The National Academy of Sciences The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 (1978) / Chapter Skim
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13. The Academy in World War II
13. The Academy in World War II
Pages 382-432
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From page 382... ...
FRANK BALDWIN JEWETT (~93~947) World War II was foreshadowed in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in Age, Mussolini's assault on Ethiopia in ~935, Italian and German interference in the Spanish Civil War (~936-~939)
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From page 383... ...
. 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.
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From page 384... ...
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.
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From page 385... ...
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 laboratories 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.
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From page 386... ...
Tuve at the Carnegie Institution; and Ross Gunn at the Naval Research Laboratory indicated 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 National Research Council to which American scientific journals agreed to submit all papers on uranium or other research having a bearing on national defense.
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From page 387... ...
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.
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From page 388... ...
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.
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From page 389... ...
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.
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From page 390... ...
2, pp. To-do (copy in NAS Archives: Jewett file 50.27)
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From page 391... ...
to correlate governmental and civil fundamental research in fields of military importance outside of aeronautics" 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)
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From page 392... ...
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 Council, enlist the services of individual scientists and engineers and the facilities of educational and scientific institutions and industrial organizations. He would write to the chiefs of the armed services and to the President of the Academy requesting their concurrence.23 Bush saw Gen.
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From page 393... ...
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.
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From page 394... ...
As the work of the committee expanded, Dumbarton Oaks, under the auspices of Harvard University, made room for the chemical units of NDRC in its spacious building near Thirty-second and R Streets; and Jewett offered additional space. The Academy building on Constitution Avenue 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 agencies.
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From page 395... ...
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 advanced 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 .
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From page 396... ...
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 technical studies for Navy bureaus. Some of these early projects resulted in subsequent NDRC activities.
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From page 397... ...
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, provide 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
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From page 398... ...
The magnetron made possible ND~C development of microwave radar, widely acknowledged as one of the most effective scientific 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 enormous technical and industrial potential at its command for further development of its new devices.
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From page 399... ...
. 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]
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From page 400... ...
N Richards, Vannevar Bush, and James B
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From page 401... ...
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.
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From page 402... ...
; and Organizing Scientific Research for War ( ~ 948)
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From page 403... ...
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.
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From page 404... ...
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.
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From page 405... ...
The most difficult administrative 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 contractors' war research. As early as the summer of 1939, the National Research Council began planning a roster covering all the fields of science and technology, and in ~g40 it was proposed as a joint project with the Science Committee of the President's National Resources Planning Board.
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From page 406... ...
Bush set up a contract with the Academy to establish an Office of Scientific Personnel (osP) in the Research Council to prepare 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 Service 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.
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From page 407... ...
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..
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From page 408... ...
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 relations, arranged statutory provision for payment of the overhead expenses associated with the Academy's committee reports and recommendations. 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.
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From page 409... ...
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
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From page 410... ...
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.
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From page 411... ...
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.
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From page 412... ...
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 Experiment 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) became 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)
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From page 413... ...
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 retaliation. The discontinued "ABC" Committee was succeeded in September 1944 by the Academy's "DEF" Committee under O
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From page 414... ...
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 specialized 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.
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From page 415... ...
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 direction of technical and industrial research for the Army's Quartermaster 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.
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From page 416... ...
Administering research in combat clothing and equipment for the Quartermaster Corps came to $962,500; the metallurgical 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.
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From page 417... ...
. See also Warren Weaver to Marston Morse, February 22, ~943 (NAS Archives: Jewett file 50.~37)
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From page 418... ...
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)
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From page 419... ...
Van Vleck, Harvard physicist; and physical chemist William D Coolidge, recently retired Director of Research at General Electric.
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From page 420... ...
It recommended 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 importance was achievement of a controlled chain reaction of uranium in an atomic pile.
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From page 421... ...
Murphree, Director of Research, Standard Oil Development Company. For the changing membership, see Smyth, Atomic Energy, pp.
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From page 422... ...
It therefore recommended 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)
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From page 423... ...
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.
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From page 424... ...
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.
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From page 425... ...
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.
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From page 426... ...
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.
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From page 427... ...
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.)
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From page 428... ...
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.
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From page 429... ...
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.
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From page 430... ...
so (OSRD Box so) ; Stewart, Organizing Scientific Researchfor War, pp.
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From page 431... ...
80; Vannevar Bush, pp.
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From page 432... ...
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.
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