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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Battle of Saipan, the Philippine Sea — June 19, 1944. Navy Lieutenant James Van Allen watched the first wave of sixty-nine Japanese fighters and bombers swarm in over the Philippine Sea. The Japanese had the advantage of lighter planeswithgreaterrange.TheAmericanHellcatshadmaneuverability and ace pilots who shot down most of the incoming enemy planes. But several penetrated the cover and headed in a kamikaze dive toward the USS Washington where Van Allen stood on the bridge as the gunners fired with a new secret weapon Van Allen had helped invent. The secret was in the detonation fuze that used radio signals to sense the presence of a plane and destroy it within a 70-foot range. VanAllenhadspentnearlytwoyearshopscotchingacrossthe Pacific to convince gunnery officers to use the new proximity fuze. The capture of the Japanese stronghold of Saipan convincedeventheskeptics .Thefuzerepelledattacksonanarmada of U.S. ships mobilizing the invasion from the Philippine Sea in the summer of 1944. That day on the bridge, the bombers reached such close range before they exploded that Van Allen could see the terrified face of one of the pilots in the first wave. Another wave of Japanese fighters swarmed in and another. American fighter pilots and gunners on the ships armed with the fuze combined forces to destroy almost all of them. “We went down after the battle and had roast beef and strawberries for dinner on a table set with a tablecloth. It was a strange feeling. We were at risk of being sunk or shot that dayandafewhourslaterwewereeatinginthewardroom.I’ve never forgotten the contrast,” Van Allen said. • • • Saipan was the beginning of the end for the Japanese. Shortly aftertheJapanesesurrenderedonSeptember2,1945,thenavy Physicists to the War Effort 4 released the story of how the fuze saved thousands of lives in the Pacific and helped end the war. “The war’s second most startling invention is a fuse that knows when a shell is close enough to a target to explode,” reported the Associated Press, using the army’s spelling of the term. “The ‘radio proximity fuse’ works so well that it once shot down 35 enemy planes in 30 minutes and antiaircraft gunners got 68 out of 72 buzz bombs bound for London.” “The discovery and development of the radio proximity fuse and its success in war, rated second to the atomic bomb, were made known today by the Navy Department,” reported the New York Times. “The fuse, no larger than a pint milk bottle, packs its power in a glass tube.” The new weapon captured headlines in Europe as well, where Winston Churchill wrote that the American-made proximity fuzes “proved potent against the small unmanned aircraft [V-1 buzz bombs] with which we were assailed in 1944.” “The funny fuze won the Battle of the Bulge for us,” said General George Patton,commanderoftheThirdArmy.Hesummeduptheimpactbest:“Ithink that when all armies get this shell, we will have to devise some new method of warfare.” For all the publicity after the war, scientists developed the fuze during the war under the same cloak of secrecy that veiled the atomic bomb. They raced against time as enemy onslaughts killed their sons, brothers, and friends in battle. America entered World War II with a dangerously outdated arsenal of weapons.Thecountryquicklyrearmeditselfwithstate-of-the-artguns,tanks, and battleships, but it was the mobilization of hundreds of scientists in top secret labs that allowed the United States to achieve victory with three new weapons—theatomicbomb,radar,andtheradioproximityfuzethatVanAllen helped invent. The proximity fuze gave America the first “smart” precision weapon in the history of warfare and gave gunners six hits for every one that could be expected with conventional antiaircraft shells and artillery guns. The fuzesniffedouttargetsintheproximityof70feetanddestroyedthem.Though the Germans had a head start on developing the weapon, they never perfected it and focused on rockets instead. The fuze destroyed the Nazi V-1 buzz bombs that laid siege to a panic-stricken London in the last stages of the war. And the fuze “broke the back of the Japanese navy,” according to navy historian Dean Allard, quoted in the PBS documentary The Deadly Fuze. But the weapon was so secret that few Americans had heard of it at the close of the war. The proximity fuze came to the rescue of thousands of American servicemen and women because Tuve didn’t wait for a declaration of war to mobilize DTM scientists. He started work on it in 1939 as Germany invaded Poland and Physicists to the War Effort 51 France, and England declared war. The United States...

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