2018年5月6日 · RDX or ‘Research Department Explosive,’ also dubbed Torpex, was surprisingly stable yet twice as powerful as TNT. Eventually, it would be used to blast through the hulls of Hitler’s U-boats, blow gaping holes in enemy dams in the Ruhr Valley and knock out bridges, railroad tracks and power stations across Nazi-occupied Europe.

On December 7, 1941, with the surprise attack by Japanese carrier planes on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the United States’ policy of official neutrality toward Britain and its Allies was replaced by one of total victory over their common enemies.

RDX, powerful explosive, discovered by Georg Friedrich Henning of Germany and patented in 1898 but not used until World War II, when most of the warring powers introduced it. Relatively safe and inexpensive to manufacture, RDX was produced on a large scale in the United States by a secret process developed in the United States and Canada .

2018年4月23日 · Twice as deadly as TNT, RDX was also ten times more expensive. In The Secret History of RDX, historian Colin F. Baxter tells the story of the people who developed, produced, and used RDX in the top-secret, $100 million factory near Kingsport, Tennessee, called the Holston Ordinance Works.

Taking a page from the plea of historian Paul Kennedy to examine World War II “history from the middle,” Baxter ofers a new perspective on the war by exploring the development and mass production of the world’s most powerful explosive then in existence, known as Research Department eXplosive or RDX.

Twice as deadly as TNT and overshadowed only by the atomic bomb, this ordnance proved to be pivotal in the Battle of the Atlantic and directly contributed to the Allied victory in WWII. In The Secret History of RDX, Colin F. Baxter documents the journey of the super-explosive from conceptualization at Woolwich Arsenal in England to mass ...

Twice as deadly as TNT and overshadowed only by the atomic bomb, this ordnance proved to be pivotal in the Battle of the Atlantic and directly contributed to the Allied victory in WWII. In The Secret History of RDX, Colin F. Baxter documents the journey of the super-explosive from conceptualization at Woolwich Arsenal in England to mass ...

RDX made its presence felt on all the battle fronts of World War II. The super-explosive proved its value in breaching dams, filling blockbuster bombs, and providing American submarine commanders in the Pacific with Torpex-loaded torpedo warheads that helped to virtually blockade Japan by war’s end.

In “The Secret History of RDX: The Super-Explosive that Helped Win World War II,” Dr. Colin Baxter examines the development, production and use of Composition B produced at the massive East Tennessee facility. Baxter notes that in 1942, German submarines threatened the entire Allied war effort.