62 Dahlgren 



had to look at all the beams and compute this all out from the strength that 

 you'd allow and finally came up with a conclusion. They didn't want any 

 technicalities. All they wanted was "yes" or "no." I remember we came to the 

 conclusion, "Yep, you can do it. It will be okay." They went and unloaded the 

 plates. Now, physicists normally don't do that sort of thing, but in that day, a 

 physicist was supposed to do everything or anything that came up that was 

 technical. 



What part did Dahlgren play in testing weapons confiscated from Germany and Japan 

 after World War II? 



There were some items that came in to be examined by Dahlgren, but, as I 

 recall, there wasn't a whole lot done in that regard. It seems to me that I vaguely 

 recall them bringing in a Japanese so-called wire-wound gun, a big gun. How it 

 tested out, I don't recall. There were some things coming back from Germany. 

 At the time, I was working mostly in instrument development, and they sent a 

 lot of electronic stuff back to us, but it wasn't anything that amounted to very 

 much. There was a lot of money and effort spent on analysis, writing reports, 

 etc., but, frankly, I don't think we learned a great deal. 



Did you feel at any given point that the mission of the Laboratory was changing to put 

 more emphasis on R(3'D rather than just testing ordnance? 



Yes, indeed. After World War II, we made a very deliberate attempt to 

 develop R&D and worked at it very hard. In fact, there was a long period after 

 World War II when there was very little proof and testing. There was a big 

 reduction in the force of ordnance workers after World War II, ordnance 

 mechanics and that kind of job, and it was then that we attempted to build up 

 the experimental and development work. After World War II and clear up to 

 Korea and Vietnam, there was a very deliberate effort on the part of the 

 technical staff at Dahlgren to build a research and development capability. It's 

 nice to look back and see that the effort paid off, but without a deliberate effort 

 in that direction, it never would have happened. 



Do you recall any problems with the local community because of the testing work at 

 Dahlgren? 



None of any great significance. We've had people come in and say the gun 

 blasts or explosions had burst out the windows or knocked down their plaster. A 

 certain amount of that went on every now and then, but we had no great 

 problems. One thing that saved us a lot of problems, I think, was the fact that 

 the Station, about the time of World War II or just a little before, bought quite a 

 bit of land up north of us — the Hooe farmland. We were then hassling with 



