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The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 (1978)

Chapter: 13 The Academy in World War II

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Suggested Citation:"13 The Academy in World War II." National Academy of Sciences. 1978. The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/579.
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l3 The Academy in World War I] FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (~93~947) World War II was foreshadowed in the Japanese invasion of Man- churia in Age, Mussolini's assault on Ethiopia in ~935, Italian and German interference in the Spanish Civil War (~936-~939), and Hitler's march into the Rhineland in ~ 936. Then Austria and Czechoslovakia fell to Hitler, and Albania to Mussolini. Upon the full-scale German invasion of Poland on September I, ~939, Britain and France declared war against the Third Reich. A week later President Roosevelt declared a state of limited national emergency. Frank Hewett, a man of great vigor and action, elected to the presidency of the Academy in ~939, was soon the driving force behind the Academy's mobilization for the war effort. Possessed of a keen intellect, wide interests, and an amazing talent for friendship, he could be, when the occasion called for it, outspoken and colorful in his speech and correspondence; and, happily for history, he kept meticu- lous records. 382

Frank Baldwin Jewett, Presi- dent of the Academy, ~939- ~947 (From the archives of the Academy). The Academy in World War II I 383 As a member of the Science Advisory Board and its Executive Council, he had tended to be wary of the partnership of science and government. Some in the Academy might deplore this cautious at- titude, but none denied his talent for getting things done. Like presidents before him, Jewett would have many occasions to remind the membership of the one and only purpose of the Academy, to respond to any department of the government "whenever called upon." Out of some idiosyncrasy, Jewett invariably wrote and quoted it as "whenever requested," and it was dutifully printed that way in Academy publications.) Descended from New England ancestors who settled in Mas- sachusetts in ~632, Frank Jewett was born on September 5, ~879, in Pasadena, California, a community at that time of some twelve houses. Paternal relatives had earlier purchased a large section of the sur- rounding country, and his father had been given a wild tract of twenty-five acres as a wedding present. He was graduated in ~ 898 with an A.B. degree from nearby Throop Institute, which later became the California Institute of ~ e.g., NAS, Annual Report for 194445, p. I.

384 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) Technology. An adviser persuaded him to do his graduate work in physics at the University of Chicago, where he roomed with Oswald Veblen and was for a time Michelson's research assistant. After receiving his Ph.D., he went to MIT in ~ got as an instructor in physics. His career, however, was not to be in physics, but in engineering. After two years at MIT, he heard of an opening in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and joined it as a transmission engineer. His life and calling coincided almost exactly with the first seventy years of the telephone. Just three years before Jewett's birth, Alexander Graham Bell had obtained his first patent, and in ~8~' formed the Bell Telephone Company. Entering the young industry when he was twenty-five, Jewett was sent first to the company offices in Boston, where he demonstrated an extraordinary knack for seeing the solution to problems and supervising the necessary engineering research. He rose rapidly to the top of its engineering department and from there went to the New York office. By ~9~2, he was an acknowledged expert on long-distance telephone transmission and was made Assist- ant Chief Engineer of the Bell System's manufacturing unit, Western Electric. He went on to become Chief Engineer in ~9~6, and Vice- President and Director in ~9~. Shortly after the Engineering Department of Western Electric became the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Jewett was made its Presi- dent early in ~925 and a Vice-President of AT&T, in charge of all research and development in the Bell System. He was elected to the Academy in ~9~8, in recognition of his achievements in communications research and development and his services to the Signal Corps and Navy in World War I, and was active in its affairs from that time on. He had come to know Vannevar Bush in ~9~7 when they met at the Navy antisubmarine laboratory at New London, Connecticut. Jewett was then an advisory member of the Navy's Special Board on Submarine Detection; and Bush, with doctorates in engineering from both Harvard and MIT, was engaged in research at the laboratory.2 In ~9~3, shortly after Jewett became Chairman of the Research Council's Division of Engineering, he brought in Bush as a member, who not long after his election to the Academy in ~934 took over the division chairmanship. The close association was furthered by their 2 Frank B. Jewett, "Vannevar Bush ~943 Edison Medalist," Electrical Engineering 63 :82 (March ~944).

The Academy in World War II I 385 membership in other Academy-Research Council committees, nota- bly the Committee on Scientific Aids to Learning.s Jewett therefore knew Bush well and was aware of his conversations in Cambridge with Karl T. Compton, President of MET, and Harvard's President, James B. Conant, about the imminence of U.S. involve- ment in the war. And he knew why Bush had come to Washington. Drawn into their "discussions of a suitable mechanism for effective mobilization of the scientific and technical resources of the country," as he reported, Jewett became one of the four "mobilizers."4 The Potentialities of Nuclear Fission On January ~6, ~939, seven months before the German attack on Poland, Niels Bohr had arrived from Copenhagen with disquieting news of a German experiment. At a conference on theoretical physics held at the Carnegie Institution of Washington ten days later, he reported the receipt of a telegram from Denmark from Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, refugee scientists from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, saying they had confirmed the experimental splitting of the uranium atom recently achieved by their colleagues Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Institute. The Meitner-Frisch report appeared in the February ~ I, ~939, issue of Nature magazine in Great Britain and was soon verified in a number of physics labora- tories in this country.5 Continuing research pointed strongly to the possibility of a chain reaction in uranium, with enormous release of energy, and, on the basis of information from Berlin, the strong likelihood that German science would organize a massive effort to develop it into a weapon. Early in October ~939, a month after the outbreak of war in Europe these conclusions were laid before President Roosevelt in a dossier that included a letter of August s, signed by Albert Einstein, ~ On that committee, see NAS, Annual Report for 1937-38, pp. 32-33 et seq.; NAS Archives: EX Bd: Com on Sc Aids to Learning: Proposed: ~936; Vannevar Bush, Pieces of the Action (New York: William Morrow & Co., COO), pp. 32-33, 37. ~ NAS, Annual Report for 1939~0, p. i; A. H. Compton, Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, ~956), p. 34. 5 Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, "Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: A New Type of Nuclear Reaction," Nature 143:239-240 (February At, ~939); Frisch, "Physical Evidence for the Division of Heavy Nuclei under Neutron Bombardment," ibid., p. ~76 (February ~8, ~939).

386 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) emphasizing the gravity of the possibilities.6 By then almost a hundred articles on the phenomenon of nuclear fission and the theory of its mechanisms had been published throughout the world. The probability of a chain reaction demanded attention at the execu- tive level. In the absence of any real confidence between the Administration and the scientific community, and confronted with the political neces- sity of maintaining strict security while exploring the possibility of harnessing nuclear fission, the President turned to scientists in the federal government. He appointed an Advisory Committee on Uranium under Lyman I. Briggs, Director of the National Bureau of Standards, to which he assigned Army and Navy ordnance specialists Col. Keith F. Adamson and Comdr. Gilbert C. Hoover. Other mem- bers were physicists Fred L. Mohler of the Bureau and Richard B. Roberts of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Three of the most knowledgeable nuclear physicists in this country were consultants: Leo Szilard, Eugene P. Wigner, and Edward Teller, who not long before had fled their native Hungary. The committee obtained a small appropriation of federal funds to support the exploratory research going on in university and institutional laboratories. By March ~g40 the findings of Enrico Fermi, John R. Dunning, Herbert L. Anderson, George B. Pegram, and Harold L. Urey at Columbia; Jesse L. Beams at Virginia; Alfred O. C. Nier at Minne- sota; Gregory Breit at Wisconsin; Merle A. Tuve at the Carnegie Institution; and Ross Gunn at the Naval Research Laboratory indi- cated that concentration of uranium-~3s, if feasible, could produce an awesome explosion, but its verification would require enormous funds and organization. By then, too, the need to hold back publication of uranium research results had become imperative,7 and in the spring of ~940 Breit proposed the establishment of a "reference committee" in the Na- tional Research Council to which American scientific journals agreed to submit all papers on uranium or other research having a bearing on national defense. In the almost total cessation of publication of information on nuclear physics that followed, Briggs's committee 6 Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, ~962), P 7 7 E.g., Niels Bohr and i. A. Wheeler, "The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission," Physical Review 56:426-450 (September I, ~939); Edwin M. McMillan and Philip H. Abelson, "Radioactive Element 93," ibid., 57:1185-1186 June ~5, ~g4O). For a retrospective account of the physicists' concerns, see Spencer R. Weart's "Scientists with a Secret," Physics Today 29: 23-30 (February ~ 976).

The~cademy in World WarII I 387 alone made possible the exchange of information among nuclear scientists in this country.8 In Tune ~940 the NRC reference committee was formalized in the joint Academy-Research Council's Advisory Committee on Scientific Publications, under Luther P. Eisenhart. Within a year it had secured the cooperation of 237 scientific journals, covering every field of research relating to national defenses With the reports on uranium-23s, Briggs's advisory committee had now gone as far as it could. The magnitude of the task was becoming clear and called for greater cooperation and administrative authority. Merle Tuve discussed the problem with Vannevar Bush, President of the Carnegie Insitution of Washington, who saw the impasse as another concern in his growing uneasiness over the state of the nation's defenses. In ~936 the Army General Staff had actually reduced its research and development allocations by half, in the belief that its range of weaponry was adequate and the funds could be better used for the repair, replacement, or production of ordnance. The first executive orders, proposed by the President in the spring of ~938 to assist industry in tooling up for weapons production, were not issued until two years later. Bush, upon making inquiries, learned with dismay that the military had little idea of what science could provide in the event of war, and that scientists were wholly in the dark as to what the military needed.~° Vannevar Bush, a craggy New Englander of strong persuasions, with a compulsion for getting things done and the temperament to see them through, had worked on submarine detection devices for the Navy in World War I and had done some fine original work in ~ NAS, Annual Report for 194041, pp. 52-53; Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946: A History of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, ~962), pp. 25-26 (hereafter cited as Hewlett and Anderson, The New World); Henry D. Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ~945), pp. 45-46 (hereafter cited as Smyth, Atomic Energy). 9 NAS, Annual Report for 1941~2, pp. 26-27 et seq.; correspondence in NAS Archives: EX Bd: Com on Scientific Publications: Advisory: Reference Com on Nuclear Physics and Isotopes: ~ g4o- ~ 94 ~ . For the kind of public speculation on atomic energy permitted thereafter, see David Deitz, "Science and the Future," The American Scholar 11:29~298 (Summer ~94~). a George C. Reinhardt and William R. Kintner, The Haphazard Years: How America Has Gone to War (New York: Doubleday & Co., ~ 960), pp. ~ 57- ~ 58; A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cam- bridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ~957), p. 367.

388 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (l93g-l947) applied mathematics and electrical engineering while teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since i932 he had been Vice-President of MIT and Dean of its School of Engineering. A highly active member of both the Academy and the Research Council, Bush shared the Academy's concern in ~ 938-~939 with finding a way to meet the nation's scientific needs in the coming war. As a member of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in ~938, he heard fellow member Charles Lindbergh, on his return that autumn from a privileged tour of Germany's munition and aircraft factories, describe the mighty war machine and invincible air force displayed for him and heard him advocate American isola- tion in the coming conflict. Bush reacted by urging NACA to propose a massive aviation research and production program to match the German effort. He joined his associates in the Academy and Research Council in discussing ways to repair the inadequacy of the nation's defense research and to get on with the uranium investigation. In January ~939, in his fiftieth year, Bush had resigned from MIT to come to the Carnegie Institution in Washington. That October he was elected Chairman of NACA; and in January Age, in order to give more time to aeronautical committee affairs and national defense, he resigned the chairmanship of the Research Council's Division of Engineering and Industrial Research. He was thus very much on the scene, when, in May ~g40, Professor Archibald V. Hill of Cambridge, Secretary of the Royal Society and temporary scientific attache to the British Embassy, arrived in Wash- ington and met with Bush at NACA to talk about aviation problems at home. Hill was prepared to discuss the organization of British war research and some of its results and to propose an exchange of scientific information. However, the authorities in London were hesitant about giving information to a neutral power. Since there had been no authorization for disclosures, Hill returned to London to press for action there. Bush's knowledge of the inadequate state of our preparations galvanized him into action. He was energetically supported by President Jewett. 'I With his associates at MIT, he was the inventor in ~925 of the Bush Analyzer, the first large-scale mechanical computer. An advanced model was to be used in the computa- tion of artillery firing tables during the war. See brief Bush profile in NAS, Annual Report for 1952-53, pp. ~ 8-~ 9, and his autobiographical Pieces of the Action, passing ~2 James Phinney Baxter III, Scientists Against Time (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., ~946), P Il9

The Academy in World War II I 389 Vannevar Bush and the National Defense Research Committee Although the Academy, with its ability to enlist the support of the principal scientific and educational institutions and organizations in the nation, might seem the logical agency to mobilize American science in a time of national emergency, it was restricted by its self-imposed independence of the federal structure. The attempt of the Research Council in ~ 933, through the Science Advisory Board, to obtain federal funds to support its proposed scientific and engineer- ing programs had failed to achieve either New Deal or Academy approval, as Jewett well knew. When called upon for specific research, however, the Academy Charter permitted it to contract on behalf of federal agencies for such research. At the request of the Civil directing psychological researches at twenty-five institutions in the selection and training of aircraft pilots. As Hap (Henry H.) Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Corps, said of early Academy efforts: Aeronautics Authority, for example, the Academy was . . . when this war started they [the Academy and Research Councill were a tower of strength as far as I was concerned. When we came to these problems of research and development that were beyond our scope or beyond the facilities we had, I always went to the Academy of Sciences, and they in turn brought in the scientists from all over the country. They sat around a table, and we went over the problems that I presented to them. They, in turn, would farm them out for us and get the results. They did a masterful job for us along that line before ... Dr. Bush's organization was created.... We used the Academy of Sciences that way for years before the war. That was the only agency that we had or knew of where we could get in contact with those who could solve those problems for US.~4 When the question of the mobilization of science came up in the spring of ~ g40, however, Dr. Jewett felt that the Academy was neither organized, constituted, nor intended to initiate and direct contract research for the government on the extensive scale necessary. The Academy, as an advisory body, was "in the position of a doctor waiting for clients; it could not adopt the attitude of an aggressive salesman and initiate attacks on what it regarded to be important military i' NAS, Annual Reportfor 1939~0, pp. 76-77. ~4 U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings on Science Legislation (S. 1297 and Related Bills) Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Military A flairs. 78th Cong., fist sees., October 8, ~g45-March 5, ~946, p. 3so. ~ JO

390 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) problems." Moreover, to have enabled it to do so would have trans- formed the Academy into an executive organization, "just another agency of Government," and destroyed the Academy's most valuable asset, "the authority of distinction without power."~5 Vannevar Bush recalled the situation in later years: . . . I think perhaps there is an opportunity here to straighten out a point which I believe is still in confused condition in the minds of a good many Academy members. Unless I am mistaken some of the members feel that when NDRC was formed and later when OSRD was formed there was a situation where a few of us who might have operated within the Academy structure operated outside of it for some strange reasons of our own. As a matter of fact it was the closest cooperation throughout the war. The real reason that the structure was set up for war purposes in the way that it was became essential for two reasons. First we had to obtain large sums of money, and toward the end directly from Congress. Second, we had to have an organization which reported directly to the President and it had his delegated authority to operate as an independent agency in our relations with the military struc- ture.... Frank Jewett, the President of the Academy worked closely in bringing this all about.... I feel that far from injuring the Academy we really gave it some opportunity to operate effectively which it might not have hades At the time, Ross Harrison, Chairman of the Research Council, said, "It seems to be true that each succeeding Enational crisis], while taking advantage of the past, still requires its special organization suited particularly to immediate times." Under the charter of the Academy, this would doubtless always be so.~7 The two principal obstacles, Jewett later said, were that the Re- search Council over the previous quarter-century had developed almost wholly along civilian lines, and the Academy, under a ruling of the Comptroller General, had to supply working funds for its admin- istration of research for federal agencies. Enormous sums would be required to direct a national research program, and the Academy t5 Jewett, "The Mobilization of Science in National Defense," Science 95:23~241 (March 6, ~942); Jewett, "National Academy of Sciences," journal of Applied Physics 14 :374-377 ( ~ 943); Jewett, "Remarks at the Dinner by the President of the Academy," Science 92:412~14 (November 8, ~940); Jewett testimony in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, Technological Mobilization. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, 77th Cong., ad sees., November-I)ecember ~942, vol. 2, pp. To-do (copy in NAS Archives: Jewett file 50.27); Jewett's position paper, November ~947 (see Chapter ~4, pp. 472-474). ~6 Bush to Philip Handler, March 9, ~970 (NAS Archives: PUBS: NAS: History). ~7 NAS, Annual Report for 1940-41, pp. 30-3 I.

The Academy in World War II I 391 neither had such funds in 1940 nor could it obtain them from requesting agencies except by act of Congress or by amendment to the Academy Charter. Although the National Research Council seemed to be the kind of organization that was needed to mobilize the nation's scientific re- sources, it was Bush's National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, already organized for the emergency, that possessed the more readily adaptable structure. NACA had been established as an inde- pendent federal agency by Congress in ~9~5 under civilian direction to direct and conduct research and experimentation in problems of flight for the government air services. Its purview was a fairly narrow field of science; it had access to congressional funds and operated with a research staff under Civil Service; and it was empowered to contract with universities and industry for additional research. There was, in the emergency, Bush asserted, "a distinct need for a [closely parallel] body [to NACA] to correlate governmental and civil funda- mental research in fields of military importance outside of aeronau- tics" and to serve as a "definite link between the military services and the National Academy."~9 Bush had discussed such an organization with Compton, Conant, Jewett, and his colleagues at NACA.20 At Bush's direction, John F. Victory, Executive Secretary of NACA, prepared a draft of an act of Congress setting up a National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) authorized to construct and operate research laboratories [this was later omitted), and to make contracts for research, studies, and reports with educational and scientific institutions, with individuals, and with industrial and other organi- zations . . . to conduct research and experiments in such laboratories as may be placed under its direction.... [and] to coordinate, supervise, and conduct scientific research on the problems underlying the development, production, '8 Jewett, "Review of the Years ~ 939-47," NAS, Annual Reportfor 1946~7, pp. ~ -3. '9 Undated, unsigned memorandum in OSRD (Office of Scientific Research and De- velopment) Box 212. See also James L. Penick et al. (eds.), The Politics of American Science, 1939 to the Present (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1965), pp. 8-~o. Note on OSRD documentation: The files of the Office of the Chairman, NDRC, of the Director, OSRD, and related series of OSRD records and correspondence, comprising over 8,ooo boxes, are in Record Group 227 of the National Archives: "OSRD Box 212" is a simplification of the formal citation, "OSRD: Administrative Office, General Records [Box 212], National Archives Record Group 227." 20 Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, pp. 24-25-

392 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) and use of mechanisms and devices of warfare, except scientific research on the problems of flighty In early June, as Dunkirk fell and the German armies drove toward Paris, Bush, through his White House acquaintance, Harry Hopkins, saw President Roosevelt.22 The President, convinced of the imperative need for organization of the nation's scientists and scientific institu- tions, at once approved, with slight modifications, the functions of the committee Bush proposed and suggested that it might be more quickly set up by executive order than by act of Congress. He agreed with Bush's plan to utilize the research facilities of the War and Navy Departments, the National Bureau of Standards, and other federal agencies and, through the National Academy and its Research Coun- cil, enlist the services of individual scientists and engineers and the facilities of educational and scientific institutions and industrial or- ganizations. He would write to the chiefs of the armed services and to the President of the Academy requesting their concurrence.23 Bush saw Gen. George C. Marshall and Adm. Harold R. Stark, both of whom expressed interest in shifting some of their current research work to the National Defense Research Committee. Karl Compton, Conant, Jewett, U.S. Commissioner of Patents Conway P. Coe, and Dean of the California Institute of Technology's graduate school, Richard C. Tolman, with whom Bush had worked out the details of the proposed committee, all agreed to serve, and on June , ~940, the President sent out their letters of appointment. The letters named Bush Chairman of NDRC; Tolman, Chairman of its Division A (armor and ordnance); Conant, Division B (bombs, fuels, gases, and chemical problems); Jewett, Division C (communica- tions and transportation); Compton, Division D (detection, controls, and instruments); and Coe, Division E (patents and inventions). Brig. Gen. George V. Strong was the Army representative on the commit- tee and Rear Adm. Harold G. Bowen, the Navy representative. 2~ Baxter, Scientists Against Time, p. ~4; draft of order attached to undated, unsigned memorandum in OSRD Box 2 ~2. 22 Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate Histo?y (New York: Harper, ~948), pp. ~53—~55; Bush to Seitz, September ~6, ~968 (NAS Archives: PUBS: NAS: History). The event as recorded in draft notes for Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (OSRD Box so) reads: "Summoned by President Roosevelt, in the spring of ~g40, the President of the National Academy and others associated with him recommended the creation of a single central agency within the executive establishment . . . for the purpose of mobiliz- ing . . . scientific personnel and the facilities of the nation." 23 Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. ~ 5, 45 ~ .

The Academy in World War II I 393 The President's letter of authorization to Bush that same day confirmed the mission of the committee to conduct and correlate scientific research in the national defense, to utilize the facilities of existing agencies and institutions, draw on the President's Council of National Defense (CND) for funds, and call on the National Academy, the Research Council, and the National Bureau of Standards for assistance in carrying out the necessary research. The letter also said that Dr. Briggs's special committee, which had been set up "to study into the possible relationship to national defense of recent discoveries in the field of atomistics, notably the fission of uranium," would report thereafter directly to Bush.24 NDRC came into formal existence on June Hi, ~ g40, not by executive order as intended but with Presidential approval of an establishing order issued by the Council of National Defense, the war council comprising the Secretaries of War, Navy, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor, first set up in ~9~6 and reactivated just the month before. At the first meeting of NDRC that same week, Bush and his associates agreed that the committee should be solely "concerned with research rather than industrial development or production," its principal task aimed at "correlating and supporting scientific research on the mech- anisms and devices of warfare." Development and production should remain service responsibilities.25 NDRC was not the only means that was proposed to mobilize the scientific power of the nation. Also contemplated was the establish- ment of a series of great laboratory complexes in Washington and other central points, fully equipped and staffed with scientists and technicians drawn from university and industrial laboratories across the nation.26 But the cost in time, disruption of scientific training in the universities, and delay in industrial research would have been 24 Roosevelt to Bush, june ~5, ~g4o (NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: NDRC); Bush to Lyman J. Briggs, June ~8, ~940 (AEC—OSRD files, Box 6~6~ [NDRC-BUSh]); NDRC, Minutes of First Meeting, July 2, ~940 (OSRD Box 73). For the request to the Academy, see Bush to Jewett, July 9, ~g4o (NAS Archives: "Minutes, Executive Committee," August 6, ~940, pp. 490-492). Roosevelt's locution, "to study into," appears frequently in the President's wartime correspondence with Bush. 25"Resolution adopted by NDRC . . . july 2, ~940," and "Memorandum concerning Procedure and Organization of NDRC," attached to letter, Bush to Ross G. Harrison, July 9, ~g4o (NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: NDRC). The report of the first meeting of NDRC, on July 2, is in OSRD Box 73. 26 Carnegie Institution of Washington, Year Book No. 40, 1940-1941 (Washington: ~94~), p. 3; Jewett, "The Mobilization of Science in National Defense," Science 95:241 urn ~~-~ ~ ~ ,, _ (Continued overleaf )

394 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) enormous. Although considerable centralization later became inevit- able, the greater part of the wartime research was carried out, as Bush intended, in existing university, institutional, and industrial labora- tories, which augmented staff and equipment as necessary. As Dupree observes: The glue which held the whole system together was not the headquarters staff of the agency nor its organization chart, but rather the contracts which it made. One of the great inventions of the NDRC-OSRD was the research contract, and the inventors were not scientists but lawyers.... [T]he research contract was the device by which the government tied the other sectors of science support to research on weaponry and medicine, in line with the strategic choices made early in the emergency. Equally impor- tant, the contract was the device by which the universities and industrial research laboratories were preserved as institutions even while their social role was temporarily but radically changed. Any solution which brought direct government operation of the laboratories where the . . . work was done would have had much more revolutionary effects on American scientific institutions, even if there had been prompt return of facilities at the end of hostilities.27 Bush at once set up headquarters at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, at Sixteenth and P Streets, N.W. As the work of the committee expanded, Dumbarton Oaks, under the auspices of Har- vard University, made room for the chemical units of NDRC in its spacious building near Thirty-second and R Streets; and Jewett of- fered additional space. The Academy building on Constitution Ave- nue was ultimately occupied by several divisions of NDRC, the whole of the Committee on Medical Research, and almost a score of Academy committees under war contracts with NDRC and other federal agen- cies. Every available foot of open space in the building the exhibition halls, the galleries, the main floor of the auditorium, the library alcoves, and finally a major part of the basement—became honey- combed with partitioned offices. When no unoccupied area re- mained, offices were halved with more partitions. To organize the administration of NDRC, Bush brought from New York as Executive Secretary and Contracting Officer, Irvin Stewart, a (March 6, ~942); Jewett address, "Proceedings, Navy Department Conference . . . April 26, ~944, pp. 36 - 37 (osRD Box i2). 27 A. Hunter Dupree, `'The Great Instauration of ~940: The Organization of Scientific Research for War," in Gerald Holton (ed.), The Twentieth-Century Sciences (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., ~970), pp. 457-459. 28 NAS, Annual Reportfor 1942-43, pp. ~7-~8; 1943-44, pp. 2, ~9.

The Academy in World War II I 395 former member and Vice-Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who since ~93' had been full-time Director of the Research Council's Committee on Scientific Aids to Learning, on which Bush, Conant, Hewett, and Ross G. Harrison, Chairman of the Research Council, had served.29 Carroll L. Wilson, former assistant to President Compton at MIT, was on the staff of the Research Corpora- tion in New York when Bush called him to Washington as his aide, to take charge of NDRC liaison with the Academy, the Research Council, and other agencies outside the government.~° As his first move, Bush obtained from Army and Navy representa- tives on the NDRC lists of new research projects that their services wanted undertaken, to determine where they might best be handled. Next, Compton made a survey of military research already under way in government laboratories and of projects that might be assigned to those laboratories. Jewett, as President of the Academy, wrote to the heads of 'e5 colleges and universities for full information on their facilities arid staffs in the sciences, while Conant sent similar letters to some so institutions across the nation with special facilities for ad- vanced research, asking for information on their capabilities in the fields of physics and chemistry; metallurgy; and civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering and for information on "specific research projects in which your staff are now engaged which may have an application in devices or mechanisms of warfare." From the replies, Carroll Wilson compiled the report, "Research Facilities of Certain Educational and Scientific Institutions" that became the NDRC "bible.',81 Academy and Research Council Committees under NDRC Far from any intention to impede or supplant the Academy or Research Council in any way, NDRC proposed "as far as possible . . . to 29 Memorandum, Irvin Stewart to Chairman and members, Committee on Scientific Aids to Learning,.June at, ~940 (NAS Archives: EX Bd: Committee on Sci Aids to Learning: General). 8° Bush to Harrison, October 3~, ~940 (NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: NDRC); Wilson to Jewett, February ~4, ~94~ (OSRD Box ~86). `t Baxter, Scientists Against Time, p. ~7; attachments to letter, Jewett to Paul Brockett, June 26, ~940 (NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Register of Research Facilities in Educational Institutions). The "bible" is in OSRD Box ~93; the working papers, including the criteria for inclusion, in OSRD Boxes zo8 and ant. A companion volume, "Facilities and Personnel in Scientific and Technical Institutions and Technical Societies," is in Hewett files, 4g.o~ (OSRD Box ~449).

396 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) work through the National Research Council and its committees." It was "the policy of the NDRC," lewett wrote, to make use of the Academy and Research Council "where they are indicated as suitable agencies." The Research Council, "a seasoned organization . . . which provides direct contact with all the major scientific and technical societies and institutions of the country," would relieve the divisions of the NDRC of "the onerous job of trying to assemble groups of people with less adequate facilities for doing this than the NRC possesses." No change in Academy procedures was necessary, for the Academy was already administering a number of NDRc-type surveys and re- search programs. During the previous year federal agencies had requested Academy or Research Council assistance with almost a dozen projects relating to defense, including the training of aircraft pilots, standardization of blind-landing instruments and equipment, an aircraft production survey for the Air Corps, investigation of problems of chemical warfare, and a number of scientific and techni- cal studies for Navy bureaus. Some of these early projects resulted in subsequent NDRC activities. In February ~g40 the Army Corps of Engineers, concerned over the possibilities of aerial strikes on American cities, had asked the Academy for the scientific and engineering data necessary to design adequate bomb shelters. Following considerable discussion on the study's scope, the Academy in June appointed a Committee on Passive Protection Against Bombing (later, on Fortification Design) under Richard C. Tolman. Eager to be of help to the preparedness program, Tolman earlier that month had "just packed up and moved to Washington, to be at the center of things." With John E. Burchard, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer, as its Executive Officer, the committee, over the next three and a half years, super- vised the expenditure of more than three hundred and fifty thousand dollars made available by the Corps of Engineers.34 52 Jewett to R. D. Booth, Vice-Chairman, Division C, NDRC, October 23, logo (NAS Archives: EXEC: CND: NDRC). See also, Bush to Ross Harrison, June 26, ~ 940 (NAS Archives: ibid.); Bush to members of NDRc,~luly 3, Ago; and Bush to individual staff officers of NAS and NRC, July 9, ~g4o (OSRD Box I). 53 NAs,AnnualReportfor 1939-40, pp. ~-2; Jewett inScience92:412~14 (November 8, Age). All but two of the projects were under contract, those with the Academy valued at $42, loo and with the Research Council, $203,000. See NAS Office Memorandum No. 726, April At, Ago; Brockett to Jewett, April ~2, ~940 (NAS Archives: Jewett file 5°. i32.2). 54 NAS Archives: EX Bd: Committee on Passive Protection Against Bombing: Beginning of Program: Ago; Bush, Pieces of the Action, pp. 32-33; NAS, Annual Report for 194445, P 3

The Academy in World War If 1 397 When the NDRC was created on June e', Tolman was appointed a member and Chairman of Division A (armor and ordnance), and Burchard was named Chairman of that Division's Section on Struc- tural Defense. From their individual vantage points, Tolman and Burchard were able to effect cooperation between the Army and civilian scientists and, when military funds became insufficient, pro- vide supplementary NDRC funds. Later, as the significance of the bomb damage studies to strategic bombing policy emerged, the intimate relationship with the NDRC enabled the Academy committee to broaden the scope of its activities beyond the immediate concerns of the Corps of Engineers.35 Another Academy effort that found its way into the NDRC structure was that of the Subcommittee on Submarine Detection, appointed in the fall of ~g40 under Edwin H. Colpitts, recently retired Vice- President of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, in response to a Navy request for a disinterested review of its submarine detection systems. In January ~94~, the subcommittee reported that the Naves current devices were not trustworthy, largely because of the "altogether inadequate research effort on fundamentals. . . Ethat had been] put forth since the last war."36 Acting on recommendations from Bush and Jewett, the Navy delegated responsibility for supplying the needed research to Jewett's NDRC Division C (communications and transportation). By the end of the war, the resulting program, di- rected by Colpitts and John T. Tate, Dean of Science, Literature, and the Arts at the University of Minnesota, had vastly improved the Allies' ability to locate and destroy submarines and had also developed the techniques for successful submarine attacks on enemy shipping.37 Besides providing a focus for the organization of science in national defense preparations, the creation of NDRC at once supplied a mecha- nism for the interchange of scientific information with Great Britain and Canada. Britain's peril during the Luftwaffe assault preceding Hitler's threatened invasion made full exchange with the United IS NRC, Committee ~ Fortification Design: Final Report (Washington, ~944); Baxter, Scien- t~sts Against Time, p. 83; John E. Burchard (ed.), Rockets, Guns, and Targets [OSRD, SCIENCE IN WORLD WAR II] (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., ~948), pp. 24~-244, 250-25~, 325 36 "Report of Subcommittee on the Submarine Problem," January 28, ~94~; Jewett to Bush, January 20, ~94~; Hewett to H. G. Bowen, February ~~ and ~3, ~94~ (NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Committee Advisory to Navy Department on Research: Subcom- mittee on Submarine Detection); correspondence in OSRD Box ~7. 37 Typescript, John Herrick, "Subsurface Warfare. The History of Division 6, NDRC," January ~95~ (copy in NAS Archives: ORG: Historical Data), pp. ~-~5 95.; Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. ~ 72- ~ 86.

398 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) States imperative; and in September 1940 a scientific mission headed by Sir Henry T. Tizard of the Imperial College of Science and Technology and scientific adviser to the Ministry of Aircraft Produc- tion arrived in Washington, authorized to exchange the military research secrets of the British government for those of the United States. Perhaps Britain's most important disclosure was the invention of a new metal vacuum tube, the resonant cavity magnetron, which, with important improvements devised in the U.S., was soon to become the heart of radar equipment for early detection of approaching enemy aircraft. The magnetron made possible ND~C development of micro- wave radar, widely acknowledged as one of the most effective scien- tific developments of the war.39 The Tizard mission also brought reports of work on a radio proximity fuze, fire control, rockets and explosives, and, through John D. Cockcroft, Britain's top nuclear physicist in the group, disclosed some findings in "Tube Alloys," Britain's code name for its uranium research.40 Fully engaged in battle and without the resources for the costly development of its research, Britain looked to NDRC and the enor- mous technical and industrial potential at its command for further development of its new devices. The high-level exchange represented by the Tizard mission was formalized by the establishment of a British scientific office in Washington and a London office by NDRC. The latter was arranged through the Conant mission in March ~ 94 l, when James B. Conant, Chairman of NDRC Division B. Carroll Wilson, and Frederick L. Hovde, chemical engineer and Assistant to the President of the University of Rochester, arrived in London. Hovde remained to take charge of the office. Any lingering hesitation on the part of the British about the disclosure of secrets of research for purposes of their development abroad ended with the signing of the Lend-Lease Act that same month.4~ `8 Baxter, Scientists Against Time, p. 120. so For the discovery of the principle of radar in ~922 and subsequent development, see Baxter, Scientists Against Time, Chapters IX-X. See also MSS history of radar by Henry Guerlac in OSRD, Records of the Office of the Historian, ~943-~946. 4°Baxter,Scientists Against Time, pp. ~~g-~20, 202, 2~5-2~6, 223, 255,424; Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939-1945 (London: MacMillan & Co., ~964), pp. 64-65. An overly pessimistic view of British efforts to organize its scientific forces for war predominates throughout the symposium by British scientists, published as Science in War (Middlesex, England: Penguin Press, Ago). 4} Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. ~ 2 i-i 22; Hewlett and Anderson, The New Worm, pp. 257-258 For a British estimate of American science in ~94~-~942, with a note on Jewett, see

The Academy in World War II I 399 Few in this country were to have any conception of the extent of the fundamental research performed by physicists and chemists in Great Britain and Europe that was later brought to the develop- ment phase in laboratories here, or of the feats of engineering and production required to turn that research into arms and equipment for the battlefield. As the end of the first year of NDRC neared, Bush disclosed in a secret report to the President the notable progress made in microwave radar and in the development of night glasses, oxygen masks, fire- control equipment, rockets, antisubmarine devices, explosives, and chemical warfare materials under more than two hundred contracts with educational institutions across the country.42 Nevertheless, it was now apparent that despite NDRC'S intensive research on instruments and devices of warfare, there were still serious gaps in the nation's defense preparations. Engineering development, the intermediate stage between research and production, which had been left to the Army and Navy, lagged badly. NDRC lacked effective mechanisms for correlating its research with that of the services or with NACA. Clearly, it would have to provide that coordination and carry its research projects to a point just short of production procurement. There was also need for better organization and stimulation of research in military medicine.43 The Office of Scientific Research and Development In May ~94~, on Bush's recommendation, Roosevelt agreed to a reorganization of NDRC that would accomplish these objectives, and on tune ad, less than six months before Pearl Harbor, signed the Execu- tive Order creating the Office of Scientific Research and Develop- ment (OSRD), with Bush as Director, personally responsible to the President. . Howland H. Sargeant, "Scientists in Government," Public Administration Review 2:345- 348 (Autumn ~942). 42 Bush, "Report of the NDRC for the First Year of Operations, June 27, Into to June 28, 1941" (OSRD Box so); interoffice memorandum, Conant to Bush, May I, ~942 (OSRD Box boa). 4~ Irvin Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War: The Administrative History of the Office of Scientific Research and Development [OSRD, SCIENCE IN WORLD WAR II] (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., ~948), p. 35. For personal views of the early operations of NDRC, see K. T. Compton's essay in Scientists Face the World of 1942 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, ~942), pp. 20-29; and Conant to Oscar Cox, General Counsel, Foreign Economic Administration, November ~ I, ~ 944 (OSRD Box 3 2).

400 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) Five members of the Advisory Council of the Office of Scientific Research and Development; Seated: A. N. Richards, Vannevar Bush, and James B. Conant. Standing: J. C. Hunsaker and Harvey H. Bundy (Photograph courtesy Wide World Photos). OSRD, with its extraordinary ability to mobilize science, with funds specifically appropriated by Congress, and with access to the Presi- dent was, like NDRC, a new kind of scientific agency in the federal structure. As an administrative agency in the President's Office for Emergency Management (OEM) and independent of the Council of National Defense, OSRD at once achieved a maximum of flexibility and freedom of operation. Moreover, through its access to the President, it established a new relationship between science and government; and its Director, Vannevar Bush, became in effect science adviser to the President and his Cabinet.44 As Director of OSRD, Bush was given "final responsibility for the 44 Don K. Price, Government and Science: Their Dynamic Relation in American Democracy (New York: New York University Press, ~954), pp. 43-45; Bush,Pieces of the action, pp. 43-45. The orders creating NDRC (June 27, Who) and OSRD appear in Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. 45 ~-455.

The Academy in World War II I 40 ~ entire program of civilian scientific research and development, not only in the fields of instrumentalities of warfare, but also in all fields of military medicine." NDRC, transferred intact from the Council of National Defense, was placed under Conant; and a new Committee on Medical Research (CMR) was established, composed of representa- tives of the Surgeons General of the Army, Navy, and Public Health Service and four civilians appointed by the President. The civilian members of CMR were Alfred N. Richards, Vice-President in charge of medical affairs at the University of Pennsylvania (Chairman); Lewis H. Weed, Director of the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and Chairman of the NRC Division of Medical Sciences; Alphonse R. Dochez, Chairman of the Department of Bacteriology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons; and A. Baird Hastings, Hamilton Kuhn Professor at the Harvard Medical School. An Advisory Council in OSRD, consisting of Bush as Chair- man; Conant; Richards; Jerome C. Hunsaker of NACA; Harvey H. Bundy, Special Assistant to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson; and Rear Adm. Julius A. Furer, Coordinator of Research and Develop- ment under Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, would assist the Director in coordinating research programs. Although not a member of the Council, Dr. Hewett as President of the Academy attended most of the meetings.45 As he had upon the establishment of NDRC, the President wrote to Jewett requesting the Academy and the Research Council to assist "in every way possible" the operations of the new agency.46 And taking the first step in gearing science to engineering and industry, Jewett launched the preparation of a companion directory to an earlier source book on the universities, this time a vast compilation of "Research Facilities in Industry."47 By December ~ 94 I, the civilian administrative staff of OSRD and the division, section, and panel chiefs of NDRC and CMR numbered No, of whom 66 were members of the National Academy or its Research Council. So well did this war research organization operate in the 45"Report of the Director of the OSRD, September 2, ~943," p. 4o (OSRD Box so). 46 Roosevelt to Jewett, July ~ 6, ~ 94 I, and reply, July ~ g, ~ 94 I; Jewett to members of NAS and NRC, July 23, ~94~ (NAS Archives: EXEC: OEM: OSRD). Bush had sought to include a statement in the Executive Order defining relations between OSRD and the Academy, and, when inadvertently omitted, it was covered in the President's letter [Bush to Seitz, September ~6, ~968 (NAS Archives: PUBS: NAS: History); Bush, Pieces of the Action, p. 45]. For the establishment of National Research Council committees in ~94 ~ to aid NDRC and OSRD, see correspondence in OSRD Boxes ~87, ~88. 47 The directory is in Jewett files, 4g.o4 ~ (osRD Box ~ boo).

402 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) years following Pearl Harbor that from its inception to its demobiliza- tion in 1947 the only changes in membership were in the Army and Navy representatives.48 As the Army and Navy gained confidence in the new research organization, and the NDRC divisions responded to their requests with project after project, the internal structure was no longer adequate. The single major reorganization within OSRD took place in December ~942, when the sprawling elements of the original five divisions of NDRC were realigned into nineteen divisions, two panels (one on applied mathematics and another on applied psychology), and three committees (on vacuum tubes, radio propagation, and tropical deterioration). The twenty-four division, committee, and panel chairmen, nine of them Academy members, were given the widest possible latitude in planning and executing their programs; and the development of new military hardware and supporting combat gear, as Bush intended, began to accelerate.49 How OSRD put nuclear physicists to work on radio proximity fuzes and radar, chemists and physicists on high explosives, engineers and physicists on submarine warfare, and physicists, chemists, and en- gineers into developing rockets is recounted in the published histories of OSRD. Similarly recorded is the work of the NDRC divisions in ballistics research, guided missiles, fire-control and bomb-guidance apparatus, radar and communications countermeasures, transporta- tion, radio, optics, metallurgy, and miscellaneous weapons. The his- tory of the CMR divisions in medicine, surgery, aviation medicine, physiology, chemistry, and malaria therapy has been written by physi- cian members of the Committee on Medical Research.50 One of the most remarkable scientific achievements of the war, the 48 NAS, Annual Report for 1941~2, pp. 2 ~-22; Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War, pp. 52, Rio. In the last year of the war staff members of NDRC totaled 505; CMR totaled 6~. [OSRD] "Statement for the House Committee on Appropriations," April ~945 (NAS Archives: EXEC: OEM: OSRD: General). The organization of NDRC as of lone 4, ~94~, in December ~942, and at the end of the war appears in Stewart, pp. to-do, 52-57, 84-97; the . . organization o: : CMR, on pp. 1 1 2- 1 13. 49 Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War, pp. 60-63, 84-97. so The OSRD historical series includes a summary volume on the activities of the entire organization, published in 1946 by Little, Brown & Company as Scientists Against Time by James PhiIlney Baxter III, and a series of seven volumes with details about different parts of the organization, also published by Little, Brown & Company under the common title SCIENCE IN WORLD WAR II. They are: New Weapons for Air Warfare (~947); Combat Scientists (~947); Advances in Military Medicine (~948), 2 vols; Rockets, Guns, and Targets (~948); Chemistry (~948); Applied Physics: Electronics, Optics, Metallurgy ( ~ 948); and Organizing Scientific Research for War ( ~ 948).

The Academy in World War II I 403 proximity fuze, was produced in great secrecy by NDRC and flown to Britain in time to blunt the V-~ robot bomb assault in the summer of ~944. In December of that year it was used effectively in the Battle of the Bulge. A radio-activated fuze that would detonate a shell or bomb at a predetermined height over a target rather than on impact had been sought here and in Great Britain since World War I. In August ~ g40, the work on a fuze was established in a new unit, Section T of NDRC under Merle A. Tuve, and a contract was drawn up between NDRC and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.5~ By late ~ 94 I, with large numbers of young physical scientists brought into the top-priority project, Tuve's group had developed a miniature radio set so rugged it would fit and function in a rotating shell fired from a e-inch gun. No more than the basic design of the fuze had been established when the Navy, anxious for the defense of its battleships against air attack, began planning its procurement. In the spring of ~942, the work on the final stages of development of the shell fuze in Section T. which reported directly to Vannevar Bush, was moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, into the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University. In the next two years, the staff increased from fewer than a hundred to more than seven hundred. A similar crash program at the Bureau of Standards, its staff numbering more than four hundred, had the Army's only slightly less-complex fuze for bombs and rockets readied when the Navy downed the first Japanese plane with a proximity fuze in a shell in January ~943.52 The effectiveness of the proximity fuze was enormously enhanced by the simultaneous development in NDRC of new electric fire-control apparatus for antiaircraft guns, a bomb director mechanism, and, most important, microwave radar and its application to antiaircraft guns and bomb directors.53 Experimentation based on the principle of radar, an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging, had been pursued in Great Britain and in the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington since the early Ados. Using pulsed radio waves, and timing their reflected echoes from space, Gregory Breit and Merle Tuve in ~9~5 had measured the height of the ionosphere. 5t Baxter, Scientists Against Time, p. 223. 52 Joseph C. Boyce (ed.), New Weaponsfor Air Warfare [OSRD, SCIENCE IN WORLD WAR II] (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., ~947), pp. 102 95., ~20, ~33-~35, ~58, ~76. 5sI6id., pp. ~2-~5, 26-27, gs-io~, ~60-~63.

404 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) Tuve was again at work on the problem when, upon the organiza- tion of NDRC in 1940, Karl Compton established Section D-1 (later, Division 14 in NDRC) under Alfred L. Loomis, Director of the Loomis Laboratories and pioneer in the field of microwaves, to investigate for the Air Corps means for bombing through fog and haze. A radically new and immensely powerful vacuum tube generating ultra-high or microwave impulses was needed. The British, working on the same problem, came up with the magnetron, brought to Bush by the Tizard mission in the fall of 1940.54 Two months later, in November, its development began at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, operating under an NDRC contract. The laboratory was directed by a University of Rochester physicist, Lee A. DuBridge, and a Steering Committee that included Isidor I. Rabi, Luis W. Alvarez, Robert F. Bacher, and Jerrold R. Zacharias. By January ~94~ the first rudimentary radar set had been put together and successfully operated. Because of the air war over Britain in the spring of ~ 943, radar became Bush's most urgent project, forcing him to divert physicists and engineers badly needed in the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos. The largest single contract group under NDRC, the Radiation Labo- ratory, produced in the next four years over one hundred and fifty distinct radar systems for the Armed Forces, from portable units for ground troops to an array of types for PT boats and battleships, for night fighter planes, submarine-hunting patrol planes, for bombers, for early warning systems, long-range navigation (LORAN), and track- ing types for antiaircraft guns.55 Almost as much an innovation as the proximity fuze and radar were the new incendiary weapons, largely developed within NDRC in the bombs, fuels, and gases division (Division B) and later by its successor group, the chemical engineering division (Division ~ Id, through the Chemical Warfare Service-NDRc Technical Committee established in August ~942.56 The Armed Forces had no incendiary bomb in Ago, and the first one produced by the Chemical Warfare Service was something filled with gasoline and cotton waste. A year later the service had magnesium and thermite bombs, but they were materials soon in short supply. The service began investigating a British incen- diary made by adding rubber to the gasoline. In October ~94~, with 54 See above, pp. 397-398; Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. ~3~42. 55 Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. ~ 45- ~ 57. The Navy's SONAR (sound navigation and ranging) was a Harvard laboratory development (ibid., p. ~76). 56 William A. Noyes, Jr. (ed.), Chemistry [OSRD, SCIENCE IN WORLD WAR II ] (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., ~948), pp. ~47 95., 388 95., No ff.

The Academy in World War II I 405 rubber sources in the Pacific threatened by the Japanese, the Chemi- cal Warfare Service at the request of the Army Air Force asked NDRC for a substitute thickener. At DuPont, chemists found that isobutyl methacrylate (IM) polymer converted gasoline into a fine rubbery jelly- but the polymer was suddenly preempted by the new plastics industry. To meet the problem of critical materials, Harvard chemist Louis F. Fieser and an independent group of chemists working under Earl P. Stevenson, President of Arthur D. Little, Inc., investigated soaps as thickeners and produced an aluminum soap of naphthenic andpalmitic acids (napalm) that in gasoline made a thick, clinging, and fiercely burning fuel. Before the end of the war, NDRC saw the production of a whole new arsenal of incendiary fuels and munitions, a wide variety of incen- diary bombs and bomb clusters, rockets, portable and mechanized flamethrowers, and incendiary devices, including the one most widely used during the war, the Air Corps's small, six-pound, oil incendiary developed under chemist Robert P. Russell, Vice-President of the Standard Oil Development Company.57 The administration of OSRD arid the activities of the Academy and the Research Council in OSRD operations were almost as remarkable accomplishments as those of the research laboratories in the univer- sities, in industry, and in federal agencies. The most difficult adminis- trative problem that OSRD confronted was finding scientific manpower for the expanding laboratories of its contractors, in competition with the new war industries, the scientific bureaus of the government, the technical branches of the armed services, and the Selective Service System, which, in the beginning at least, tended indiscriminately to induct young scientists and engineers into the Armed Forces.58 Later the OSRD established excellent rapport with the Selective Service System, which gave sympathetic consideration to its requests for the deferment of scientific and technical personnel crucial to its contrac- tors' war research. As early as the summer of 1939, the National Research Council began planning a roster covering all the fields of science and technol- ogy, and in ~g40 it was proposed as a joint project with the Science Committee of the President's National Resources Planning Board. With the Board's inclusion of the social sciences, the humanities, and education, the register set up in July ~ g40 became the National Roster 57 Chemistry, pp. 420 ff 58 Baxter, Scientist Against Time, pp. ~28-~29; Bush, "The Kilgore Bill," Science 98:572 (December 3 I, ~ 943); Science 99:258 (March 3 I, ~ 944).

406 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) of Scientific and Specialized Personnel, maintained by the Planning Board and the Civil Service Commission, under the direction of Leonard Carmichael, President of Tufts College. In April 194e it was transferred to the War Manpower Commission. By late 1944, the roster had detailed punch-card data on 6go,ooo individuals.59 But the roster was not yet fully in operation in April 1941, when the expansion of NDRC activities highlighted the shortage of scientists and engineers capable of directing the growing number of development projects. Bush set up a contract with the Academy to establish an Office of Scientific Personnel (osP) in the Research Council to pre- pare for the use of NDRC, as well as the armed services and other federal agencies, a more carefully evaluated register than that of the National Roster.60 Although the OSRD contract with the Academy was terminated in September ~943 as the emergency subsided, the Office of Scientific Personnel, as an agency of the Academy, continued to operate throughout the war and after, recruiting trained men in critical fields for university laboratories and industry, working with Selective Ser- vice to prevent unwise drafting, assisting in the operations of the National Roster, and serving, through the Roster's facilities, the specialized needs of OSRD and other agencies. Joseph C. Morris was Director of the Office until the autumn of ~94~, when it came un- der the direction of Homer L. Dodge. Merriam H. Trytten, per- sonnel specialist ire physics, was brought from the National Roster in ~944 and directed the Office for the next twenty-three years. The mobilization of scientists began within two months of the establishment of NDRC, by which time it had approved contracts for military projects with nineteen institutions. As late as December ~ 941, Bush still held to his original idea of carrying out NDRC research through "cost-basis contracts with academic institutions and industrial companies which in most cases permit scientists to work in their own laboratories with the least disruption to other defense and training activities."62 It had become evident by then, from the rudimentary status of many of the new weapons and devices OSRD had under development, 59 Charles W. Eliot, Director NRPB, to Jewett, June 2~, into (NAS Archives: EXEC: NRFB: Roster of Scientific Personnel: General); NAS, Annual Report for 1939-40, p. 30 et seq. 60 NAS Archives: EX Bd: Of rice of Scientific Personnel: Beginning of Program: ~ 94 I; NAs,Annual Reportfor 1940-41, pp. 39-40; 1941~2, pp. 29-30. 6~ NAS, Annual Report for 1942~3, pp. 23-25; 1943-44, pp. 22-23; [Leonard Car- michael] National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel (Washington: June ~942). 62 Quoted in Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. ~ g-20.

The Academy in World War II I 40~7 that both the interdisciplinary requirements and the sheer numbers of scientists and technologists needed to bring them to completion would make his plan of decentralization impossible. Some of the universities were already becoming "science factories," specializing in one or more disciplines and calling in related specialists from other institutions. Thus great central laboratories for chemical research began to evolve, at the Universities of Illinois, Chicago, and North- western, at the California Institute of Technology, and at George wasn~ng~on university. one rocket laboratories at the California Institute of Technology, the radar projects at MIT and the Johns Hopkins University, and the underwater sound and radar counter- measures laboratories at Harvard all became huge organizations of . . . . . . . sment~sts and engineers representing Institutions from coast to coast. Largest was Lee A. DuBridge's Radiation Laboratory at MIT, whose staff of almost four thousand included scientists and technicians from sixty-nine different academic institutions.63 The National Academy came close to being something of a "science factory" itself, as the NDRC called on it for advice on an increasingly large and disparate range of research. The order creating NDRC in ~g40 had specifically permitted Bush to "enter into contracts and agreements with . . . the National Academy of Sciences and the Na- tional Research Council . . . for studies, experimental investigations, and reports."64 After determining the requirements and research the services wanted, the NDRC, and subsequently the OSRD, drew heavily on Academy and Research Council committees for the direction of much of that research. Reimbursement could only be obtained several months after the expenses had been incurred, and the Academy's limited reserve funds were inadequate to provide the working capital for its expanding activities. Fortunately, the Carnegie Corporation and other founda- tions provided several hundred thousand dollars for the purpose. By the fall of ~ g40 almost twenty Academy-Research Council committees were engaged in studies or directing projects for NDRc.65 Following Pearl Harbor, federal agencies were permitted to advance working v.. .. . ~ ~ . .. A. . . . . . . 63 Julius Stratton, "Learning and Action," American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 108:387-388 (October ~964); Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. 20-22, ~57. 64 For the wording of early NAS-NDRC contracts, see OSRD Box ~7. 65 The Annual Reports of the Academy show an additional twenty-six committees set up in ~94~, thirteen more in ~942, twenty-four in ~943, and sixteen in ~944-~945, a total of ninety-eight committees concerned specifically with wartime research. See also NAS, Annual Report for 1944-45, pp. 2-8. For the working funds, see NAS, Annual Report for 1946-47, pp. 2-3.

408 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) funds after a contract was in force, but the Academy continued to be in need of private funds for precontractual expenses. A secured financial problem was the mounting administrative ex- pense of overseeing the many advisory committees. The Comptroller General ruled that, under the Academy's Charter, only those ex- penses directly related to a particular project could be reimbursed. Upon its establishment in June ~94~, the OSRD took over the NDRC contracts with the Academy, transferred the Academy's contract with the Federal Security Agency to the OSRD Committee on Medical Research, and, setting a precedent in Academy-government rela- tions, arranged statutory provision for payment of the overhead expenses associated with the Academy's committee reports and rec- ommendations. Thus, for the first time since the founding of the Academy, Congress, through OSRD, specifically allocated funds to the Academy adequately defraying the full cost of its services.66 These arrangements checked the drain on the Academy's grants from foundations and greatly facilitated its work. Nevertheless, the continuing need for a revolving fund for the Research Council's Division of Medical Sciences was met to the end of the war by a special appropriation from the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation.67 The extraordinary complexity of the Academy's f~nan- cial ties with the government necessitated for the first time the appointment of a Business Manager, and in August ~942 G. Donald Meid was brought from the comptroller's office at Purdue University to join the staff of the Academy.68 The NRC and the Committee on Medical Research ~ second unprecedented event in Academy-government relations came about as a consequence of the close relationship of the Research Council's Division of Medical Sciences (DMS) with the new OSRD Committee on Medical Research (CMR). This was the central issue discussed at the first meeting of the Committee on Medical Research 66 The legislative authority for the funding, in the amount of $8 ~,ooo, appears in Public Law 353, 77th Cong., fist sees., December ~7, ~94~. Authority for subsequent years appears in Public Law 678, 77th Cong., ad sees., July 25, ~942; Public Law ~39, 78th Cong., fist sees., July ~2, ~943; and Public Law 372, 78th Cong., Ed sees., June 28, ~944 (NAS Archives: Jewett file so.~32B). 67 NAS, Annual Report for 1941-42, pp. 22, 55. 68 NAS, Annual Report for 1942-43, p. 2 I; Hewett to R. G. Harrison and i. C. Hunsaker, February 24, ~942 (NAS Archives: Jewett file so.~32B).

The Academy in World War II I 409 on July 31, 1941. In effect, the Division, under Chairman Lewis H. Weed, Director of the School of Medicine of the Johns Hopkins University, had for more than a year been performing the functions of the CMR. In the spring of 1940, the Surgeons General of the Armed Services had called upon the Research Council for studies of new chemotherapeutic agents under development and of the use of whole blood substitutes in the treatment of surgical shock. By late summer, Weed had established DMS committees on these and other subjects of interest to the military, including problems in nutrition, anesthesia, and surgery.69 In September 1940, three months after NDRC was created to sup- port research on instruments of warfare, the Council of National Defense established a Health and Medical Committee "to coordinate health and medical activities affecting national defense." Appointed members of the committee were Irvin Abell, head of the American Medical Association's preparedness unit, the three Surgeons General, and Weed. Transferred to the Federal Security Agency that December, the Health and Medical Committee concerned itself with medical school curricula, draft deferment of medical students, and related adminis- trative questions. Medical research was assigned to the Division of Medical Sciences, and in January ~94~ a contract was signed between the Federal Security Agency and the Academy providing funding for division committees on aviation medicine and neuropsychiatry, as well as for those created at the request of the Surgeons General before the organization of the Health and Medical Committee.70 Although the limited funds provided by the Federal Security Agency contract precluded an ambitious research program, by the time CMR was created the Division of Medical Sciences had established liaison with its counterparts in Britain and Canada and had become thoroughly familiar with both the personnel and the research needs of the military through an active network of eight major committees and thirty-three subcommittees on military medicine and surgery, totaling 22~ members.7~ 69 A. L. Barrows, Office Memorandum 7~5, April lo, Ago; Office Memorandum 763, May no, ~g40 (NAS Archives: MED: Committees on Military Medicine: General); NAS, Annual Report for 1939-40, pp. 67-68. 70 Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War to. ao; NAS, Annual Report for 1940-41. ~ , ~ __. . ~ ~ pp. 69-72; L. H. Weed to Irvin Abell, December 30, ~g4o (NAS Archives: MED: Committees on Military Medicine: General). 7: L. H. Weed, "The National Research Council and Medical Preparedness,"Journal of

410 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) A continuing role for the division was inevitable when in July 1941 Bush set up the Committee on Medical Research as part of OSRD. Following CMR'S first meeting, Bush wrote the NRC Chairman, Ross G. Harrison, that, rather than creating an array of new advisory groups within CMR, he would "regard those committees and subcommittees as already available" through the NRC Division of Medical Sciences.72 Weed, one of the four civilian members of CMR, was made its Vice-Chairman, and the chairmen of the eight war-related commit- tees of NRC were appointed CMR consultants to enable them to propose needed research directly to CMR. An OSRD contract with the Academy supplied funding for supplementary administrative staff and for the frequent in some cases monthly meetings of the committees and subcommittees of the Division of Medical Sciences. Office space was allocated for CMR'S headquarters on the third floor of the Academy building, next to those of the division.73 As the CMR program expanded over the next three years, so too did Chairman Richard's administrative responsibilities. In June ~ 944, Dr. Chester S. Keefer, Wade Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, was appointed medical administrative officer, and six divisions were created (medicine, surgery, aviation medicine, physiology, chemistry, and malaria) to take over direct supervision of the medical contracts.74 When the war ended, CMR had placed 593 contracts totaling more than $24 million, all but 92 of them on the recommendation of the Division of Medical Sciences. The medical, medical-technical, and chemical research involved 5,43 ~ inves- tigators, the largest numbers concentrated in the work on blood the American Medical Association 117: 1-9 (July ~ 9, ~ 94 I); NAS, Annual Reportfor 1940~1, p. 72; E. C. Andrus et al. (eds.), Advances in Military Medicine [OSRD, SCIENCE IN WORLD WAR II ] (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., ~948), vol. I., p. xiii. 72 Bush to Harrison, August 7, ~94~ (NAS Archives: MED: Committees on Military Medicine: Liaison with OSRD Committee on Medical Research). For Bush's perspective on the establishment of CMR, see his Pieces of the Action, pp. 43-47 75 Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War, pp. gg-~o~; A. L. Barrows to Bush, July I, ~94~ (NAS Archives: MED: Committees on Military Medicine: Funds); Minutes, "Advisory Committee on Buildings and Grounds, August 8, ~94~" (NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Committee on Buildings and Grounds). Science Service, which had occupied offices in the building since ~924, was forced to find other quarters in the fall of ~94~ as the Academy accommodated an increasing number of emergency agencies (NAS, Annual Report for 1941-42, p. ~8). 74 lewett to Bush, April 4, ~944, and Bush to Jewett, April 7, ~944 (NAS Archives: MED: Committees on Military Medicine: Liaison with OSR~CMR: Reorganization); memoran- dum, Carroll Wilson to Bush, May lo, ~ 943 (OSRD Box 39); Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War, pp. ~ lo- ~ ~3; CMR-NRC correspondence in OSRD Box ~88.

The Academy in World War II I 411 substitutes and blood transfusion, the development of penicillin, atabrine for malaria, DDT and other insecticides necessary for the health of the armed services, aviation medicine, and artificial limbs.75 A Committee on Prosthetic Devices in the Research Council, re- quested by the Surgeon General of the Army in the fall of ~944, was set up under OSRD contract in April ~945 under Paul E. Klopsteg, Professor of Applied Science at Northwestern University. It was later reconstituted as a continuing advisory group to the Veterans Admin- istration.76 One of the largest research groups assembled during the war, that for chemical and biological warfare, remained wholly precautionary and preventive. Chemical warfare research was begun in Into in the NDRC division concerned with gases and chemical problems, of which Roger Adams, inventor of the irritant smoke, adamsite, in ~9~8, was vice-chairman. A year later it was expanded and subdivided in OSRD'S Divisions of Chemistry, under Walter R. Kirner, California Institute of Technology chemist; Absorbents and Aerosols, under William A Noyes, Jr., Professor of Chemistry, University of Rochester; Chemical Engineering, under Robert P. Russell of the Standard Oil Develop- ment Company; and Explosives, under George B. Kistiakowsky, Professor of Chemistry, Harvard University. Through contracts with chemical warfare laboratories established at MIT, Columbia, Chicago, and Illinois, the NDRC developed new methods of detection and new protective devices and equipment for toxic warfare and produced an arsenal of advanced chemical warfare weapons, including toxic agents, a chemical mortar, smoke 75 Stewart, Organizing Scientific Researchfor War, pp. ~02-~os; Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. ~gg-300; A. N. Richards's testimony in Hearings on Science Legislation (S. 1297 and Related Bills), pp. 458-464. By August ~945 the Research Council's Division of Medical Sciences comprised 3~5 members on twelve major committees and thirty-four subcommittees, covering the fields of aviation medicine, chemotherapeutic and other agents, convalescence and rehabilitation, industrial medicine, medical information, medicine, neuropsychiatry, pathology, sanitary engineering, shock and transfusion, surgery, and treatment of gas casualties (Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War, p. ~ 0 ~ ). Including the NRC Committees on Drugs and Medical Supplies and the Board for Coordination of Malarial Studies, there were fourteen main and forty-two subcommit- tees, with a membership of 379 [George B. Darling in Morris Fishbein (ed.), Doctors at War (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., ~945), pp. 369-37~]. On the production of penicillin, see H. T. Clarke, I. R. Johnson, and Sir Robert Robinson, The Chemistry of Penicillin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ~949), and NAS, Annual Reportfor 1948-49, p. 3; also A. N. Richards in Nature 201 :441-445 ( ~ 964). 76 Advances in Military Medicine, vol. I, pp. ~34-~39; NAS, Annual Reportfor 1944-45, p. 37 et seq.

412 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) generators, flamethrowers, and incendiaries. To CMR was assigned the medical research under contracts supervised by the Research Coun- cil's Committee on the Treatment of Gas Casualties. Some idea of the extent of research undertaken for the Chemical Warfare Service (cws) may be seen in a single investigation, that of the toxicology of flame attack, which involved NDRC units at MIT, the Standard Oil Development Company, New York University, the Harvard and Johns Hopkins Medical Schools, the Navy Bureau of Ordnance and Medicine, the Armored Medical Research Laboratory, and the Exper- iment Station at Suffield, Canada.77 The need to meet the possible threat of so-called biological or bacterial warfare (including many chemical substances as well) be- came a War Department, rather than OSRD, responsibility, aided by the counsel of an Academy committee.78 The feasibility of biological warfare the deliberate use of pathogenic and chemical agents to produce disease or death in man, animals, and crops had for some time been under investigation in Great Britain and Canada when, in July ~94~, Secretary of War Stimson called a meeting of representatives of the Chemical Warfare Service, the Surgeon General of the Army, Army G-2 (Intelligence), and OSRD to consider the potential threat. They agreed to call on the National Academy to assess its current potentialities.79 In October ~94~, the Academy and Research Council appointed a twelve-member "WBC" Committee to make the assessment, headed by Edwin B. Fred, Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin.~° In February ~942, the committee reported biological warfare a distinct possibility and urged that defensive and offensive measures 77 Leo P. Brophy et al., The Chemical Warfare Service: From Laboratory to Field, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, ~959), pp. ~65-~66 and Chapters I-IV. 78 Memorandum, Bush to H. H. Bundy, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War, December 3~, ~94~ (OSRD Box boa). 79 Except as noted, this brief account of biological warfare research is based on Brophy, The Chemical Warfare Service, Chapter V. 8° Members of the committee included William M. Clark, physiological chemist at Johns Hopkins; Louis O. Kimmel of the Rockefeller Institute; Thomas M. Rivers, bac- teriologist at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital; William H. Taliaferro, University of Chicago microbiologist; Lewis H. Weed and Ross G. Harrison of NRC; and Academy President Jewett. Liaison members included representatives of the cws, Army Ordnance, Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Surgeon General's Office, Depart- ment of Agriculture, and U.S. Public Health Service. On that committee, see Jewett in NAS, Annual Report for 1946-47, p. 4.

The Academy irz World War II I 413 be formulated at once. A month later the British, through OSRD liaison, reported their progress in experimental studies and some actual production of agents, and urged this country to undertake the large-scale program it was not equipped to launch. On May ~5 an advisory agency of eight called the War Research Service (WRS), headed by George W. Merck, manufacturing chemist and President of Merck and Company, and Edwin Fred of the now disbanded "WBC" Committee, was set up in the President's Federal Security Agency. The War Research Service was to recommend biological warfare projects to appropriate federal agencies and initiate research through cws contracts with universities and industry. WRS was formally or- ganized in September ~94~. A month later a new Academy and Research Council group, the "ABC" Committee, met to act as technical adviser to the War Research Service, its Chairman W. Mansfield Clark, Professor of Medicine and Chemistry at Johns Hopkins Uni- versity. Among its members were Roger Adams and Milton C. Win- ternitz, whose divisions in NDRC and CMR, respectively, carried out chemical and medical research for the Chemical Warfare Service. Both men were veterans of gas warfare in World War I. Until late in ~943, WRS concentrated on establishing antibiological warfare programs in the United States, the Defense Commands, and the Theaters of Operations and on supervising basic research in the universities. Then, military reports of German rocket research, at once suspected of being a potential vehicle for biological agents, resulted in a redirection of policy. In June ~944, within a week after the first V-~ rocket bomb fell on England, the President transferred the program from the civilian War Research Service to the Chemical Warfare Service and ordered all-out preparation for possible retalia- tion. The discontinued "ABC" Committee was succeeded in September 1944 by the Academy's "DEF" Committee under O. H. Perry Pepper, Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, to guide the technical research of a new Special Projects Division in the cws. Research laboratories for the cws were constructed at Camp Detrick, Maryland; production plants at Vigo, Indiana; and proving-ground installations at Horn Island, Mississippi, and Granite Peak, Utah. To the end of the war, the Academy committee remained the top x, The preparation of a cognate report, Rosebury, Kabat, and Boldt's "Bacterial Warfare: A Critical Analysis of the Available Agents, Their Possible Military Applica- tions, and the Means for Protection Against Them," authorized by A. R. Dochez of the Academy and member of CMR, was submitted to the Research Council in June ~ 94e and subsequently printed in The Journal of Immunology 56:7-96 (May ~947).

414 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) advisory body to the Secretary of War in matters of biological warfare. Its offices were located in the Academy building in Washington.82 At the height of its activities, the biological warfare program was by far the largest research element in the Chemical Warfare Service, comparable only to the Manhattan Project in the numbers of spe- cialized scientists and engineers manning its installations. The periods of greatest apprehension concerning enemy use of chemical and biological weapons were just prior to the landing of U.S. troops in Italy in the autumn of ~943, in Normandy in June ~944, and during the preparations for the advance up the island chain in the Pacific. The persistent reports of German intentions to resort to germ warfare subsequently proved to be only an element of psychological warfare. Their considerable research had actually been aimed at protecting their troops against bacterial agents reportedly used by guerilla agents on the eastern front. On the other hand, the Japanese had indeed developed a "bacillus bomb," but despite official ap- prehension it was never present in any of the great paper balloons that crossed the Pacific and descended in the forests of the Northwest and Canada early in ~945. The balloons were freighted only with explosives and incendiaries. Other Academy and Research Council Advisory Committees Metallurgy was another field in which the Academy and Research Council played a large and significant role. In July ~g40 the Advi- sory Commission of the Council of National Defense had asked the Academy to assist in determining which of several processes then available for making high-grade manganese from manganese ore would produce substantial tonnage most quickly for steel production. Additional requests so increased during the next six months for advice on problems associated with tin, beryllium, chromite, and other minerals that in February ~ 94 ~ Hewett and Harrison ap- pointed a joint Academy-Research Council Advisory Committee on 82 NAS, Annual Reportfor 1944-45, p. 7; 1945-46, p. 2. See also, memorandum, "Activ- ities of the Academy and the National Research Council related to Chemical and Biological Warfare: ~9~7-~970" (NAS Archives: ORG: Activities: CBW: ~970). x, C. G. Suits, George R. Harrison, and Louis Jordan (eds.), Applied Physics: Electronics, Optics, Metallurgy [OSRD, SCIENCE IN WORLD WAR II ] (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., ~948), PP 3 ~4-3 i9

The Academy in World War II I 4 1 5 Metals and Minerals under Clyde E. Williams, Director of the Battelle Memorial Institute.84 In July ~94~ Bush, faced with increasing OSRD involvement in metallurgical problems, asked the Academy to devise some coordinat- ing mechanism. Jewett and Harrison responded that December by appointing a Metallurgical Advisory Committee, again under Wil- liams, comprising representatives of leading industrial, professional, academic, and government agencies. The following May, this commit- tee and the Advisory Committee on Metals and Minerals were merged to form the Academy-Research Council War Metallurgy Commit- tee.85 During the next four years the War Metallurgy Committee and its staff of fourteen directed the expenditure of over $~.5 million pro- vided by the War Production Board for research on production of alumina and magnesium, on mica processing, on iron and steel processing, on industrial diamonds, and on a wide variety of conser- vation and substitution studies and surveys. Similarly, nearly $5 million in OSRD research contracts were the responsibility of the committee in the fields of aircraft materials, armor plate, guns and ammunition, heat-resisting alloys, welding, and foundry materials and practice. In all, the War Metallurgy Committee provided OSRD and the War Production Board with over a thousand reports before the conclusion of its work in June ~946.86 Another wide-ranging program was the Research Council's direc- tion of technical and industrial research for the Army's Quartermas- ter Corps, which began in May ~943 when members of the Corps came to Hewett with a list of sixteen critical difficulties they were having with combat clothing and equipment. By December ~945, the Research Council's Division of Engineering and Industrial Research had supervised forty-four projects for the Quartermaster General, concerning textiles, leather and footwear, plastics, insecticides, per- sonal equipage, and other quartermaster items.87 84 "Report on Activities of the Advisory Committee on Metals and Minerals of the War Metallurgy Committee, NAS—NRC, ~940—~945, ~946, pp. ~5 - 22 (NAS Archives: E&JR: War Metallurgy Committee: Advisory Committee: Report on Activities). 85 Bush to Jewett, July 25, ~94~, and attached correspondence (OSRD Box ~7); NAS Archives: Jewett file 50.~326-28 and 50.727. 86 NAS, Annual Report for 1945~46, p. 37. 87 Office memorandum, W. H. Kenerson, subject: Quartermaster Department Projects, May ~3, ~943 (NAS Archives: E&JR: Com on QM Problems: Beginning of Program); Jewett to Brig. Gen. Georges F. Doriot, December ~3, ~945 (ibid., General); correspon- dence in OSRD Box ~86.

416 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) Altogether, between 1940 and 1945, the Academy entered into thirty-four war-related contracts with ten federal agencies for advi- sory and administrative services, including the Civil Aeronautics Administration (three contracts), Defense Plant Corporation (one), Navy Department (four), War Department (eight), Federal Security Agency (two), Council of National Defense (one), Office for Emergency Management (two), OSRD (ten), War Food Administration (two), and War Production Board (one). All committee members served without personal compensation, the only reimbursement be- yond direct costs being that to the Academy for overhead expenses of contract administration. Among the largest contracts was that for the selection and training of aircraft pilots >~03,so~begun In 1940 and lasting almost to the end of the war. Contracts with the Federal Security Agency and OSRD'S Committee on Medical Research, for advisory services in connection with almost $2 s,ooo,ooo in medical research, totaled $~,o8g,2s6. Administering research in combat clothing and equip- ment for the Quartermaster Corps came to $962,500; the metallurgi- cal program for OSRD amounted to $509,500; and that on materials and material substitutes for the War Production Board, $337,500. Other Academy contracts in smaller amounts ranged from its studies of aluminum salvage, aircraft production, and mine field clearance to the assessments of the potentialities of biological warfare, problems of sound control, and studies in food and nutrition. Government contracts placed with the Academy during the War totaled $5, ~62,g~o.89 Two special panels attached to NDRC, on applied mathematics and applied psychology, began as Academy committees. That in mathe- matics was set up in the summer of ~94~ to aid OSRD in making greater use of mathematicians. The membership of the committee under Marston Morse was, however, weighted with the pure mathe- maticians in the Academy, and when greater need for applied math- ematicians arose in December ~942, Bush drew from that group for 88 A second committee on food was that in the Research Council's Division of An- thropology and Psychology, the Committee on Food Habits, under Carl E. Guthe, Chairman, and Margaret Mead, Executive Secretary. From ~ 94 ~ to ~ 947 the committee was active in determining the food habits of various ethnic and socioeconomic groups and their relation to the goals of the War Food Administration, and the food habits of war-torn countries requiring emergency food supplies (NAs,Annual Reportfor 1940~1, pp. 77-78 . . . 1944-45, p. 52; Margaret Mead, Food Habits Research: Problems of the 1960 s, NAS—NRC Publication ~ 2 2 5, ~ 964). 89 NAS, Annual Report for 1944-45, pp. 2-6.

The Academy in World WarII I 417 his panel in NDRC, headed by Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation. Nevertheless, of the several hundred who ultimately comprised the panel, a large number were professionally designated as pure mathematicians, and other "puree" held direct appointments throughout the war on the staffs of technical services.90 Of that discipline Dr. Jewett was to say in a moment of mild hyperbole: Without insinuating anything as to guilt, the chemists declare that this is a physicists' war. With about equal justice one might say it is a mathematicians' warm One of the most useful and significant developments of World War II was the concept of operations research. It had been variously defined, but for purposes of this discussion it can be described as "the application of the experimental and theoretical methods of physics and mathematics to industrial and military problems...,"92 and as "involving many variables for which there are several alternative courses of action."93 The British, who devised it, applied it first to the coordination of their aircraft warning radar with antiaircraft batteries and defending aircraft. In this country, it was applied initially to subsurface warfare. At the request of the Navy, the NDRC established in March ~94z, under Section C-4 of NDRC, a body known as the Antisubmarine Warfare Operation Research Group (ASWoRG).94 By the end of the war scores of research analysis units were working at test and research installations here and overseas, assessing weapons performance, studying ballistics data, and aiding in photographic interpretation and bomb-damage assessment.95 90 Bush to Jewett, January So, ~942 (OSRD Box ~7); Morse to Jewett, April 7, ~942, and W. F. Durand to Conant, April ~6, ~943 (OSRD Box ~86); Marshall H. Stone, "American Mathematicians in the Present War," Science 100:529-535 (December ~5, ~944). See also Warren Weaver to Marston Morse, February 22, ~943 (NAS Archives: Jewett file 50.~37); transcript of interview with Morse, November 3, ~968 (NAS Archives: PUBS: NAS History); NAS Archives: EX Bd: Com on Applied Mathematical Statistics: ~942-~953. 9~ Quoted in Morse, "Mathematics and the Maximum Scientific Effort in Total War," Scientific Monthly 56 :51 Uanuary ~ 943). 92 Earl Ubell, "Scientists' New Method for Research," New York Herald Tribune, June 3°, ~952. 93 "Cooperative Operations Research," Research for Industry (Stanford Research Insti- tute) 6: 1 (September 7, ~ 954). 94 Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. 404-406. See also J. G. Crowther and R. Whid- dington, Science at War (London: H.M.S.O., ~947), pp. g~-~2~. 95 Baxter, Scientists Against Time, pp. 97, 409-4 ~ o.

418 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) The Applied Psychology Panel of the NDRC grew out of the mili- tary's need for development of effective methods of selecting and training the personnel who would operate the complex new weapons being developed by OSRD. It had been originally appointed in 1942 as the Committee on Service Personnel Selection and Training of the Research Council's Division of Anthropology and Psychology, but the increasing scope of its activities led Bush to bring it directly into the NDRL'S structure in the fall of ~943. Some direct results of projects undertaken by the panel were the adoption by both the Army and Navy of a test of aptitude for selecting radio code operators, an improved training program for radar operators, a 25 percent increase in the accuracy of B-2g gunners, systematic lesson plans and training manuals for use with most Navy guns, and highly successful classifica- tion and training programs utilized by the USS New Jersey and the Amphibious Training Command of the Atlantic Fleet.96 The Question of an Atomic Bomb The most far-reaching decision made in mid-~g40 was to attach the Uranium Committee under Dr. Briggs to the newly organized NDRC, on the same level as its divisors and with similar access to research funds. To strengthen the committee, Bush brought in physicists Merle A. Tuve of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, George B. Pegram of Columbia University, Jesse W. Beams of the University of Virginia, Ross Gunn of the Naval Research Laboratory, chemist Harold C. Urey of Columbia University, and as consultant, physicist Philip H. Abelson, also of the Carnegie Institution. The new committee agreed that the research in "atomistics" must be increased, even though a majority of the members were inclined to view nuclear fission as a source of unlimited useful energy sometime in the future rather than the means to an ultimate weapon in the coming war.97 Enough was then known to make clear that the possibil- ity of the release and control of atomic power presented almost 9fiIbid., pp. 395 95.; notes for "A history of NRC psychology and the war" (OSRD Box ~88~; Charles W. Bray, Psychology and Military Proficiency: A History of the Applied Psychology Panel of the National Defense Research Committee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ~948). 97 A. H. Compton, Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative, p. 46. This account also levies on Conant's thirty-page manuscript, "A History of the Development of an Atomic Bomb," written in the spring of ~943 (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3o3o, SO Historical, in Records of Hq., U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Washington, D.C.).

The Academy in World WarII I 419 insuperable difficulties and belonged in the category of long-range research. Some NDRC members, notably Conant, protested its inclu- sion as an "instrumentality of war" in the research program, since it represented so much pure research in nuclear physics as to commit many of the top physicists required in more immediate matters.98 Nevertheless the exploration could not be abandoned; and accepting Briggs's methodical approach, Bush approved in July a request of the Uranium Committee for $~40,000 to continue experiments with uranium and graphite for further determination of their physical constants. In the spring of ~ 94 ~ Karl Compton and Ernest 0. Lawrence of the University of California, inventor of the cyclotron, urged Bush to stimulate Briggs's committee further. The British research appeared to be making greater strides than our own, and Briggs's committee was neglecting promising alternative approaches to an answer. Feel- ing the weight of their arguments, Bush had Lawrence appointed a temporary consultant to Briggs.99 And, several weeks later, he asked Jewett to appoint a committee of the National Academy to review the program, advise Briggs and NDRC on the possible military aspects of atomic fission, arid make definite recommendations for future work "in this difficult field."~°° Jewett convened a committee with Arthur H. Compton of the University of Chicago as chairman that included Ernest Lawrence; theoretical physicist John C. Slater of MIT;~Iohn H. Van Vleck, Harvard physicist; and physical chemist William D. Coolidge, recently retired Director of Research at General Electric. The committee was deeply conscious of the almost unopposed German conquest everywhere and foresaw a war "which Emight] continue for a decade or more" with any eventual reversal of its course imperiled by the assumed German lead in nuclear research. Yet Urey at Columbia was not alone in believing he "could see the fission process impossible by all methods then under investigation." Still, the threat was there, and gaining the lead might be the only hope for a successful outcome of the war.~°t 98 Bush to Jewett, June 7, ~94~ (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3030, SO Historical); Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, p. z7; Baxter, Science against Time, pp. 424-425 99 Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, pp. 35-36. ~°° Bush to Jewett, April ~5, ~94~ (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 303~, Misc. Sol); Bush to Jewett, April ~9, ~94~ (NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Committee on Atomic Fission: Gen- eral). at A. H. Compton to Jewett, May ~7, ~94~, "Report of the National Academy of

420 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) A meeting on the Berkeley Campus of the University of California, March 29, ~ g40, to discuss the proposed construction of a 8-inch cyclotron. Left to right: Ernest 0. Lawrence, Arthur H. Compton, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Karl T. Compton, and Alfred Loomis (Donald Cooksey photograph courtesy the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California). The Academy report submitted to Bush on May ~7, ~94~, after several weeks of study and a meeting with Briggs's committee, re- flected the cautious but optimistic view of the committee. It recom- mended an intensified research effort over the next six months to determine whether a large-scale program would be likely to produce militarily useful applications and justify the continued diversion of so many physicists from other military problems. Of primary impor- tance was achievement of a controlled chain reaction of uranium in an atomic pile. If successful, it would probably make possible the produc- tion of militarily useful radioactive materials within a year and in three years a power source for submarines and other ships. In the meantime, much more study of isotope-separation methods was necessary to justify construction of pilot plants. As for the achieve- ment of critical amounts of fissionable uranium isotope U-23s for a Sciences Committee on Atomic Fission" (AEC~SRD files, Box 6~7~, Jewett correspon- dence, in Washington National Records Center, Modern Military Records Division, Suitland, Maryland); Urey to A. H. Compton, May 3, ~94~ (ibid.). As Conant recalled, "there was a possibility that the constants of nature would be such that atomic energy for power would be possible, but an atomic explosive impossible" [On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach (New Haven: Yale University Press, ~947), p. xii].

The Academy in World War II I 42 ~ bomb, it would be difficult, uncertain, exceedingly costly, and at least three to five years away.~02 Jewett thought the report "authoritative and impressive," but agreed with Bush that its emphasis on research and on uranium fission as a power source was not enough. And without more im- mediate military application in view, some on Bush's NDRC staff balked at the large sum of money—it amounted to $3so,oo~ proposed for uncertain research. Bush realized he had not asked the Academy committee the right question. It was as much to expand and speed up the uranium program as to bridge the gap between research and development in the overall program that OSRD was created in June ~94~ and NDRC subordinated to it.~°3 With that reorganization in progress, Bush again called on the Academy, this time for a report on the engineering aspects of the uranium program that would provide an answer to "how far and how quickly results could be put into practical use," assuming the success of current fundamental research.~04 The committee, augmented by chemical engineers Oliver E. Buckley, recent successor to Jewett as President of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and L. Warrington Chubb of Westinghouse, had its second report ready on July ~ 1.105 The report, which Bush saw in draft form on July 9, disappointed him. It endorsed the previous proposals from an engineering standpoint, but with so much fundamental research still under way, the committee found it impractical to make any real engineering appraisal until the experimental demonstration of a controlled chain ~02 "Minutes of the Advisory Committee of the National Academy on Uranium Disinte- gration," April 30, 1941 (NAS Archives: Committee on Atomic Fission: General); "Report of the National Academv of ~Science.s (-,ommittee ~ --rat -I ~ . . . May 1 7, 1 94 1 "; Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, pp. 36-38; Compton, Atomic Quest, pp. 46-47; Smyth, Atomic Energy, pp. 5 I, 71. to, To accelerate its contract research, Briggs's committee was reorganized in the summer of 1941 and again that December, when it became the S-1 Section of OSRD. Members of the committee in that period included Conant as Bush's representative and director of the program; Gregory Breit; Edward U. Condon, Westinghouse Research Laboratory physicist; Lloyd P. Smith, Cornell physicist; Henry D. Smyth, Princeton physicist; Urey; Lawrence; A. H. Compton; and Eger V. Murphree, Director of Research, Standard Oil Development Company. For the changing membership, see Smyth, Atomic Energy, pp. 47-49, s 1 n, 75-77, 8 1, 84; Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, pp. 19-20, 25, 44-45, 51, 75 ~°4 Bush to lewett, June 13, 1941 (NAS Archives: Committee on Atomic Fission: General). t05 Jewett to Bush, June 25, 1941 (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3o3o, S-1 Historical); Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, pp. 38-39.

422 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) reaction had been achieved. The committee still offered only "reason- able hopes" of success in this "radically new thing." The report also noted a new development that spring, the possibil- ity of a plutonium bomb, based on the transuranic element No. 94 found by Glenn T. Seaborg, a chemistry instructor under Lawrence at Berkeley. Plutonium, probably as fissionable as U-23s, seemed to the committee a likely basis in the distant future for what might be described as a "super bomb."~06 The committee believed Bush to be concerned at that juncture with the next stage of the undertaking before he authorized all-out re- search and requested large-scale appropriations. It therefore recom- mended the establishment of a central laboratory in NDRC, like that for radar at MIT, to test the possibility of a chain reaction in purified unseparated uranium and to accelerate efforts to separate uranium isotopes in quantity, "since this appears to be the only way in which the chain reaction could be brought about in a mass small enough to be carried in a bomb."~07 The British had reached a similar conclusion, and their MAUD committee, a code name for the counterpart of the Briggs committee, feared that German efforts were much further advanced and had accordingly concentrated their research on large-scale separation of U-23s for a bomb. It was the feasibility of a bomb, not a chain reaction, that Bush wanted to determine, and the arrival early in October ~ 94 ~ of the full MAUD report with its confidence of success settled the question in his mind of whether the likelihood of a bomb merited the vast effort it would cost.~°8 i06 Element 94, plutonium, had been predicted by Bohr and Wheeler in ~ 939, described by McMillan and Abelson in June ~940, found by Seaborg between March and June ~94~ using Lawrence's cyclotron, and isolated by him in pure form in April ~942 [Lawrence to Conant, April 7, ~ 943, and attached reports (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3032, Historical File, Special)]. Lawrence's proof that 94 underwent slow neutron fission was presented to the Academy committee in July ~94~ [Conant to Lawrence, March 3 I, ~ 943 (ibid. )]. The discovery of plutonium, merely noted in the Academy report of May ~7, had become extremely important in the report of July ~ I. ~07 Bush to Jewett, July 9, ~94~ (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3032, l-DMS); "Report of the NAS Committee on Atomic Fission, July At, ~94~" (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3034A, Chubb). For the decision against a central laboratory then, see Urey to Conant, December 27, ~94~ (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3034, Sites). '°8 A preliminary draft of the MAUD report had been forwarded by Hovde to Carroll Wilson for Bush and Conant on July ~ 7, ~ 94 ~ (Extracts from draft report, "The Release of Atomic Energy from Uranium," in AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3032, Historical File, Special; Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, pp. 42-43.

The Academy in World WarII I 423 On October 9, ~94~, the Academy committee, now numbering ten with the addition of Warren K. Lewis, physical chemist at MIT; Robert S. Mulliken, physicist at Chicago and authority on isotope separation; and George B. Kistiakowsky, explosives expert at Harvard, was asked for a third report, on the actual technical possi- bilities of obtaining an explosive fission reaction with U-~3s.~°9 His mind now made up, Bush that same day saw Vice-President Wallace and President Roosevelt and obtained their agreement to large-scale support of a program of research and planning that would determine whether a bomb could be made.ll° The preliminary draft of the report that Arthur Compton assem- bled on October ~6 for the coming meeting of the expanded commit- tee still "estimated chances of building successful fission bombs. . . only about even." It nevertheless called for acceleration of the research program and the planning of pilot and full-scale plants. Even though all forms of uranium should prove nonexplosive, the separation or even enrichment of U-~3s would in any case make a chain reaction more useful as a source of power. The committee that met ten days later, described by Bush to the President as including "some hard-boiled engineers in addition to some very distinguished physicists," was more positive. Knowing little other than the direction of effort in the British report (a privileged communication restricted to Bush and Conant), but motivated by the all-but-inevitable entry of this country into the war, the Academy committee turned its whole attention to the possibility of producing a weapon. Urged on by Lawrence, the gadfly who foresaw a substantial prospect of a chain reaction and the stakes as fantastically high, the committee on November 6 gave Bush the answer he wanted. Based on current theory and accumulated experimentation, "A fission bomb of superlatively destructive power will result from bringing quickly together a sufficient mass of element U235." If the entire program were reor- ganized and the engineering development of isotope separation achieved, U-~3s might be made available in the necessary quantities in three to four years. 109 Bush to Compton, October 9, 1941 (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3030, S-1 His- torical); Jewett to Ross G. Harrison, October 6, 1941 (NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Com on Atomic Fission: Appointments). 110 The top policy group set up at that meeting comprised the President and Vice- President, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, Bush, and Conant. 'll Compton to members, NAS Uranium Committee, October 16, 1941, and "Prelimi- nary Draft of Report. . ." (AEc-OSRD files, Box 6162). 1~2 Lawrence to Compton, October 22, ~941 (NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Com on Atomic

424 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) Two weeks later Bush had engineering and physics research groups at work assembling pilot plant design data. At a meeting of the President's top policy group on December ~ 6, it was agreed that when the time came the Army Corps of Engineers would take over erection and operation of the plants for reasons of security and because of the immensity of construction required. Furthermore, the Corps had high priority on available construction materials. The program was discussed at a critically important meeting on May 23, ~942, attended by Briggs, Eger V. Murphree, and Compton, Lawrence, and Urey, who headed crash programs to achieve uranium fission, uranium separation, and heavy-water production. They recommended that $85 million in contracts be placed before July I, ~ 943, for the construction of both the pilot plants and the large-scale production plants that would be needed. Bush and Conant forwarded the report to members of the top policy group and recommended that the Army undertake construction of the pilot plants. On June ~7, the President agreed to these proposals. In August Bush turned over the designs for pilot plant production of U-23s and plutonium to the Army engineers of the Manhattan District, code name for the agency that was to make the materials for the bomb. On December a, Enrico Fermi in his "laboratory" under the stands of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, produced the first chain reaction in an atomic pile using unseparated uranium. The President signaled all speed on the pregame and contracts were let for full-scale plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In May ~943, when OSRD transferred the last of its contracts to the Manhattan District, all plant designs were frozen. With construction of the laboratory for the final assembly begun at Los Alamos under a University of California contract, the work of Briggs's uranium sec- Fission: General); "Report to the President of the National Academy of Sciences by the Academy Committee on Uranium," November 6, ~ 94 I, and Bush to Roosevelt, November 27, ~94~ (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3030, SO Historical). Compton's draft of October ~6 was much less confident than the second draft of October z6, on which the final report was based. It may be significant that at its meeting on October 21 the Academy committee heard Marcus L. E. Oliphant, Australian physicist then at the University of Birmingham and a member of the MAUD committee, discuss British progress [Minutes of Meeting of Advisory Committee . . . on Atomic Fission, October 2~, ~94~ (AEC Bush-Conant files, Box 3034A, Chubb)]. Oliphant had told Lawrence earlier, in August ~94~, something of the work and conclusions of the MAUD committee (Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, p. ~ ~6). ~~, Arthur H. Compton signaled Fermi's achievement of a chain reaction at Chicago in the telegraphed message: "The Italian navigator has just landed in the new world" (Compton, Atomic Quest, p. ~44).

The Academy in World War II I 425 tion was finished. The remaining link between the OSRD and the huge production program was the Military Policy Committee, with Bush as Chairman and Conant as his deputy, to which the Army project would report.~4 The atomic bomb was two years and two months away. Meanwhile, from something close to a standing start, the nation had raised, equipped, trained, and dispatched overseas its first sizable fighting forces. The rapid development and application at sea of LOIN, radar, sonar, and infrared techniques had begun to reduce the German submarine menace; and as Bush noted in his third OSRD report to the President in the fall of ~943, the defensive phase had ended. This country went on the offensive with the landing on Guadalcanal in August ~94e, in North Africa that November, and the Allied invasion of Sicily in July ~943. By then a whole array of new weapons and equipment artillery and mortar shells and bombs with the proximity fuze, bomb-director mechanisms, new smoke devices, incendiaries and flamethrowers, a guided missile, new field radio equipment and radio direction finders, land vehicles and amphibious landing craft, and new medical equipment and supplies were in the last stages of development or already under procurement for the operations to come in the Pacific and in Europe.~5 The OSRD Office of Field Service As OSRD development went into high gear, Bush foresaw the time when scientists and engineers would have to go overseas with the new equipment to explain its operation, initiate training in its use, and assess its capabilities. He recognized that civilian status was necessary for these experts to give them access to all levels of the military, preclude their assignment to administrative duties, and ensure mobil- ity in the field. On October ~5, ~943, he announced the creation of a third element in OSRD, the Office of Field Service (OFS), whose members wore on their overseas uniforms shoulder patches with the '~4 Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, pp. 82-83. Of the thirteen-member group directing the uranium project in the Manhattan District, three in key positions had been National Research Fellows: Oppenheimer, Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory; Robert F. Bacher, in charge of the detonator assembly; and Kenneth T. Bainbridge, in charge of the bomb's detonation. Also in that group were seven other former Research Fellows: Compton, Lawrence, Allison, Jesse L. Beams, Gregory Breit, Edward U. Condon, and Henry DeWolf Smyth. ~5 Bush to the President, attached to "Report of the Director of the OSRD, September 2, ~943 (OSRD Box so).

426 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) designation "Scientific Consultant." Karl T. Compton, back from a recent mission to London, became Chief of the Office of Field Service, and Alan T. Waterman, Yale physicist in NDRC, his deputy. The Office of Field Service ultimately numbered between four hundred and five hundred. Through that office, guided-missile ex- perts served as consultants to the Air Force in the European theater. Experts on underwater sound-ranging gear, for locating mines, as- sisted the Navy in the Mediterranean. Experts in communication systems and in radar and radio propagation went to the Southwest Pacific area, along with specialists in tropical deterioration of equip- ment and medical specialists in malaria and tropical skin diseases. Radar engineers helped adapt and install their new equipment for the Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force and sixteen radar countermeasure specialists were rushed to Britain to assist the Navy in the Normandy invasion. ~7 The first intelligence mission with attached scientists had followed American troops ashore during the invasion of Italy in the fall of ,943. The real interest of the mission, and its greatest concern, centered on the Nazi laboratories in France and Germany, where it hoped to learn the state of German development of a nuclear weapon. These were the primary targets of ' the ALSOS (Greek for "groves") mission, the joint Army-Navy task force with scientists from OSRD'S Office of Field Service. This group was organized for the Normandy operation at the insistence of Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, Director of the Manhattan District. It was headed by Academy member Samuel A. Goudsmit, nuclear physicist at the University of Michigan. Other specialists with the mission were to track down German developments in biological and chemical warfare, rockets and jet propulsion, proximity fuses, and radar. As the Allies approached Berlin, the last of the key German nuclear ~6 Baxter, Spends Against Time, pp. ~26, To- I. Waterman succeeded Compton as chief a year later when the latter became Director of the Pacific Branch of OSRD. Although OFS scientists retained their civilian status, they wore uniforms in the field. For several reasons, few scientists actually wore the shoulder patches. See Lincoln R. Thiesmeyer and John E. Burchard, Combat Scientists [OSRD, SCIENCE IN WORLD WAR II] (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., ~947), p. go. ~7 OFS teams arrived in Britain with the proximity fuze in the summer of ~944, for use against the German V- robot bomb. Although stored in the field that October, the fuzes were not released to American artillerymen, lest they fall into enemy hands, until December ~8, ~944, two days after the Battle of the Bulge began. They were first used in the Pacific for the bombardment of Iwo Jima in February ~945. The first American robot bomb or guided missile, the BAT, under NDRC development since late Age, saw service under OFS guidance in the last months of the Pacific war.

The Academy in World War II I 427 physicists Heisenberg, Von Laue, Hahn, Gerlach, Bothe, Harteck, Diebner, Wirtz, van Weizsacker, Clusius- as well as their papers and documents, were located, and the failure of their atomic research was revealed. Owing as much to Hitler's distrust of scientists as to rivalries among the scientists themselves and their political sponsors, the German work on nuclear fission remained at about the same stage that had been reached here in ~g40.~8 On the other hand, German U-boat and torpedo development, armor, aircraft, and aeronautical research were of a high order, while their V-~ and V-z rockets at Peenemunde, and the totally unsus- pected series of nerve gases found in munition storage areas after the war, were admittedly technical and scientific triumphs. Much less dramatic were the findings of the A~sos-like contingent of scientific intelligence specialists that arrived in Japan immediately after V-} Day. Nowhere commensurate with earlier apprehensions were their discoveries of Japanese scientific accomplishments in weaponry, and their nuclear research had been limited to its possible development for industrial power.~9 By the autumn of ~944, the certain success of the Normandy invasion of June 6 set off the first wave of postwar planning. Even as Academy members arrived in France with the ALSOS mission, the Academy at home, in its role of learned society, began considering the restoration of amenities between the scientists of the Allied nations and the Axis powers. Establishment of relations with Japanese science began soon after the war; those with German science, as after World War I, were delayed. t~8 Samuel A. Goudsmit,Alsos (New York: Henry Schuman, ~947), pp. 7~, ~23, passim. See Goudsmit profile in The New Yorker (November 7 and ~4, ~943), and also, Boris T. Pash, The Alsos Mission (New York: Award House, ~969). 3~9 Thiesmeyer and Burchard, Combat Scientists, pp. ~ 62- ~ 8 I. coin October ~944, anticipating the end of the war, OSRD set up a publications committee consisting of Irvin Stewart, Conant (for NDRC), Richards (CMR), Compton (OFS), Tuve, lames P. Baxter, III, and Carroll L. Wilson to superintend the publication of OSRD research results in periodicals and monographs, prepare comprehensive histories of its divisions, and contract with Baxter for a one-volume history (Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War, pp. 290-295). 121 In the case of Japan, the Academy, at the request of the American military government, as well as of leading Japanese scientists and technologists, agreed to advise on the democratization and rehabilitation of their research institutions. It led to an Academy committee headed by Roger Adams that spent the summer of ~ 947 reviewing their facilities, plans, and prospects [NAS, Annual Report for 1943-44, pp. 30-3 ~ et seq.; NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Science Advisory Group on Science in Japan: ~946-~947; Science Advisory Group report, "Reorganization of Science and Technology in Japan," August 28, ~947 (NAS Archives: ibid.)]. (Continued overleap

428 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) The leading spokesman for many in this country who were deter- mined that German science and the German nation must be forever rendered incapable of launching another world war was Henry Morgenthau, fir., Secretary of the Treasury and confidant of the President. Few supported Morgenthau's plan to reduce Germany to an agrarian nation, but opinion was almost unanimous on the neces- sity of controlling German science and industry in the future. At the insistence of Morgenthau, the President in September ~944 requested Leo T. Crowley, Chief of the Foreign Economic Adminis- tration (FEA), and the Secretaries of the War, Navy, and State Depart- ments to prepare recommendations for the "control of the war- making power of Germany." Their reports were to cover every aspect of German engineering and research bearing on implements of war and determine the conditions necessary to ensure control of her light-metals industry, of oil and petroleum, rubber products, radio and radar, steel and ferroalloys, chemicals, and strategic minerals. In February ~945, Crowley called on OSRD and NACA for technical assistance with the reports, in particular for the survey of Germany's engineering and research. Unlike gathering scientific intelligence for ALSOS, this sortie in postwar policy seemed to Bush outside the purview of OSRD, and he called on the Academy for the requested study of German research. The Academy report, prepared by a committee of eight under Roger Adams and concurred in by Bush for OSRD and Hunsaker for NACA, along with thirty-one other papers prepared for FEA'S Technical Industrial Disarmament Committee (TIDC), was quietly buried shortly after its appearance. The whole matter took on a different aspect as the consequences of the agreements made by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the Yalta In Germany Roger Adams joined Lt. Gen. Lucius Clay's staff briefly in November ~945 as scientific and technical adviser. The Academy, at the request of the War Department, assisted in securing Adams and, subsequently, MIT chemist George Scatchard as scientific advisers for the military governor. This mission was to advise on the proper handling of postwar German science and to obtain reports of wartime research for dissemination in the United States (NAS Archives: Jewett file so.~32sJ, Post-War Planning; NAS, Annual Report for 1945-46, p. 4). ~22 Crowley to Bush, February 6, ~945; Bush to jewett, March 6, ~945 (OSRD Box 4), and related correspondence in OSRD Box ~86. ~23 Jewett to Bush, March 30, ~945 (NAS Archives: Jewett file so.~32sJ); TIDC Project 3, Study of the National Academy of Sciences under the Auspices of the Of Ace of Scientific Research and Development and the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics in the Treatment of GERMAN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND ENGINEERING from the Standpoint of International Security, 68 pp., July 2, ~945 (OSRD Box 4); NAS Archives: ORG: NAS: Committee on Postwar Treatment of German Science and Engineering: ~945.

The Academy in World War II I 429 Conference in February ~945 became evident following the Potsdam meeting that summer. Threats from a new quarter were all too clear in the intransigence of the Russian delegates to the United Nations. The Allies, faced with Soviet expansion into war-wasted Eastern Europe, immediately saw the need for a revived and economically viable Germany as a buffer against the Communist advance. The decisions made at the Yalta Conference were to have profound and long-lasting effects on postwar American science. Planningfor Postwar Science In the early spring of ~ 945, with the end of the war in Europe in sight, Bush and Conant began discussing plans for transferring to the armed services those research contracts essential to the war against Japan, preliminary to the liquidation of OSRD. That agency would continue certain important engineering and medical research until the armed services, the Public Health Service, or other federal agen- cies assumed responsibility. All other work on war weapons and medicine—almost go percent of the OSRD program- would end.~24 From the outset Bush had declared NDRC (and later, OSRD) a temporary emergency agency intended only to devise new and im- proved weapons for the coming war. It had no postwar plans. Follow- ing a meeting of the OSRD Advisory Council on July 28, ~944, Bush sent letters to the Secretaries of War and Navy outlining a program for the termination or transfer of its research contracts, effective upon the collapse of Germany.~25 Looking back, Bush saw the accomplishments of OSRD during its 124 On December 3~, ~945, OSRD had over 2,5~5 contracts, with 5,700 supplements, three-fifths of the contracts through NDRC, more than one-fifth through CMR, and over loo for basic research in atomic energy. Including research projects originating in NDRC and CMR, OSRD carried out a total of ~,397 separate contracts with industrial and academic organizations, involving the expenditure for research of more than half a billion dollars, almost equally divided between the Army and the Navy (Stewart:, Organizing Scientific Research for War, pp. 322-323). ~25 On August 28, ~944, Bush presented his termination program to the President, two weeks later alerted the technical staff of OSRD, and on October 3 notified all OSRD contractors of the demobilization plans. On August ~6, ~945, ten days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Bush requested presidential approval to close out OSRD and release its investigators. Although the disposal of NDRC and CMR contracts was essentially completed that December, OSRD continued its staff operations, at the President's request, for two more years, until December ~947, while it awaited a successor agency ["Report to the President on the Activities of the OSRD, August 28,

430 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (193~1947) ~ i~ ~ [, I ~ 1 ~ .~. ~_~ 1_~ a_ _ President Truman congratulates ten key scientists, January 20, ~947, for their work in the wartime Of rice of Scientific Research and Development. Left to right, seated: James B. Conant, President Truman, and Alfred N. Richards. Standing: Karl T. Compton, Lewis H. Weed, Vannevar Bush, Frank B. Jewett, l. C. Hunsaker, Roger Adams, A. Baird Hastings, and A. R. Dochez (Photograph courtesy Wide World Photos). four years as prodigious indeed, achieved in ways wholly unexpected at the inception of NDRC in 1940. He had intended his mobilization of scientists under NDRC to confine its efforts to fundamental research in weapons and materials of war. The engineering development and production would be the responsibility of the services and industry. The nature of the actual role NDRC and OSRD were to play did not become clear until the Tizard mission arrived, bringing the results of recent British research. Many of the new weapons and devices that the British had conceived were still in embryo; and their realization depended upon intensive developmental research before they could be engineered for production a task possible only in an organization like NDRC, with access to unlimited funds and to all the scientific and engineering resources and facilities of the United States. As Bush became aware that neither the armed services nor industry was equipped to take these new instrumentalities to a noint short of production and that a scientific organization of larger scope and authority must assume the responsibility, OSRD came into being. Its functions were not only to develop an array of weapons and ready ~944," p. so (OSRD Box so); Stewart, Organizing Scientific Researchfor War, pp. 299-30~, 3°4, 3~3, 3~5-3~6].

The Academy in World War II I 431 them for mass production, but to assist in the selection and training of the officers and men who would use them, to supply scientists in the field to advise on their operation, and to appraise the performance of the new weapons ~26 The President of the Academy was to say that "basically, OSRD was the greatest industrial research organization the world has ever known."~27 It bequeathed to the nation a store of new technology probably unequalled in history, but by concentrating the country's scientific resources on these technological and military developments, the support of basic research had been neglected. As early as the spring of ~944, this consideration began to preoccupy both Bush and Jewett. The extraordinary machinery created by OSRD for the enlist- ment of science, and its unstinting support by Congress, must some- how be perpetuated after the war to restore the perilous imbalance. Bush has described the initiation of the effort: The whole program started when President Roosevelt toward the end of the war called on O.S.R.D. for a report and recommendation on postwar science. It was soon possible to gather together committees on various aspects of the problem, for the men who could contribute were already working together. It did not take five years to come to conclusions, as it sometimes does on such matters; it took only a few months, for there was an extraordinary consensus of opinion. The result was entitled Science the Endless Frontier. It called for heavy federal support of the scientific effort in the postwar scene.~29 Jewett was equally aware that the total involvement of the Academy and Research Council as advisory agencies of OSRD and participants in its operations had wrought a permanent change in the relation of the Academy to the federal government. Although he differed vigorously 126 Like the wartime developments in technology, "most, if not all, of the useful results [in medicine] were in no real sense discoveries, but developments of prior discoveries" [A. N. Richards, "The Impact of War on Medicine," Science 103:578 (May lo, ~946)]. 127 Testimony in Hearings on Science Legislation (S. 1297 and Related Bills), p. 429. See also the rationale in A. Hunter Dupree, "Central Scientific Organization in the United States Government," Minenua 1:46~ 165 (Summer ~963). 8 Jewett, "The Promise of Technology," Science 99:1-6 (January 7, ~944). On the almost complete stagnation of progress in fundamental science in that period, see testimony of Isaiah Bowman in Hearings on Science Legislation (S. 1297 and Related Bills), p. i2; Irving Langmuir, p. 25; Harlow Shapley, p. 49; F. R. Moulton, p. 80; Vannevar Bush, pp. 20~-202; J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. boo; A. N. Richards, p. 465; Detlev W. Bronk, pp. 56~-562; Henry DeW. Smyth, p. 646; Harold C. Urey, pp. 658-659; and Lee A. DuBridge, p. 829. 129 Bush, Pieces of the Action, p. 64; ]. M. England, "Dr. Bush Writes a Report: 'Science the Endless Frontier'," Science 191:41-47 (January 9, i976).

432 / FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (1939 - 1947) with Bush on the role of the government, nevertheless, he saw that the Academy could not, as after World War I, return exclusively to its high calling as learned society, receptive to occasional requests for its disinterested counsel in matters of science. The new world emerging called for the permanent mobilization of science, and, as ensuing events were soon to demonstrate, for its deep involvement in political, social, and moral questions as well.

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The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 Get This Book
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Among the oldest and most enduring of American institutions are those that have been devoted to the encouragement of the arts and the sciences. During the nineteenth century, a great many scientific societies came and went, and a few in individual disciplines achieved permanence. But the century also witnessed the founding of three major organizations with broadly interdisciplinary interests: the Smithsonian Institution in 1846; the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists, which in 1848 became the American Association for the Promotion (later, Advancement) of Science; and the National Academy of Sciences in 1863.

The founding of the National Academy of Sciences represented a momentous event in the history of science in the United States. Its establishment in the midst of a great civil war was fortuitous, perhaps, and its early existence precarious; and in this it mirrored the state of science at that time. The antecedents of the new organization in American science were the national academies in Great Britain and on the Continent, whose membership included the principal men of science of the realm. The chartering of academies under the auspices of a sovereign lent the prestige and elements of support and permanence the scientists sought, and in return they made their scientific talents and counsel available to the state.

The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 describes the National Academies from inception through the beginning of the space age. The book describes the Academies' work through different periods in history, including the Postbellum years, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.

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