A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE 

 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION'S PART IN WORLD WAR II 



INTRODUCTION 



With the onset of World War II, so many new agencies were created 

 to cope with problems facing the Government and the Army and Navy 

 that for a time the chief concern of the Smithsonian was to find its 

 place in the scheme of war activities, and how best to make its re- 

 sources count in the Nation's total war effort. Many research organi- 

 zations with physical and chemical laboratories were immediately 

 called upon for aid in urgent wartime investigations, and their prob- 

 lem was mainly how to accomplish promptly all that they were asked 

 to do. At the Smithsonian, where the sciences dealt in— chiefly 

 anthropology, biology, geology, and astrophysics — were of less obvious 

 war usefulness, and where the facilities consisted of museums, art gal- 

 leries, and small laboratories, staffed by highly specialized scientists 

 in the disciplines just mentioned, the problems were to find its field of 

 war service and to make its resources known. 



The Secretary of the Institution, sensing this situation shortly after 

 Pearl Harbor, met it by appointing a War Committee to canvass the 

 Institution's possibilities and to recommend specific lines of action. As 

 a result, a large part of the effort of the staff was diverted to work con- 

 nected directly or indirectly with the war, and the Smithsonian Insti- 

 tution was found to be an essential cog in the great war machine in 

 Washington. Although its role was inconspicuous as compared with 

 those of the large war agencies, nevertheless it was found to offer serv- 

 ices not readily available elsewhere — services whose lack might well 

 have led to costly mistakes and delays. The war was to an unprece- 

 dented degree a war of science, utilizing not only the physical sciences, 

 but also anthropology, biology, and geology — branches of science 

 with which the Institution is particularly concerned. Its staff of 

 highly trained specialists in these and other fields, as well as its loca- 

 tion near the nerve centers o,f the Army and Navy and the other war 



1 Prepared by a committee appointed by the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 

 Dr. Alexander Wetmore, consisting of Carl W. Mitman, Head Curator of Engineering, 

 U. S. National Museum, and Webster P. True, Chief of the Editorial Division, Smithsonian 

 Institution, in accordance with the request of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 

 through the Bureau of the Budget, that all agencies prepare an objective statement of 

 their participation in the war effort. 



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