He was also trying to run things his own way: was there anything queer about that? Maybe. Maybe, though, it was only the behavior of a man who was used to giving orders.
—WR, from Brain Waves and Death
ON November 11, 1940, Armistice Day, Loomis held the first meeting of the radar lab in its new headquarters on the ground floor of Building 4, a squat concrete structure on the edge of MIT’s campus. About twenty people gathered into one of the small classrooms, all of them having received an invitation from Loomis that was so worded “as to sound like a courteous order.” Security was tight. The windows of the laboratory were painted black, and a guard was posted at the door. Only a few of the physicists who had been recruited thus far managed to make it for opening day, but everybody found they knew everybody else. As Rabi later remarked, “We all came from the same bar.” It felt like a family reunion of sorts, and people were already walking around squabbling good-naturedly about where their benches should go and what they needed to buy. It made for an easy informality, as well as a sense of high spirits and fun.
Karl Compton opened the meeting by providing the early arrivals with a general overview of the situation and then turned the meeting over to Loomis, whom he introduced as “the man who knows more about radiolocation than anyone else in America.” Loomis filled them in on the fundamentals of microwave radar and outlined the first problem to be tackled by the group: an “airborne interception,” or AI, radar to defeat the night bomber. Everyone present knew that Göring had changed his strategy and that since the beginning of November the Luftwaffe’s daily assaults on England had been replaced by night attacks.
The British had long anticipated the change in strategy, and it had been the primary concern of the Tizard Mission. The first German air raids, which had begun on August 8 and had rapidly increased in intensity, had been directed at RAF bases. Since September 7, mass raids had been ravaging London and other major cities in England. Thanks to the Chain Home system, the British had been able to spot the incoming planes and had exacted a toll. During August, the Luftwaffe’s losses in raids over England was 15 percent—in all that month, they lost 957 aircraft. In the great air battles of September, the Germans had lost 185 aircraft out of an attack force of 500.
According to Bill Tuller, one of the young MIT researchers who had been at Tuxedo Park, Loomis, in his usual straightforward manner, outlined the challenge before them: “At that time, day bombing had just become too costly, and night bombing was beginning to be used by the Germans with striking results. The problem then was the detection of the night bomber by an operator in the night fighter, who was then to guide the fighter pilot to a position from which the bomber could be seen by the dark-adapted pilot.”
These night attacks were forcing the British pilots to rely increasingly on the still crude airborne interception radar that had been developed by Bowen and his compatriots in the preceding two years. Because of the limitations of AI, the British had developed a whole different technique called “ground-controlled interception” (GCI). In this system, a controller on the ground, watching the air situation on a special radar set, used the low-frequency Chain Home stations to pick up invading aircraft. The high-frequency GCI radars, which were more accurate but shorter range, would then target a German bomber and give detailed vectors to the fighter plane under his control, maneuvering the plane into position one to three miles behind and just below the target. The radar operator in the plane was then instructed to “flash his weapon,” and the airborne radar system took over, guiding the fighter to within visual range.
During the daytime raids, all that was required was to bring the pilots into the general vicinity of the incoming stream of bombers, and then the pilot took over, using his own sight and judgment to select targets and gun down the enemy. The nighttime raids, however, demanded much more accurate course directions than these radar sets could deliver. It also relegated experienced pilots to the role of hapless chauffeur right up to the moment when they were close enough to see the blur of the enemy plane against the sky; only then, at the last minute, could they press home their attack.
It went without saying that this complicated system required a very high order of skill and virtuosity on the part of the ground controller, the radio operator on the plane, and the pilot, and that in wartime Britain there was a critical shortage of such talent. In addition to the radar system’s technical shortcomings, the RAF’s Blenheim bomber planes lacked the speed and weaponry required to take on the Luftwaffe and were having little success after sundown. The radar system that had enabled the RAF to function so brilliantly during the daylight raids of the Battle of Britain left them blundering in the dark. The night fighters desperately needed more sharply defined radar beams, and that meant microwaves. The magnetron promised the development of radar sets using much shorter wavelengths than the 1.5 meter then in service. Only at wavelengths below 10 centimeters could an antenna be small enough to be installed on an airplane yet still produce a sharp enough beam to give a highly accurate read on the enemy’s location. This electronic eye—which could see through clouds, fog, and cover of night—was Britain’s most pressing radar need, Loomis told them, and the laboratory’s first priority.
After Loomis’ briefing, the various industry representatives on the microwave committee gave updates on their progress in manufacturing the components. Although the original timetable had been extravagantly optimistic, there were no delays. Incredibly, almost all of them would meet the deadline. The following day, Loomis and Lawrence declared the new lab open for business. Bell delivered the first five copies of the British magnetron right on schedule. After everyone had a chance to admire them, they were locked in a safe in DuBridge’s office.
Frank Lewis, one of the young MIT researchers who had joined Loomis’ Tuxedo operation, had been the first to arrive and along with several other members of the original staff spent the first few days giving demonstrations of their microwave aircraft detector, mounted on the Loomis Laboratories truck, to the new recruits at the East Boston Airport. “Loomis brought the entire crew from his lab at Tuxedo Park,” he recalled. “We picked up all the equipment we had originated, and all of the stuff we had bought to work with, and we put it into the didey wagon and we drove the truck up there.” Having already heard reports of the British tracking systems, and the two-hundred-mile range covered by their equipment, some of the new recruits scoffed at the Tuxedo device’s measly two-mile range. Young, cocky, and supremely confident, they were certain that with their collective brainpower they would invent a radar system that would whip the Nazis and win the war.
The first week in Cambridge was tense and bewildering. Loomis was creating the radar laboratory out of thin air, and the fact that it did not really exist yet, combined with all the secrecy surrounding the project, made it hard to know exactly how to proceed. Everyone was told the project they were going to work on was for the military: “We had to keep our mouths zipped shut all the time,” recalled Lewis, “and we had to be sure that we were working with people who were cleared for this.” As they began to set up shop and contact the various manufacturers about the delivery of parts and supplies, they realized for the first time the extent to which Loomis had simply willed the enterprise into being. Seeing how far the country still was from entering the war, and knowing from firsthand experience how difficult it was to move the services in a new direction, Loomis had essentially hijacked the project for himself: “The microwave committee, which was a fictitious organization that was set up by Alfred Loomis, had made arrangement with all these government contractors to work on these problems,” explained Lewis. “They had no official appointment from the federal government to do this. But Loomis got them all talked into doing it, and they were so convinced that they were it, they went right ahead. And it’s a good thing they did.”
For all Loomis’ wealth and freewheeling style—he had used money out of his own pocket to jump-start the new lab—the government had him on a short leash. The feasibility of microwave radar had to be established quickly if the project was to get the green light and receive further funding. “Loomis got all the radio manufacturers that he could get his hands on to buy the idea that this was going to be a big show, and he would be the main propellant, and they’d better do what he told them,” said Lewis. “He didn’t put it in those words, but that’s what he was saying.” As far as the salesmanship was concerned, “It took the talents of a Loomis and a Compton,” agreed Bowles, adding that there was “more than a bit of skullduggery” that went into the early contracts, most of which were negotiated verbally and not set down on paper until months later, creating all sorts of havoc. “We pretty well got away with murder.”
Everyone agreed that the new lab needed to have some sort of title, but a descriptive yet nonrevealing name was hard to find. Finally, one of the Berkeley group suggested calling it the MIT Radiation Laboratory in honor of Lawrence, who was largely responsible for their all being there. The misleading name would account for the large and rather sudden concentration of experimental physicists and cyclotroneers in Cambridge, while at the same time it would be descriptive, in a sly way, of their purpose. In the interests of secrecy, they also hoped the disguise would fool outsiders into thinking that they were engaged in research as altogether remote from the war effort as nuclear fission, which was considered of no practical significance as compared to radar. The “Rad Lab” met with unanimous approval and was officially adopted.
As the parts began to appear, and more physicists arrived, a loose structure took form. The immediate work was divvied up into seven technical sections based on the components, and as everyone had expertise in different fields but not specifically in the radar set’s dissembled parts, the selection process was somewhat random. “We chose up just like a baseball team,” said Rabi. “We chose up sides. What would we take?” Turner took receivers; Bainbridge took pulse modulators; Lewis took klystrons; and so on. Rabi opted for the magnetron, though as he recalled later, “I had no idea how it worked.” He was hardly alone. Most of the young nuclear physicists, freshly arrived from their university laboratories, knew little to nothing about microwave electronics and had only the vaguest understanding of how the British ten-centimeter magnetron would transmit power for a radar set. But then no one else did, either. Microwave radar was virgin territory and the magnetron brand-new technology.
Rabi was confident that he and his fellow physicists had “the intellectual mobility” to find out everything they needed to know. As he was in charge of the magnetron group, he decided to go around to MIT and ask some of their electrical engineers for advice. “After talking to them I could see they didn’t know anything, either,” he said, “so we started absolutely fresh and designed magnetrons.” Everybody did the best they could, hopping back and forth across organizational lines as needed and throwing out ideas to members of one group or another. Caught up in the excitement of the adventure and imbued with a sense of their own importance and assured success, they plunged into the unknown.
“It’s simple,” Rabi boasted in one of the early sessions, when they were seated around a table, staring at the disassembled parts of a magnetron. “It’s just a kind of whistle.”
“Okay, Rabi,” challenged Edward Condon, one of the Berkeley physicists recruited by Lawrence, “how does a whistle work?” The long silence before Rabi attempted an answer spoke volumes about how much they still had to learn.
Bowen was struck by the easy camaraderie that prevailed at the lab: “Everyone worked long hours and did not spare themselves. Here was the cream of American scientists, hell-bent on doing all they could for the war effort.” There was little time for relaxation, but on Friday nights the gang all gathered at the bar behind the Commander Hotel just back of Harvard Square, where Luis Alvarez and Ed McMillan, among others, were staying. Inevitably, this was soon dubbed “Project 4,” a last and vital addendum to the lab’s must-do list. Bowen generally took a lot of ribbing on these outings, particularly because the mural decorating the walls of the bar depicted various patriotic scenes “dear to the hearts of all Americans”—the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s ride, and Minutemen shooting through the trees at the Redcoats. “The message was loud and clear—this was where they beat the pants off the British,” he recalled with amusement. “Proceedings usually began with an expression of solidarity, a friendly toast to the British—‘The hell with the Limeys.’ ” There were also weekly dinners in Chinatown, limerick competitions, and the “laugh meter,” featuring jokes only physicists could appreciate. As a break from the tension, everyone read science-fiction novels and dog-eared copies were passed around.
Loomis moved into the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, where he occupied a lavish suite—particularly given the spartan dormitory quarters assigned to his physicists—and often hosted private dinners for Bush and other NDRC officials. Because of his long hours at the lab and erratic travel schedule, Ellen spent most of her time with her parents in Dedham, away from the noise and dirt of the city. Because Hobart was also immersed in the radar project, and both her boys were now enrolled at the Fay School in Massachusetts, Manette had an excuse to be in Boston and came as often as she could. She and Loomis continued to see one another secretly and were so circumspect that it seems neither their families nor anyone at the lab guessed what was going on. They were greatly helped by the fact that Boston had been flooded with hundreds of newcomers, and people’s lives no longer conformed to a regular pattern. Young men were scattered in hotels and temporary housing all over the city, many of them separated from the wives and children they had left behind. Young women who had never worked before were taking jobs in town and going about in slacks and sweaters. There was a general feeling of chaos and things building toward a crisis, and it tended to make people more casual than they might have been in more orderly times. Later, the dim-outs made it hard to get around at night, and the darkness no doubt covered a multitude of sins.
THROUGHOUT that fall, work proceeded at a furious pace that DuBridge, with heavy irony, described as “the blitz.” The physicists set about trying to understand why the magnetron worked so well and initiated theoretical and experimental studies. Rabi’s group quickly discovered that the magnetron could produce far more power than the British had suspected and soon enough was known to improve the efficiency considerably. As the parts were delivered, work was begun on testing and adapting them, while other groups designed components for use in an aircraft.
By mid-December, the lab had almost doubled in size and was employing thirty-six people: thirty physicists, three guards, two stockboys, and an indomitable secretary by the name of Edythe Baker, whose idea it had been to paint the windows. It had also outgrown its original space, first moving upstairs, via a spiral stairway, to the second floor and then upward again to the top of Building 6. There they had erected a crude wooden “penthouse,” about twenty by fifty feet, covered in green tarpaper, and a second story was already being added. The so-called Roof Laboratory soon became the main hub of activity as the various components they had ordered started to arrive and they began to hitch up the radar system.
On December 16, emboldened by their progress, Loomis wrote out on the blackboard a schedule of ambitious target dates for the AI project:
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Goal 1: |
By January 6, a microwave system working in the Roof Lab. |
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Goal 2: |
By February 1, a working system mounted in a B-18 bomber supplied by the Army. |
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Goal 3: |
By March 1, a working system adapted for an A-20A attack bomber (the plane most likely to be used for night combat). |
Loomis and Lawrence set up a group dedicated to assembling the system and appointed Alvarez expediter to ensure that the deadlines would be met.
By late December, a complete ten-centimeter pulsed microwave radar set was assembled on the roof, and they would soon be able to begin testing it against buildings in Boston, just across the Charles River. This was a two-antenna system, with separate parabolas for transmitting and receiving. The two large dishes, mounted in a rickety apparatus in the Roof Lab, looked like two monstrous black eyes staring out at the golden dome of the State House and the Boston skyline. The physicists, shivering in their unheated penthouse laboratory, had put together the parts and wrestled the unwieldy system into operation. Now the only question was, Could their electronic eyes see?
Loomis took a quick break for Christmas, heading to Hilton Head for the holidays. All three of his sons were away at war, but Ellen would be there, along with Julia and Landon Thorne and their family. He invited along the Comptons, as well as Bowen, who was on his own for the holidays, as his wife was stuck back in England owing to wartime travel restrictions. Loomis knew the Welshman had more than earned a rest after an exhausting few weeks demonstrating the British AI and ASV (air-to-surface vessel) Mark II long-wave radar sets to American military personnel. Bowen had showed off the performance of the Mark II, which he had helped develop and which had been fitted into a U.S. Navy PBY aircraft. Flying over merchant ships in the Atlantic, he had successfully picked up an echo from a capital ship at a range of about sixty miles. Satisfied that this was the equipment to adopt, the navy had finally agreed to take over for the Tizard Mission, placing orders with the Philco Corporation for seven thousand copies of the ASV radar systems. An additional ten thousand sets were ordered from Canada’s Research Enterprises Ltd. Ultimately, the procurement would run into hundreds of thousands of sets, the majority of which would be used by American forces.
Just before New Year’s Eve, Roosevelt gave a speech promising aid to Britain from the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Bowen, who was heartened by the president’s address, only hoped it had not come too late. As Loomis and his friends rang in the new year, they had much to celebrate and much yet still to do. Loomis’ best estimate was that the project would take at least two years and millions of dollars in government funds. England was being methodically bombed by the Luftwaffe. The dark winter of the Blitz had begun.
ON a cold, clear morning on Saturday, January 4, 1941, two days ahead of schedule, a radar beam was sent out from the Roof Lab, and the first echoes from the Christian Science church tower in Boston were detected. In less than eight weeks after they walked into the Rad Lab, Loomis and his band of microwave novices had managed to build a working prototype of a radar system. It was far from perfect; in fact, there were so many tuning stubs introduced at so many different points that coaxing the tuning was “distinctly an adventure.” But it was a start. An excited DuBridge telegraphed Lawrence at home in Berkeley, where he had returned just in time for the birth of his second son on January 2:
ROOF OUTFIT IN FALL [sic] SWING LOOMIS IS JUBILANT. . . . FEBRUARY FIRST DATE LOOKS EASY IF SHIP COMES IN HOPE YOU ARE AS PROUD OF YOUR BABY AS WE ARE OF OURS=LEE
Loomis’ euphoria was short-lived. It quickly became apparent that there were almost as many things wrong with the system as there were right. To begin with, it was poorly designed and was altogether too large and unwieldy. The main problem still facing them, and one that seemed to have no easy solution, was that the radar system they were charged with designing had to be compact enough to fit into the nose of a fighter plane. For the system to be small enough to be practical, they would have to find a way to use a single antenna, or “duplexer,” for both transmitting and receiving. Unfortunately, no one knew how to build such a device.
An air of gloom descended on the Rad Lab. In a sense, they were back to square one. The design of the duplexer—what the British called a “TR” (transmit-receive) box—had confounded them from the beginning. Without a duplexing or switching device, or some kind of protection, the main transmitted pulse would burn out the receiver crystal. Because the outgoing signal was a million times stronger than the incoming echo, the question was how to use a single dish that poured out a powerful radar beam without swamping the feeble echo that bounced off the target and returned in a few microseconds.
DuBridge organized several teams to attack the problem. From day one, the physicists at the Rad Lab were guided by Loomis’ insistence on a hands-on approach and practical rather than theoretical solutions—they lived by the law of “cut and try.” Finally, after some frantic efforts and several failed attempts, a makeshift single-antenna system was made to operate. The team, under Jim Lawson, who happened to be an amateur radio enthusiast, succeeded in fashioning a TR box by using a klystron amplifier as a buffer in the line from the antenna to the receiver crystal. As Alvarez observed, “If we had been paid in proportion to our contributions to the success of the first microwave radar program, Jim Lawson would have earned more than half the monthly payroll.”
Lawson’s roof team spent hours on end fiddling with the homemade contraption, one of them working in a bulky coonskin coat against the cold. The signal-to-noise ratio in the receiver made it very hard to stay on the proper frequency. One day, while they were working with the system, they picked up a great deal of interference that made it impossible to pick out a signal. “We nuclear physicists had absolutely no idea what to do,” recalled Alvarez. Then one of the Berkeley group asked if anyone had a pair of earphones. An MIT engineer ransacked the classrooms and finally found an old pair in a student laboratory. When they hooked up the earphones to the radio receiver, they heard a voice crackling: “Hello CQ, CQ, hello CQ.” The mysterious noise they had been hearing was a local amateur radio operator announcing himself over the airwaves. After taking some added precautions, Alvarez noted, “We were back in the radar business again.”
On a raw New England morning on January 10, the single-dish system finally picked up echoes from buildings in Boston. DuBridge, who was in Washington, got the news in the form of a cryptic telegram—“HAVE SUCCEEDED WITH ONE EYE”—just in time to inform a meeting of the microwave committee that was being held that day.
They were not out of the woods yet. The makeshift system was subject to frequent breakdowns, and while they had managed to obtain a signal by pointing the dish steadily at the target, a practice called searchlighting, the weak signal produced by their equipment did not seem to hold out much promise for scanning. For that, they would need still more power. As repeated attempts to pick up airborne signals failed, and frustration mounted, many of the Rad Lab physicists began to doubt that the rooftop system would ever perform this essential feat. As Bowen later recalled, “For the first, and possibly only, time a mood of pessimism crept into the group and some doubts were expressed about whether a system would ever be capable of receiving echoes from an aircraft.”
The deadline pressure was exacerbated by the tension created by the war and the political demands from Washington. Things could not move fast enough for Bush. “It was characteristic of Bush’s management,” Bowles observed later. “He wanted results. He was constantly putting the blowtorch to us.” Loomis was under enormous pressure to succeed. A great deal of jealousy had been aroused on the part of industrialists who saw the Rad Lab as future competition and were critical of the group’s fitness for the job. There was also considerable skepticism on the part of some government officials who questioned whether a bunch of academic physicists—whom the army and navy derisively called “doubledomes”—could successfully carry out such an urgent wartime project. If it turned out to be a wild goose chase, who was going to answer for the wasted taxpayers’ dollars? Even respected members of the scientific community expressed reservations. Earlier in 1940, the grand old man of American physics, Robert Millikan, had warned that it was “a mistake . . . to concentrate fifty prima donnas in physics at any one spot.”
The February 1 deadline to have a working system mounted in a B-18 bomber came and went. Even Lawrence, visiting the Roof Lab four days after the target date, wondered aloud whether the magnetron could ever be made into an operational airborne unit. Alvarez, who was taking the maestro on his rounds, defended the rooftop team’s efforts and bet Lawrence they could probably make it work well enough to detect a signal from a flying aircraft. They shook on it, and Lawrence told him he was prepared to eat his words. They had two days before he and Loomis were due back in Washington to give a progress report to the microwave committee.
Alvarez and his team worked around the clock all the next day but came up empty-handed. On Friday, February 7, the microwave committee gathered in one of Bush’s conference rooms at Carnegie. The more impatient members expressed dismay at the lab’s lack of progress and suggested junking the whole project. Loomis and Lawrence had pressed their luck as far as they could, and the army and navy were eager to see the last of the scientists and their microwave radar.
Early that same morning, there was a flurry of activity at the rooftop lab. Alvarez, a Berkeley colleague named Lauriston Marshall, and a handful of others were making a last ditch effort to track a plane and prove the project’s viability in time for the meeting. One of the physicists, operating on a hunch, decided to detach the parabola and hold the antenna by hand. Another scouted for planes, peering through a crude telescope. As he had done for days now, Alvarez gazed dully at the scope. Suddenly “a blip appeared.” Marshall stared at the monitor. As the plane gained in altitude, it was tracked on the screen. Twisting his head to look out from the rooftop lab, Alvarez saw a commercial plane disappearing into the distance. He scrambled down the penthouse’s narrow spiral stairway and raced to the phone.
When the call was announced, the meeting fell silent. DuBridge took the receiver and heard Alvarez and Marshall excitedly blurt out, “We’ve detected an airplane at two miles.” DuBridge held up two fingers. Lawrence “caught it right away,” his grin showing that he understood that they had obtained echoes at a range of two miles. For the benefit of the rest of the committee, DuBridge reported: “We’ve done it, boys.”
Lawrence telegraphed Alvarez: “I HAD MY WORDS FOR LUNCH.”
The microwave committee voted confidence. With the rooftop AI system up and working, Alvarez and McMillan—Lawrence’s two hand-picked protégés from Berkeley—immediately set to work designing and building a wooden mockup of the bombardier’s compartment in a B-18. Alvarez installed a second AI system in their wooden prototype, which was equipped with a special Plexiglas nose that was transparent to microwaves. Between February 13 and March 5, they worked over their test until the Douglas B-18 that had been assigned to the project by the U.S. Army Air Corps finally arrived. After extensive ground tests—actually roof tests, using a water tower on a building six miles away—McMillan declared that the experimental airborne ten-centimeter radar system was ready to fly. The B-18, which had been flown up from Wright Field by an army crew, was waiting at the National Guard hangar at Logan Airport. On its first outing on March 10, the radar system performed with mixed results, but after several weeks and many modifications, its performance gradually improved.
On March 27, Alvarez and McMillan headed out for the first test run using aircraft as a target, taking along Bowen as an observer. They proceeded eastward over Cape Cod in search of open skies and were surprised at how clearly the ships below showed up on their radar screen. This was a far better result than had been expected. They then made several runs at the target, a single-engine plane borrowed from the National Guard, and got satisfactory echoes at a range of two to three miles. They were feeling quite pleased and were about to turn back when several large merchant ships in Cape Cod Bay caught their attention. Switching off the elevation scan and leaving the radar set to give range and azimuth signals only, they did a run at a large ship in the bay. Flying at about two thousand feet over the water, they tracked a ten-thousand-ton vessel heading for port. While there is no record of the maximum range at which it was detected, Bowen estimated it was about ten miles. More important, the system’s admirable performance had not been hampered by the “sea return,” the interfering echoes from the ocean’s surface. While he knew this was not exceptional compared to the British long-wave ASV radar, “for the first flight of a centimeter-wave radar it was a great performance.” Over the roar of the bomber’s engines, Bowen could hear his colleagues’ wild cheering.
Unable to resist the temptation to try for the extra mile, Bowen said, “Let’s go to New London and see if we can find a submarine.” New London was home to a major navy submarine yard, and they could be there in thirty minutes’ flying time. Just a few days earlier at Tuxedo Park, Bowen had been talking to Loomis about the pressing need for a microwave sub-hunting radar, so this seemed as good a time as any to test the system’s potential. Barely able to contain their excitement, Alvarez and McMillan agreed at once and instructed the pilot to head down to Connecticut. As they flew low over Long Island Sound, the radar picked up several large submarines cruising offshore. One was fully surfaced and presented an excellent target. They made several runs broadside on and obtained a strong signal at a maximum range of four to five miles. For the scientists aboard the plane, it was a dramatic moment—no one had ever detected a submarine with airborne microwave radar. Their sightings were the first real evidence that radar performed well over water. It was “an epoch-making flight,” Bowen wrote in his memoirs. “We returned in triumph and the news spread around the Laboratory like wildfire.”
From then on, ASV radar for submarine and ship detection was added to the Rad Lab’s growing roster of projects and would soon become far more important than their original assignment, as by this time the Battle of Britain was ebbing and the British had lost interest in the night fighter. As Bowen, Alvarez, and McMillan had observed, their airborne microwave radar was perfectly suited for submarine detection, which was a lucky break for the British. “After the Luftwaffe retired from the Battle of Britain, German bombers had only a nuisance value,” recalled Alvarez. “The German submarine campaign against Allied shipping, on the other hand, could starve the British to the point of surrender.” It would take only minor alterations to turn the airborne system into a highly successful ship detection system, but the tactical advantages were immense. It was a whole new kind of radar and an entirely different breed of defensive weapon. At that very moment, German submarines were beginning to appear in U.S. waters near the East Coast and were harassing the vital transatlantic freight route. The list of sinkings on the Atlantic highway was horrific—over four million tons by the end of 1940—and it was becoming very clear that England would not be able to hold out much longer unless some defense was found. If the Germans were to continue successfully to disrupt Allied shipping, they could defeat the British Isles. While America was not yet in the war, the U.S. Navy realized that airborne microwave radar provided them with a means of detecting this dangerous threat. The navy immediately ordered a trial system, and the British wanted two sets as soon as they could get their hands on them. Here were the first fruits of the Tizard Mission.
For Loomis and the Rad Lab physicists, March was a turning point. For four months, all of their efforts had been focused on building a working radar system and getting it aboard a plane within the time frame Loomis had mapped out on the blackboard in mid-December. They had accomplished that and much more, all of which was described in detail in Loomis’ first report on the lab, which the microwave committee had submitted to Bush at the beginning of the month.
In short order, the NDRC approved another $300,000 for the lab, and it was estimated that more than $1 million would be needed for salaries to prolong the work another year. When Congress was slow to approve the funds, threatening to stall the lab’s progress, Loomis and Compton pulled one of their end runs, first convincing the MIT Corporation to come up with $500,000 and then appealing to their old friend John D. Rockefeller Jr., who agreed to help underwrite the salaries of the technical staff to the tune of $500,000. Private enterprise, in Loomis’ view, could move mountains in the time it took the government to pass a single bill. With the threat of war looming, however, Congress was eventually persuaded to fork over the money, and both MIT and Rockefeller were repaid.
As Loomis continued to conspire behind the scenes to keep the lab afloat, and to agitate for preparedness among the power elite, he chafed at Roosevelt’s reluctance to publicly back Britain’s cause. Ernest Lawrence, in a letter to Robert Sproul, the president of Berkeley, recalled Loomis’ insistence that research for war required speed, and Congress’ hesitancy, coupled with the military’s intransigence, could cost them dearly:
He drew a striking parallel between the present international situation and the financial situation prior to the crash. He said that now people are asking him when we will enter the war just as in 1928 his friends were asking him when the stock market crash was coming. He said that in both cases such a question is quite beside the point. He said that once a person admitted a stock market crash was coming a prudent individual will immediately get out of the stock market and not consider when the crash is coming and thereby try to hang on and make some more profits. Likewise at the present time it is of secondary importance when we will get in; of first importance is the admission that we are going to get in, and our action accordingly should be that of preparing just as though we were actually in the war!
With that in mind, Loomis stopped at Woodley on April 21 for a long overdue visit with Stimson, whom he had not seen for some weeks. As usual, Loomis used the opportunity to lobby for the importance of the new radar detectors, which the Army Signal Corps was still fussing over and finding every excuse not to embrace. Throughout that winter and spring, Loomis’ anxiety over America’s slow pace in preparing for war had increased—it was not nearly as much as he and his colleagues had urged. After the desperate air battles fought in the British skies the previous summer, the defeat of the Luftwaffe had been followed by a strangely quiet winter in the European war. While there was little doubt that Hitler would mount another campaign that spring or summer in a final effort to conquer the British Isles, and the German U-boats were already advancing his cause, it was still difficult for most Americans to face the fact that the country might have to intervene. To prop up Britain, which was faltering, and to keep the country out of the war, the administration had enacted the lend-lease bill, allowing Britain to borrow war supplies against the promise to repay after victory. The agreement was, Churchill wrote Roosevelt, “a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common purpose.” But it touched off a long, bitter debate in Congress and was eventually passed in March.
Despite the controversy, Loomis shared the secretary of war’s impatience with the isolationists and the president’s overly cautious course, which appeared to be one of waiting for circumstance to start the fight for him. Stimson argued that if the policy of sustaining Great Britain was to succeed, America had to throw the major part of her naval strength into the Atlantic battle. There was simply no other way to ensure the safe delivery of the lend-lease supplies. Both Loomis and Stimson respected Roosevelt’s political acumen, but as Stimson noted in his diary, they believed the president should take more decisive action, and if he said frankly that force was needed, and asked for the country’s approval, he would be supported:
I found both [Harvey] Bundy [Stimson’s liaison to the War Department] and Loomis at the Department and I spent a large part of the morning talking to them. . . . I found everybody rather discouraged by the war news and by the fact that the President doesn’t seem to be keeping his leadership in regard to the matter. There has been one of Walter Lippmann’s articles in last Saturday’s papers which gives the situation as a great many people are thinking it. It’s rather a defect in his tone and attitude when he does discuss the matter in his press conferences that is the cause of the trouble. We are in such a serious situation that I think people feel that it is no time to joke about it and yet the President’s press conferences are always on a light tone. I found that complaint quite universal—that he had not taken a serious enough note with the people. . . . Alfred Loomis was at lunch and dinner with me and it was very good to see him again and to talk with him. He gave me some very encouraging news about the progress of his work in Boston for the defense matters and he told me that the great victory of the British in the Mediterranean Sea a short time ago was due to their being able to locate with a new device the Italian ships in the dark.
During Loomis’ visits, Stimson often sought out his advice on various advanced weapons being developed by the services, and on this occasion he was eager to talk to him about a new device that recently had come to his attention. Drawing on Loomis’ background in the Army Ordnance Department during the previous war, Stimson wanted to know “if there was a way of using our new bantam cars with a good-sized gun in them to stop German tanks.” McCloy had suggested putting a tank-killing gun in one of the new little jeeps, and General Marshall had informed him they were working on a similar idea in connection with airplanes—the cars were light enough to be transported by a big aircraft “two at a time.” Such was Stimson’s faith in Loomis, and lack of confidence in the originality of his forces, that he asked his cousin to “apply his inventive head” to the problem and to accompany him to Fort Knox to see them in action. “These little cars will run everywhere and run very fast and are typically American because they have the flexibility which appeals to the initiative of the young.”
On May 6, Stimson delivered a radio address supporting active naval assistance to the British, stating as clearly as he dared his conviction that war was coming: “I am not one of those who think that the priceless freedom of our country can be saved without sacrifice. It can not. That has not been the way by which during millions of years humanity has slowly and painfully toiled upwards towards a better and more human civilization. The men who suffered at Valley Forge and won Yorktown gave more than money to the cause of freedom. Today a small group of evil leaders have taught the young men of Germany that the freedom of other men and nations must be destroyed. Today those young men are ready to die for that perverted conviction. Unless we on our side are ready to sacrifice and, if need be, die for the conviction that the freedom of America must be saved, it will not be saved. Only by a readiness for the same sacrifice can that freedom be preserved.”
While Stimson was not the only political leader to express this view, it was one of the boldest speeches by a cabinet member at the time. Roosevelt, however, continued to listen to the contrasting advice of his State Department advisers, and Stimson’s diary entries over the next few weeks reflect his growing pessimism “that the country has it in itself to meet such an emergency.” Loomis, who had completed his assignment to study tanks, returned two weeks later, bringing with him a report and some photographs of a trial of the Bantam cars conducted by the cavalry of the 1st Division at El Paso. Stimson was delighted to learn that the idea he and McCloy had come up with had been proving successful: “The tests showed that the gun thus mounted was the realization of what everybody is trying for now—a moveable gun mount. The car is very speedy; easily maneuvered; and the gun has been put on it by these Cavalrymen without any difficulty and with it they made much better scores.”
On May 11, London suffered its worst air raid of the war to date, with more than 1,400 killed. Three days later, the great British warship Hood was sunk. On May 22, Bush called on Stimson, and they had a long conference concerning Bush’s desire for a new organization for scientific research for the army and navy:
He told me that the Navy needed it much more than the Army—they were more backward in it—but that the Army needed it somewhat. He told me that his proposition was that a new Assistant Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy should be created which had this in charge, and when I asked who he recommended for it in regard to the Army, he said, “Alfred Loomis.”
Five days later, on May 27, the president gave a vigorous radio speech that, while falling well short of what Stimson had suggested, firmly asserted the doctrine of the freedom of the seas and made it clear America intended to use “all additional measures necessary” to assure the delivery of supplies to Great Britain. Roosevelt also declared an “unlimited national emergency,” giving his administration broader powers in dealing with the crisis.
On June 5, Loomis and Stimson had lunch at Woodley to discuss the situation and Bush’s proposal in particular. “We hammered out the various ways and methods which he would have to do in his work,” wrote Stimson. “On the whole I think it is a very satisfactory arrangement, or will be one.” Loomis continued to frequent Woodley in June, and predominant in all of his talks with Stimson was his message, which he stressed over and over again, that many of the Rad Lab’s new airplane detectors were ready and should be put into use as soon as possible. A few days later, Stimson noted in his diary that after dinner with Loomis, he and Bundy “talked over Alfred’s particular specialty and what we should do to get the better system of communications and the protection system into the Army.” Bundy, who was a lawyer with no background in science, did his best to maintain good relations with the military while trying to help clear a path for the scientists. Whenever they hit a roadblock, he later recalled: “Bush would needle me and then I would needle the secretary and then the secretary would hit the army over the head.”
The only problem was that the army knew that Stimson’s sympathies lay with the scientists—with Bush, Compton, and Loomis—and that he, too, was impatient with them for failing to modify their weaponry and methods as soon as the new technical advances became available. Both sides had nothing but harsh opinions of the other. As Bundy put it, “The military don’t like to be needled particularly. And they would have naturally the feeling that these damn scientists weren’t practical men; they were visionaries. . . . And they didn’t want to waste time on something that wasn’t going to win the war.” So back and forth the arguments went, with Loomis making urgent back door appeals to Stimson to do something. A week later, on June 19, Stimson wrote:
Bundy has come back with word from Loomis and Karl Compton, who have been conducting investigations and experiments up in Boston. He reports them as saying the time has come to freeze the present situation—to waste no more time in experimentation but to go on and build plenty of instruments as we can with the knowledge we now have. They said the developments had gone along far enough so that we could depend on them now. There is always a reluctance of the Department to stop experimenting and I knew we would find it here particularly. . . . However, Loomis and Compton are going to be down here in person next Monday, so we arranged for another meeting with them to clinch the matter as to all the delay.
No matter how hard Loomis tried to push ahead, now regularly going over Bush’s head straight to Stimson, he could not get the Army Signal Corps to move faster. On June 23, Stimson, after a conference on the delay in constructing airplane radar detectors, vented his own frustration in his diary:
It has been terribly held up by the finesse of the Signal Corps, who have been fussing over it for years instead of copying the workable arrangement the British have. I was fairly shocked to find how little they had done today. I dined with Bundy, and he had Loomis and Compton there, and also had in McCloy and [Robert] Lovett and we talked the whole thing over in the evening and if the fur doesn’t fly tomorrow I’ll miss my guess. The same old story of the better being the enemy of the good! and our Departments are worse sinners in this respect than anybody I know. They fuss over things trying to better them until the crisis is on us and the troops haven’t got any of the equipment in question.
By keeping up the pressure, Loomis eventually achieved his end, and that spring Stimson ordered the first radar for the Army Signal Corps into immediate production. In the months to come, the white-haired secretary of war, who at seventy-three was in the position of having to evaluate and approve a whole new generation of advanced weaponry, would lean heavily on his cousin’s technical expertise, as well as the scientific counsel of Bush, Compton, and Conant. Through these “dippings down,” as Stimson called his practice of consulting directly with a trusted adviser on the progress in a specific field, he was able to cut through the bureaucratic double talk of the military and maintain a surprisingly accurate picture of what was really going on within his organization.
Meanwhile, Bush had been working on a solution to the stalemate. On June 28, Roosevelt, by executive order, created a new, greatly expanded organization called the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). Directed by Bush, with Conant as his number two, the OSRD would be run by scientists like Compton and Loomis as a flexible, fast-moving, and creative source of new weapons. They would be the first civilians to “push their heads into the generals’ tent”: they would be working toward military objectives, but independent of military control and unburdened by their outdated notions of what was and was not possible. The scientists had prevailed. Finally, substantial federal funds would be poured into university laboratories, not only greatly accelerating the pace of work, but enabling them to move beyond pure research to the production of revolutionary new devices that would make all the difference in the coming contest.
NOW that there was no longer any question that the laboratory would continue, it began to grow exponentially. By the spring of 1941, the Rad Lab staff had already grown to more than 140: 90 physicists and engineers; 45 mechanics, technicians, guards, and secretaries; and 6 Canadian guest scientists. Over that summer and fall, it would swell to almost 500 people, and more than $19 million would be committed to the secret radar systems they were developing and assembling. The penthouse roof laboratory was so dangerously overloaded that Cambridge authorities worried that it presented a serious fire hazard and urged MIT to relocate the whole operation to Mitchell Field on Long Island. Loomis and Compton dismissed this idea, but a new two-story building was slapped up and promptly filled to overflowing. More space on campus was procured, and almost every week, MIT students would arrive at a classroom only to find it sealed off and teaming with strange men.
Loomis and Lawrence’s handpicked crew, which had labored with bunkered intensity on the AI radar, unencumbered by bureaucracy or, for that matter, any kind of formal routine, was evolving into a massive research and development organization. “It was a magnificent enterprise—staggering,” recalled Bowles, notwithstanding his frequent complaints about Loomis’ loose management style and indifference to housekeeping chores. “We went up by octaves on our money.” He remembered being in Compton’s office one afternoon when the MIT president was calculating that they had a budget of about $500,000 or so, and seeing where things were headed, he multiplied it by two. “But even then he was well under it,” said Bowles. “There’s nobody that can waste money like a physicist, but I think the result was extraordinary.”
The sustained chaos of the first year could no longer serve as a management style, so an older, seasoned administrator named F. Wheeler Loomis (no relation), the longtime chairman of the Physics Department at the University of Illinois, was hired to sort out the personnel problems—not all egos adjusted equally well to teamwork—and impose discipline and order. A skilled bureaucrat, he was, as one early recruit observed, exactly what the unruly mob of prima donnas required, “a son of a bitch.” If virtually every request for further funds or equipment had met with the approval of Alfred Loomis, under the day-to-day direction of the easygoing DuBridge, almost nothing got past Wheeler Loomis, who made frequent use of the word no.
As Loomis and his physicists kept envisioning new devices and setting off in new directions, the Rad Lab kept getting bigger and spawning new projects. The core group in the lab was still concentrated on Project I, perfecting AI equipment for aircraft. Lawson designed a new rugged spark-gap TR box, and in April it was incorporated into the B-18 bomber system, making it possible to pick up ships at a distance of fifteen miles. By late May, one of the rooftop model AI sets was sent at the army’s request to Bell Labs for production, escorted there in the protective custody of two Rad Lab physicists.
At the same time the Roof Lab was mastering the art of ten-centimeter radar, Rabi, who was head of research, was already pushing on to the three-centimeter model, which would provide even sharper focus and more detailed information. As far as he was concerned, the lab’s mission was “to develop something which could do as much harm as possible to the enemy.” In considering any new tactical device, his standard query was “How many Germans will it kill?” Developing the three-centimeter cavity magnetrons demanded new components and even more challenging techniques, and while the military regarded it as another wasted effort, the policy makers at the Rad Lab were determined to pursue every promising avenue. Loomis made sure the three-centimeter project went forward, and it would succeed beyond all expectations. Because they now needed magnetrons in large quantities for their radar devices, Raytheon was also contracted to manufacture the disks and would supply the first three-centimeter magnetrons that would be used against the Germans.
Work on Project II, the microwave gun-laying radar, which had begun in January, was also progressing quickly. Loomis, in part because he was one of the few scientists at the lab with a background in astronomy, had suggested early on that they should use a conical scan to give precise azimuth and elevation, an innovation that played a vital part in the system’s success. The other key role was played by Louis Ridenour, a brilliant and caustic physicist from the University of Pennsylvania, who bullied his group into going for broke in trying to build the first fully automatic tracking system. At the time, all naval fighting sets were manual, and automatic tracking was not considered feasible. Ridenour wanted to develop a ten-centimeter microwave radar set that could pick up an enemy plane on the screen, lock in on it, and follow it while continuously feeding the coordinates into a computer, which would point the antiaircraft gun at the target. After working out the theory for Loomis’ conical scanning and borrowing freely from the physicists working on the airborne set, Ridenour’s group was able to get a set to automatically track a plane from the roof of Building 6 on the last day of May. Six months later, an improved system was demonstrated for the Signal Corps at Fort Hancock. Obviously superior to its predecessors, it would become the prototype for the SCR-584 automatic tracking radar, one of the most important radar sets to come out of the Rad Lab, which was used by the army throughout the war. Thousands of SCR-584s would be deployed in battle and would play a crucial role in protecting the ground troops from air attacks.
THANKS to Loomis’ preoccupation with what had come to be known as his “shower idea,” the Rad Lab was also making great headway on Project III, the need for a long-range system of navigation independent of weather conditions. Back in October 1940, in the thick of the marathon planning sessions for the new radar lab, Loomis had talked to Bowen about Tizard’s conviction that the North American continent was much better suited than war-torn Europe to develop and test a long-range navigation system. Loomis, “who must have been working a 24-hour day,” recalled Bowen in his memoirs, “had fully appreciated this and practically overnight—on the basis of the description I had given him of the British GEE—came up with the suggestion of doing a similar thing. . . .” Pacing back and forth in the library of his New York penthouse, Loomis had excitedly elaborated on his idea to Bowen:
What about a pulsed hyperbolic system, like GEE, but on long waves which would be reflected from the ionosphere and would, therefore, give a range of one or two thousand miles. Since the two ground stations would themselves be about a thousand miles part, there was a problem of synchronisation. This he proposed solving using his specialty—in this case highly accurate quartz clocks—at each station.
Bowen had thought it a “marvelous idea,” and from that time on, Project III had proceeded along the specific lines Loomis had suggested, becoming the basis for a new long-range navigation system, originally called LRN for Loomis radio navigation, though after Loomis objected to its being named after him, it was changed to Loran, for long-range navigation. Loomis had proposed a rather ingenious scheme in which pulsed radio waves from fixed shore stations would produce a grid of hyperbolic lines from which planes or ships, equipped with a specially designed pulse receiver, could fix their position. The key to Loran, as Alvarez later wrote, was Loomis’ use of a time-measuring technique—a system of receiving and comparing the time of arrival of pulses—an expertise he had accrued during his long obsession with precision timekeeping:
The Loran concept of a master station and two slave stations can be traced to the Shortt clocks, which had a master pendulum swinging in a vacant chamber, and a heavy-duty pendulum “slaved” to it, oscillating in the air. To obtain a navigational “fix” with Loran requires the measurement of the time difference in arrival of pulses from two pairs of transmitting stations. Each such time difference places the observer on a particular hyperbola. The observer’s position is fixed by the intersection of two such hyperbolas, each derived from signals originating from a pair of long-wave transmitting stations. . . . The techniques for separating the signals and for measuring their differences in arrival time were “state of the art” at that time, but the problem of synchronizing the transmissions to within a microsecond, at points hundreds of miles apart, was a new one in radio engineering. Loomis proposed the following solution: the central station was to be the master station, and its transmissions were timed from a quartz crystal. The other stations also used quartz crystals, but in addition, monitored the arrival times of the pulses from the master station. When the operators noted that the arrival time of the master pulses was drifting from its correct value, relative to the transmitting time at that particular “slave station,” the phase of the slave’s quartz crystal oscillator was changed to bring the two stations back into proper synchronization. This procedure was able to bridge over periods when the signals at one station “faded out,” and it was also what made Loran a practical system during World War II. . . .
With so many brilliant physicists pursuing independent lines of research, it certainly did not hurt that Loran was Loomis’ own idea. His proposal was quickly approved by the microwave committee, and a group was set up to order the necessary parts, test equipment, and oversee the installation. A small group headed by Melville Eastham began work on the system early in the summer of 1941, and while waiting for equipment to arrive, they made a series of improvements, including moving to a longer wavelength to allow over-the-horizon operation. The basic system was completed in September, and the first field tests with a system using medium frequencies were conducted over the next three weeks.
A tunable receiver had been installed at Harvard’s Cruft Laboratory, which had been made available, and another was set up at Lawrence’s room at the MIT Graduate House. They had also obtained two abandoned lifeboat stations from the Coast Guard—one off Montauk Point, at the end of Long Island, and the other at Fenwick Island, off the coast of Delaware. They continued their investigation, running tests between the coastal stations and receiver stations in the Midwest in order to get a general idea about the behavior of sky waves over land. The main receiving station was set up by Donald Kerr in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the home of the scientist S. A. Goudsmit, and they made control observations with a receiver mounted on a station wagon, stopping at Springfield, Missouri, and Frankfort, Kentucky. The tests strongly supported the possibility of stable sky-wave transmission and were so promising that they decided to abandon the original plan, which called for the ultrahigh frequency. As a result, Loran became the sole Rad Lab product not based on microwaves, an irony that was not lost on any of the Tuxedo Park pioneers.
Loran proved to be an extremely important new method of navigation, its principle virtues being that it was simple and highly successful. By means of Loran charts, created by the Hydrographic Office, an operator could plot his position accurately in about two minutes. More important, for wartime use, the ship or plane equipped with Loran emitted no signal that might betray its position to the enemy. It also proved relatively impervious to weather, with only severe electrical storms disrupting the system. By day, fixes could be obtained up to 700 miles from the transmitting stations, and by night, up to 1,400 miles. The NDRC immediately ordered that Loran be put into service in the North Atlantic. On September 25, Loomis reported on the Rad Lab’s rapid progress to Stimson, who noted that it was “a very interesting talk. Things here at last seem to be jumping along.”
While Loomis was congratulated for the dazzling ingenuity of Loran, there were those who found its similarity to the British system—the two schemes turned out to be virtually identical, though at the time the Americans were not permitted to know the details of GEE—too coincidental. Loomis’ loyalists credited him with arriving at the idea independently, granting that the sketchy facts furnished by various members of the Tizard Mission might have helped to “clarify or perhaps crystallize the project.” Bowles, who had always chafed at working under Loomis, was outraged that the financier had somehow managed to usurp their British partners, and he made no secret of it. His efforts to stir up controversy were stymied by Bowen, the mission’s chief technical expert, who fully supported Loomis’ account of his bathtime brainstorm and later testified to the fact when the navy applied for a patent in Loomis’ name.
Bowles could not let the matter drop. He was furious that there was never any admission on Bowen’s part that Loomis’ “shower idea” was anything but original: “Apparently, again, Alfred with his typical methods had been able to brainwash [Bowen]. He evidently captured Taffy Bowen’s fancy and in effect put Bowen in a position where he couldn’t do anything else but support Loomis’ idea. In other words, it is my theory that Loomis would not have had the idea had he not been able to so involve Bowen in a step-by-step process so as to find out exactly what our British cousins had in hand.”
It soon became obvious that Bowles and Loomis could not both endure under the same roof. “Loomis took a relatively possessive position in respect to the radiation lab as if it were his baby,” Bowles complained. “I suppose with his ego and his past history, he wanted no competition.” He blamed the banker’s frosty reserve for the lab’s often difficult relations with outside agencies, particularly the navy, where Bowles had good contacts. “His ways with the military were not the ways of a first-class salesman. He worked with his cards too close to his chest, in fact hidden in his vest when he wore one.” Bowles made a clumsy attempt to undermine Loomis’ authority by criticizing him behind his back to Compton, apparently unaware of their close friendship. When he lost that argument, his bitterness increased. By the end of 1941, despite Compton’s efforts to alleviate the situation by assigning Bowles duties that kept him at a safe distance, it became, in Bowles’ own words, “an impossible situation.” Hoping for a showdown, he sent Compton a memorandum marked “Personal” enumerating Loomis’ grievous shortcomings as chairman of the microwave committee:
I have a few observations I wish to pass to you relative to the Microwave Section–Radiation Laboratory relationship which I hope will help your perspective of the problem. Please excuse the facetious tone—I am hurriedly doing this before I leave for Sperry.
First as to the Committee: We began operating as a Committee the first few meetings, then it became clear to me that Alfred did not want that kind of a Committee. The other Committees, as I understand them, have operated much as a unit. . . . Alfred’s position is that the Committee members were merely directors to be informed and to be used when we went after funds. I believe I pretty well quote the sentiment expressed.
At the start Alfred told me that the two of us would have to look after things and I took him seriously. Later when I was removed from the Executive Committee running the Laboratory, I again understood from your memorandum on the subject that in a broad sense you, Alfred and I were to look after the general progress and policy. . . .
I felt at the time, and I spoke to you about it, that it would help my position administratively were I made Vice Chairman of the Section. As I remember it you seemed to approve the idea. I then spoke to Alfred and he brushed the idea aside by pointing to the strong position that of SECRETARY implied, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of Navy, etc. . . .
I suspect a certain minority in the Laboratory who do not like to recognize the authority of others have satisfied themselves that I am a “secretary” to write letters and do the bidding of others. This has made it hard for me especially when I have had to carry most of the administrative burden of the Section.
Alfred has done the job of a genius in so many ways, but I have had to try to keep a semblance of order into things and fill in those parts which did not interest him. . . .
Bowles’ tone turned nastier as he went on to question Loomis’ habit of ignoring policy, choosing instead to exercise sovereign authority over many of the lab’s new projects and contracts: “This independence has been shown in the Laboratory’s way of turning out reports of secret material without Committee approval in many cases; a procedure that I am sure is not the NDRC’s. . . . It is the same independence that resulted in the Laboratory’s giving Westinghouse a contract for ten-centimeter magnetrons without Committee knowledge. Perhaps Alfred did know. . . .” He concluded by assuring Compton that he was glad he “taking up whole matter with Van [Bush],” adding, “I give it only with the idea that it suggests a point of view among a few, perhaps only one or two militant ones—that may grow to bring embarrassment to you and the Institute.”
Bowles no doubt realized how seriously he had underestimated Loomis when he was informed by Compton that his services at the laboratory were no longer required and that he was scheduled to take a position in the U.S. Army Air Corps communications area. “It was a polite way of banishing me,” recalled Bowles. “Loomis had seen to it I was about to be sold down the river; in other words, his desire was to have me get the hell out, to use a common idiom. Compton sided with Loomis, if there was any side to be taken.”
Bowles was saved from ignominy by Bush, who intervened at the last minute and, in an effort to avoid any more embarrassment than the imbroglio had already caused, persuaded Stimson’s office to take him on as an “expert consultant” on radar. (Loomis had been the logical choice as the secretary’s adviser on the new weapons, but concerns about nepotism forced Bush and Stimson to find another candidate.) Bowles left MIT for Washington in April 1942 and went on to become a highly effective ambassador for the new art of radar in Washington and played an important role in bringing the civilian scientists and the military high command closer together. But he never forgave Loomis, and years later he acknowledged that he found it infuriating that the former banker commanded so much loyalty and respect while he, one of MIT’s original radar pioneers, had managed to win few friends among the close-knit Rad Lab crew. “An element resolved in our problems at the time was that I didn’t belong to the fraternity of scientists who were brought in as the initial staff of the radiation lab. In other words I was not a physicist, I had no doctor’s degree, and of all low brow things, I was an engineer,” he said, adding bitterly, “I was a stranger in their midst.”
Compton would always try to minimize the power struggle at the lab that resulted in Bowles’ departure, and while praising the radar expert’s abilities, he put it down to “the limitations of temperament and personality” that had led him into conflict with so many others in the past. Bush, who had his own rocky relations with Bowles dating back to the early years of his academic career at MIT, already knew about his ability to stir up strife. In the mid-1930s, when Compton had considered promoting Bush to vice president of MIT, Bowles had voiced an unfavorable opinion of the engineer, to the effect that he “had nothing but admiration for Bush’s methods and not one damn bit of use for his methods.” Bush, who had been promptly informed of the comment by Compton, asked Bowles to drop by his office, and the two men hashed out their differences for the next two and a half hours. But their relationship never recovered, and the two were often at odds. Bush always tolerated Bowles as a bright but “strange chap,” too difficult and disloyal to be trusted. Bush always assumed Bowles’ problems at the Rad Lab were largely of his own making: “It was Bowles against the field,” Bush added, and “they pasted the hell out of him.”
Bush, meanwhile, was not blind to Loomis’ behavior and was fully aware of the adroit financier’s propensity for masterminding events. There were times when their relationship became quite tense, particularly on those occasions when Loomis, in combination with Lawrence or the accommodating DuBridge, behaved as if the Rad Lad were an establishment virtually independent of the parent. An acutely skilled politician whose stern demeanor reminded some of a school principal, Bush was not shy about setting him straight. While he admired Loomis’ energy and determination, he felt it necessary at times “to steer him to a path.” According to Bowles, whose new perch in Washington occasionally afforded him the pleasure of seeing Loomis called in on the carpet, Bush “had a way of making clear in no uncertain terms who was boss. When dealing with a subtle plan or machination he was an artist in achieving a point by the use of memoranda concealing what was really on his mind.”
But for the most part, Bush gave Loomis a great deal of latitude and made allowances for the fact that in civilian life he had not been accustomed to heeding the chain of command. For that matter, until he joined the OSRD, Bush was willing to bet that Loomis “had never taken an order from anybody at any time.” As he observed years later, “Alfred’s always been a close friend of mine, but a tough egg to work with. I think during the war when he occasionally changed his direction of action at my behest, it was about the only time that he ever paid attention to anybody over his head.”