War! uhn. What Is It Good For!?

Wars sucks, and I’m not just talking about the 70’s funk band with the social agenda (although I hear that “Lowrider” has done wonders for the sales of Marmite).

Death, disease, destruction, violent thinning of the gene pool, and anguish for generations: this is the product of Pauly Shore movies, and war is just a little bit worse. No one with a balanced mind would prefer war to peace, chaos to balance, or Pauly Shore to Corey Feldman, but what you can never ignore is the inevitability of armed conflict or how good Lost Boys is. As ubiquitous as armed conflict is in human history (like Haim/ Feldman in the 80’s), the situations that invariably cause war are even more common: hunger, oppression, religious intolerance, and good old-fashioned greed and hunger for power.

So, in the face of the dire situation where war cannot be avoided, especially since the definition of “war” as we know it constantly changes from simple “armed conflict” to espionage, information wars, technological conflict, Corey Haim’s lame comeback attempt in Bikini Bandits Go to Hell, economic conflict, surgical military strikes and assassinations, we can only look to the bright side of armed conflict: good movies and technology.

The good movies part is obvious: Wars make for good movies, and Corey Haim has never been in a war movie (unless you count Legion and god knows, that doesn’t even qualify as a movie). This is not to say that all war movies are good, but when you consider movies like The Eagle has Landed, The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape, The Green Berets, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Flying Tigers, Casablanca, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Ran, The Caine Mutiny and television series like Band of Brothers, it comes into focus. Even fictional wars make for great film: Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Starship Troopers, and various other films with the word “star” in them (except for A Star is Born)

As for technology, necessity is the mother of invention, and war is one mother of a necessity. During the campaigns in WWII, for every soldier in the field, firing shells and pushing the Allied forces further into Europe, Africa or Japan, there were three soldiers whose duty was to supply him. Food, clothing, clean water, ammunition, socks, cigarettes, chocolate, lemon powder, gun cleaning kits, more cigarettes, prophylactics and even more cigarettes; your average GI needed almost 70 lbs. of rations and supplies every day. This doesn’t include the massive amounts of fuel needed to operate the ships, airplanes, trucks and jeeps moving back and forth from the front lines. This required a national industrial effort that has never been matched, even to this day.



And American industry is nothing if not industrious. With billions of dollars being thrown around by the Allied governments, the companies that could offer (that “oh-so-American" of standards) bigger, better, faster, more were more likely to get the contracts to manufacture the goods that kept the fighting men fighting.

Most of the following inventions are more precisely described as innovations of evolution, not revolution. Most of the things that made the war winnable already existed, but were made better, more practical or cheaper by technologies developed in the build up to and during the war.

Shelf-Stable Foods

“Canned foods” actually began when Emperor Napoleon issued an invention contest, offering a cash prize of 12,000 francs to anyone who could find a way to effectively preserve foods to be transported to his legions of troops, scattered as far away as North Africa. The winner was a man named Nicolas Appert who discovered that vacuum sealing food in airtight containers (he used glass champagne bottles) would preserve food for months. Unfortunately, the heavy glass bottles were impractical and canning didn’t become popular until the early 20th century with the mass production of tin canisters (from which we get the word “can”).

In WWII, every soldier in the field got C-rations, which included canned entrees. Notoriously inedible, they literally provided the fuel for the men who won the war. After the war was over (I suppose there were a lot of cans left over) the rise of foods that were more convenient (read: cheap and indestructible) led to the canned foods we love (or rather, avoid like the plague) today.



Radar

Although the Japanese actually discovered most of the basic principles of radar, their failure to appreciate its applications allowed the British, desperate to find a better early detection system for the constant blitzkrieg bombings from the German Luftwaffe, put the technology to work.

Radar, an acronym stemming from “Radio Detection and Ranging,” has spread from its use in defense coordination to aviation and air traffic control, meteorology, and those assholes in uniform who stand next to their squad cars and point their “radar guns” into traffic right behind an overpass, giving you a fucking heart-attack, even though you know you’re only going five miles over the speed limit.

Penicillin

Although the anti-bacterial attributes of Penicillin were discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928 (due mostly to the fact that he was a slob that kept dirty dishes all over the laboratory and never paid his half of the utilities), the first patient successfully treated with Penicillin wasn’t until 1942 (in America, I might add.)
It’s been thought that the use of Penicillin, even as woefully under-supplied as it was back then, was responsible for saving the lives of an estimated 7.5 million servicemen and civilians.

Penicillin is also a Japanese rock band in the style of “visual kei,” which is just a fancy way of saying they dressed like women and pranced around like fruitcakes, but were way less talented than David Bowie.

Plastics

It started as parkesine, celluloid, bakelite, it even faced competition from organic materials like rubber and gutta percha, but it wasn’t until 1941 that the scientists at DuPont developed a chemically inert, super light weight, inexpensive material known as neoprene. It immediately replaced the much more expensive silk in the parachute and went on to meet endless industrial applications in mass production.

You can tout the “plastic is forever” shit like the hippies do, but never forget that the low cost and complete availability of plastics make modern life what it is today. From the bumper on my Toyota, to the keys I’m typing on now, to the nylon stockings clining to every curve of my hairy legs, to the “Wee Man” XS condoms (ribbed for somebody’s pleasure) that I wear on my shamefully tiny penis, plastics are the building blocks of modern society and sexual perversion.

Nuclear Weapons

Nuclear weapons have been […] working for peace in the post-war world. They make the cost of war seem frighteningly high and thus discourage states from starting any wars that might lead to the use of such weapons. Nuclear weapons have helped maintain peace between the great powers and have not led their few other possessors into military adventures. Their further spread, however, causes widespread fear. Much of the writing about the spread of nuclear weapons has this unusual trait: It tells us that what did not happen in the past is likely to happen in the future, that tomorrow's nuclear states are likely to do to one another what today's nuclear states have not done. A happy nuclear past leads many to expect an unhappy nuclear future. This is odd, and the oddity leads me to believe that we should reconsider how weapons affect the situation of their possessors.

-“The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better” by Kenneth Waltz, Professor, Emeritus, Political Science, UC Berkeley



The list goes on and on (and, unfortunately, gets even more boring). However, as the great Richard Dawkins once wrote, “There are innumerable ways to die, but only one way to live.” For every invention that hit the mark and found some, if even minor, use in the war effort, there were countless inventions or innovations that were too impractical, expensive, and sometimes just plain dangerous. The best ones, though, were just really, really fucking stupid.

In his book “My Tank is Fight!” Zach Parsons chronicles the most absurd inventions to arise out of the WWII war effort. The book details everything from wooden jet-packs for Nazi Sturmtroopers, to an attempt by the American Army to invent a tank that could fly, to the P1500 “Monster,” (funnily enough called the “LandKruezer”) which was to be the biggest cannon ever built (800mm) stuck on the biggest tank ever built (200+ tons).

The best one that Parsons writes about, however, is the one in which even the most brain-dead among us can see the flaws: the aircraft carrier made of ice.



It was called “Habakkuk” (a biblical reference, specifically a paragraph having to do with awe-inspiringly stupidity) and the plans put it at 2,000 feet long, 300 feet wide, displacing 2,000,000 tons of water and was to be made out of 280,000 blocks of Canadian ice. The question “why the fuck…?” comes to mind, following by a headache and a little drooling. The answer is summed up rather well by a great critic of the project, Sir Charles Goodeve:

"Ice," it was pointed out, "was plentiful and didn't sink. Let us build large unsinkable aircraft carriers of ice and thus provide air cover for an attack on a remote and unprotected part of France. Steel limits the size of our carriers to tens of thousands of tons; with ice we can throw off our shackles and build carriers of millions of tons each.
"Ice is plentiful! Ice is unsinkable! Ice is hard! The enemy will never suspect it! Ice will win the war!"

Certainly, the limitations of steel can be endlessly expounded upon, but it does have one distinct advantage over ice: it doesn’t melt. Needless to say, the project soon evaporated (ha!), but I daresay, mostly because the British didn’t have the $70 million dollars it would have required.

Where exactly I was going with this, I don’t know, but what I do know is that people, especially people faced with a hardship like fighting fucking Nazis, come up with a lot of really great ideas, and a lot of really shitty ones. We can all agree war is the worst thing we’ve ever invented (aside from Hot Pockets), but it’s the kind of necessity arising from conflict and fight for survival that puts human ingenuity, an already awesome force, into overdrive.

So next time someone mentions that the war in Vietnam was bullshit, you can say “Hey buddy, without the Vietnam War, we wouldn’t have napalm, or Kevlar, or Apocalypse Now.” That oughta shut ‘em up, unless they look like they’re about 60 years old and they’re missing a leg or something, then it’s best to just agree with them.