Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Invention That Won World War II

Toss up between spam and the A bomb😆

Grand Coulee dam is credited with being THE most critical component of the Manhatten Project as it supplied the massive amounts of electricity to power the Uranium separation process at Hanford Wa.

Don't forget J R Simplot and his dehydrated mashed potatoes. Produced in plants built specifically for the war effort.

The collective will of the American people won WW2, not any single device or idea.

Don't forget that $11B ($190B today) of lend-lease we gave Uncle Joe.

Deuce and a half, or 6x6 for the Jarheads, plus Liberty ships. Logistics, logistics, logistics...

The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were a pretty big help.

Liberty ships.

Logistics big time, and on the spot decision making at individual, squad, platoon, and company level to start with.
Low level and higher level leadership was not suppressed by 1 man at the top like Hitler after Stalingrad or Tojo in Japan.

some suggest hitler lost the war when he invited russian blood to be spilt.

One might make an argument for all the inventions noted above, plus radar. No single invention won the war, although they all contributed, and of course the atom bomb ended it.

Kudos, however, to those who mentioned the Greatest Generation as being THE key. And that includes all of that generation, most certainly those who served by producing the other inventions and those who fed all of the rest.

Honestly don't think any one invention won the war by itself although many of them influenced tactics and may have shortened the war. The combination of Russian manpower in the East armed with "good enough" weapons and American logistics on the Western front and in the Pacific made it unwinnable for Germany or Japan.

"I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were "discussing freely" among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war. No one ever discussed this subject officially, and I don't think Stalin left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state here that several times in conversations with me he noted that these were the actual circumstances. He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so." -Khrushchev Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev: Commissar, 1918-1945, Volume 1

Uranium separation was undertaken at Oak Ridge and the result was the uranium U-235 bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Uranium only contains .72% U-235.

Hanford produced a man made element, plutonium. The New Mexico desert bomb and the Nagasaki bombs were Plutonium weapons. Grand Coulee power was critical for supplying power to the Hanford operations.

Paul Harvey once said that Stalin spoke English quite well yet always used an interpreter. No one outside of his close associates knew he knew English. In meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill, he overheard talk that wasn't intended for him and he always had a little extra thinking time before his interpreter could translate.

It wasn't an invention but Hitler's divide and conquer policy cost them big. They needed to take other countries 1 at a time, not all at once.

I'm going to assume you mean the breaking of the Enigma codes. I don't think there was any one invention that won the war, but the work of English and American code breakers certainly had a major influence on the eventual result.

They knew so much about what was going on that they had to make great efforts to fabricate plausible reasons why they knew what they knew, so the enemy wouldn't figure out that the codes were broken and change the system. This would include having observation planes make a "fortunate" appearance where they already knew the enemy was going to be.

An excellent novel about all this (and a lot else) is Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

No contest ,Fat Man and Little Boy.You can put all the others mentioned here and they won't come close.How many months, even years were we fighting in the Pacific theater and the Japanese surrendered in days after us dropping these two.

uncle joe has been paraphrased as sayin' that the us supplied equipment & logistics, england supplied the planning, and russia supplied the blood to win ww2.

i guess at the 50,000 feet level, there's some truth in that statement.

+1

An argument can be made for the Norden bomb sight.

Our enemies used the “spray and pray” method from anything above a few thousand feet.

A device that allowed us to accurately drop bombs from 10 times that altitude, an altitude that defied accurate flack, and limited fighter attack to a few minutes.
It allowed us to decimate axis infrastructure, factories, fuel and ammo depots to devastating effect.