Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars

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Innovating Victory shows that the use of technology is more than introducing and mastering a new weapon or system. Three companies built prototypes—the Ford Motor Company, Willys-Overland, and the American Bantam Car Company.

This is new territory for both authors, who approached this work on technology with nontechnical backgrounds and during a challenging period for learning new things. What stands out in some cases is how quickly these technologies went from discovered physical phenomena, to idea, developed prototypes, workable innovations, and dominating advantages in a period of only a few decades while in others the basic technology existed for more than a century before countries found a way to use it effectively in naval warfare.Less than a month later, American bombers dropped two additional atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ultimately convincing the Japanese government to surrender. When considering the title of the book I had expected some discussion of how innovation in certain countries resulted in victory in the wars considered.

For navies, the ultimate criterion is whether the weapon/tool/platform effectively advances the task of securing power at sea and contributes to ultimate victory. The historical analysis is very structured, with each technology analyzed across three phases, its discovery, exploration, and exploitation. If you have turned it off manually in your browser, please enable it to better experience this site. Both tools aided navies in bringing weapons to bear on their opponents and (generally) increased the amount of available information. The most famous naval action of the nineteenth century, the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, was fought by the British and Franco-Spanish navies with wooden, wind-propelled line of battle ships and guns that fired solid shot weighing up to forty pounds out to four hundred yards.They illustrate the relationship between innovation in the area of military technology (and, secondly, in doctrine) and use of that technology in combat. Differences in national resources, force mixtures, priorities, perceptions, and missions forced nations to approach the problems presented by new technologies in different ways. The battleship, the preeminent naval platform of 1805, 1905, 1914, and 1939, had been superseded in general utility and overall importance by the aircraft carrier and the submarine, platforms that hardly existed at the turn of the century. It can never be done,” said Danish physicist Niels Bohr, “unless you turn the United States into one huge factory. Building a military airplane required about 1,000 pounds of rubber, a tank needed about 2,000 pounds, and a battleship required about 75 tons.

But a decisive weapon must have not only a target, but also a hand to wield it properly—the practice and technique to properly bend the bow.

O’Hara is the author or co-author of more than 10 books, mainly on topics of World War I and II naval warfare. The military professional might not be surprised by these lessons, but they are worth noting and many of the assumptions and biases demonstrated in the cases are still prevalent today. In response, scientists, technicians, and inventors supplied a steady stream of new products that helped make victory possible. If Germany had fielded 50 more submarines when World War II began, the outcome may have been quite different.