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To U.S. scientists, the turning point of World War II was March 20, 1943. That was the day that U-boat sinkings began to sag like a beaten fighter. Bigger and bloodier battles have since been—and are yet to be—fought, but, in the scientists' log, none more decisive. And no one knows better than they how close the United Nations came to losing the crucial Battle of the Atlantic.
Last week a small part of the story could be told. The struggle against the U-boats was primarily a battle of technology, and in the summer and fall of 1942 Allied technologists heard disturbing news about the U-boat's growing effectiveness. New German devices and tactics were steadily increasing the submarines' kill. U.S. scientists, too, were working on new devices, but there was no predicting how soon they might begin to produce results. That winter the Allied high command sweated through perhaps the worst period of the war, awaiting a U-boat campaign which might virtually cut off communication between America and Europe.
That it never came was due to a double break: the Germans got their improvements into play later and the Allies earlier than expected. When the chips were down, U.S. scientists won. In the last ten days of March, 1943, U-boat ship sinkings dramatically dropped two-thirds. They have continued to decline ever since. At 1943's end, Adolf Hitler publicly acknowledged that "one single technical invention of our enemies" had checked his U-boats.
That was not quite correct; no one device but a combination of new techniques and tactics was responsible. But his unwilling tribute was much appreciated by the anonymous army of U.S. scientists who are fighting a deadly, technological war.
Secret Army. Their general is a shrewd, imaginative physicist, Dr. Vannevar (rhymes with beaver) Bush, in peacetime president of the Carnegie Institution's vast scientific empire. His job is unprecedented in U.S. military history: as chairman of the Army & Navy's Joint Committee on New Weapons and Equipment, he is the first civilian technician ever to sit in the highest war councils. The Office of Scientific Research and Development, which he commands, is in effect a fifth branch, G5, of the military general staff. Under OSRD (working with the Army's and Navy's own laboratories), practically all the nation's military-scientific research is mobilized.* OSRD has a National Defense Research Committee (weapons), a Committee on Medical Research.