Times of Crisis 85 



there. The only major thing missing in the way of facilities was the Computation 

 and Analysis Building [the present computer facility]. 



Did you come to Dahlgren as a Naval Reserve Officer"? 



No. At the time, I was on the staff at the University of North Carolina. I'd 

 taken my Doctor's Degree about 3 years earlier in 1938, and I began to consider 

 doing something during the war to help the country. I went to some of my 

 friends who directed me to Dr. Thompson at Dahlgren. I had an interview with 

 him and he offered me a job. I came to work on the first day of July 1941. 



In those days, the civil service procedures were very complicated and slow, 

 and it wasn't possible to offer people civil service jobs, so what they did was offer 

 me a contract job which amounted to the same thing as a civil service job with no 

 permanence. I had a year's contract at about a GS-7 salary, and by the end of 

 that year, of course, the war was in full swing and they weren't about to let us go. 



There were about three or four of us who came in about the same time, and 

 so they converted us to civil service and we stayed. I did experimental work dur- 

 ing the war. Dr. Thompson was called the Experimental Physicist, and I was on 

 his staff. Largely, we were doing studies of one kind or another, and I remem- 

 ber the first job we did was to study the solenoid chronographs. Those were the 

 devices we used in those days to measure projectile velocity. 



That was quite a long study, and there were others — bombsights took a lot of 

 effort. I also remember the flap we got into about Tarawa. The marines went 

 ashore on Tarawa and discovered to their consternation that the bombardment 

 preceding the attack had not ruined the Japanese the way they thought it was 

 going to do. The Japanese had built themselves coconut-log and sand fortifica- 

 tions. These were astonishingly effective. They retired into their fortifications, 

 and when the bombardment stopped and the marines came ashore, the 

 Japanese came out full of fight. They were supposed to have been completely 

 destroyed. 



So the Fleet said, "What is wrong with our ammunition? Why have you done 

 this to us? Please explain, and tell us what we can expect the next time?" So we 

 went through this period of designing and building coconut-log encasements 

 and firing 5-inch projectiles at them. It came out exactly as you'd expect. It is 

 not difficult to stop a 5-inch projectile. 



Then we had also at the beginning of the war what was first called the 

 Reduced Scale Laboratory, later the Armor and Projectile (A&P) Laboratory. I 

 had a fair amount of interaction with some of the people there, notably on the 

 question of understanding light armor and how you should heat-treat and 

 design and choose light-armor material for best protection. We used to have 

 quite a bit of trouble with that. The Bureau of Aeronautics had a standard form 



