Reading 25
“The Great War was the first truly high-tech war, and as such it put to rest all sorts of myths and false assumptions about the role of modern technology in warfare. One was the notion that deadlier weapons would make wars shorter and more humane, because civilized nations would not possibly continue to fight for long when the human costs were so high. Today, that conviction strikes us as naïve, laughable, and obscene, all at once, because we know it to be tragically false; we know the slaughter that actually ensued in 1914–1918. But in the West at the turn of the century, the almost childlike faith in the benign nature of technological progress and the goodness of science made it seductive.”
- Paul Lockhart, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare (2021)
“There is little doubt that the Second World War witnessed a great many surprising leaps forward in weapons technology, and in technology in general. There is also little doubt that Nazi Germany deserves the lion’s share of credit for most of those leaps forward. In jet propulsion (and jet aircraft), in rocket technology, in small arms and artillery and armour and submarines—German engineers were either significantly ahead of their Allied counterparts or completely in a class of their own. Even in the ultimate technological innovation of the war, the harnessing of the power of the atom, German scientists came frighteningly close to beating the Allies. It is not at all empty speculation to consider how far German scientists and engineers might have advanced in the technology of death had the Reich not been under constant attack from the air in 1943–1945, nor to recall that the war was hard-fought and a close scrape. But in the end, Soviet and American weapons—often inferior to their German analogues—prevailed, because the Russians and the Americans could manufacture those weapons in staggering quantities and the Nazi war machine could not. When it came to weapons in the Second World War, good enough was good enough, as long as there were enough.”
- Paul Lockhart, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare (2021)
