Secret projects during World War 2

As we celebrate the D-Day invasion and WWII in general we have been gifted by John's great blog entry on the subject. Take time to read it here: http://xhamster.com/user/jonboi18/posts/301022.html. In it he really does the brave men that fought for us a great honor.

While the invasion and brutal fighting was what won the war in the end, with bravery and blood, there were many technological projects that shortened the war and saved thousands of lives. As we take the time to memorialize the efforts of these brave men I think its also important to honor the efforts of some truly brilliant men and women. It is through their breakthroughs that we were able to break the German codes and develop a weapon so horrid that it was instrumental in ending the war.

Before we get into the highly technical aspects and major secret projects during the war, I want to spotlight a British innovation that had a huge effect on the war: the bouncing bomb.



It was common knowledge that damaging the German infrastructure was vital to the war effort. A huge part of the this infrastructure was the dams they used for water re-routing and power generation. Previous attempts to hit these dams proved futile, as bomber launched torpedoes tended to break up on the surface of the water and the rest of the dam was protected by torpedo nets and depth charges. This problem came to the attention of a capable British engineer by the name of Barnes Wallis. Before designing the bouncing bomb he worked for Vickers aircraft design, where he gained fame by designing the geodetic airframe. In designing it he conceived of a bomb that would skip off the water and thereby the torpedo nets and depth charges. The result was the cylindrical design you see above, spinning backwards at 500 rpm the bomb skipped along the surface before contacting the dam and plunging beneath the surface to detonate. The resulting raid on Germany's Ruhr Valley and the destruction of the Mohne dam was key in damaging German infrastructure. While they were able to rapidly repair it and restore service the derivation of resources allowed Britain to gain a foothold that would lead to the eventual Allied victory.

After the war Barnes Wallis went on to be one of the pioneers of 'swing-wing' aircraft which would lead to the development of the Panavia Tornado(ironically used by both the German Luftwaffe and the Royal Air force). This design would also influence the highly capable F-14 Tomcat Naval fighter. Wallis was also key in designing the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, although he left the project early because he was not happy with the direction it was headed. He would be knighted in 1968 for his contribution to British military technology.



Now on to Enigma and the efforts of the famous Bletchley Park and it's mathematicians.



The German Enigma machine was a very advanced (for the time) cryptographic machine. Now I'm not going to go into geeky nirvana explaining how it worked, but for the time it was bleeding edge technology. Enigma produced used changing pathways of electric current to implement a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, which in one stage (rotor) was not that complicated but when combined together to make four total rotors it became difficult to break. In fact for sometime it was considered unbreakable even its commercial version, that is until three Polish mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki, and Henryk Zygalski broke the code. Later Marian Rejewski went on to design the first cryptographic bombs, a technology was later used by the famous Bletchley Park.



Bletchley Park (mansion above) was the headquarters for the Government Code & Cipher School, which was tasked with breaking foreign codes and decrypting enemy signals. Divided into several huts along with mansion, this comparatively small block of land had an massive impact on the war. While mostly famous for breaking the Enigma code it also broke the just as advanced stream-cipher Lorenz code, which was used by the German army. Mathematician Bill Tutte is credited with breaking that particular encryption system and it resulted in constructing the British Tunny a reverse engineering project of the Lorenz machine.

Enigma was proving to be a huge problem for allied forces, it allowed seamless organization of the German Navy including their devastating U-boat attacks. It would fall to the brilliant Alan Turing and Dilly Knox to solve the puzzle, a task they were more than capable of. As most concentrated on the wiring of the Enigma, Turing and Knox used the application of crib-based decryption (again, I won't bore with the details) for use against Enigma. It was this work, which was a brilliant extension of earlier work of the Polish and combined with innovative statistical insights would result in the Bombe. The cryptographic Bombe allowed the British and Allies to decipher Enigma codes and effect major victories. During his research in breaking the naval Enigma he also assisted Bell Labs in the U.S. in creating the Secure Speech protocol, which involved frequency shifting.



It was also Turing's work that allowed Tutte and his group to break the aforementioned Lorenz cipher, the Colossus computer was based on the Turingery, a side project of his. Breaking these ciphers allowed the Allies to shorten the war by at least two years, Winston Churchill was quoted as saying that the efforts of Bletchley Park allowed them to win the war.

Unfortunately there was a tragic side to the story of Dr. Alan Turing. After the war while he contributing greatly to the burgeoning fields of computer science and mathematical biology, he was convicted for being a homosexual, which was still a crime in Great Britain. He would plead guilty to the 'crime' and was chemically treated, a process which rendered him impotent. Turing would also have his security clearance removed which ended his cryptanalysis career and banned him from coming into the United States. He would die two years later of suicide by cyanide poisoning. Suicide being the cause of his death has been debated because of private experiments, but regardless, the end of his life was tragic and sad. He was a hero of the Allied powers and they turned their backs on him because of sexual orientation. Now we are recognizing him for the great man he was, the father of modern cryptanalysis, computer science, and mathematical biology.

The Manhattan Project



The scientists above were deeply involved with the development of the atomic bomb. They are Dr. Niels Bohr, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, Dr. Richard Feynman, and Dr. Enrico Fermi.

To preface this, we all know what the Manhattan project is and what it's results were, but what is sometimes not appreciated is the effect it had on ending the war. Much like deciphering Enigma shorted the war so did the horror of the atomic bomb.

The idea of atomic weaponry was first delivered to President Roosevelt in the Einstein-Szilard letter. It was to convince the United States to acquire stockpiles of fissionable material because of the development of powerful new weaponry. Fermi was already working in research of nuclear chain reactions and the weapons were based on Einstein's work on mass-energy equivalence. An accelerated weapons development project was initiated under the code name: Development of Substitute Materials. The Manhattan Project was one of the largest military initiatives in history, for instance, just the Oak Ridge facility employed 82,000 workers.

While the details are long and complex, the U.S. succeeded in developing nuclear weaponry. On July 16, 1945 the first nuclear test was carried out at Trinity, proving the feasibility of the technology.



Shortly after, in August of 1945 two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Little Boy (gun type) and Fat Man (implosion type) respectfully. Nearly 200,000 people were killed or injured in the two bombings. It was very shortly after that Japan surrendered to the U.S. Partly because of the fear of atomic weapons and impending war with the Soviet Union. While the atomic bombs killed tens of thousands their use shortened the war considerably may have saved lives on both sides.

We are confronted with sobering aftermath of the Manhattan Project, the beginning of the Atomic Age and nuclear arms race. While there are benefits of atomic innovation such as nuclear power and various types of medical treatment, the specter of a global thermonuclear war hangs over our heads sixty years later.

It was Dr. Robert Oppenheimer that said after the Manhattan Project and later innovation of thermonuclear weaponry: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds".

There were men of great brilliance and bravery during World War Two, it was tragic that it had to happen at all. The holocaust, fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the use of atomic weaponry and the death of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Perhaps as a race we can look back on their accomplishments and mistakes and learn from them not to allow something like this happen again.

Maybe in the future we can take their brilliance without the war.

Either way, we must remember everyone who contributed, from soldiers to scientists, cooks to sailors. They were all were a part of an effort on which our world is built. Do their memories justice.

As always, thank you for reading.