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from the could-not-have-done-it-without-them dept.
This Daily Beast article titled "The Nerds Who Won World War II" details a book describing the influence of great technical minds in winning WWII for the alllies.
In Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, historian, international security authority, and Yale professor Paul Kennedy turns on their heads many standard notions about how the Allies won.
Kennedy dwells lovingly on the eccentric scientists, naval officers, and others who outfitted the British Admiralty unit called the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development, locally known as Wheezers and Dodgers. Men brought up on H.G. Wells and Jules Verne science fiction set their minds to solving the convoy crisis. They studied where the U-boats preyed on ships and convinced the air services to add an extra fuel tank to extend aircraft coverage enough to close the North Atlantic gap. They came up with the U-boat-killer shipboard multiple-grenade launcher called the Hedgehog, for its spiked look, as a supplement to less effective depth charges and tinkered with other weaponry to reach the deep-diving subs. Add to that the development of cavity magnetrons: escort ships and aircraft began to carry these small microwave radars enabling them to spot and chase down wolfpacks lurking in wait for the convoys, sometimes hundreds of miles away.
Although nerds have definitely gotten some widely publicized credit, especially for encryption, in films such as Enigma, is it enough? Should other nerd archetypes like engineers be receiving more credit in media with regards to WWII?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @02:07PM
Why don't you hero worship nazi nerds too while you are at? Geez.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @02:50PM
> Why don't you hero worship nazi nerds too while you are at? Geez.
Troll actually makes a good point.
Lots of nerds prefer to be heads down engineers, ignoring the moral implications of their work. We are not computers thoughtlessly doing the bidding of someone else. It is our responsibility to constantly evaluate how the results of our work are and will be used.
(Score: 5, Funny) by M. Baranczak on Saturday May 09 2015, @03:39PM
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That is not my department!" says Wernher Von Braun.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday May 09 2015, @04:09PM
Next up? "Oedipus Rex"!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Saturday May 09 2015, @10:33PM
Please credit Tom Lehrer for that!
Or as the old saw goes, the US won the Cold War because our Nazi scientists were better than their Nazi scientists!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @04:17PM
Troll actually makes a good point.
I agree. However, without the Germans most of the soviet and US space race would have been years behind. They basically bootstrapped that whole thing. Just so they could land bombs on the english.
A lot of things can be turned into a weapon unfortunately. It is not hard to strap a bomb to something going very fast...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @04:24PM
> However, without the Germans most of the soviet and US space race would have been years behind.
Look where it got us. After going to the moon a couple of times, everything stagnated.
Seems like in the long run it didn't make much of a difference.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Saturday May 09 2015, @05:05PM
What's stagnated? It's moved in fits and starts, but today most of us in the developed world use satellites on a daily basis, to say nothing of the ongoing exploration of the sun, planets, and other bodies around the solar system. As well as the increasingly detailed orbital studies of the Earth itself - something that's going to be vital to mitigating and/or preparing for the long-term changes we're initiating.
It didn't live up to the science fiction of the time, but then that was grossly optimistic anyway. Colonization has always been driven by economic opportunity or social dissatisfaction - and neither has been great enough to justify the danger and financial expense of settling another world. Why settle another world when Antarctica, undersea habitats, or even deep underground habitats are so much radically cheaper, safer, and more hospitable? If the EmDrive or its cousins prove to be generating an actual thrust that could change very rapidly. Otherwise we're likely stuck waiting for ion drives to become powerful and efficient enough to do the job - and that's likely going to take a whole lot of money being invested from the already meager research funds allocated to space.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @09:31PM
> What's stagnated? It's moved in fits and starts, but today most of us in the developed world use satellites on a daily basis
And if we were ten years later getting into orbit we would still be doing all of that because the limiting factor on satellite capabilities is not rocket science.
> to say nothing of the ongoing exploration of the sun, planets, and other bodies around the solar system.
You are right to say nothing about those things because they don't matter to 99.999% of the population. Whatever knowledge is gained from those endeavours is absolutely, 100 percent, not time critical. A 10 year delay wouldn't have made an iota of difference to anyone not directly employed by those projects.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday May 09 2015, @11:58PM
So, what usage of rockets do you imagine *would* matter to more than a minuscule fraction of the population? Aside from missile bombardment. I mean sure, it would be fun to take a vacation on the Moon, but would that really *matter*?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @03:20PM
Why don't you hero worship nazi nerds too while you are at? Geez.
If they were Jewish or openly gay, they probably weren't around to help.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Sunday May 10 2015, @12:28AM
To be fair, if they were openly gay, they wouldn't have the opportunity to help on either side.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Saturday May 09 2015, @05:04PM
we do [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @05:52PM
It's something not nearly enough people have even heard of, much less though about.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Geotti on Sunday May 10 2015, @12:30AM
Including the Soviet counterpart [wikipedia.org] for completeness' sake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @10:05PM
Why not? You can't blame people for supporting their country, when that country commits atrocities without their knowledge. The work of these people is no less worthy of appreciation just because they ended up on the wrong side by no fault of their own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2015, @04:12AM
Some of these nazi nerds devised diesel fume gashouse and zyklon B. And our nerds devised the nuke that got dropped in Japan.
Us nerds need to learn to think deeper of implication of our work. We bare more responsibility than we would like.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2015, @04:16AM
My bad. Zyklon B wasn't originally cooked up for human massacre, but it was some nazi nerd who came up with the idea to use it for gas chamber.