An Oral History of African-Americans and the Development of Radar Defense Technology at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey 1940-1959

Edited by: Robert Johnson, Jr. Associate Prof. of Communications Framingham State College 100 State Street Framingham, MA 01701-9101

  Dr. Walter S. McAfee was born in 1914, in Ore City, Texas, a small town in Upshure County.  He was there until he was three months old, when his parents moved to Marshall.

 "Both my parents grew up on farms.  My dad's father was a CME minister and my dad went to Texas College, which was the CME school.  That is, he finished prep there--that's what he always called it.  My mother was the daughter of a rather successful farmer who sent his kids to school.  In fact, my grandfather had a son who finished Bishop College with a Bachelor's Degree and then went to Chicago and got a medical degree and practiced medicine until he was about 88 years old."

 "My mother finished normal at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, which was an elementary school teacher's degree.  They had to take tests in those days and they claim to have lost one of her test papers, so she never really taught, but she taught us.  In fact, all nine of us, and all nine of us went on to receive college training."

 Dr. McAfee went to high school in Marshall where he graduated and took a second honors:

 "The man who taught me chemistry was an excellent teacher and he also taught me physics.  His name was Freeman Prince Hodge.  I sometimes become emotional when I think about him because when I was finishing high school my mother and father came to see the place and Hodge met them in the hallway.  He told them, 'I always refer to him as my 'intellectual giant.'  I'd never known that he had thought that much of me, except that I know that we were more than just a little friendly."

 Dr. McAfee received a first year tuition scholarship to Wiley College, entering in September of 1930 and graduated in June of '34, Magna Cum Laude.  He remembers one teacher in particular:

 "I met a guy named Charles Anthony McCain who later taught both at Minor Teacher's College and Howard University in Washington, DC.  He taught me general physics and sophomore mechanics at Wiley College.  He was very instrumental in advising me when I first started taking physics as I was talking about taking engineering."

 In 1934 when he graduated, the Depression was still on and though he was only 19 years old, he found he had to persevere:
"I was young enough, it didn't matter.  I tried getting teaching jobs and I guess maybe I looked a little too young or else they didn't have any openings, but I kept trying.  I worked all kinds of different jobs.  I did farm labor, worked as a carpenter's assistant putting up sheetrock...

 "Then I got a couple of substitute teacher's jobs. I also did some house-to-house selling of something that's called 'Zanol Products.'  It's special food and beauty products.  As the summer of '35 wore on, it seemed that I wasn't going to get a job teaching, so I said to my mother and father, 'I'm going to go to Columbus, Ohio because I can apply for scholarships and fellowships as a first-honor student at the state college.'  I didn't have the slightest idea that I wouldn't get it.

 "So Ohio State wrote back and said, 'You will not have to apply separately for admission.  You are admitted on the basis of this application.'

 "I got on a bus in late August of '35 and went to Columbus, knowing nobody and not knowing where to stay when I first got there.  I had $9.29 in my pockets.  I asked a black fellow who worked at the bus station if he knew anybody who kept students.  He said he knew a very good family and when I got there I laid it on the line.  I said, 'I don't have money.  I'm willing to work.  I'm a graduate student at Ohio State.'

 "The Admissions Office sent me over to the Graduate Office.  I talked with the woman in charge and I said, 'I'd like to major in theoretical mathematical physics.' She looked at my records and said, 'You've got twenty-five hours and A and B records.  You can get in.'  She put 'admitted to do graduate work in physics' on my papers and from then on it’s been physics."

 Dr. McAfee completed his Master's thesis under Dr. Llewllyn H. Thomas, a British professor.  He also took courses with Lande who was better known because of the Lande G-factor, or the spectroscopic splitting factor, named after him.  Dr. McAfee remembers him as: "...older than Thomas but Thomas was, somehow considered the better physicist.  I did some studies of theoretical physics under Lande and I did some under a youngster who had gotten his Ph.D. at Princeton under E. U. Condon."

 Dr. McAfee received a Rosenwald Fellowship after the War and completed his Ph.D. thesis under Hans Bethe at Cornell University.  As he recalls it, "it was important at that juncture to close that gate."

 "I got my Master's in June of '37 and then I taught in a junior high school in Columbus, Ohio.  I taught general science, mathematics, and 9th grade biology there for five years from October '37 to April of '42.  In April of '42 I came to Fort Monmouth.

 "I had filed with Civil Service for a job and I was on the list.  You know, they made it an un-assembled exam.  Un-assembled exams were given at P-2 and above.  Assembled exams usually were given at P-1 or lower.  But as time went on, they started hiring people on War Services Indefinite Basis, rather than on a career basis because at the end of the war they didn't want to have to keep all those people.

 "Now I was on the list and the first offer I got was Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to solve problems in hydro-aeromechanics.  According to the paperwork, I was to supply information and send the application back.  So I read the duty and at the end it asked me questions about race and religion and to send a picture and so-forth.  I knew that the NAACP and others had been fighting to get that kind of request removed from applications.

 "We had a friend who was a black chemist and he was suing all the time because he was one of these guys that was always number 1, 2, or 3 at the top of the exams.  Whenever he went for an interview he ended up dead when he sent his picture.  At that time, they didn't have to take the top man, they had to take one of the top three.

 "So I sent it with the picture.  They sent it back, 'no'-- they had hired somebody for that position.

 "The next offer I had was to teach elementary calculus
to the aviation cadets at Kelly Field in Texas.  I didn't get that one.  It asked for pictures and so-forth.

 "The next position I was offered was at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Michigan to teach alternating current theory.  I looked at it and thought about it for a long time because it didn't ask for a picture.  Finally I thought I'd better send it in, but I didn't get that one either.

 "Then later I got the one from Fort Monmouth.  I looked at it and I said, 'This time they didn't ask for a picture and I'm not going to send them one.'  So I sent the letter in and they asked me when could I report?'  That's one of the other things they ask, and one of the things that, if you said, "At the end of the school year," they could use as an excuse to drop you--it's too long. "So this time I said, 'Immediately on notification.'  It came back saying., 'report on the 21st of April.'

 "I had to tell the principal and let him find a teacher to substitute for me.  I also had to talk with the assistant superintendent who was in charge of secondary education and he tried to get me to stay.  He said, 'If you were being drafted to fight the war or if for some particular need, you had some particular talent and they were drafting you to do a job for a certain length of time, we would give you the leave of absence.  But we've decided that all of our people with special training or special talents would be leaving us, if we gave them leaves of absence.  You'll have to resign and when the war is over, you have to come back and apply on the same basis as other people apply.'
"I said, 'I think I'll resign.' I told the principal of the conversation and that I was sending in my resignation.

 "My wife was expecting our first child.

 "I read an article in the Pittsburgh Courier written by a professor who wanted it known that one of his black students was getting a job at the Signal Corps Radar Laboratory at Fort Monmouth. I read that and I said, 'Good, that's where I'm going.  At least I won't be alone.  If they fire me, they've got to fire two of us.'

 "When I got there, I reported on the 21st of April, I found there were a number of blacks who had come down from New York and were already working.  They sent me up to Camp Evans for pictures, but Evans wasn't ready yet.  They told me to come up in the middle of the next day.  Now, I had to find a place to stay and John C. Carter handled that for me.

 "I was asked if I had a place to stay and I said, 'No,' and they sent for a black fellow.  This fellow came along said, "I'm getting to be the father of this whole group!"  Carter found a place were the people were willing to take us and I had to talk them into serving meals, so that I wouldn't have to go around finding a place to eat.  The family name was Keyes.

 "So, when I was brought in for an interview, the man who was in charge of personnel for the general engineering branch asked me what my education was.  I told him that I had a Master's Degree in theoretical physics and had practically finished the course requirements for a Doctorate.  He said, 'Theoretical physics, oh, good.  Tell me some of the courses you've had.'  I gave the courses and he says, 'By, God, Dr. Carroll wants somebody like that and we've been getting people who want to pass themselves off as mathematicians or mathematical physicists and they don't have anything.  Now we've got one.'  By that time, Tom Carroll passed the door and he called him in.  He said, 'I want you to see what this man has.'  Carroll looked at my paperwork and said, 'Very good.  Do you already have your Doctorate?'  I said, 'No, I've been teaching at a junior high school and taking additional courses above my Master's for about three or four summers.'  He said, 'You'll get it soon, won't you?'  I said, 'I hope so.'

------

 "The title of our theoretical unit finally got to be Theoretical Studies Unit, but it was first called Radar Siting Group.  People would walk by and make jokes about, 'You people do anything besides sit?'  Then later somebody decided we were working for more than just radar siting, that we were doing mathematical studies for radio propagation and for radar coverage patterns and so-forth, and so they changed it to Mathematical Analysis Group.
Then we moved over in another reorganization.  You should see how often they reorganized.

 "We also worked with the radar antenna people a lot.  I did a paper once for the people who were in what ultimately became the Countermeasures Group.  At that time it was called IFF and beacon,  IFF--Identification, Friend or Foe--let's find out who they are before we shoot them.

 "Tom Carroll outlined several problems that needed to be attacked and he asked Herb Wolf and me to work on one of them.

 "Wolf and I had done a paper on the scattering of electromagnetic waves by ellipsoids and spheres, by the way.  What were trying to get there is how to get radar cross sections or radar echoing areas for bodies of different shapes.  With Max Sherman, we did radar coverage patterns and Fresnel Zone studies and so-forth.  That's applying optical methods to compute the radar pattern and how to chose so that the ground didn't foul up your ability to use your radar.  We studied diffraction of radar beams or electromagnetic beams over ridges and through trees--the kinds of things that people who operate these radar units have to do.

 "There was an old radar set around that the antenna people had to use.  I think it was called the SCR-265.  It had a horizontal array that was used for measuring distance, then a vertical array that you could tilt back and forth to measure elevation.  A more modern type of radar that was being used at that time was the so-called P.P.I.--Planned Position Indicator, the SCR-270.  The whole head rotated and the plan position could tell you where the target was.

 "I wrote several reports during World War II, one of which was A Note Concerning Nabarro's Work on the Paraboloid Antenna.  Also, I wrote or co-authored several technical memoranda.  One, for example, was on a class of antennae with directive devices. This later paper was accomplished in collaboration with Ralph Loring,  where we assumed a circular aperture for the antenna reflector and an axially symmetrical area.  Suppose it's a circle and I draw perpendicular to the circle center, coming out of the page, that's the axis.  So symmetrical about that axis was the way the thing was illuminated and so I integrated the type of antenna pattern you could get by illuminating the aperture various ways.

 "Then the other one I wrote was a technical memorandum
which had to do with detecting non-magnetic mines.  A metallic mine-- the way you detect it is, you generate currents, and currents generate magnetic fields which are detectable underground. But with the non-magnetic mine, you have to use something approximating an antenna as the thing under the ground has different electrical properties than the things around it; it gives a different loading effect on the antenna.

 "There are problems with it.  A person can go to some hard ground and just dig up some soft ground and stamp it back and you'll go across it and you'll detect the irregularity.  The other problem they were concerned about was did it give enough radiation itself to interfere with your radar reception or communication reception.

 "So what we were asking first was how good a detector is it of non-metallic mines.  This other thing was to what extent may it interfere with communications of radar that you have to have operating in the field.  So I did that one on a rush basis.  They assigned it and I worked overtime, worked hours home at night, found my errors and went through it again.  I always say, 'It doesn't do much good to rush work.  You find errors that you didn't think you could make.'

 "Technical reports were supposed to be approved by your section chief and then your branch chief.  Most of what we were working on was top secret so they didn't get published, except within the agencies.  Usually you could come to terms with the fellows you were working with about sharing credit.

-----

 "Generally, the way we worked on this was very informal.
With Herb, I talked to him.  Quite a lot, I worked alone.  We didn't have electronic computers in those days, so I had used the Marchand, the Monroe and I learned to use the Friden thereafter at Fort Monmouth--desk computers.  Not adding machines, they were really calculators.

 "In those earlier days we did not keep log books.  Much later they issued logbooks and asked you to keep them, but they were more interested, not in your calculations and things, but if you had an invention or something.  Inventions didn't come to the theoretical people, unless they accidentally stumbled across them.
 "We had a group, the Reproduction or Drafting department.  If you had curves to be plotted, you made your draft and then you took it down to them and they made it up.  They also had a typing group where the girls just sat and typed.  So if you had a report you were getting ready, you'd take that to them.  Generally, you worked alone.  I know one guy who got himself into trouble because he wasn't working at all.

 "Carroll had left Merton Frank in charge.  Ralph Loring had taken something over to ask this man who was from Brooklyn, to do it.  The man looked at it for a few minutes and said, 'I don't want to do that.  It's not interesting.'  Ralph went back, sat down, fumed for a while.  You know, he had been working in the oil fields in South America where when you told a guy to do something, he did it.  He went back over to him and he said, 'I said I want you to do this.  I need the calculations by sometime or other.'  'I don't want to do it.  It's not interesting.'

 "Ralph went over and told Merton Frank and Frank, I think was glad to show his muscle, went over and he said to this man, 'Mr. Loring says he wants you to do this and Mr. Loring is senior to you.  I direct you to take this and do it.'  The man said, 'I don't want to do it.  It's not interesting.'  He said, 'I didn't ask you whether it was interesting or not.  I said do it.'  Again the man refused, so he called it insubordination and reported it to the colonel who was head of the Evans Signal Lab.  The colonel had a hearing and fired him.  That's the only time I know of a guy getting fired flat out and he didn't protest it.  I don't think he thought it would happen.

 "There were no offices or cubicles.  All of us were in the room and we had desks.  I didn't get an individual office until after I was back from Cornell with my Ph.D.  On a typical day, I worked from 8 AM to four thirty or so.

-----

 "There was a fellow named Captain Vollum, who had a microwave radar project.  Clarence White, who was black, had come to work with us.  Somebody misplaced him or he exaggerated his abilities in some areas, and he was put to work as a P-3 with a guy who was a bit of an idiot.  Clarence had gotten a Bachelor's Degree in pre-med at Amherst College.  He got his Master's Degree under Woodard at Howard University.  Then Howard had some money given to them to set up an astronomy department.  They were willing to send somebody to Berkeley to learn astronomy and to come back.  Now, Clarence put in three out of five years out there and did not get a Ph.D.

 "He was sent over to interview with Ralph Loring after running into some trouble building things in another unit.  Ralph talked with him, found out that he had a Master's in math and that he studied astronomy out at Berkeley, and so he took him in as a
P-3 (a lateral transfer).

 "He was not the sharpest guy on the kinds of things we had to do.  Vollum wanted to detect mortar shell trajectories and extrapolate back to ground level, so that we could fire counter shots and blow them up.  He said he wanted a chart or a map or something that he could look at, read off the coordinates from the radar and then tell where the mortar was placed.  Clarence did a fairly decent job of that, after I worked with him to get the radar coverage pattern and to get the trajectory of the mortar (which is more or less a parabola, an ellipse).

 "Afterwards, Clarence went on something else, which took up all the rest of his time.  He was trying to make a chart for something that Kenneth Norton had thought of.  Norton, of NBS, had worked out large-scale applications on the generation and propagation of radio waves. His idea worked on a vertical antenna standing on a plane, an infinitely conductive plane.  Norton's theory had moved away from perfect conductivity to the kinds of conductivity you get with the earth or with seawater--relative conductivity.

 "So Clarence White got the idea of making up a chart or some kind of a nomogram that would be useful in answering this.  When you know the properties of your soil and you've got the power of your antenna, you can tell what your field strength is.  He called it the 'field strength calculator'.  Then he went over to the patent section and wanted to submit it to the patent people and they said they wouldn't know what to do with it because it's not patentable.

 "Eventually, Clarence left and went to teach at the school at Hampton Institute, now Hampton University.

 "The computations he did for the mortar shell locator were very useful. The only thing is, it turns out that the radar accuracy isn't good enough for you to target direct counter fire, but it's good enough for you to shoot scatter fire.  You can't shoot precisely at the point where it’s on the ground.  You have to kind of cover an area.  But we did that.  So he and I wrote up a memorandum for that and Vollum seemed happy with it.

 "I understand Clarence claims some originality or contribution on the first radar signal to the moon, 'Project Dianna', sent in January of '46.  He was in my group.  He never contributed to that.  He was included in a history of blacks at Fort Monmouth and that was mentioned as a courtesy to the fact that he was there in my group.

 "When they came to speak to me initially, they knew that I had done radar coverage diagrams.  I had done radar sighting.  I had done radar-echoing areas or radar cross sections and I had done refraction studies in the atmosphere.  I had a paper on it with Harold Webb and Eugene Jarema, 'CW Injection As A Means of Decreasing the Minimum Detectable Signal of a Radar Receiver' [December 19th, 1944.]

 "Colonel John Dewitt was head of Evans and he had previously tried bouncing radar signals off the moon and failed.  E.K. Stodola was head of the civilian branch section that we in theoretical studies were under at that time. I computed a radar cross section of the moon, a radar coverage pattern, and distance to the moon, so they could tell how big the signal would be when it returned.  It turns out that you could have detected the returning signal with the previous computations if it was much further away.

 "Somehow Stodola seems to have discounted the value of the mathematical stuff, but they were thrilled when they found out it was close enough.  The press release was sent out but I was not mentioned.  The paper that Harold Webb wrote and published was a paper that included most of my work.  There were a lot of technicians who cried that they weren't named in that paper and should have been, too.

 "The paper by Harold Webb and Colonel Dewitt was published while I was at Cornell starting on my Ph.D., and in that paper, the business of fading is all wrong.  The correct interpretation is for the fades that the magnetic effect of the earth's magnetic field and propagating along the magnetic line of force, the so-called Faraday Rotation of the Plane of Polarization, is what affects the returning signal.  The rapid fading arose primarily from our particular arrangement which permitted detection only near Moonrise or Moon set.

 "I was really annoyed when I heard the news reports and found those statements and later saw Webb's paper.  All of those who were mentioned in the newspaper and that first published paper got jobs.  Webb went to the University of Illinois, MacPherson got a job at Sprague Electronics in Boston,  Stodola took a job somewhere up in New York out on Long Island, then later moved to Florida.  Those three guys got top jobs.

 "The press release has an interesting story to it. There was a combined meeting in New York of the American Physics Society and the Engineering Society.  We were going up each day to meetings and Jarema, on the train one day said to someone, 'Tonight's the night,' and someone else said, 'Shh.'  The next day, I turned my radio on and I hear this announcement and I said, 'Gee, I would have stayed if I had known.'  They announced it at the end of the meeting.  After the announcement, they took pictures.

 "When they came to Fort Monmouth to take more pictures, my office wasn't down in the area where the antenna was.  Those people who knew that they were going to come back for pictures went down to get in them and said nothing to anyone.  Sometime later, somebody connected with publicity at the Army was talking with me and said, 'I looked at all those early things and I don't find you anywhere.  Can you tell me why that is?'  I said, 'I can tell you why, but I don't care to get into a discussion about it.'

 "The point is, I didn't get any of the publicity until after I got the Rosenwald Fellowship to Cornell, which was announced around May or June of that year.  The moon radar was announced in January and then in May or June they wrote big articles about me
and then they made some nice statements about how I had worked on the theoretical problems connected with radar.  I said, 'They could have told that in the beginning.'

 "By the way, on the 25th anniversary of this thing they've got pictures of me with Governor William Cahill, Major General George Van Dussen, Harold Zaul, Gilbert Cantor, Eugene Jarema, Peter Devriotis.  There's another one with Mayor Arthur Crum, General Walter Lots, and George Zuckerman.

-----

 "I had been around there for a long time with a P-3 and watched guys who had come in as technicians and become professionals.  See, the technicians had sub-professional grades and I had watched guys who had come in as P-1s, that's a junior science grade, and they had gone by me in three years.  People were getting promotions and I wasn't.  Captain John A. Daun had become our section chief and so when I went into talk to him, because Ralph Loring who was my unit chief had said the colonel who was in charge of branches wasn't going to approve anybody's promotion above the level of P-3 who didn't have supervisory responsibility.
 "Now, Daun was a mathematician and he liked coming into the room and talking to me in the theoretical studies section and one or two other members.  We would talk and I would even read German with him or read a German section of the Mathematical Methods in Theoretical Physics by Courant Hilbert.

 "What Daun said to me was 'Walter, I understand.  You're a gentleman.  You don't go down and holler.  I'm going to go see the colonel.  I'm going to go see the general.'  A lot of these people had been able to get these promotions by fighting it that way.  I don't know whether that was true or not because I knew a black guy who was a technician and he couldn't get a promotion and he saw people getting promotions doing the same thing he was doing.  He wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt.

 "The guy said if he hadn't written Mrs. Roosevelt, he wouldn't have had it.  I don't think he would have.  He was dealing with a black man and he wasn't going to give it.

 "Two or three things that we were sure were happening at various places where if they had one position and had a black man and a white man competing for it, the white man got it.  Mainly there's less friction that way.  The black man isn't going to fight that hard.  Of course, today you wouldn't say that.  I guess we were just getting into the jobs.

 "But Daun did get me my P-4.  Then I went off to Cornell and when I came back from Cornell with Ph.D., I got a P-5.  All the raises that were given were given as General Schedule, GS.  They got rid of the SP designation.  SP was 'subprofessional'.  CAF was 'clerical and filing' and P was 'professional'.  After the reorganization, the relabeling of standardization of grades, it became this way:  A P-1, which had been a SP-6 was 2,000.  So all the SP's went up in steps of two; the other went up in steps of four.

 "So the GS-5 became what the SP-5 was and the GS-6 became the SP-6.  Then an SP-7 was given, which had no P parallel.  When you get to the P-2, you got the SP-8 and so-forth.  You'll find that the P-3 was about a twelve.

 "I qualified on the permanent list for a 5 with my Ph.D.  I had filed this at the recommendation of our personnel manager in the applied physics branch.  That was the name of our branch by then.

 "Much later they stopped having branches. When I got back from Cornell they set up the Nucleonics branch and I was the section chief in that branch.  My Ph.D. was conferred February of '49 and I worked as a GS-12.

-----

 "In the fall of '48 I returned from Cornell as a unit chief of the Theoretical Unit and moved into the Nucleonics Section.  At first, Nucleonics was so small it was not made into a branch.  It was made into a section and attached to the Applied Physics branch. I finally got them to change the name of my unit to Radiation Physics because we had charge of all of the radiation sources.  That is, all of the secondary calibration methods for nuclear radiation sources.  This is where I worked very closely with people from the other two services and with the National Bureau of Standards, in Washington, DC.

 "During the early days, we did quite a lot of travel.  (I also purchased a Van De Graaff apparatus from the concern in Boston that manufactures them.  A Van De Graaff is an accelerator.  It's like a DC accelerator, rather than a cyclotron.  It was delivered just about the time I moved back over to Radio Propagation, so I never got to use it.)

 "We were building up at that time; we went from three to about ten people.  When I became Section Chief in '49, it went to about sixteen.

 "An interesting thing happened there.  I got along with many of the whites and I could find out what was going on rather easily.  One of the guys who was working with personnel told me that they were going to make Nucleonics a branch and that the unit chiefs would become section chiefs.  A colonel offered me a job somewhere to work on some difficult theoretical problem that had come down from Washington.  Normally my branch chief, who was a square shooter, would make that offer.  So I talked with the man who was the branch chief's personnel manager and he said, 'Mac, don't move.'  Dr. Anderson had told the chief of Nucleonics that he could break away at anytime to become a branch and that the unit chiefs will become section chiefs.

 "So I went over to see Dr. Anderson, the branch chief of the Applied Physics branch, and I told him that I was not accepting the offer.  He said that the chief of Nucleonics told him, the he felt sure that I could be talked into it. I asked him first, 'does that job carry a promotion?'  He said, 'No, it's just a lateral transfer.'  I said, 'Then I'll stay where I am,' and he asked me, "Why are you doing that?," and I said, 'Dr. Anderson, ever since I've been here, when someone asks me to do something, I ask myself is it in the interest of the laboratory and if it  was, I took it.  I think its time for me to ask is this in the interest of Walter McAfee, and I think this one isn't.'

 "When they made Nucleonics a branch my unit became the Radiation Physics section and I became Section Chief--a GS-13. About a year or so later, they reorganized again and they combined my section with another fellow's and I became an Assistant Section Chief.

-----

 "I never had trouble on an army base after '48.  So when Truman integrated the Army, my rating was high enough they didn't bother me.  I went to places and they gave me good quarters.  They gave me the best --I usually got the VIP quarters.

 "If you look back at 1946, the first travel I did was straight to New York and back.  In New York I just ate at a restaurant.  A group of us went to see what was called the Burroughs Group at Columbia University, which was dealing with radio propagation, and we spent the day there and we went out for lunch together.

 "The next place I went to was down to the Naval Research Lab in Maryland to discuss one of my papers, just as the war was ending.  I knew I couldn't stay in a white hotel in Washington, DC, but Henry Letcher was a cousin to Duke Ellington and had married a girl from Columbus, whose people I stayed with when I was at Ohio State.  I called and asked if I might spend the night and they said yes and I stayed there and got travel out to the Naval Research Lab the next day.

 "I learned later there were black hotels near Howard University, but I didn't know that at the time.  That's where I stayed in later years when I went.

 "I had a booklet that one of the other blacks gave me and, for example, two or three times I would fly into El Paso in the evening and fly out in the morning to go to Arizona to go to Fort Huachuca, and without his booklet I wouldn't have known where to stay.

 "One time, not long after my return from Cornell, there was an international meeting on nuclear physics held at the nuclear lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  A German who had been working under me, Dr. Ramm, and I traveled to the hotel for that meeting and when we went to register, a guy came over to me and said, 'I'm sorry, I don't want to do this, but this is a segregated town and the government has given this as a private contract and we have to obey the state law.  I'll get you a place to stay,' and he got a very nice family.  So I slept there and I paid for meals at the dining room there, but not in the dining rooms of the hotel.

 "Ramm would come to eat with me and finally quite a number of the whites would come and eat with me and someone asked, 'Do you run into this often?'  I said, 'Everywhere I go.'

 "Another time, before they had removed restrictions in Washington, I used my membership with Triple A to reserve a hotel room for me in Washington.  I went to a meeting at the Pentagon, came out of the Pentagon, came back to my hotel room.  You have to tell them before 5:00, you see, and I was there by 4:00.  The guy first looked at the clock, then stared at the clock, then leaned way over and then he called for somebody, the manager, and then he finally said, 'I'm sorry, we didn't tell Triple-A that we had reserved a room for you.  There are conventions and things going on here all the time and we told them that we would do all we could to place you.  Now, there's a hotel called the Dunbar....,' I said, 'Never mind, leave me alone.  I know how to find my way around', and I walked out.

 "Another one that I had once was when I went to Frenchman's Flats in Nevada where we had a nuclear test. I went out there and observed nuclear explosions, and then came back to the hotel where you had to come for airport pickup.  Now, my plane wasn't leaving until two something in the morning, so I walked up to the guy at the desk and said, 'May I have a room?  I don't have to go until two,' and he said, 'I'm sorry, we don't have any rooms.'  Right after that, four guys come up and said, 'Look, we're tired.  We've been on the road all day.  We got to have rooms.'  He says, 'Your rooms are right...,' after he told me he didn't have any.

 "I walked back into the lobby and sat down. There was a black guy sweeping the floor and he came by and swept under my foot. He would say, 'Hello,' and I would lift my feet and move and let him sweep.  He did this quite a few times.  Then he said, 'Is you the cook we were waiting for?' and I said, 'No, I'm not.' Later he says, 'I knew you weren't a cook, but the white guy at the desk asked me to check to find out who you were.'  They thought I was the cook that they were expecting and I didn't know where to go.  I said, 'Well, I'm not a cook,' and he said, 'Well, I could see you was dressed and I told them you must be a traveling man.'  I said, 'I'm not a traveling man, either.'  He came back to me again and he said, 'This place is terrible.  I'm from Los Angeles and we go anywhere we please there.'  I said, 'Look, don't tell me about Los Angeles.  It's not that good, either.  What have you done to change it here?"  He couldn't answer me.

 "All of the work for field tests and for tests of nuclear weapons and so-forth were done in this area.  We always had to have somebody out observing or testing or checking to see how army equipment held up in a nuclear environment.  We had to check propagation of radio waves through the hot region of an atmospheric nuclear explosion.  We had to check the calibration of the equipment to see that it worked all right, so that we could measure the dosage and tell what people were being exposed to, so that we could take care of the soldier in the field.

 "I had a lot of fun with that, from the fall of '48 until the fall of '53.

-----

 "In the fall of '53, I took over as section chief of the Radio Propagation section, or Electromagnetic Wave Propagation section, we called it then.

 "The whole business is a game of improvements or new techniques and almost every time something gets announced by a President, I'm sure he catches twelve people flatfooted.  As an example.  We were working on things for satellites, before anybody's satellite was up.  That was while I was in propagation, '53 to '56.  We called it 'Project Lunch Box' and we were planning all kinds of experiments to see what kinds of experiments you could put on board the satellite.  An interesting history, the three services had to compete for getting the right to launch it.

 "So I went down to a cosmic ray conference in Mexico and there was lots of plans about what they were going to put on satellites and the Russians never even admitted they were working in the satellite but because Eisenhower had just announced that we were, they kept trying to find out what weight would be carried, what would be the payload, how big an experiment could you put on.  So the Russians just kept asking questions of that sort and, of course, our people responded that that information was not provided in President Eisenhower's statement.

 "We knew a satellite could be launched.  We didn't know that we had reached the ability to do it.  You see, we didn't reach it at all in Eisenhower's time, Kennedy said we will do it and we'll put a man on the moon.  Then they took this thing away from the navy and gave it to the people in Huntsville, Alabama.  That's the army.

 "A lot of people say that the work I was very much a part of, bouncing and receiving radar signals off the moon heralded, the US’s ability to send manned spacecraft.  I don't discourage those comments.  My whole feeling is that without radar to the moon, they could still have done it if they had been pressing the business of missiles.  Like the V-2 that the Germans fired.  Just keep building those things and getting better, you could still have done it.  But as I say, if people say that this heralded the space age, then I say fine.  You take one step at a time and since we had learned to do radar coverage patterns and echoing areas and signal to noise ratios and ranges on things, the next thing to do was to make one that had the right parameters to reach the moon.

 "The other thing to do was to find out what can you do with it, either scientifically or technologically.

-----

 "John C. Carter used to get some of the blacks together, quite a number of times, at somebody's house. And he asked me if I'd like to go and my wife and I went and we talked.  We used to play bridge together with him and his wife.  We went visiting in the community, but generally I stayed home with my wife and the kids.  When we did visit somebody that we worked with, it was usually a Jewish couple who invited us and we invited them in turn.

-----

 "We had internal training programs.  In fact, I taught in the internal training programs quite a lot.  Several of us got together on that.  Engineers hadn't had much to do with microwaves and so they hadn't had much to do with learning fields and strengths.  They lumped circuit calculations, so the engineers had more trouble than physicists did because physicists had had field theory.

 "Everybody found out that the agricultural department had a graduate school in these areas and they tried to find out how it was done.  After some work, they got an arrangement with Rutgers to give graduate courses in Electrical Engineering.  Believe it or not, Rutgers didn't have a graduate course program in engineering at that time, but they put together one and came down and they gave it.

 "Dr. Anderson asked me to teach a course in elementary calculus and I taught a course in differential and integral calculus in one summer to all of the engineers who were entering Rutgers that fall.  I was surprised, some of these engineers didn't have the slightest idea about calculus. Finally, at the end of the class there were only about four people I would have passed in that course in calculus and there were about twenty-nine or thirty in the class.

 "It came about because some of us were interested and after we got it started semi-officially, Personnel took it over and it became a regular thing called the Internal Training Program.  This was for anybody.  In fact, in most of my classes they were all white.

 "John Ruse, who was head of antenna section, was very happy to cooperate and help in this.  By the way, the first time I heard something that sounded like it could lead to this thing we now call the stealth bomber, came from John Ruse, back in about '42 or '44.

 "In October of '56, I received the first Secretary of the Army research and Study Fellowship presented by President Eisenhower.  This was to study radio astronomy and solar physics or ionospheric propagation.  By this time, I was head of the propagation section, having taking over for the chief, since both chief and assistant chief had been moved into unclassified areas as a result of the visits of Senator McCarthy and his committee.  I had this for three years and in '56 I went to Harvard for a year and worked in radio astronomy.  Then I traveled overseas to England.

 "I returned in '58 and wrote a detailed summary of my work to the Secretary of the Army.

 "In '58-'59, they exploded three bombs over the Atlantic Ocean.  What they tried to show was that an explosion sent out some kind of an EM pulse signal which was received as if you had two signals traveling in different tunnels, one above the other, arriving at a certain place at different times.  The time kept getting farther apart as they traveled; this explanation was offered by Bommke after the data were collected and analyzed by him and his group.  This result has been shown to be incorrect by two independent groups of scientists.

 "All of the signals primarily traveled at the velocity of light, except that below the bomb there was a compression in the ionosphere; the plasma came down through the top of the troposphere and was converted into another electromagnetic wave.  It traveled at the speed of light, too.  So all you had was a constant difference at every station and what these guys thought they had was a staggering distance at every station.

 "And Bommke, who was German now in charge of Exploratory Research for Surveillance, and was very difficult to work with, had such a crazy model that all their conclusions were wrong.

 "One other German scientist who worked for him said, 'I know it's wrong, but you know, whenever I talked to him I find he has such a quick insight to things, sometimes much quicker than I could ever get.  So I don't know that I can confront him on this.'  But I confronted him.

 "Then much later I attended an international conference that was held in Los Angeles and this Russian woman, a geophysicist, was there and she was telling about how the conclusions were wrong.

 "Three bombs were exploded and for a long time nobody said anything about it.  It was called 'Project Argus'.  One day the New York Times came out with a big headline and a full-page story. It turns out that the Russians had already made measurements.  Why would they do it in the Atlantic and not the Pacific?  I think it's because it's more convenient and you could have all of your scientists right up and down the Atlantic coast.  I talked with one of the best authorities on earth currents so that we had a good station up at New England that really worked.

 "You see the one thing I had against Bommke is you couldn't talk to him and I wouldn't work for Jesus Christ if he wouldn't listen to me.  When they reassigned him, they moved him to another position.  They didn't downgrade him or anything.  They just took him and he was no longer head of the exploratory research and they said, 'You don't give your subordinates proper credit.'  Now, that wasn't the reason they did it, but that was a good reason.  So they did it for one reason and named another.

 "I was in exploratory research for as short a time as I had to be, a matter of months.  The latter part of '58.  Then I went in as a consultant to the Division Director in the Applied Physics Division.  I was there until I think it was '65 when they set up the Passive Sensing.

-----

 "As far as the McCarthy hearings go, let me say that the only people I heard about who were in trouble were those who worked in my unit.  Usually the adjutant sent to interview or to talk with them.  You would never know what happened in the conversation.

 "If a guy lost his clearance, it was up to the security people to see that he didn't come into the area.  I never got any word.  Only once did I get involved early to help someone.   I heard a guy tell that when he was a little boy, he grew up as a Catholic and he was an altar boy.  I remembered it, and later when he said they were after him I said they are fighting any way they can; you fight back that same way.  'Write back to them and tell them that you grew up as a Catholic and that you were an altar boy when you were a young man and that you subscribe to the Catholic church's position on communism.'  He looked at me for a moment and I said, 'Write it and send it in.'  He said, 'I seldom go to church.'  I said, 'They don't give a damn.  They don't know.'  So he went back and wrote it.  He didn't get put out of there.

-----

 "In '65 I was in the area of electromagnetic theory, radio propagation, nuclear effects, and EMP--electromagnetic pulse that's generated by nuclear explosion.  I wrote a report that was finished somewhere close to the end of the year, and the colonel and a couple of other scientists thought it was worthwhile and somehow they made another reorganization and in the process of making the reorganization, they put me in as the technical director of Passive Sensing.

 "Passive sensing meant detection without having to generate a signal.  Radar is active; you send to a source and it comes back. In infrared detection, you detect the sources by what they are doing and you don't tell the enemy what you're up to.  They had something that's called FLIR, forward looking infrared, which is like infrared television.  You could see on your screen heat, or a difference in temperature. For example, when we went out to Hughes Aircraft they were watching the cars on the highway.  It was interesting to watch the German-made car that had its motor glowing in the back.  So passive sensing and all of that was in my hands, and so was certain research in the nuclear area.  Not the making of equipment, but the detection of radiation and things of that sort.

-----

 "Towards the end of my career, we had a number of accomplishments.   One is we published several papers in the Journal of Applied Physics and in the Journal of Vacuum Science.
Also, there was the Army Science Conference paper.  In '61 I  received an Army Science Achievement Award as well as an honorary doctorate in science from Monmouth College.

 "In '82, Wiley College elected me to it's Science Hall of Fame.

Page updated December 31, 2003   page created February 10, 2001

Content copyright Professor Robert Johnson Jr. used with permission