Radar as a Defensive Technology

Image: Aerial View Of Pearl Harbor; Wikimedia Commons

One of the most impacting days of the second world war was when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. There was a SCR-270-B radar that was stationed on the north side of Oahu that detected the first Japanese plane an hour before it attacked. Sean Foley explains that this scanner had a range of one hundred and forty miles and according to public records, of the seven hundred and ninety-four radars produced between 1939-1944, five were stationed on Oahu the morning of the attack on Pearl Harbor. (5) While the United States understood the effectiveness of radar technology, at that early point in the war they did not yet trust it or its operators enough to commit to the readings. Even though radar was not effectively utilized in the defense of Pearl Harbor, many believe that if those early operators had been trusted the attack on Pearl Harbor could have been mitigated. the British used radar to effectively mitigate the amount of damage caused by German air raids, and while these attacks were still devastating, many historians agree that they would have been far worse without the use of radar technology. Also, the differences in focus and development of radar technology among the Allies and the Axis greatly contributed to the outcome of the war. The German military leadership decided to focus on offensive radar use rather than defensive, and this paired with their slower radar development led to increased effectiveness of Allied defenses and, as many hypothesize, to the Allied victory at the end of the war (Foley, 10). While the radar was an incredibly effective defensive tool, the targeting technology associated with it was not advanced enough to guarantee offensive effectiveness. It was also such an effective defensive weapon that it gave the Allied forces an edge against an enemy who was far more offensively focused.