58 Dahlgren 



became a journeyman. Then when he became a supervisor, he became a 

 leadingman, and then went to a quarterman. From quarterman, he went to a 

 chief quarterman. The foreman was above the chief quarterman. They were 

 the old ratings. Back when I was there, a foreman was normally a man that had 

 at least 100 or 150 men. Now a foreman can be a person who has 12 to 20 men. 

 The foremen had important jobs looking after all these people. 



You were in charge of range operations for a number of years. Did you encounter any 

 funding proble7ns? 



I had the Dahlgren range operations during a long period when very little 

 was being spent on development in guns or ammunition. In fact, there was a 

 period when I think the current wisdom was that guns and ammunition were 

 obsolescent. You could more or less just look forward a certain number of years 

 and say there just wouldn't be any more guns. Ordnance would be all bombs, 

 missiles, and rockets. It was during that period in which they were developing 

 TERRIER, TALOS, and TARTAR missiles and other such surface-to-air 

 weapons. They were doing a lot of work on development of unguided rockets, 

 too. But there was a tendency to say, "Well, the gun testing facilities, the 

 instrumentation, and what goes with it are more or less not the place to put any 

 significant capital investment." There were years starting immediately after 

 World War II when there was money available, and we did get some good new 

 instrumentation during those first couple of years. After that, there was a long 

 period during which money for gun range improvement was virtually nonexis- 

 tent. That's the time when they were building up more and more of the type of 

 rocket testing that was going on at NOTS in China Lake, missile testing at White 

 Sands, and all sorts of facilities for testing the newly developed ordnance of that 

 kind. 



There was a long period when we had to live on a pretty skimpy diet. I would 

 say that it wasn't until probably during the Korean War that some money 

 became available because they needed material. During the Vietnam War, the 

 Department of Defense found that they had to revive a lot of the things that 

 they had decided to lay away and forget about. For instance, there was a trend 

 to put nothing but rockets and missiles on airplanes, and they found very 

 quickly that they had to have guns on airplanes. There was a problem because 

 we had practically disbanded at Dahlgren all the people we had working on 

 aircraft machine guns. When Vietnam came along, fortunately we still had at 

 Dahlgren a few people that knew something about aircraft machine guns. They 

 were worth their weight in gold — people like Clif Samuels who knew how these 

 guns operated and, when they didn't operate, knew what to look for. When the 

 Fleet came in and said, "Nothing is working right," we could send him out and 

 find what was wrong. 



