Word: bushing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...science of destruction, growing by leaps & bounds since World War I, has changed, and continues to change the whole face of warfare. During World War I, precision manufacture, mass production and the internal combustion engine upset all the old techniques. Barbed wire and the machine gun, recalls Author Bush, "ended forever the hot rush of masses of men." In modern times, says he in a typical scientist's estimate, not man but the factory became "a dominant element in the whole paraphernalia...
...reached the climax of Hiroshima. Dr. Bush thumbs through the catalogue of miraculous instruments of World War II: radar, the eye which helped save Britain during the Nazis' all-out bombing campaign; sonar, the underwater ear which helped break the Nazis' almost-decisive U-boat campaign; missiles, such as the V-i which "might well have stopped the [Normandy] invasion"; rocket-firing bazookas which can stop tanks; recoilless guns which can be carried by two men and have the power of 75-mm. howitzers...
...much to be feared as any weapon in the arsenal, says Dr. Bush, is the submarine, now able to stay submerged for long periods "with only a small end of a pipe [the schnorkel] sticking out like a swimmer breathing through a straw," able to outrun pursuers and overtake fast convoys, and carrying long-range homing torpedoes which could be fired from a point beyond the earshot of sonar. The Nazis had been a few months too late with their undersea engine of destruction. But there it is now, says Bush, a heritage of German ingenuity: "one of our greatest...
These weapons and many more-in awesome priority, the atom bomb-are in the arsenal. So, ruminatively, Dr. Bush looks into the near and distant future...
...Canceled Bomber. On the other hand, the bomber in mass formations over land targets had become very vulnerable. One lesson of World War II, says Bush, is that "bombardment of enemy cities in the face of determined defense, as the sole means of bringing victory over a foe of equal or comparable strength, was a delusion, and not worth the extreme cost and effort it entailed . . . [In the future] no fleets of bombers will proceed unmolested against any enemy that can bring properly equipped jet pursuit ships against them in numbers, aided by effective ground radar, and equipped with rockets...