Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
WWII, even more than its predecessor, took the Fordist machinery of
mass production and applied it to death as e
ciently as it had been used for
the making of cars and other objects. In total, an estimated 50 million people
perished, including 20 million in the USSR and 10 million in China. The Nazi
onslaught against Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, communists, the handi-
capped and retarded, union members, and others exempli
fi
ed the horri
fi
c
capacity of modernity to destroy as e
ciently as it could construct. The
Holocaust demonstrated that advanced technology could be put to the most
horri
c of uses, and undermined the teleological notion of inevitable pro-
gress that had long accompanied linear views of history. As Bauman (1989)
shows, the Holocaust was not some aberration of modernity, but, because
it was methodically planned and bureaucratically executed in as rational a
fashion as the Nazis could muster, it was the very embodiment of modernity.
One of the con
fi
ict's major repercussions concerned numerous improve-
ments in aviation, including lighter and stronger alloys, more powerful and
e
fl
cient engines, and long-range bombers and troop transport planes, which
allowed soldiers to be rushed to critical areas within days rather than weeks.
Airplanes extended the spatial scale of battle, and with the capacity to raze
cities, obliterated the traditional distinction between combatants and non-
combatants. World War II therefore enshrined air power as the dominant
form of military muscle. The psychological distance between pilots and their
victims played an important role in normalizing aerial hyperviolence:
“Methods that would be condemned out of hand if carried out by armies on
the ground were becoming routine from the air” (Carroll 2006:81). Air-borne
death invited a widespread reassessment of European geopolitical space in
light of the devastation these new weapons of mass destruction brought with
them. The primary impacts, however, were psychological, i.e., mass terror. No
longer was the English Channel guarantee against invasion. The improve-
ments in aviation design initiated during the war set the stage for mass air
passenger travel in the post-war boom
World War II gave an enormous boost to other technologies of time-space
compression, including radar, computers, jet engines, and the atomic bomb.
Prior to the war, military research was typically subordinate to civilian needs;
the war reversed that relation, and in the process greatly facilitated the
deployment of space-defying tactics and machinery. Echolocation was an
important moment in the con
ict's reconstruction of space and time, includ-
ing radar for the assessment of bombers and sonar for the detection of sub-
marines. Similarly, Long Range Aid to Navigation (LORAN) systems guided
Allied ships across the Paci
fl
c, while German U-boats made Britain's mari-
time isolation irrelevant. The blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) was the prototype
of the new,
fi
cations such as
the Maginot Line into archaic relics (Hugill 1993). Germany's use of V-1 and
V-2 rockets against Britain initiated a new epoch of strategic missiles, rising
to a height of 60 miles and velocities of 3,200 mph; between September 1944
and March 1945, more than 500 V2s targeted on London killed 3,000 people,
fl
flexible style of warfare, which turned older forti
fi
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