴ The Soviet atomic bomb is, of course, a post-war development,⁵ and most literature on Soviet science is arranged thematically such that the war does not stand out. Yet science and science-based technology must have made an important contribution to the eventual Soviet victory over Germany on the eastern front.

As far as the United States is concerned, older literature such as Daniel Kevles’ account⁶ still dominates the historiography. In general, there is an emphasis on such ‘Big Science’ projects such as the atomic bomb⁷ or radar.⁸ However, the tacit assumption that these two novel, interdisciplinary, and large-scale projects were typical or even stereotypical of American science – let alone science in general – in the service of the Second World War should now be questioned. This assumption has been strengthened by the recent emphasis placed by historians on science in America after World War II.⁹ This emphasis may well be due to the intrinsic importance of the topic, but an assumption that we already know what there was to know about the wartime period may also have contributed.

Recently the losers, Germany and Japan, have attracted the attention of historians of science interested in the war.¹⁰ In a book on Japanese secret weapons, Walter Grunden argues that:

Japan’s failure to organise large-scale research and development projects for the war effort stalled its progress toward … high-technology development. Although Japan also engaged in efforts to produce nuclear weapons, radar, and technologically sophisticated missiles, it did not effectively mobilise its pool of scientific and engineering talent en masse towards the end … there was no Big Science revolution in Japan as occurred elsewhere in the West during World War II.¹¹

The German case is relatively well known. There is an older but still valuable book from the 1970s on the mobilisation of engineering and technology.¹² During the 1980s and 1990s, literature appeared on the German variant of ‘Big Science’, including aeronautics, rocketry, and nuclear research.¹³ Disciplinary studies appeared at around the same time for individual sciences, although usually not emphasising the theme of World War II.¹⁴ The Max Planck Society’s research program for the history of (its predecessor) the Kaiser Wilhelm Society during National Socialism produced a great deal of work on German science during the Second World War – the war made up almost half of the Third Reich – as well as a major work by Helmut Maier on the mobilisation of science and science-based technology for the war effort.¹⁵ The important message of this newer literature is that rather than the war stopping or interrupting science in Germany, it often enhanced and facilitated it.

Unfortunately, very little is known about the application of science to war for Axis ally Fascist Italy,¹⁶ wartime allies such as Hungary, or collaborating regimes such as Vichy France.¹⁷ Émigrés played an important role in the fight against Germany, but this subject is usually integrated into histories of particular projects, rather than studies of émigrés in particular, so that it is also mainly limited to subjects such as radar or atomic bombs.¹⁸

Recently scholars have used comparative history in order to investigate the interaction of science and war.¹⁹ For various reasons German examples have played a major role in these comparisons, with a welcome integration of Japanese case studies. Just as with national histories, there have been relatively modest contributions from experts on Soviet or American science.

In general, the subject of science during and contributing to the Second World War is surprisingly incomplete. The fact that some subjects such as radar, rockets and nuclear weapons have received so much attention obscures the fact that a great deal is either poorly understood or essentially unknown. This is both the result of, and the reason for, the common assumptions that radar and the atomic bomb are all one needs to know, that they are the patterns the rest of science followed. This collection serves the valuable purpose of fleshing out and expanding this picture.

Scope of Subject

What should be included and excluded from this study? Scientific research or development work that was no different from research done in peacetime is relevant in this regard. Sometimes, a remarkable amount of continuity in the research existed where one might have expected an interruption because of the extraordinary circumstances created by the war. The historian of science is interested in both this ‘unexpected’ continuity and the way scientists managed to maintain it.²⁰ Research done because of the war, directly or indirectly, or done significantly differently because of the war, is especially important. This includes research on weapons and other things directly relevant to the war effort, but should not be restricted to it.

Time span is also important. Studies of science during World War II cannot merely begin with the commencement of hostilities and end with the armistices – and not only because, depending on the country, there is no one beginning or end. There is a relevant prehistory, as well as postscript to this history. The former should include, for example, rearmament and mobilisation efforts immediately prior to the war; the latter should also examine the post-war transfer of technology, scientific techniques, and manpower from Germany to other countries. But, of course, the line has to be drawn somewhere. This chapter will include the Soviet work on atomic bombs from 1945 to 1949 because this was an immediate consequence of wartime developments, but other post-war examples will be excluded.

Who should be included is also an important consideration. Of course, scientists from the warring countries, but also scientists in occupied countries as well as those scientists forced to work for the German war effort, both inside and outside of Germany. Ideally, scientists working in industry in all of these countries should be included. They contributed an important and large portion of the research and development during the war, although much less is known about these researchers because of the difficulty in gaining access to sources in private archives.

Of course, historians would want to include research that today is, and perhaps even immediately after the war, was recognised as important, first-rate science. But they should also look at work that scientists today might not be impressed by, that might now even be labelled ‘not serious’ or ‘pseudo-science’, so long as the researchers at the time did seriously pursue it, or the regimes seriously supported it. Thus, in general, a history of science during World War II should include much more than it excludes.

The Quality of the War

World War II was not the same everywhere or for every side; rather, it was different for the various countries involved. In Germany it was also a racial war. Even if we limit ourselves to the period after the German invasion of Poland, German military strategies and occupation policies clearly had a racial and sometimes genocidal dimension. Scientists were intimately involved, for example, in the planning and implementation of the ‘Germanisation’ of occupied lands in the east. Scientists helped sift the ‘racially valuable’ element out from the existing populations and plan the future settlements for transplanted Germans. When German anthropologists trained SS physicians in racial hygiene (the German term for eugenics) during the war, this was as direct a contribution to the war effort as German engineers training soldiers how to operate a new weapon. Scientists who were trying to develop a scientific method for determining race, given the context of a war against racial enemies, inside and outside of the National Socialist ‘People’s Community’, were also not only contributing to the war effort, but were seen as doing precisely that.

In the Soviet Union, ironically, it was not an ideological war of communism against fascism. Early on, Stalin and other leading Soviet officials realised that this would not suffice to rally the Soviet people. Instead, the Soviet leadership called upon their citizens to fight for mother Russia against the invading Germans – and here, as in most countries fighting Germany during the war, ‘Nazi’ and ‘German’ came almost to be synonyms. In Japan it was a racial war, including the brutal occupation of China and other parts of East Asia, as well as a fight to ensure Japan’s rightful position as a world power. In the United States, the war was not about German racism or anti-Semitism, rather German aggression, but was racist towards the Japanese. In Britain it was not a racial or ideological war, rather more a matter of responding to German aggression. Since the war meant different things to different countries, it also meant different things to scientists in these countries.

Total War

In total war, when whole societies or populations are mobilised for the needs of a modern, industrial and technological conflict, almost all scientific activity becomes war work. During wartime, strained war economies both lost manpower to the army and were urged to increase the quality and quantity of production. In the warring countries, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, these mobilisations led to a shortage of scientists and engineers for industries vital to the war effort.

The universities and technical colleges were expected to help make up the difference, even as their staff and students were being called up....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction Ordinary scientists in extraordinary circumstances
• 1 The mobilisation of science and science-based technology during the Second World War: A comparative history
• 2 To work or not to work in war research? The case of the Italian physicist G. P. S. Occhialini during World War II
• 3 Scientific research in the Second World War: The case for Bacinol, Dutch penicillin
• 4 Preventing theft: The Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory in wartime
• 5 Electron microscopy in Second World War Delft
• 6 ‘Splendid isolation’? Aviation medicine in World War II
• 7 National Socialism, human genetics and eugenics in The Netherlands, 1940—1945
• 8 The birth of a modern instrument and its development during World War II: Electron microscopy in Germany from the 1930s to 1945
• 9 Aerodynamic research at the Nationaal Luchtvaartlaboratorium (NLL) in Amsterdam under German occupation during World War II
• 10 Masa Takeuchi and his involvement in the Japanese nuclear weapons research programme
• 11 The cyclotron and the war: Construction of the 60-inch cyclotron in Japan
• 12 Forging a new discipline: Reflections on the wartime infrastructure for research and development in feedback control in the US, the UK, Germany and the USSR
• 13 British cryptanalysis: The breaking of ‘Fish’ traffic