Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars

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For mines, torpedoes, and radio, this is the Russo-Japanese War; for submarines and aircraft, World War I; and for radar, World War II. An example documented by O’Hara and Heinz is China’s use of mines dating back to the tenth century during the Sung dynasty. Within each of these chapters, they do a commendable job of producing a pleasingly readable condensed history that compares development success and failure across several nations including the United States, United Kingdom, Russia (and the USSR), Italy, France, Germany, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire, although not all of them in each case. It also provides some stimulus for consideration by those planning the future of navies, in an inceasingly complex and challenging world.

Moreover, the chapters are provided with useful illustrations, pictures, and graphics that emphasize the authors’ points. The Second World War was an arms race: a period of intense scientific activity and technological developments. Forethought, strategic vision, and technical acumen might drive technological development in periods of peace, but it is a thesis of this work that navies learn the best use of new technology only through the medium of peer-to-peer combat.

Three companies built prototypes—the Ford Motor Company, Willys-Overland, and the American Bantam Car Company. Naval technologies present in 1905 that had been unknown at Trafalgar included torpedoes, radio, moored contact mines, and (barely) practical submarines.

This book looks at how selected world navies incorporated certain technologies into their ships, operations and doctrine.Once the technology existed, however, bottom-up experimentation and lessons learned were the quickest ways to develop effective exploitation methods. Your use of the translations is subject to all use restrictions contained in your Electronic Products License Agreement and by using the translation functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against ProQuest or its licensors for your use of the translation functionality and any output derived there from. The chapters on mines, torpedoes and submarines are particularly germane given heightened anxieties regarding possible conflict with China. It can never be done,” said Danish physicist Niels Bohr, “unless you turn the United States into one huge factory.