&gt; World War II, which is usually discussed in terms of atomic bombs and V-2 rockets; these contributions are summed up in the phrase “the physicists’ war.”<p>I have two complaints about this complaint.<p>It overlooks the importance of radar and radar detection in WWII, and many of the people in radar development were physicists.<p>Second, <i>WWI</i> was &quot;The Chemists&#x27; War.&quot; There&#x27;s even a book by that name on the topic. That war is known for the use of chemical weapon attacks, and guess who made those weapons. I&#x27;ll quote from summary on Amazon for Freemantle&#x27;s book:<p>&gt; Within months of the start of the First World War, Germany began to run out of the raw materials it needed to make explosives. As Germany faced imminent defeat, chemists such as Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch came to the rescue with Nobel Prize winning discoveries that overcame the shortages and enabled the country to continue in the war. Similarly, Britain could not have sustained its war effort for four years had it not been for chemists like Chaim Weizmann who was later to become the first president of the State of Israel. Michael Freemantle tells the stories of these and many other chemists and explains how their work underpinned and shaped what became known as The Chemists&#x27; War.<p>Thus, while coal hydrogenation helped Nazi Germany stay in the war, the Haber-Bosch process made the ammonia needed to produce the explosives that helped Kaiser Germany stay in the war.<p>Certainly chemists were important in WWII (as were mechanical engineers, aviation engineers, metal working, and many other specialties). But the appellation &quot;the physicists’ war&quot; also highlights the relative decrease in the role of chemistry on the actual fighting, compared to WWI.