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Weapons and Technology of World War 2

Curator’s Offices

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Back Wall Artifact

Curator’s Office

Contact me at [Your linked email address]

I am in eighth grade at Depoali Middle School and I will be going to Damonte next year. I play the flute.

Parker Allison

Note: Virtual museums were first introduced by educators at Keith Valley Middle School in Horsham, Pennsylvania. This template was designed by Dr. Christy Keeler. View the Educational Virtual Museums website for more information on this instructional technique.

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Room 1

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Science of Weapons and Technology

Room 2

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Institutions of Weapons and Technology

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Room 3

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Art of Weapons and Technology

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Room 4

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Literature of Weapons and Technology

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Room 5

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Movements of Weapons and Technology

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From 1939 to 1945 more than two billion dollars was spent on building the atomic bomb. The bomb had the power to destroy entire cities. On August 6th 1945 the atomic bomb was used for the first time on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb took out 90% of the city and killed 80,000 people. Later another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki killing around 40,000 people. This led to Japan’s surrender in the war.

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The Atomic Bomb

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The Enigma machine was an electro-mechanical cipher machine that was developed in Germany after WWI. This machine was used in all branches of the German military for wireless communication. One person would type their message into the enigma machine and the other person would see different letters lighting up every time the person types. The second person would write down the lit up letters than decipher the code from there.

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The Enigma Machine

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The radar transmitter produces strong and really short pulses of radio energy. The pulses are directed to certain area, if there is anything in that area like a boat, plane , or the ground , the radio waves reflect back to the radar antenna which is converted into an electric signal which can be seen by the operator.

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Radar

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The Schiessbecher was a German grenade launcher used in world war two it could be used against infantry , fortifications, and light armored vehicles with distances up to 280 m. The rifle grenade propelling cartridges shot a wooden projectile through the barrel to the rifle grenade which primed the grenade. The grenade launcher could be attached to rifles like the Karabiner 98k and the karabiner 98a.

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Grenade Launcher

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Artifact 5

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Artifact 6

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Artifact 7

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Artifact 8

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During the war there was often a lot of propaganda used to advertise the use and progress that weapons cause. These posters showed people what progress there was that has been made and the kinds of weapons that they were using. The poster to the right was used in 1942 and was printed at the U.S. Government Printing Office when the United States took their place in the war.

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Propaganda for Weapons

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During the war there were artists, scientists and engineers who had to design all of the weapons and technology during the war to try and make them as practical useful as possible. To the right this is what a blueprint might have looked like during the war before the weapon would be mass produced for use. An example of this would be Major General Leslie Groves who monitored the production of the atomic bomb and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the people who designed the bombs.

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Designing The Weapons

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During the war there were complicated German machines that sent out war messages using a complicated machine that coded the messages. The Bombe was designed to help decode those messages. A man named Alan Cumming made the machine with the help of his crew that were also assigned to complete the same job. The machine was a major help to defeating the Germans during the war.

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The Bombe

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During the war tanks had to be made so that jobs such as shooting the gun at the top and moving can be done at the same time. The people who made these tanks had to be creative and inquisitive to be able to carry out these types of actions. These types of things were very hard to make it where that it properly worked and would be a powerful weapon. There were many different models of tanks that were made during the war.

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Tanks

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The spear of destiny is basically a knife that is believed to have started and ended the war. Hitler was believed to sought out the spear from when he took reign, and it is believed that once the spear was in his possession. When the war ended and Hitler had killed himself, the spear had been taken by allied forces

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The Spear of Destiny

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A few months after the war ended one of the planes that belonged to the U.S. were flying back to America with fourteen men on board. The plane mysteriously disappeared on the way to Florida. The pilot was known for sometimes becoming unclear about his location, but at least five other planes have disappeared in the relatively same area. All of the men are presumed dead, yet no wreckage was ever found. There is still no sign of the flight today.

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The Disappearance Of Flight 19

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There are folk tales about these planes such as a young couple in the 70s saw this plane fly by them, yet the driver was only a ghost, as the plane passed by them the ghost sadly waved. Hours later that plane was found in a crash, with no passengers on board. There are many different versions of these stories such as that during the war there was one plane that had not become back from a mission. Hours later the plane returns, by the time it had surely run out of gas, but all of the soldiers were found to have been dead for a very long time, and in some variations of this story, there were no passengers to be seen anywhere, but few could see a ghost at the wheel with the plane in a condition that would not be possible to fly

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The Haunting of WW2 Ghost Planes

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During the war millions of people died from poisonous gas during the holocaust. Many people who visit the concentration camps in which these things happen claim that they can hear and or sense the cries of those who had died in these horrible situations. The people who had died had done no wrong, but were sent to their death for being forced to show up at these places with their lives in their hands.

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Victims of Gas

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During the war it was difficult for the leaders of our country to decide if atomic bombs should be used during the war because of all of the negative impacts that it could have. The leaders knew that it would surely end the war, but it would have a lot of negative impacts on the society over there. It would kill over 200,000 people and have negative health impacts on many more. the United States did help to clean up the impacts it made, but that would not lessen the damage.

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Protests against The Use of Atomic Bombs

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During the war many people believed that there was a lot of segregation and discrimination against certain races. The branches of the military were segregated so that only a certain race would be in that certain branch. This would end in 1998 when Harry Truman made an executive order to end military segregation. An example of this would be that African Americans were not allowed to work on the front lines unless there was a shortage of people who could work on the front lines.

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Ethnic Minorities

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During the war there were many weapons that became extremely popular to begin using among all of the countries. These weapons were very powerful. The picture to the right has a karabiner 98k in it. This gun is known for being a powerful and important weapon during World War Two. There were more common for German forces. It is estimated that over 14 million of these guns were made during the war and the gun is very sought after today from collectors. There are several other weapons that were similar in production level and their current values.

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Weapons

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During the war many kinds of new technology was invented during the war two help with many different things. One of these types of technology would be penicillin. Penicillin was used to get rid of infections by killing all of the bacteria. This saved a countless number of soldiers from dying of a simple infection that could not be cured without the use of penicillin. Another example of technology that came to use during WW2 that is not medicine-related is radar. Radar could detect movement and was a very important piece of the war.

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New Technology

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Enigma was a coding machine that the Germans used to code their messages and make it extremely difficult for any of them to be deciphered. A separate machine had to be made by the allied forces to crack the codes that this machine created. Japan made another coding machine called the Lorentz machine, this was similar to Enigma. Both of these were considered to be the first kinds of computers because of the complicated way that they functioned.

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The First Computers

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The DUKW was an amphibious six wheel drive truck made during WW2. It was used to transport troops and supplies over land and water. It was also used for approaching and crossing beaches during amphibious attacks.

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DUKW amphibious vehicle

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WW2 set a standard for aircraft combat because it produced faster, more powerful, and stronger planes. They were used for things like reconnaissance, bombing, ground attack, and much more . There is a total of 452 WW2 airplanes.

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Aircraft

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The FP 45 liberator was a pistol made by the united states during the war. It was dropped to people fighting in the resistance. The gun was dropped in a small wooden box which had 10 rounds and instructions on how to use the weapon.

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FP 45 Liberator