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When the first World War broke over Europe in 1914, the physicists at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, famed citadel of pure science, scattered to Government Service, as they will doubtless do in 1939. But during the first World War the late revered Lord Rutherford, great formulator of the atom's internal structure, stuck to his post. He was on the verge of splitting the atom. When a committee of scientists sought his help on a method for submarine detection, he put them off by saying that if he could prove atomic disintegration it would be more important than the war itself. As it turned out, it was not.
The scientific achievement most important to the Germany of World War I was only indirectly a military weapon, and has since been used far more in peace than in war. This was Fritz Haber's nitrogen-fixation process which enabled Germany to manufacture nitrates (for explosives) and other nitrogen compounds from thin air. Haber's name has been smirched in Nazi Germany. He was a Jew.
** According to Chemicals in War (TIME, March 8, 1937), by Lieut. Colonel Augustin M. Prentiss — generally considered the most thorough treatise on gas warfare, past and future, in English.