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posted by martyb on Saturday May 09 2015, @01:26PM   Printer-friendly
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?

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Saturday May 09 2015, @10:33PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Saturday May 09 2015, @10:33PM (#180881)

    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!

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    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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