THE ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE 185 



NDRC. They were addressed to the Executive Secretary; and the project 

 control section had the task of following them through the OSRD organ- 

 ization. 



Promptly after its receipt each project was referred for recommenda- 

 tion to the NDRC division indicated by the Chairman's Office as appropri- 

 ate to receive it. The divisional replies were in turn referred to the Chair- 

 man's Office. Recommendations that projects be declined were brought 

 before the next meeting of NDRC where the adverse recommendation was 

 invariably supported. Recommendations of acceptance were approved with- 

 out reference to the Committee until a few months before V-E Day, when 

 NDRC began to review all recommendations for consistency with the ter- 

 mination program of OSRD. 



In view of the size and complexity of the Army and Navy and of the 

 autonomy of NDRC divisions, the attempt to channel projects so as to 

 insure appropriate review was not uniformly successful. Requests at times 

 were submitted directly to the Chairman's Ofi&ce or to NDRC divisional 

 offices by officers or bureaus, although Service regulations required that 

 projects come through a central office in each Service. The Chairman's 

 Office regularly returned them for proper handling; the divisions some- 

 times returned them but at other times acted upon the requests. No fixed 

 rule was possible. Speed was essential and divisions would properly start 

 work upon informal representations of officers of their acquaintance. In 

 many cases the paper request would follow the initiation of research by 

 days or weeks. In some cases, however, it developed that the requesting 

 officer was expressing his own views which were not shared by his supe- 

 riors and that the division was working upon a problem in which there 

 was no official interest and no place to use the results. 



The second function of the project control section was the recording and 

 distribution of reports. The variety of reports has been mentioned in Chap- 

 ter IV. The section had the task of correlating reports with projects and 

 with contracts as far as practicable, and of distributing most of them. The 

 magnitude of the task is shown by an approximation that the total num- 

 ber of separate reports fell between 30,000 and 35,000, and the number of 

 copies of each ranged from 2 to 100 or more. The rapidity with which 

 OSRD grew, the speed with which it worked, the harassment of inade- 

 quate personnel, the autonomy of divisions, the varying habits of con- 

 tractors, the need for communicating results as rapidly as possible regard- 

 less of form, the high security classification of the contents of most reports 

 — all these made for variety in reports and confusion in their handling. 

 Several months after V-J Day the task of untangling reports was still un- 

 der way. There was a reasonable chance, however, that a complete and 

 usable file would be ready by the time a successor organization had been 

 established. 



