22 Dahlgren 



of the scientific work in the early days as they were later. That wasn't their fault. 

 It was just part of a "growing up" process. 



Dahlgren was once a 7najor stop for postgraduate officers from the Naval Academy. Were 

 you satisfied with the abilities and attitudes of most of these young officers who came to you 

 for training! 



The abilities were certainly there. They were able young men who had gone 

 through the Navy postgraduate course and did good work. The kind of train- 

 ing they had to have before they came to Dahlgren was not always the kind that 

 would be recommended now to get ready for that sort of program, but I think it 

 worked out as well as you could expect under the circumstances — starting out 

 from scratch. Primarily, what the younger officers who came to Dahlgren 

 gained was that they had a chance to see firsthand how all the pieces fit together 

 in the development of weapons for the Navy. I think it was worthwhile for them 

 and for Dahlgren. 



There were very few civilian professionals at Dahlgren in the early years. How did you 

 find the working relations between civilians and the military"? 



It went all the way from one extreme to the other. In some cases, there were 

 military people who were very sympathetic with the work that we were trying to 

 do, and they did what they could to help us. But there were also many cases 

 where people just didn't understand the importance of the work and thought 

 of it as kind of an impediment. They weren't very cooperative. However, in 

 many cases, they were quite cooperative with me, personally. The difficulty was 

 that the atmosphere set around this sort of work was not especially developed. 



There was a lot of work in aviation at Dahlgren during the 1920's and 1930' s with tests 

 of machine guns, bombs, and the very fine Norden bombsights. Did you support this effort 

 and feel that Dahlgren was a proper place for such work? 



It certainly was the proper place, but we had to improve the facilities for 

 doing the work, and that was precisely what we were trying to do. Of course I 

 had quite a bit more to do in my area with the other kind of work that was 

 already in progress at Dahlgren just to develop the work as well as we could and 

 try to increase the interest in it. 



Can you give us the general background of your work in small-scale testing of weapons 

 that eventually led to the establishment of the Armor and Projectile Laboratory at 

 Dahlgren in 1940? 



The more we got into finding out what the problems were, the more we 

 realized that we had to do what we called fundamental work. We had to 



