On June 12, as the German blitzkrieg attacked the French countryside, Bush went to see Roosevelt to make his case for the creation of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). They were joined in the Oval Office by Harry Hopkins, the president’s closest aide. Bush presented Roosevelt with a single sheet of paper clearly spelling out his plan for mobilizing the scientific community for war. The document, containing a brief four-paragraph outline of his proposed agency, stipulated that the NDRC would be made up of members from “War, Navy, Commerce, National Academy of Sciences, plus several distinguished scientists and engineers, all to serve without remuneration.” Its function would be “to correlate and support scientific research on mechanisms and devices of war.” The NDRC would work in close liaison with the military, but independent of its control.
After months of feeling that his hands were tied by a campaign promise to protect American boys and adhere to the isolationist policy, Roosevelt jumped at the opportunity to take constructive action on another front. He had already had to decline countless requests from Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, and France’s beleaguered premier, Paul Reynaud, calling for America to intervene in the war. If America would not come to their aid, it could at least supply them with arms. What was needed in the present emergency was a massive weapons production program, one that could be up and running in record time. Bush agreed to head up the program and was promised a direct line to the Oval Office and as much money as he needed from the president’s special fund. It took only ten minutes for Roosevelt to approve Bush’s audacious plan, scrawling, “O.K.—FDR,” across the memo.
On June 14, German tanks rolled into an undefended Paris. One week later, France surrendered and was forced to suffer the humiliation of signing the agreement in the same railway coach in which the Germans had signed the armistice of November 1918. The photograph of a triumphant Hitler posing in front of the military convoy was on the front pages of all the newspapers. England braced for a bloody summer. “The Battle of France is over,” Churchill told the House of Commons. “I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin.” Stimson, who was now seventy-two and had spent the past year enmeshed in a difficult and exhausting legal case, could no longer stay silent. On the night of June 17, he gave a radio address laying out seven steps that should be taken immediately in the national defense, beginning with the repeal of the “ill-starred so-called neutrality act.” He also called for the opening of U.S. ports to British and French vessels for repair; the accelerated supply by every means in our power—if necessary, by navy convoy—of war matériel to England and France; and the immediate adoption of compulsory military service. The following day, he received a call from President Roosevelt asking him to become secretary of war.
Upon hearing that Stimson was entering the cabinet, Lawrence immediately wrote Loomis: “I know if I were Colonel Stimson I would certainly be depending on you for all sorts of advice,” he predicted. “In fact, I would create a new job, Under-Secretary of War for Technical Matters, and draft you for the job.”
IF anyone could mold a group of civilian scientists and skeptical military leaders into an all-out American defense organization, Loomis believed it was Bush. He was, by nature, an inventor, a fixer of problems and machines. “I’m no scientist, I’m an engineer,” Bush would often say of himself, and the assertion reflected his impatient, hard-nosed Yankee demeanor. He had a long-standing interest in the applications of science to war that dated back to his days doing antisubmarine research in World War I. Throughout his career, first at MIT and then at Carnegie, he had straddled the worlds of basic and applied research and brokered deals between university and industry laboratories. Every bit as autocratic as Loomis himself, he was not afraid to break the rules or bend institutions to his will. There was a strong personal and professional bond between the two men and a mutual admiration for their ability to get things done. “Of the men whose death in the summer of 1940 would have been the greatest calamity for America,” Loomis would observe a few years later, “the president is first, and Dr. Bush would be second or third.”
Bush, in turn, held Loomis in extremely high regard. He knew of his reputation as a financial genius and knew firsthand of his keen scientific mind. According to Caryl Haskins, who worked for Bush in Washington during the war, the two men had an extremely warm and easy relationship, and when they conducted business it sounded “just like two friends having a conversation.” For two such charismatic, larger-than-life men, they could both be very subtle. They thought along such similar lines at times that they almost finished each other’s sentences, and along with a bone-dry sense of humor, they shared a love of tobacco. Loomis was always lighting up cigarette after cigarette from the pack of Lucky Strikes he always carried on him, and Bush was rarely without his pipe. “Alfred was the same-caliber man as Bush, and they recognized it in each other,” recalled Haskins. “It was simply a great personal relationship. Alfred was more talented than most people, and he had a gift for talented people. Bush respected him, and knew his abilities well enough to ask him to come to Washington to help. And he did come.”
Bush decided to divide the NDRC into five divisions, each to be headed by a member of the main committee. Each division would then be composed of several sections, which would serve as the true operating units of the organization. The section chairmen were therefore key and had to be chosen with great care. They would be respected civilian scientists and required to work at demanding full-time jobs on a voluntary basis. Bush wasted no time drafting his friends, appointing Conant as his deputy and tapping Jewett, Compton, and Loomis for top positions. He also called up Richard Tolman, the respected theorist of physical chemistry, who was head of the California Institute of Technology, and Conway Coe, the commissioner of patents. Together, they would serve as the top scientific generals in the coming war. It would fall to them not only to recruit scores of individual scientists, but also to write hundreds of research contracts with universities, industrial laboratories, and research centers. Each would have the power to vastly enrich his own institutions and friends, which under different circumstances would have given rise to all kinds of questions about conflicts of interest. But the crisis demanded that everyone act decisively and judiciously, and Bush trusted his team to rise to the challenge. No one was more vulnerable to charges of self-interest than Loomis, who had been a prominent Wall Street figure and enemy of the New Deal, and whose cousin, Henry Stimson, had just been named Roosevelt’s secretary of war. Their “kinship,” wrote Bush, “might easily have created a problem but for Alfred’s care to avoid it.” But the threatening world would make for strange bedfellows, and Loomis and Stimson were the first of many New Deal critics the Roosevelt administration would embrace in the months to come.
To deflect any criticism Loomis’ appointment might attract from the ranks of professional scientists, Bush and Compton quickly mounted an effort to have his name put forward in the National Academy of Sciences, a private organization created to provide expert advice to the government, whose membership carried their cadre’s ultimate seal of approval. Lawrence had suggested the idea to Compton in a letter only a few weeks earlier, no doubt at Loomis’ behest:
I hope the microwave work at MIT is being accelerated, as doubtless it is. It is mighty fortunate that Van [Bush] is in Washington to influence the army and navy toward a more scientific approach to the problem of warfare, and I wish that Alfred now were a member of the National Academy in order that he could be more influential in that direction. . . .
With Bush and Compton in on the game, Lawrence enthusiastically championed Loomis’ nomination, and as he promised Compton in a brief note on June 5, “I am going to make it a business to see each member of the physics section.” He added that he would also like to lobby another section but was not sure what field was most appropriate, biology or engineering: “Alfred certainly is well-known to the biologists for all his work, but whether he is known to the engineers is not clear to me.” He s
uggested Compton talk to various academy members and “find out how they feel about it.” Bush, Compton, and Lawrence then turned to Jewett to help resolve the awkward matter of how best to frame Loomis’ scientific contribution and make sure that it passed muster with the academy members. As the reluctant Jewett warned Compton, someone as eclectic as Loomis would not be an easy sell:
I am returning herewith, signed, the Intersectional Nomination for Loomis, which you sent me with your letter of June 20th. While there is no question Loomis would be a valuable addition to membership of the Academy, and while Bush and I have talked the matter over extensively, I had a bit of uncertainty as to whether it was best for me to sign because of my position as President of the Academy. However, by signing you will see I have resolved my own doubts.
As between the two proposals for nomination, I incline toward the two-section combination of Physics and Engineering because I believe it would be easier to qualify Loomis as an engineer than as a physicist. However, if he can be qualified as a physicist I am sure a large majority of the engineers will support him and it might make it easier getting in more border-field people. . . .
It took months of tireless “electioneering,” as Compton put it, to get Loomis in under the heading of physicist. As he wrote Lawrence at one point, “My defense for presenting Loomis’ case was simply that his activities were so much on the borderline of physics . . . that there was a danger of a man very valuable to the Academy being lost sight of because he fell betwixt and between formalized sections.” Compton also warned Lawrence to step back from too much overt politicking: “I doubt whether it would be advisable for another letter to go out on behalf of Loomis but I do think that a little personal missionary work as the occasion offers, or perhaps a personal letter to a few members of the Section who are such close friends of yours that the letter would not be taken amiss, might be worthwhile. . . .”
In the meantime, Bush had arranged for the NDRC to be given jurisdiction over the Briggs uranium committee and various other subcommittees, all unpublicized. American scientists were asked to comply with wartime censorship and exercise extreme discretion, and scientific journals were instructed not to publish papers on fission and any related subjects. The NDRC immediately began to inventory the country’s research facilities and technical manpower. Compton approached the military agencies to compile a list of critical projects, those programs not yet under way that would be worthwhile, and those needing to be supplemented. As the program began to take form, and Conant assumed more of the burden of administrating the massive effort, he was amazed by the autonomous and far-reaching powers granted to Bush and his deputies at the NDRC: “Scientists were to be mobilized for the defense effort in their own laboratories. A man who we of the committee thought could do a job was going to be asked to be the chief investigator; he would assemble a staff in his own laboratory if possible; he would make progress reports to our committee through a small organization of part-time advisers and full-time staff.”
Bush himself later admitted he had pulled off something of “an end run, a grab by which a small company of scientists and engineers, outside established channels, got hold of the authority and money for the program of developing new weapons.”
Over a period of weeks, responsibility was divvied up among the five main divisions, with Compton assigned to take charge of Division D—the radar division. Compton asked Loomis to be chairman of the special microwave committee (Section D-1). He netted the assignment in part because he had been immersed in the subject for the past year and quite possibly knew more about radio detection than anyone, and in part because of the close relationship he had forged with Compton and Bush. Moreover, Loomis had proven himself a gifted improviser in marshaling support for the big cyclotron, a man who could move mountains if they stood in his way. It also just so happened that he possessed one of the finest facilities in the world to carry out exactly this kind of work and was presently doing pioneering radar research at his Tuxedo laboratory in conjunction with MIT.
Loomis chose the members of his own panel, appointing Bowles as executive secretary. After contacting Ralph Bown of the Bell Telephone Company, and Hugh Willis of Sperry, he proceeded to hold his first meetings at Tuxedo Park on July 14, 1940, before any of them had received their formal appointments from Bush. They set out their administrative needs, methods, and objectives and decided for the sake of speed and efficiency that it was important to keep the group small. They defined their goal in clear terms: “So to organize and coordinate research, invention, and development as to obtain the most effective military application of microwaves in the minimum time.”
From day one, Bowles chafed at working under a man he felt, for obvious reasons, was an interloper. Loomis’ unorthodox and occasionally high-handed methods would further stoke his resentment. “The microwave committee was to me a kind of mongrel gathering at the start,” Bowles recalled, placing the blame squarely on Bush’s shoulders for approving it in the first place. “Loomis had been a rather devious financier, and an operator par excellence. You never knew what the hell he was up to behind the scenes. But he was a driver, and brilliant, too brilliant for his own good in my judgment.” But the British had already established the noble tradition of using “indigent scientists” to help apply modern technology to the military need of the country. “In Bush’s mind, as I read it,” said Bowles, “there was in this country a vast body of highly trained minds in the field of science diffusely spread throughout the country in our educational matrix. Here was a resource scattered from here to breakfast, relatively inactive as it stood, which could contribute material were it organized and well directed.”
Despite their differences, Loomis and Bowles managed to work together fairly well in the beginning. The committee was composed primarily of representatives from industry, including GE, Sperry, Westinghouse, RCA, and Bell Telephone. The army also had a presence, though it was there primarily to raise questions. It was an awkward mix, and not easy to steer, which made for lots of disagreements, according to Bowles, and “a lot of unhappiness.” Early on, the committee members deadlocked on the issue of who should actually produce the radar sets. The corporate worthies felt the MIT scientists should be confined to basic research and kept finding reasons why their great industrial laboratories should be put in charge of the primary development and production. Loomis and Bowles both felt strongly that the bulk of the development work should be done in one dedicated laboratory, and they ought not to depend solely on outside contractors. To overcome the deadlock, a number of decisions were passed up to Compton and the NDRC, which sided with Loomis. When Jewett, the head of Bell Labs, found out, he felt he had been “double-crossed.” This led to “a very hot meeting,” recalled Compton, and some tension between various parties for some time thereafter. But had Loomis not held his ground, Bowles later grudgingly admitted, the radar project certainly would have ended up solidly “in industry’s control.”
The microwave committee’s first priority was to determine what research the army and navy wished them to undertake and to award the contracts to the best candidates. During the summer months, Compton and Loomis toured all of the important radar developments, first paying a visit to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) at Anacostia, and then the army installation at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where Colonel (later General) Roger B. Colton, director of the Signal Corps Laboratories, showed them around. Because both the navy and army research projects were regarded as strict military secrets, no “outsiders” knew of them, so Compton and Loomis had to be officially informed of the significant technical advance known as pulse radar.
The basic principle of pulse ranging, which characterizes modern radar, had been around for some time and had been discovered almost simultaneously in America, England, France, Germany, and Japan. In the United States, it was first used in 1925 by Merle Tuve and Gregory Breit at the Carnegie Institution in Washington for measuring the distance to the earth’s ionosphere, which is the radio-reflecting l
ayer near the top of the atmosphere. The technique consisted of sending skyward a train of very short impulses, a small fraction of a second in length, and measuring the time it took the reflected pulse to return to earth. In 1933, it had occurred to scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory that the pulse technique could be used to detect objects such as airplanes and ships. Over the next few years, they solved the problems of generating pulses of the proper length and shape, developing a common radar antenna for both transmitting and receiving called a “duplexer,” and designing cathode ray tube displays for the received pulses. By 1936, the army, working independently at their Signal Corps Laboratories, had invented a detector for use by antiaircraft batteries. The system not only detected radio pulses from aircraft, but passed on information about their direction, elevation, and range. Even though the British had lagged behind, they quickly took the lead in radio detection under the Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt, who first patented radar in 1935 for his meteorological studies and then, in an environment of impending war, quickly applied it to military defense.
By the time Compton and Loomis were being introduced to pulse radar, the navy had named their system “radar,” a manufactured term that was an abbreviation of “radio detection and ranging,” while the army referred to their outfit as RPF, “radio position finding.” The British, meanwhile, called their closely guarded system RDF. As the war effort got under way, the more convenient term radar would be adopted by common consent by the U.S. forces and subsequently, in 1943, by the British. All the radar development projects were “shrouded with a terrific amount of secrecy,” according to Compton, and they came away with the distinct impression that neither branch was aware of the research being done by the other service. Consequently, they “felt duty bound to avoid being a channel by which information could be conveyed from one group to the other.” The third meeting of the microwave committee was held on July 30 in Washington. The night before, there was a big dinner at the Wardman Park Hotel attended by Bush, Compton, and Jewett, followed by an evening discussion in the large suite Loomis kept there for such purposes. Loomis introduced the senior army and navy officers to the various committee members, and another trip to review the radar equipment was arranged.
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