view additional pages

New Weapons for the Next War

by JAY EARLE MILLER

The last war saw the development of tanks, flame throwers, poison gases and airplanes as war weapons—what will the next war bring forth? Little-known facts about the latest death-dealing weapons and the defenses developed to draw their fangs are set forth by Mr. Miller in this absorbing and authoritative article.

A GERMAN patrol of Uhlans, the sunlight glinting on their polished helmets and the tips of their long lances, rode out of the woods above the Marne and down toward a small copse where a scouting detachment of Algerian cavalry, with drawn sabres, laid in wait for them.

The time is mid-August, 1914, just seventeen years ago, and the description is from a recently published volume of war memoirs by a French cavalry officer. Imagine the scene—lances against sabers. Here’s another war-volume, “Fighting Fury”, the autobiography of Major James Mc-Cudden, V. C, the famous “Jimmy” McCudden of the British Royal Air Force, who shot down fifty-seven German machines before he lost his life in an accident. Just seventeen years ago today (August 22, 1914) he, with the British air force in France, saw his first German machine. The ground crew turned out to take pot shots at it with rifles while six English planes took off, armed with home-made hand grenades, in an effort to bomb it down.

Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

MOBILIZING MATERIALS

By ARTHUR GRAHAME

A TELEPHONE bell rang in the office of Edward R. Stettinius Jr., chief of the National Defense Advisory Commission’s materials division. It was the Chinese Embassy calling.

A sizable quantity of tungsten had just become available in Indo-China. Would the “United States be interested?

It most certainly would. Three calls by Stettinius brought quick results. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation would supply funds for the purchase. The Procurement Division of the Treasury would instruct one of its agents to do the buying. The Maritime Commission would arrange shipment. Next day, the tungsten was aboard an American ship, on its way to the U. S. A.

Read the rest of this entry »

Unshackle Him!

When “Ding” penned this cartoon some months ago, America’s great defense program was just beginning to roll. Today, industry has gone to war. Our powerful industrial giant is slipping free of his shackles and the smoke of activity is pluming from the nation’s factories. To provide our readers with an authoritative background against which to project the news of the day, POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY presents on the following pages the first of a series of dramatic articles revealing just how industry is being mobilized to arm Uncle Sam’s vast forces of defense for guarding our country against the danger of attack from any quarter.

Big Russian Bomb Holds Sixty Little Ones

Whirling down from the sky, a gigantic aerial bomb employed by Russian aircraft breaks open before it strikes the ground, to release and spread a deadly cargo of small incendiary bombs over a wide area. Nicknamed “Molotov’s bread basket,” after Viacheslav M. Molotov, Russian Commissar for Foreign Affairs, the mammoth bomb is seven and a half feet long and over two feet in diameter. Vanes at its tail cause it to whirl when released from the rack of a bombing plane. This action ultimately opens the steel sides, allowing sixty small incendiary bombs within it to hurtle outward in all directions and plummet earthward to set fire to any inflammable object on the ground within a broad circle. First used in actual warfare against Finland, the bomb was employed to set fire to towns whose houses were constructed of wood.

FUTURE GI. Keyhole peek at what the atomic war’s fighting men may wear. New Army developments shown at Fort Ord, Cal., are this transistor-radio helmet, heat-resistant mask, nylon armored vest and automatic aluminum-alloy rifle that fires at a rate of 700 rounds a minute.

A vertical flame thrower is certainly an cool looking, if not terribly practical idea.

view additional pages

Britain’s Walls of Fire

Awesome flame defenses protected Britain against Nazi invasion in 1940

FIVE years after Britain’s darkest days, when invasion threatened hourly, it is revealed that a barrier of flame would have met the Nazis if they had attempted to storm the English coast. The coast and adjacent waters would have been set afire. Oil tanks were sunk in hillsides; pipelines ran out under the sea.

Beating Bombs Into Mufflers
PRACTICE air bombs, left over from the war, are being converted to a peacetime job. Air Forces trucks and autos in Germany urgently need mufflers, so the Bruck Air Ordnance Depot at Nuremberg is making them from surplus-bomb stocks.

The project, started late in 1946, Has already turned out more than 4,600 truck mufflers. Now the production line is well into an order for 2,200 jeep mufflers. Capacity is 600 of these a week.

Polish Plane Packs Guns in Its Pants
War planes now even carry guns in their “pants.” The illustration at right, of a new Polish fighting craft, shows how a machine gun is attached to the streamline fairing of the undercarriage. Like other guns installed in the plane, it is fired by remote control from the cockpit, as the pilot points his machine head-on at the target. In contrast, designers of American fighting planes prefer to mount the guns elsewhere, so that the landing gear may be retracted in flight for less wind resistance and greater speed.

Tank Walks Tight Rope of Bridge Piles
Like a Gargantuan beast stalking along a giant’s tight rope, an armored Russian tank is pictured in the unusual photograph above crossing a stream by rumbling over the tops of the piles of a dismantled bridge. The shot was made during the filming of a motion picture built around the activities of the Red Army, for release as part of a celebration marking the twenty-first anniversary of the founding of the Soviet fighting forces.

view additional pages

Tomorrow’s Missiles Take Off
TOMORROW’S Navy will be ready to fight with weapons as deadly accurate as William Tell’s arrow. Successors to the carronade and Dahlgren gun are such characters as Little Joe and the Gargoyle. Some are guided missiles, some are planes, some are power-packages. All fly regularly out over the Pacific from the Navy’s Air Missile Test Center at Point Mugu, Calif. Each run is tracked by radar and telemetering devices. Some units are preset, unalterable once flight commences. Others, with their own radar to detect and steer for the target, are fiendishly accurate. Command-system missiles are usually radio-controlled; course-seeking missiles are directed by light beams or radio energy.

view additional pages

Gas!

America was ready to give and take if the Axis had turned loose with the most inhumane of all modern weapons!

LOOK carefully at the pictures on these pages—if you’ve been wondering what we would have done in case the Axis powers had introduced deadly chemicals in the recent war.

It seems fantastic, weird and remote, now that the shooting is over. But here are the brutal facts, revealed for the first time by the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service. It was alert and ready to retaliate in heaping measure had our enemies used gas. Although the U. S. is not a party to any treaty or other agreement not to use gas, we have long been committed to the policy that we would not resort to this horrible weapon unless it was first employed by our foes. The fact that our troops were fully prepared for offensive and defensive gas warfare undoubtedly stopped the Axis from challenging us on this score.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s interesting to read articles like this one, where the revolutionary aspects of one particular piece of technology are considered in near isolation. The author correctly assumes that bombers will get much bigger, fly higher, faster and become much more destructive. But this leads him to the following conclusion:
“In all probability, we shall not see the great numbers of airplanes we had in the last war (WWI).”
Why? Because, “It is so difficult to find aircraft in heavy clouds and in the dark, that the menace of opposing aircraft will be almost negligible.”

People predicting the future often forget that the change they are focusing on is not the only change occurring. In the case of WWII you had radar, acoustic detectors, air patrols, intelligence, radio listening posts and flack among others. All of these combined to require an exponential increase in the number of aircraft, not the great reduction predicted.

view additional pages

The NEXT WAR in the AIR

By GENERAL WILLIAM MITCHELL
Former Commander Air Forces, A.E.F.

AIRCRAFT can now be built that will go around the world at the equator on one charge of fuel.

Lighter-than-air craft now can be made to carry fifty or sixty tons of useful load besides crew and fuel; they can ascend to 30,000 feet or more, and their radius of action is greater than that of any other known means of transportation.

Heavier-than-air craft now can be made to go from 6,000 to 8,000 miles, carrying 4,000 pounds of bombs, to operate at an altitude of 35,000 feet, and at a speed between 300 and 400 miles an hour.

But at present we are in a period of arrested development in air power plants because we cannot easily get away from the internal-combustion engine. We are making these bigger and more powerful continually, at present up to about 4,000 horsepower, while our engine fuel is being made safer and more economical. Steam engines and rocket engines are being experimented with, but our greatest aerial development will come with the development of an entirely new type of engine, lighter, stronger, safer and less complicated. The modern gasoline engine has from 2,000 to 5,000 different parts, one of the most complicated mechanisms ever made, not excepting the mechanical toys of the middle ages.

Read the rest of this entry »