Allied technological cooperation during World War II

The Allies of World War II cooperated extensively in the development and manufacture of new and existing technologies to support military operations and intelligence gathering during the Second World War. There are various ways in which the allies cooperated, including the American Lend-Lease scheme and hybrid weapons such as the Sherman Firefly as well as the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons research project which was absorbed into the American-led Manhattan Project. Several technologies invented in Britain proved critical to the military and were widely manufactured by the Allies during the Second World War. Tizard Mission The origin of the cooperation stemmed from a 1940 visit by the Aeronautical Research Committee chairman Henry Tizard, during which Tizard arranged to transfer UK military technology to the US in the event that Hitler's planned invasion of the UK should succeed. Tizard led a British technical mission, known as the Tizard Mission, containing details and examples of British technological developments in fields such as radar, jet propulsion and also the early British research into the atomic bomb. One of the devices brought to the US by the Mission, the resonant cavity magnetron, was later described as "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores". Small arms began to be shared after the fall of France, most of the 'sharing' being one sided as America was not yet directly involved in the conflict and thus all the movement was from the United States to the United Kingdom. In the months following Operation Dynamo, as British manufacturers progressed in building replacements for the materiel lost by the British Army in France, the British government looked overseas for additional sources of equipment to assist in overcoming shortages and prepare for future offensives. The most extreme example of the shortages were found in the quickly improvised Local Defence Volunteers, later renamed the Home Guard, who were forced to train with broom handles and makeshift pikes using lengths of piping and old bayonets until weapons could be supplied.