Polish Contribution To World War II - Technology

Technology

• Józef Kosacki invented the Polish mine detector, which would be used by the Allies throughout the war.
• The Vickers Tank Periscope MK.IV was invented by engineer Rudolf Gundlach and patented in 1936 as the Gundlach Peryskop obrotowy. Initially it was mounted in Polish tanks such as the 7TP and TKS. Subsequently the design patent was bought by the British and used in most tanks of World War II, including the Soviet T-34, the British Crusader, Churchill, Valentine and Cromwell tanks, and the American M4 Sherman. The main advantage of the periscope was that the tank commander no longer had to turn his head in order to look backwards. The design was also later used extensively by the Germans.
• pistolet wz. 35 Vis, often simply called the "Radom" in English sources, is a 9 mm caliber, single-action, semi-automatic pistol. It was adopted in 1935 as the standard handgun of the Polish Army. The design was appropriated by the Germans and from 1939–1945, 312,000 - 380,000 VIS pistols were produced and used by the German paratroopers and police as the 9 mm Pistole 35(p).
• PZL.37 Łoś was a Polish twin-engine medium bomber designed in the mid-1930s at the PZL factory in Warsaw by Jerzy Dąbrowski, and used operationally in the Invasion of Poland in 1939. Thanks to the laminar-flow wing it was one of the most modern bombers in the world before World War II.

• Swiatecki bomb slip, a bomb-release system was invented by Władysław Świątecki in 1925 and patented in the 1926 in Poland and aboard. Some components was used in the pre-war Polish PZL.37 Łoś (Elk) bomber. In 1940 Świątecki's invention was taken over by the British, who used it in the Avro Lancaster bomber. In 1943, an updated version was created by Jerzy Rudlicki for the American B-17 Flying Fortress.
• Wz. 35 anti-tank rifle, 7.92 mm anti-tank rifle developed in secret and used by the Polish Army during the Invasion of Poland invented by Józef Maroszek. The rifle was development of the Mauser rifle with its own special 7.92 mm cartridge with a muzzle velocity of over 1,000 meters per second. With a range of 300 metres it was very effective against all German tanks of the period (the Panzer I, II and III, as well as the Czech-made LT-35 and LT-38) at 100 meters.
• In World War II, there was an important need to take bearings on the high frequency radio transmissions used by the German Kriegsmarine. The engineering of such high frequency direction finding systems for operation on ships presented severe technical problems, mainly due to the effects of the superstructure on the wavefront of arriving radio signals. However, solutions to these problems were proposed by the Polish engineer Waclaw Struszynski, who also led the team which developed the first practical system at the Admiralty Signal Establishment, England. These systems were installed on convoy escort ships, and were very effective against the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. The father of Wacław Struszyński was Professor Marceli Struszyński, a member of the Polish resistance, who analysed the fuel used in the V2 rocket, the formula being subsequently sent to England.
• A rubber windshield wiper was invented by the Polish pianist Józef Hofmann.
• Henryk Magnuski, a Polish engineer working for Motorola, in 1940 invented the SCR-300 radio, the first small radio receiver/transmitter to have manually set frequencies. It was used extensively by the American Army and was nicknamed the walkie-talkie.