The victors of WW2 were countries that invested heavily in science and technology, and they won because they invested heavily in science and technology. Radar, sonar, flight, automatic fire-control computers, industrialization, oil refining, steel, penicillin, synthetic rubber, codebreaking, nukes - it's very likely that without them, the winners of WW2 would be very different. And many of those innovations were made by scientists who ethnically were born into "the other side", but left Europe because of Hitler's persecution of academics and scientists. This was not lost on either the US or USSR during the Cold War - we invested heavily in science & science education in the 50s and 60s because it was a way to gain a military advantage over our adversaries.
Most of the people who fought in WW2 are dead now, the institutional memory is fading, the idea of a future war for survival is largely unthinkable, and so many people don't see the point in better understanding the natural world through rigorous observation. When you're alive, you're free to have all sorts of different opinions; when you're dead, the only fact that matters is that you're dead. The natural world doesn't care whether you're alive or dead, and selection bias is the most powerful force in science.
This is not an argument that we need another war to get people to believe in science! The biggest success of science is in building a world where people are free to not believe in it. But it's worth remembering that that world might very well be temporary, and if it disappears, I'd rather be on the side with the better models of reality.