Category: Radar

"GOOD MORNING, MOON"

10/4/2019

The moon is in the ascendant this weekend. The theme of this year’s World Space Week (October 4-10), which begins today, is “The Moon: Gateway to the Stars.” Coincidentally, International Observe the Moon Night, a moveable feast that occurs in late September or early October, happens to fall on October 5 - tomorrow - in 2019.

World Space Week, inaugurated in 1999 by the United Nations, and Observe the Moon Night, launched by NASA in 2009 to celebrate its return to moon exploration, are public engagement programs intended to increase awareness of space exploration and science. Both organizations, however, have taken the short view of the history of space exploration. The beginning of World Space Week commemorates the launch of Sputnik 1, the first human-made earth satellite, on October 4, 1957, which is described as “opening the way for space exploration.” NASA also dates the "Dawn of the Space Age" to the late 1950s, when a series of unsuccessful attempts by the USA and the USSR to orbit, impact, or carry out a "fly-by" of the moon culminated in a Soviet Union fly-by on January 2, 1959 - listed as a partial success because the goal was impact.

* * * * *

Project Diana enthusiasts know better. The true dawn of the space age, the event that opened the way for space exploration, occurred on January 10, 1946, when a small band of radar scientists at Camp Evans on the coast of New Jersey said “hello” to the moon, and for the first time ever in human history, the moon said “hello” back.

At moonrise, 11:48am, the men aimed their antenna at the horizon and started transmitting. Their first few tries were unsuccessful, but at 11:58am, the moon began answering - tentatively, then definitively. The conversation continued until 12:09pm, when the moon moved out of radar range. On the following three days, and on eight additional days during the month, two-way communication resumed: Signals were sent, and around 2.5 seconds later, the time it took to make the 800,000km round trip, the moon reflected back the greeting from Planet Earth.

* * * * *

And just like that, Project Diana disproved once and for all the going hypothesis that the ionosphere could not be penetrated by radar. By adding the radio band to the visible portion of the electromagnet spectrum, the use of radar expanded our observational capabilities tenfold. Not only that, it represented the first-ever application of radar astronomy, which offered the possibility not simply of observation but also communication with other parts of the universe.

A practical result of the birth of radar astronomy was that measuring the distance to and velocity of a heavenly body or a spacecraft became so accurate that over thirty years later, even though other methods were available that might have been adequate, it remained the method of choice for tracking the Apollo 11 mission. The moon bounce technology pioneered by Project Diana - that is,
reflecting microwaves off the moon and analyzing the reflected signal - was subsequently used for topographical mapping of Venus and other planets near enough to be within radar range, measurement and analysis of the ionosphere, and radio control of space travel, missiles, and orbiting artificial satellites.

The space program as we know it today could not exist in the absence of this advance.

* * * * *

A less tangible contribution of Project Diana was its effect on the imagination not just of the public but also of the scientific community. As I have written elsewhere in this blog, “[T]he inspirational and aspirational elements of the project dynamized future research by emboldening scientists to consider such new and exciting possibilities as artificial satellites, space probes, and yes, human spaceflight, in the process garnering widespread public support for such efforts in ways that have been well-documented here and elsewhere.”

One more way in which Project Diana inaugurated the space age: It started the tradition of naming space programs after Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. In actual fact, as someone pointed out, most of the subsequent programs were named after gods and not goddesses. All that has now changed with Artemis, named for Diana’s Greek alter ego, a collaboration between NASA and its commercial partners to land “the first woman and the next man” in the region of the lunar south pole by 2024. The longer-term goal of the Artemis program is to establish a sustainable colony on the moon, and eventually to send a crewed spaceflight to Mars.

* * * * *

After the success of Project Diana, the team was disbanded and its members reassigned to other work. When the Army then started jobbing out much of its research program, scientists originally attracted to the Signal Corps by the research opportunities it offered came to feel that the jobs they had come to do no longer existed; many, like my father, left for positions in private industry, where the action, they concluded, now was.

Another decade would elapse before the first artificial satellites were rocketed into space, followed rapidly by crewed spaceflights. But despite this long hiatus, Project Diana was no mere “precursor,” it was truly the foundation of all subsequent space exploration.

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D-DAY AND CAMP EVANS

6/6/2019

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“Full victory - Nothing else.” Those were General Eisenhower’s orders to the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division at the Royal Air Force base in Greenham Common, England, as they waited to board their planes for the first assault wave.

Lt Col Simon R Sinnreich, America’s highest ranking Jewish officer during World War II, had a similar take.
Our family didn’t know him during that era, but Si and his wife Emilie became close friends of my parents soon after we moved to Long Island in 1956 - a friendship that lasted to the end of their lives and has continued into the next generation of Sinnreichs and Stodolas. Although it wasn’t easy to get Si to talk about the War or his service in Europe, my husband, who has a gift for drawing people out, once asked him how many troops the generals were prepared to lose in the Battle of Normandy. Si’s answer was stark and simple: “As many as it took.”

For most of us, the term "D-Day" evokes haunting images of wave after wave of landing craft approaching the Normandy beaches, of the hapless paratrooper left hanging for hours after his chute became entangled on a church steeple in the nearby village of Sainte-Mère-Église, and of course of the Normandy American Cemetery with its seemingly endless expanse of crosses. On this 75th anniversary of D-Day, when solemn military ceremonies and moving first-person accounts by the few remaining veterans, now in their nineties, flood the media, these heroic exploits and appalling sacrifices claim most of our attention.

Diorama at the InfoAge Science and History Center of an American paratrooper caught on a church steeple.

World War II era mobile radar unit on the site of the former Camp Evans, now the InfoAge Science and History Center.

Less well known, though also worthy of recognition, are the contributions of the so-called “wizard war” to this historic victory. Here are a few words about Camp Evans’ participation in this effort:

To induce Field Marshal Rommel to hesitate or possibly even to deflect the German Panzer Divisions to the wrong place, Eisenhower stationed a shadow invasion fleet in Northern England, complete with dummy inflatable tanks, and leaked misleading information through his network of spies to suggest the invasion would take place at Calais, not Normandy. He knew, however, that this ruse would not be enough to deceive Rommel, because the Nazis had radar units all along the French coast searching for signs of an invading fleet. The Allies' only hope of evading these tireless sentries was to destroy as many of them as possible and then to use the same strategy of adding competing information to the mix.

The radar scientists at Camp Evans, along with their counterparts in Great Britain, the US Navy, Harvard, and MIT, were tasked with developing the equipment needed to carry out these plans. Their efforts enabled bombers to zero in on German radar sites, to interfere with (jam) their communications, and to introduce confusion by dropping “chaff” - mostly strips of aluminum - to create a cloud of indecipherable images on Nazi radar screens, ploys that caused Rommel to delay sending Panzer Divisions to Normandy long enough for the Allies to establish a beachhead. As a result, the German air response was next to non-existent. In addition, radar sets designed at Camp Evans landed on the beaches to protect the troops as they fought to fend off Panzer attacks.

By D-Day, radar and its military uses had clearly come a long way in both sophistication and precision since the Chain Home network described in my most recent post. Using radar not only to obtain information but to spread disinformation, then called radar countermeasures, is now known as Electronic Warfare or EW, the field in which my father continued for the remainder of his career.

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A VISIT TO LITTLE GLEMHAM

5/27/2019

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My father’s maternal grandfather, Arthur King, emigrated to the U.S. in the late 19th century from Little Glemham, Suffolk, England, where his father and then his brother had served as clergymen at St. Andrew's Church. He left behind a large and close family of siblings, and for the rest of his life, black-and-white photos and letters written double-sided in a spidery script on flimsy "airmail" paper flowed freely across the Atlantic.

My great grandfather Arthur King. He contracted polio late in life and walked with a cane.

At a family wedding a few years ago, surrounded by the people I love best - my husband, my daughters, my grandchildren, my siblings and their families - I had the sudden insight that as the oldest grandchild of Edwin and Beatrice King Stodola, I am the Stodola family matriarch.

With great honor comes great responsibility! In particular, I find myself heir to most though probably not all of the Stodola family archives. This material did not come to me all at once, but piecemeal over the course of many decades. I can't even remember how it all made its way to me. Some of it I've had as long as I can remember. Some my father packed away in cardboard cartons when we moved from New Jersey to New York. Once my mother died, he never again opened them or made any attempt to sort their contents. Later the boxes, still unopened, were carted from our basement on Long Island to a storage unit in Florida. My stepmother tried valiantly over time to identify and get things into the hands of the right Stodola child (mostly me, because she knew I would care and share), But like me, she was hampered by cryptic labels (my favorite: "him and me") and nonexistent dates, and in addition knew far less about our family history than I.

Although I have eight great grandparents and sixteen great great grandparents, just like everyone else, the Kings have always seemed a little larger than life to me because I heard so much about them from my grandmother, who as an adored only child maintained close ties with her father’s relatives in England; and because the Kings were a prolific and retentive lot, leaving a rather large paper burden behind for their descendants to sift through. Over the years, I have threaded my way through most of the documents in my possession and succeeded in identifying many though not all of the photos. I have also connected, through DNA matching and more traditional methods, with second and third cousins who still live in the UK and are much more steeped in King history than I.

In order to become an American citizen, my great-grandfather had to renounce allegiance to Queen Victoria. His citizenship papers are part of my King family collection.

In 1998, before genealogy tourism was even really a thing, Ovide and I made a fascinating visit to the tiny town of La Copechagnière near the Loire Valley of France, birthplace of his ancestor Paul Vachon who in the 17th century brought his three sons to the New World, giving one the “dit” name of Pomerleau. As a family history buff with a keener interest in how our forebears participated in the larger sweep of human history than in an exhaustively-documented series of begats, I concluded that If one hopes to learn about the life and times of one's ancestors, there is no substitute for walking where they once walked.

I vowed on the spot that we would one day make a similar pilgrimage to Little Glemham.

“One day” finally arrived more than 20 years later, this past April, when we embarked on a two week tour of London and environs that included an exploration of Little Glemham in Suffolk and a visit with two second-cousins-once-removed in Sussex. Except for the stress of driving on the left, along narrow roads with many roundabouts, which fell solely upon Ovide, and the stress of navigating, which was my bailiwick, our vacation could only be described as idyllic. Even the weather cooperated - we never even unpacked our umbrellas.

The rest of this essay is about our trip to the UK.

* * * * *

In case you are wondering where to find Little Glemham, population 187, it’s located just a couple of miles south of Great Glemham, population 224. Even the Brits have to google to find it. And yes, it’s really spelled that way - two m’s, no n’s.

When we started planning our itinerary, we realized we could include Easter in our schedule, which seemed a propitious time to visit St. Andrew’s. I emailed the current rector, who assured me that although St Andrew’s is now part of a “benefice” of eight churches - necessary because attendance had dwindled too much to justify weekly services at each church - an Easter service was indeed planned for St. Andrew’s.

On our first full day in East Anglia, knowing we might not have an opportunity to poke around much on Easter Day, we stopped by St. Andrew’s, which looked exactly as I remembered it in my photographs. The only problem was, it also looked like every other church in every other nearby village, even to the little gatehouse in front, with only minor variations in size and layout. These parish churches date back to the Middle Ages - starting life as Roman Catholic churches and after Henry VIII becoming Anglican - and I guess having hit on a successful formula, the builders decided to stay with it.

We were greeted by two devoted volunteer caretakers, Rod and June Clare, who were busily cleaning and decorating the church for Easter. No need to knock - like all the little churches we visited it is open 24/7, with signage apologizing profusely if for any reason it might have to be closed for even a few hours, just please close the door when you leave to keep the birds out - and we were welcome to stay as long as we wished.

Rod Clare sharing some of St. Andrew's rich history with me.

June Clare dusting and polishing.

St. Andrew's has been fortunate in its history and is happily well-loved by those few who remain on its rolls. Since it was first built in the 12th century, it has benefited from several updates in its first few centuries, from a restoration project in the 1850s, and from extensive recent repairs. Though the departure of the lead bellringer several years ago led to a silencing of the bells, they can now be heard once again thanks to a troupe of ringers that circulates among the local churches. (Listen to the bells of St. Andrews!)

Then...

Babies have been baptized at this font since the 13th century.

...and now.

The window on the north wall, given by parishioners and friends in honor of Arthur's brother, was the work of a local artist, Margaret Rope of Leiston.

After we finished our tour of the sanctuary, Rod led us to the King family plot in the churchyard, where we found monuments marking the graves of my great great grandfather and several of his descendants. Though the stone was partially effaced with time, we could make out the words “parish priest” faintly etched on the side. My grandmother had always referred to him as “rector," so I consulted Professor Google and found that the terms rector and parish priest, along with vicar and curate, are used more or less interchangeably despite barely perceptible differences in their technical definitions. (My brother, who has spent lots of time in the UK, claims that “understanding the ins and outs of the Anglican Church is like cricket - if you weren’t raised with it, it will always be a Mystery!”)

I assumed at first that the charming old home next to the church was where my great grandfather had grown up but later learned that by the time the Kings came on the scene, the rectory had been relocated about a mile away, to a house large enough to accommodate Richard Henry II, his wife Fanny, and their twelve children. A sign in front of that building (now privately owned) identifies it as the "Old Rectory", presumably making the one next to the church the old Old Rectory.

The original rectory, next to the church.

The newer "Old Rectory," about a mile from the church, where the Kings lived.

* * * * *

We arrived early on Easter Day so that we would be sure to find seats. We needn't have worried - the six of us who attended could each have occupied a whole row with room to spare. I was repeatedly struck by the thought that Little Glemham was once home to enough parishioners being born, getting married, suffering, dying, and attending church each and every Sunday to provide Richard Henry King II with year-round full-time employment. He would probably roll over in his grave to learn that the attendees at the 2019 Easter service barely outnumbered the clergy, largely because Ovide and I were there and another man was in town for his father’s funeral, and that the current rector is a woman - who rushed off at the end to conduct another service in another part of her benefice.

* * * * *

Also in honor of Easter Day, Glemham Hall (more properly Little Glemham Hall) was open for a tour of the premises. Such tours are common in the UK, as many of the beautiful old Elizabethan stately homes that once formed the backbone of England's social, economic, and governmental system struggle to maintain themselves in a state of “arrested decay.” Today the key employees are more likely to be event planners than butlers. Unlike many such tours, however, this one was conducted by the lord of the manor himself, who had grown up in those 80-some rooms and knew it as no docent ever could.

The house was built by the DeGlemham family in the mid 16th century, replacing the moated manor house their forebears had built on the site in the 13th century. In 1709 the North family purchased the property, along with the lordship of the manor, and shortly thereafter made major structural changes to give it the beautiful Georgian facade it boasts today. During the latter half of the 19th century, when my great great grandfather was rector of St Andrew’s, the mansion was occupied by Alexander George Dickson, a Conservative Member of Parliament and second husband of the widow of Lord North.

Think Upstairs Downstairs. Think Downton Abbey. Think (as did I) of the rector of St Andrew’s being honored by an occasional invitation to tea at Glemham Hall.

Beautiful Glemham Hall

Phillip Hope-Cobbold, surrounded by his ancestors, welcoming his guests.

A modern painting of the Glemham Manor grounds, showing Phillip's two sons playing lawn tennis in the background.

The current lord of the manor is Major Philip Hope-Cobbold, a descendant on his mother’s side of the Cobbold family, who made their fortune in the 18th century by founding a major brewery. The Cobbolds bought the house from what was left of the North family in 1923, so in fact Philip Hope-Cobbold’s forebears just barely overlapped with the Kings’ tenure. Still, the tour was both intimate and amusing, and Philip himself was totally charming, leaving us satisfied that we had gained at least a little insight into a social system that somehow allowed the Kings in their rectory to interact in a carefully choreographed way, friendly but at a distance, with the occupants of the nearby manor house.

* * * * *

As luck would have it, East Anglia, land of my father’s forebears, also played a critical role in the history of radar during World War. The Bawdsey Radar Transmitter Block, just 15 miles from Little Glemham in the village of Bawdsey on the Suffolk coast, was the first operational radar station in the world, where British scientists and engineers secretly gathered during the 1930s to demonstrate that radio waves could in fact be used to locate moving targets. Chain Home, code name for a series of early warning radar antennas strategically placed all along the British coastline to detect and track incoming aircraft, fanned out from Bawdsey.

During the Battle of Britain in 1940, their resources stretched almost to the breaking point, the British sent a delegation to the United States to propose a marriage of British science and knowhow with American industrial capability. Public sentiment in America favored neutrality; Henry Tizard, head of the mission, took the bold step of showing the Americans the technical innovations they had achieved without any promise of reciprocation. As Tizard hoped, the sheer impact of British superiority in the development of radar was sufficient to convince the Americans it was in their own best interest to support the British effort, and thus began the amazingly productive British-American collaboration in the development of radar.

It was just around this time that my father left his entry-level job at the War Department assigning radio frequencies to Army facilities ("boring!") to begin his fledgling career as a radar scientist. Although the Tizard Commission visited Bell Labs in New Jersey and Columbia University in New York City, I have found no evidence of their having stopped in Belmar - and in fact the subsequent locus of collaboration focused on the creation and development of the famous Rad Lab at MIT rather than on work already in progress by the Army Signal Corps at Camp Evans. Still, it seems likely the American commitment to the British war effort, cemented by the Tizard Commission, set the stage for my father’s career in radar research and his particular expertise in moving target detection.

Although we didn't have a chance to visit the Bawdsey Radar Museum, we did spend a couple of engrossing hours at the Parham Airfield Museum near Little Glemham, housed in the original World War II Control Tower of Framlingham Air Force Station #153. The museum is dedicated to the 390th Bombardment Group, which carried out more than 300 combat missions in the Boeing B17 “Flying Fortress,” during which 19,000 tons of bombs were dropped and 342 enemy aircraft were downed. Nearly 200 American planes never returned, and today being Memorial Day, it seems especially fitting to honor the more than 700 service members killed in these risky missions. Also worthy of mention are the humanitarian flights undertaken just before V-E Day to supply desperately-needed food to the Dutch.

In a world where Americans aren’t universally welcomed or appreciated, it was heart-warming to bask in the affection and gratitude with which the Yanks are still, even after all these decades, remembered at Parham.

Ovide owned a Hallicrafter SX28 receiver as a teenage ham radio operator. More recently, he and some fellow Club members restored one at Station W8UM. So he was delighted to find one on display at the Parham Airfield Museum.

* * * * *

Over the past year or so I had become friendly with my DNA match Jane, a second-cousin-once-removed who is also descended from Richard Henry II, so we spent a few days at an inn near her home in Sussex, south of London. Jane and her husband David turned out to be the most gracious hosts imaginable. Jane is a superb cook who served up steak and kidney pie and other traditional delicacies, and David entertained us with a video he had made for the BBC back in the 1980s in which he persuaded some friends to help him mow his lawn by staging a very amusing lawnmower tango worthy of Monty Python. We also watched an episode of Escape to the Country, the BBC version of House Hunters (but much better), featuring a visit to the one-of-a-kind Black Cow Pure Milk Vodka distillery developed by a well-known maker of cheddar cheese in West Dorset - where their daughter (my third cousin) happens to be employed.

Cousin Jane introduced me to her cousin (and like Jane, my second-cousin-once-removed), Ian, and we enjoyed a delightful luncheon with him and his wife Nathalie. Ian, unlike me, is a bona fide genealogist, so it was gratifying to be able to help him fill in the blanks on Arthur’s family (including five generations of descendants with the middle name of King).

Of all the things he shared with me, nothing was more thrilling than his photos of the Boys’ Butterfly Collection. One of the few pieces of information I could coax from my father about his relationship with his grandparents was his fond memory of butterfly collecting expeditions with Arthur. Thanks to Cousin Ian, I now understand that this activity was not just an idiosyncratic passion of Arthur's, it was part of a King family tradition that he must have hoped my father would enjoy and carry on.

My great grandparents (Arthur and Vergetta Sayers King) with my father.

The King Boys' Butterfly Collection

After our time with Jane and Ian, we had one day left to tour Sussex and decided to spend it exploring Canterbury and its Cathedral. Coincidentally, the date of our visit (April 25) was probably very close to the date more than six centuries before on which Chaucer’s fictional pilgrims were busy concocting tales to entertain their fellow adventurers as they wended their way towards the Canterbury Cathedral. Even from today’s perspective, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are amazing structures, but to appreciate them fully, it is necessary to imagine them rising up almost literally out of nowhere, with nothing nearby of anywhere near the same magnitude; and then to imagine yourself a penitent who has never been more than a few miles from where you were born, whose sole experience with churches is with something on the scale of St. Andrew’s in Little Glemham. No wonder the pilgrims felt themselves in the presence of something supernatural and otherworldly.

* * * * *

My grandmother’s stories had given me the impression that a long line of Kings had been rectors of St. Andrew's in Little Glemham since time immemorial. In actual fact, my second great grandfather Richard Henry King II appears to have been the first to serve in that capacity, succeeded by his son Edward Septimus King (younger brother of my great grandfather Arthur, and of Richard Henry III, grandfather of my cousins Jane and Ian).

Richard Henry King II (1824-1886)

Edward Septimus King (1864-1925)

I have no further evidence of a King dynasty in Little Glemham. Richard Henry II himself was in fact baptized not in Little Glemham but in Mortlake, south of London, where the King family had apparently resided for a very long time: The King family crest that my cousins regard as authentic (as opposed to a somewhat different version painted by my grandmother that was a prominent part of my childhood iconography) is labeled “King of Mortlake/Arms granted 1589." I don't know the profession of Richard Henry King I, my third great grandfather, but like his forebears he was buried in Mortlake. His father, my fourth great grandfather Dr Charles King II, was a physician who lived and died in Mortlake.

Dr. Charles King II (1730-1814)

For much of its history Mortlake ("mort" apparently meaning "salmon," not "dead") was officially a village, though a village large enough to support a variety of industries including potteries whose products are still very much in demand, a tapestry works, a sugar refinery, and breweries at various times in its history. Its dreamy beauty was captured by JMW Turner in two landscapes painted in 1826 and 1827, depicting views of and from a large town house then known as Mortlake Terrace, commissioned by its owner. Currently Mortlake is a suburban district of London and a popular sleeper community.

In Little Glemham it was possible to walk where my ancestors had walked because the landscape has retained its small-village character and hasn’t changed beyond recognition. Probably Mortlake would have been more of a challenge.

At any rate, a quest for another day.

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edwin howard armstrong: DIANA's godfather

6/8/2018

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In 1991, just a few months before he died, my father was awarded the Armstrong medal and plaque by the Radio Club of America. Of all the accolades he received, none would have been more meaningful to him. Sadly, he was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and beyond grasping the nature of the honor that had been bestowed on him. He hadn’t forgotten, however, that Major Edwin Howard Armstrong was one of his heroes, and he would happily discourse about the importance of Armstrong’s work to anyone who would listen.

I now wish I had listened more closely.

* * * * *

Most radio buffs are familiar with Armstrong’s turbulent career in wireless communications, during which he revolutionized the field not once but repeatedly - in the process stirring up mighty opposition from stakeholders in a new way of doing business that had little use for lone-wolf inventors like Armstrong.

His earliest work focused on improving receiver sensitivity. While still in college, he perfected the regenerative circuit, which dramatically improved radio reception by means of a positive feedback loop in the receiver, using a triode tube recently invented by Lee De Forest. Armstrong went on to invent the superheterodyne, which still further improved reception by mixing an incoming high-frequency signal with a second tunable lower-frequency signal to produce a predetermined intermediate frequency (IF) still further improved reception. The superheterodyne outperformed every previous approach including his own regenerative receiver and remains the industry standard to this day.

He then turned his attention to developing wide-band frequency modulation (FM) radio. Radios in use at the time were designed to be sensitive to the strength or amplitude of the incoming signal (that is, amplitude modulation or AM), but were also sensitive to environmental disturbances such as thunderstorms or electromagnetic waves emanating from electronic equipment. No amount of tweaking or shielding could fix this problem. Armstrong took a radically different approach, arguing that by varying the frequency instead of the amplitude of the signal to be transmitted and designing receivers accordingly, such interference could be prevented. He devoted much of the remainder of his life to demonstrating the superiority of FM.

As a wedding gift to his wife, Armstrong (shown here on their honeymoon in Palm Beach) built the world's first boombox.

Armstrong, a fearless climber, atop RCA's 115-foot north tower on the roof of the 21-story Aeolian Hall in midtown Manhattan.

Unfortunately for Armstrong, the commercial potential of the burgeoning field of wireless communication created a mercilessly competitive environment dominated by huge, well-heeled corporations. Armstrong’s genius as a radio engineer was matched only by his naivete about the realities of organizational politics (“all substance and no style,” as one biographer put it). Wildly underestimating the ability of greed and self-interest to prevail against (as he saw it) simple truth and honesty, Armstrong engaged in a long series of time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes quixotic legal battles to defend and protect his own interests.

His first such encounter was with Lee De Forest, who responded to Armstrong’s success by laying claim to the idea of regeneration, despite little evidence that he even understood how the triode tube he invented worked, let alone that he had dreamed up Armstrong’s brilliant new application for it. The ensuing litigation lasted for over a decade, with AT&T throwing its muscle behind De Forest after buying up his patents. In the end the Supreme Court, befuddled by the technical details, ruled against Armstrong, despite universal recognition among his scientific peers that regeneration was his invention and not De Forest’s.

His conflict with De Forest, personally and professionally devastating though it was, paled in comparison to that subsequently elicited by the introduction of FM technology. By essentially eliminating the static that bedeviled AM radio, FM threatened the broadcasting industry not only by obsolescing millions of dollars worth of existing radio equipment overnight but also by diverting interest, attention, and coveted frequencies away from the anticipated Next Big Thing, television.

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) - led by David Sarnoff, formerly his friend and collaborator, now his bitter foe - was not about to take this lying down. Both fair means and foul were employed to thwart Armstrong: Lawsuits were filed and then intentionally dragged out, patents were infringed, royalties were withheld, reverse engineering was used to buttress fake claims of priority. Armstrong was forced to remove his equipment from the top of the Empire State Building, ostensibly to make room for television equipment, driving him to move his operation to Alpine NJ. Here the first FM station, W2XMN, began broadcasting in 1939 - but only after the FCC first revoked his license and then restored it but diverted FM into a new frequency band at limited power - again, supposedly to make way for TV channel 1. (Ironically the Alpine station was briefly resuscitated after radio communication from the World Trade Center came to an abrupt halt on Nine-Eleven.)

FM station W2XMN broadcast from Alpine, NJ, where Armstrong's 425 ft antenna tower dominated the Palisades landscape. It's still there!

Faced with the prospect of seemingly unending legal battles he could ill afford, Armstrong became despondent and even lashed out at his beloved wife Marion, who moved out of their home to escape further abuse. On the night of January 31, 1954, Edwin Armstrong donned his overcoat, scarf, gloves, and hat, removed the air conditioner from a window of his 13th floor apartment in Manhattan’s exclusive River House, and jumped to his death. Marion Armstrong continued to prosecute her husband’s unresolved infringement suits and ultimately triumphed, winning some $10 million in damages. Sadly, this vindication came too late to comfort or benefit Armstrong himself.

* * * * *

Far less known - perhaps because it remained highly classified for many years - is the story of Armstrong’s work on FM radar during World War II. Indeed, in Armstrong’s entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, this phase of his career is casually dismissed as “a hiatus caused by World War II.”

Politically conservative and proud of his military service in World War I, Armstrong generously extended to the US government royalty-free use of the patents he had so fiercely defended - a patriotic but costly gift. Meanwhile, in addition to his legal expenses, he was self-funding much of his research at Columbia (having declined a salary for his appointment as a full professor at Columbia in order to escape administrative duties and minimize teaching responsibilities), as well as his high-powered FM station in Alpine NJ. (His red and white antenna, all 425 feet of it, still looms over the surrounding Palisades landscape, where its affluent neighbors regard it as an eyesore.)

As his debts mounted catastrophically, his attorney, Alfred McCormack, urged him to accept government contracts for his investigations of long range radar. These contracts enabled Armstrong to hire an assistant, Robert Hull, a newly-minted Columbia graduate, and together the two set about adapting FM technology to radar. The end of World War II, however, brought these explorations to a close, leaving no clear indication of what they hoped to accomplish. Since then, continuous wave FM radar has found only specialized applications, and pulse radar remains the technology of choice for most purposes.

* * * * *

And here begins my quest to clarify the nature of Armstrong’s role in Project Diana. Starting with a standard SCR-271 early warning radar, Armstrong and Hull had transformed the equipment into a powerful transmitter and sensitive receiver using conventional pulse radar. The Project Diana team modified the set still further, adding a tunable crystal to allow the narrow band receiver frequency to be adjusted to compensate for the Doppler shift caused by the constant relative motion between the earth and moon.

As I worked on my most recent blog entry, about the famous bedspring antenna, I found myself becoming increasingly curious about whether Armstrong had directly interacted with the Project Diana team, and whether he had actually spent time with them at Camp Evans during this period. On the one hand, I had never, among all the first-person accounts I’d read by the Project Diana team, including my own oral history interview with my father, encountered any mention of face-to-face meetings or discussions with Armstrong. On the other hand, Belmar and Alpine are less than 100 miles apart, and Armstrong was highly familiar with the Marconi facility, where he and David Sarnoff in happier times had first listened to signals from his regenerative receiver.

The answers to these questions proved surprisingly elusive, even after I consulted such authoritative and comprehensive sources as Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis, Man of High Fidelity by Lawrence Lessing, The Invention that Changed the World, by Robert Buderi, and the librarians in charge of the Armstrong archives at Columbia University. Finally, with the help of Fred Carl, Director of the InfoAge Science History Learning Center, I found my way to Al Klase and Ray Chase, who work with the New Jersey Antique Radio Club's Radio Technology Museum at InfoAge, where they specialize respectively in the development of radar and Armstrrong's career.

Al very kindly directed me to an audio recording made in 2005 of an interview with Renville McMann, a panelist at a celebration broadcast from Alpine of the 70th anniversary of FM radio [starting at min 7:00]. In this loving reminiscence of Armstrong, McMann describes the time he innocently suggested that Armstrong point his equipment towards the moon - and with uncharacteristic vehemence, Armstrong refused. That feat, as McMann later learned, was reserved for the Army. “Armstrong had a duplicate setup of the Camp Evans equipment at Alpine,” adds Al; indeed, “the SCR-271 radar tower, sans antenna, is still there…. So clearly, there was direct contact with the Diana team. Armstrong's narrow-band receiver was crucial to the success of the project.”

Al goes on to observe, “It's easy to assume Armstrong visited Camp Evans during the Diana era, it was only a day trip, even without modern roads, but I see no hard evidence. Dave Ossman, in his excellent radio drama version of Empire of the Air [starting at min 7:26] has Armstrong at Evans for the first experiment, but rereading [the original book version of Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis, p. 298], we could attribute this to artistic license. I, too, would like to know if he was there.”

But as Ray muses, it appears that the famous radio pioneer took pains to maintain an "arm's length" relationship with the youthful Diana team to ensure that they got full credit for whatever successes they achieved. He did such a good job of covering his tracks that barring some unexpected scholarly find, the nature and extent of his personal interactions with the Project Diana team will remain shrouded in mystery.

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THE FAMOUS BEDSPRING ANTENNA

4/22/2018

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My parents, never known to be particularly demonstrative, were uncharacteristically ebullient. After months of intense activity and preparation, my father and his colleagues had “shot the moon” with radar waves, and the moon had echoed back: message received. “We did it!” he exclaimed, enfolding his wife in a bear hug. “I knew you would!” my mother replied with a broad grin. She knew from long experience that if my father said something could be done, it almost certainly could.

Not everyone, however, had shared my mother’s implicit faith that Project Diana would succeed. Radar had more than demonstrated its utility during World War II in locating enemy aircraft and submarines, but - hit the moon? Earlier unsuccessful efforts had convinced many that asking radio waves to pierce the ionosphere, hit a designated object in space, and then return back through earth’s atmosphere to the point of origin was expecting too much of the technology. Indeed, the standard method for measuring the distance to the ionosphere at that time was “pulse ranging” - that is, bouncing radio waves off the reflective surface of the ionosphere and timing their return, not passing through it.

Only a group of optimistic visionaries would attempt such a feat. Only a group of engineers would have the practical know-how to accomplish it.

This effort was the brainchild of Lt Col John "Jack" DeWitt, head of the Evans Signal Laboratory at Camp Evans in Wall, NJ. Right after the Japanese surrender in September of 1945, DeWitt was assigned the task of developing radars capable of detecting missiles from the Soviet Union. Since no missiles were available for a test,
DeWitt decided the moon could serve as a stand-in - and incidentally allow him to carry out a project he had dreamed of since long before World War II. Like my mother and unlike the skeptics, he was quite confident (despite a previous failure of his own several years earlier) that it could be done, if done right.

If ever there was a monument to American ingenuity, it is surely Project Diana. The approach, as I mentioned in an earlier post, was to work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test. “Materials already on hand” was the watchword. No attempt was made to design any of the main components for the project from scratch, and little if anything new was purchased to make it happen. The transmitter, the receiver, and the antenna all represented novel applications and redesigns of equipment they had used before.

These three elements were interdependent and had to work together as one for the project to succeed. Arguably the most critical, however, was the antenna, since the failure of previous attempts was attributable in large measure to insufficient sensitivity of the receiver antenna.

* * * * *

By the end of World War I, Army scientists at Fort Monmouth realized that the biggest threat in the next war would come from the air, and that Americans could no longer depend on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to protect and isolate them. Early detection of incoming threats was crucial if attacks on the homeland were to be avoided or minimized. Initial conceptual explorations of radar began as early as 1920. In the mid 1930s, radar research at Fort Monmouth took a more practical turn, to the point where development of a prototype of the SCR [Signal Corps Radio OR Set Complete Radio, used interchangeably]-268 was well underway.

Then, in 1938, shaken by the discovery in their midst of a Nazi spy named Guenther Gustave Maria Rumrich, a Chicago-born German whose friendly curiosity had enabled him to infiltrate the radar research program alarmingly easily, the Army decided to increase security and reduce accessibility by moving the operation from Fort Monmouth to Fort Hancock.

It was at Fort Hancock that the legendary SCR-270/271, capable of detecting bombers 150 miles away, was developed under the leadership of Dr. Harold Zahl. Among other important innovations, this system featured a common antenna for both transmitting and receiving, made possible by a gas-discharge device called a duplexer invented by Zahl. The SCR-270 was a mobile unit; the SCR-271 was a fixed, tower-mounted version that differed mainly in having an antenna with a somewhat higher resolution.

My father was recruited as a young engineer to the Army's radar research program at Fort Hancock in early 1941, in the Radio Position Finding section. He participated in the development of the SCR-270/271 radar and continued to work on modifying and improving it throughout the War. Many years later, he wrote of this radar that it was "still the Old Faithful, coming through where more modern and more advertised sets have become unavailable."

An SCR-270, with its bedspring-type reflective array antenna, ready to rock and roll.

As the nation inexorably drifted towards war, it was realized that Fort Hancock, at the tip of a peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, New York Bay, and Sandy Hook Bay, also had some shortcomings as a location for radar research. More space was needed, it was argued, and the fierce nor'easters that periodically struck the base coated the radar equipment with a film of salt that undermined performance. Its location, so favorable to defense from conventional land and sea attacks, made it vulnerable to U-boat strikes.

So the Army purchased the old Marconi site in Belmar from King’s College and rechristened it Camp Evans. Piecemeal, the radar research program was evacuated from Fort Hancock. Pearl Harbor hastened the transfer, and by 1942 the move to Camp Evans was complete.

With the acquisition of the Camp Evans site, the Signal Corps inherited a rich history of antenna development. During World War I, the Navy had assumed control of the property, and although Marconi’s famous 400-foot wireless towers were used for the dispatch of important messages - indeed, historians dubbed World War I the “wireless war” - breakthroughs in reducing radio static achieved by a resident Canadian scientist named Roy Weagant enabled replacement of these ungainly structures by safer and cheaper if more ho-hum 30-foot antennas. This news was kept under wraps until after the War; “The End of the Giant Towers,” proclaimed contemporary headlines. All of them were gone by 1925.

The arrival of the Army and the entry of the US into World War II transformed the site into a major center for radar research. In addition to newer systems (some involving testing of conceptual designs developed at the MIT Rad Lab), refinement and stepped-up production of the "Old Faithful" SCR-270/271 continued throughout the War - turning Building 37 into a veritable antenna factory as bedspring-type array antennas ranging in length from 2 to 30 feet were assembled for installation on trailers to be used in remote locations. One such SCR-270 radar provided an early warning of incoming Japanese aircraft at Pearl Harbor - though in one of history’s most egregious command and control failures, the information was initially misinterpreted by the Operator and subsequently discounted by the Commanding Officer on duty.

* * * * *

Project Diana, a name intended (among other things) to befuddle the Guenther Rumrichs of the world, introduced a whole new series of challenges beyond the reach of existing technology designed for (relatively) short-distance detection of enemy aircraft.

Early on, DeWitt decided to use as a starting point a crystal-controlled FM transmitter/receiver specially designed for the Signal Corps by Major Edwin H. Armstrong, the "father of FM radio," by modifying an SCR-271. This set had features that could address two important problems:

1) Due to the relative velocities of the earth and moon, the frequency of the returning echo differed from the transmitted signal (a phenomenon known as Doppler shift) by as much as 300Hz, a number that was constantly changing depending earth's rotation and moon's orbital path. DeWitt called on the Theoretical Studies Group for these elegant calculations, which were done by the mathematician Walter McAfee.) The Armstrong radio was capable of being fine-tuned to the exact frequency required to compensate for the Doppler shift at a given point in time.

2) Signals bounced off an object 238,000 miles from earth would take much longer to echo and be much too weak to be detected by receiving antennas then in use. As noted, this was a problem that had bedeviled previous attempts to shoot the moon. To amplify the incoming signal, it was decided to generate a much longer pulse that would be easier for the receiving antenna to detect. The Armstrong radio was one of the few existing sets capable of generating such a long pulse.

The long pulse, while solving one problem, created another, since there was no antenna on site ready to receive such a signal. To come up with a solution, DeWitt called on the Antenna Design Section at Camp Evans. Two prominent antenna specialists, one the section head, designed a novel system using a quarter-wave step-up transformers. This approach failed to work, however, even after extensive efforts to tweak the transmitter.

DeWitt then turned to his own little group of engineers, who came up with the inspired solution of positioning two SCR-271 stationary radars side-by-side to create an enormous (40x40 ft) double bedspring antenna consisting of a 8x8 array of half-wave dipoles in front of a reflector that further enhanced the 111.5 MHz signals. Who was the first to propose that approach will probably never be known, but given my father's long experience and intimate familiarity with the SCR-271, his leadership role on the team, and his general approach to problem-solving, it wouldn't surprise me if the credit belonged to him. In any event, translating the idea into reality was undoubtedly easier said than done, but engineers from the Mechanical Design Center rose to the occasion and succeeded in assembling the Diana Bedspring. (Unfortunately, engineering specifications were destroyed by the Army in 1971, so our knowledge of the design details remains sketchy.)

This whole contraption - there is no other word for it - was mounted atop a 100-ft reinforced tower in the northeast corner of Camp Evans. The heavy and ungainly antenna could not be tilted, it could only be rotated in azimuth; so moonshots could only be attempted twice a day, usually at moonrise but occasionally at moonset, during the 40-minute window open when the moon passed through the 15 degree wide beam of the antenna pattern.

Panoramic view of Camp Evans

The iconic Diana Bedspring, perhaps the most famous antenna in history, has become the unofficial symbol of Project Diana. Its picture, doctored by a photo editor who thought the moon looked too dim in the original so used 20th century “Photoshop” technology to “burn in” a picture of the sun in its place, appeared on the front pages of newspapers and on magazine covers throughout the world. Readers of this blog see it every time they open a new post. If the late David Mofensen’s dream of having Project Diana commemorated on a postage stamp is ever fulfilled (which can’t happen before 2046 because - I know, I checked - the US Postal Service will only issue such stamps in multiples of fifty years after the event), surely the Diana Bedspring will be the featured image.

* * * * *

So where is the Diana Bedspring? Perhaps it was scrapped in the mid-1950s, when the Army removed its old radar units from the site to make way for a parabolic dish antenna, a design already in widespread use by most US search radar at the end of the War. Or perhaps it was finally destroyed in the early 1990s, when the Army began to demolish the historic site in response to a Department of Defense decision to close many military bases including Camp Evans - until Fred Carl, now Director of the InfoAge Science History Center, almost literally threw his body in the path of the wrecking ball. Or perhaps it is still being stored in pieces in some forgotten location, awaiting reassembly. In any event, it is, in the wistful words of an InfoAge volunteer, “no longer available.”

The replacement antenna was a 50-foot dish created by the Signal Corps, using the frame of a captured Nazi Wurzburg Reise radar, to serve as our first satellite tracking antenna. In honor of its predecessor, it was dubbed the “Diana Dish.” In 1957, when the Soviets stole a march on the US by launching their Sputnik satellite, the Diana Dish was joined by a companion 60-foot dish named the “Space Sentry.” In 1960, control of space research was transferred to a new civilian agency, NASA, which continued the weather observation research already underway at the Diana site and proudly broadcast the first televised images of cloud movements from space.

The Diana Dish has joined the Diana Bedspring in the dustbin of history, but the Space Sentry was gifted by the Army to InfoAge, which has refurbished it for scientific and educational purposes as part of a larger effort to restore and preserve the Diana site. On January 10, 2015, a local amateur radio club celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Project Diana experiment by using the Space Sentry to make a series of Earth-Moon-Earth contacts.

The Space Sentry, just a few hundred feet from where the Diana Bedspring once stood.

* * * * *

Although the development of communications satellites has obsolesced moon bounce as a national security tool, Earth-Moon-Earth or EME has become quite popular among amateur radio operators. The object of modern EME, unlike Project Diana but like successor projects such as PAMOR, is a two-way exchange of information, in which a signal is sent from one station to another by ricocheting it off the moon; overcoming the challenges of weak signal communication is part of the fun and represents a test of skill. EME is the longest path between any two stations on earth.

To accomplish this feat, EME enthusiasts need to erect antennas that by amateur radio standards are often large enough to jangle the nerves of Property Owners’ Associations and perhaps violate the aesthetic sensibilities of their XYLs (ham-speak for ”ex young ladies” - that is, ahem, their wives). By Project Diana standards, however, most modern EME antennas are mere minikins and some are even portable.

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CELEBRATING DIANA DAY

1/10/2018

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Seventy-two years ago today, on January 10, 1946, a handful of scientists at Camp Evans in Belmar NJ, led by Lt Col Jack Dewitt, successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication - and the world has never been the same.

My father, E. King Stodola, was the team's scientific head. It's not hard to guess why he was chosen for this role. He was an engineer with good social skills and expertise in moving target detection (in this case a very large moving target). His approach to everything, from household repairs to shooting the moon, reflected the can-do spirit that Americans brought to World War II - work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test.

Applying this method to the challenge they now faced, the team heavily modified an SCR-271 bedspring antenna, jacked up the power, and pointed it at the rising moon. A series of radar signals was broadcast, and each time the echo was heard 2.5 seconds later, the time it takes light to reach the moon and return.

As Fred Carl, COO of the InfoAge Museum located on the former Camp Evans site, succinctly put it, "Project Diana was a pivotal event that built on World War II expertise but pointed the way to the future." The conclusive demonstration that the ionosphere could be pierced captured the world's imagination. It opened the door to space exploration and to communication with the universe beyond the earth's envelope.

On January 10, 2016, I launched this blog to celebrate Project Diana in the context of life in postwar America and in particular of my Jersey Shore childhood. My husband thought I'd run out of things to say after a half a dozen posts. Two years later I'm still going strong.

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THE MOON ENTERS THE COLD WAR

12/7/2017

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Pearl Harbor, whose 76th anniversary we observe today, marked the end of American isolationism - not just as a political ideology but also as the comfortable assumption that its location beyond two oceans could somehow protect the US from the rest of the world. Pearl Harbor, and the declarations of war by Hitler and Mussolini that followed shortly thereafter, thrust the US into the role of defender of liberty and democracy and leader of what later came to be called the “Free World.”

After the War ended with the Axis powers soundly defeated, the temporary alliance between the Western bloc, led by the US, and the Eastern bloc, led by the Soviet Union, became unraveled by their profound social, economic, and political differences. The result was a Cold War between these two superpowers that lasted for over forty years, sustained by the belief on both sides that only the buildup of arsenals capable of “mutually assured destruction” could keep either side from demolishing the other. It was also characterized by the development of spy technology far more advanced than anything that preceded it - technology that, to remain effective, demanded almost epic levels of secrecy by those in the know.

* * * * *

I have elsewhere referred to Project Diana as the opening salvo in the Cold War, but only recently have I come to appreciate the full truth of this statement. Although much has been made of Jack DeWitt's almost obsessive fascination with the idea of bouncing radar off the moon, it is well to remember that his actual assignment from the Pentagon was to study ways to detect and track Soviet rockets that might, drawing on expertise captured from the Germans, it was feared, be capable of reaching the US. DeWitt argued, with some justice, that since there were no such rockets currently available for testing, hitting the moon would equally well confirm that radar could penetrate the ionosphere.

Not long ago a reader kindly referred me to a recently declassified document, originally published in 1967, in which the author, Frank Eliot, asserts that the “entirely new technique” emerging directly from Project Diana - that is, using the moon to receive and reflect radio signals - offered a possible solution to the thorny problem of how to intercept Russian radar signals in an era when flights over the Soviet Union were prohibited. Although Project Diana involved monostatic transmission - that is, sending and receiving signals in the same location - a Naval Research Laboratory engineer named James Trexler figured out as early as 1948 that signals emanating from one location (e.g., in Russia) could potentially be detected via bistatic transmission to other locations (e.g., in the US) if they happened to bounce off the moon.

Thus was born the highly classified PAssive MOon Relay or PAMOR, code-named "Joe." Initial tests proved so promising that the project was intensified, at even deeper levels of secrecy. As one wag put it, “Leave it to the US Navy to weaponize the moon.”

Moon bounce via bistatic transmission. (Courtesy of Roger Shultz)

The Russians, of course, weren’t bouncing signals off the moon for the benefit of their Cold War adversaries. Indeed, most of their signals simply escaped the atmosphere and disappeared into outer space. Detecting those that did serendipitously hit the moon could only be done at certain times of day, in certain locations on earth where both the sending and receiving elements could “see” the moon at the same time; nor could the lunar terrain be too “rough” for clear reflection of signals. Antennas had to be at least 150 ft in diameter and preferably larger, and only a few were available for that purpose (e.g., those at the Grand Bahama tracking station, the Naval Research Laboratory’s Chesapeake Bay Annex, Stanford University, and Sugar Grove, West Virginia).

There were more ways for this effort to fail than to succeed, but the military got lucky - not only in having favorable antenna locations and encountering favorable lunar conditions, but also, in the case of the “Hen House”, a major anti-ballistic missile operation deep within the Soviet Union, in being able to take advantage of occasional brief practice sessions during which the Russians actually set their radar to track the moon. In the end, PAMOR proved to be an intelligence coup, continuing to yield information until the late sixties, when it was obsolesced by communications satellites.

PAMOR's success led the Naval Research Laboratory, in the mid 1950s, to commission an ambitious spinoff code-named Operation Moon Bounce, a series of experiments to test the feasibility of using the moon as a natural communications satellite. These tests were so effective in refining moonbounce technology that Operation Moon Bounce was used for several years to link Hawaii with Washington DC. Like PAMOR, Operation Moon Bounce was superseded in the late 1960s by networks of communications satellites - networks whose design profited from the experience gained during the Moon Bounce tests.

Moonbounce communication, generally referred to as Earth-Moon-Earth or EME, is now largely the province of amateur radio enthusiasts, who continue to reap the benefits of Operation Moon Bounce and ultimately of Project Diana.

* * * * *

As anyone who follows this blog regularly must be aware, the Army's reluctance to publicize Project Diana has long puzzled me. Based more on my own inferences from my father’s comments than on anything he actually said, I have generally interpreted it as retribution for Jack DeWitt's lack of complete candor about what he was doing, forcing the Army to play catch-up after the fact.

Still, this explanation has never entirely satisfied me. Why (per an earlier post) should those who left the Signal Corps (that is to say, those over whom the Army no longer maintained control) be selectively denied media attention? Why should my father, even decades later, have trouble gaining access to his own earlier work? Even granting that DeWitt was an ask-for-forgiveness-not-for-permission kind of guy working in an organization that prized discipline, it all seemed - well, a bit of an overreaction on the Army’s part.

The recently declassified article by Eliot has given me a somewhat different perspective on this issue. In short, it suggests that the Army discouraged media attention less because of what the Project Diana team did wrong and more because of what it did right.

The success of PAMOR clearly depended on the Soviets' remaining unaware that their emissions were being monitored, a consideration that makes the Army’s wish to control information that might provide clues about the extent of its capabilities more understandable. Likewise, severely restricting access to information about PAMOR and its debt to Project Diana based strictly on need-to-know provides a more plausible explanation for classifying it above my father’s level of security clearance than an arbitrary determination to curtail access to his own work, even though it did in fact have this (presumably unintended) consequence.

Did my father know about PAMOR? He obviously wouldn’t have told me if he did, but given that documents such as the Eliot article weren’t declassified until 2014, I tend to doubt it. Had he known, he might have been more philosophical about the modest notice given by the Army to Project Diana’s milestone anniversaries.

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TORA, TORA, TORA?

4/5/2017

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A few weeks ago, in a post describing my father’s work on detecting incoming kamikaze attacks, I mentioned that his earlier work on the Army radar that had successfully detected Japanese planes approaching Pearl Harbor was probably the basis for his assignment to find a way to prevent Japanese planes from flying “under the radar.” This offhand remark generated a flurry of comments and questions. One friend wrote: “WAIT! You’re saying your dad…knew planes were coming in to bomb Pearl Harbor???…. That is a breath-taking piece of information, Cindy.”

Although I went back and added a link to the original entry in support of this observation, it is such a quintessential Camp Evans story that I decided it was worth a post of its own.

First, lest I left any room for confusion: No, my father had no idea that planes were coming in to bomb Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, as he later stated unequivocally in my oral history interview with him. In fact, there is no reason why he should have known. He was still a newbie at Camp Evans, less than a year on the job. His task was to optimize the equipment then in use, the SCR270, and work on the next step in the series, the SCR271, planned for installation at Pearl Harbor but not yet built.

In the hours during and after the attack, the only ones likely to be privy to information about what had or hadn’t been detected were the members of a select, top secret group that had been working at Camp Evans for years to prevent surprise air attacks on critical vulnerable targets including not only Pearl Harbor but also the Marshall Islands, Midway, the Philippines, the Panama Canal, and others. Needless to say, these men held positions well above my father’s pay grade.

The SCR270B was a portable unit that could be carried in four trucks. The antenna, a steel tower folded over on itself with nine bays clamped onto it, stood at 50 feet when deployed.

What actually happened in Hawaii that fateful morning is a classic example of an advanced new technology getting out ahead of its end users. Privates Joseph L. Lockard, age 19, and George E. Elliott, in his early twenties, reported for duty at 4am at the Opana Mobile Radar Station, located 230 feet above sea level on the northern tip of Oahu. Although they were supposed to work in three-man teams, only the two men were on duty - Lockard serving as Operator and Elliott as both Plotter and Motorman.

It was an unusually quiet morning, and Lockard took advantage of the lull to train Elliott in the use of the SCR270B. At 7am, the end of their shift, Lockard began shutting down the unit, when suddenly the oscilloscope picked up an image on the 5" screen so surprising he first thought something was wrong - a blip so large it must have been at least 50 planes. As of 7:02am, the blip appeared 132 miles from Oahu. Elliott suggested they report this reading to the Information Center at Fort Shafter, around 30 miles south of the Opana Station. Lockard hesitated at first, but after several minutes of conversation - during which the blip moved another 25 miles closer to Oahu - he gave Elliott the go-ahead.

Joe Lockard on duty at the Opana Mobile Radar Station.

At the Information Center, Lieutenant Kermit Tyler, Pursuit Officer and Assistant to the Controller, was on duty that day, and except for the Switchboard Operator, he was alone. The Switchboard Operator took down Elliott's message - then, realizing that Tyler was still in the building, turned the call over to him.

Tyler's job description was "to assist the Controller in ordering planes to intercept enemy planes...." This was his second time serving in that capacity, the first having taken place three days earlier; he had no training in radar. The Controller and the Aircraft Identification Officer were out of the building having breakfast. Dismissing out of hand the possibility that the blip could actually be incoming enemy aircraft, Tyler scoured his mind for alternative explanations, then remembered that a squadron of B57 bombers - "Flying Fortresses" - was expected from the mainland that morning. With a sigh of relief he uttered five words that haunted him for the rest of his life: "Well, don't worry about it."

By now it was 7:20am. The planes were 74 miles away.

The first bombs struck Pearl Harbor at 7:55am, and only then did the three men realize what it was they had seen on the radar screen. Had the information been passed along, even with only a little over half an hour's lead time, American aircraft might have been dispersed and ammunition readied. Had the Navy been notified, it might have used the information to help locate the Japanese aircraft carriers from which the invading planes took off. Although it is unlikely the main thrust of the attack could have been averted, a response, any response at all, might have demoralized the Japanese by undermining their supreme confidence that they had achieved "tora," a surprise attack - a goal they saw as crucial to their success.

In subsequent inquiries, Tyler was exonerated due to his lack of training and experience. Lockard received the lion's share of the credit and was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1942. Elliott was given the Legion of Merit but declined because he felt, with some justice, that he should not be given a lesser medal than Lockard.

Meanwhile, back at Camp Evans, thousands of miles to the east, members of the team charged with preventing surprise attacks waited on tenterhooks when they learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, fearing their radar had failed. “If our radar had not given warning because of breakdown, or just ineffectiveness," said First Lieutenant Harold Zahl, "surely part of the finger of blame would point at our group.” He himself had designed and hand-made special tubes for the radar set; had one of them failed? Not until several days later did they receive a call from Washington reassuring them that human error and not equipment failure had been responsible.

* * * * * * * * * *
Although no one knew exactly when or where an enemy strike might occur, the Navy had developed and emplaced ship-based radar units as early as 1940, and by early 1941 the Army team at Camp Evans had set up land-based radar systems in potential target areas around the world. In addition to the Opana station, four other radar units had been installed in Hawaii. This is no secret.

Moreover, the story of the radar signals received by Lockard and Elliott but misinterpreted by Tyler and then ignored altogether is hardly an obscure anecdote buried in tomes read only by military historians or on websites visited only by passionate World War II buffs. On the contrary, it has been retold countless times in popular books and movies over the years. Notable among them: a brief, readable account entitled A Day of Infamy written by Walter Lord and published in 1957 (60th anniversary edition issued in 2001), in which a riveting description of the events that unfolded in the hour before the attack appears; a Japanese-American full-length dramatization of the events of that day entitled Tora! Tora! Tora!, which garnered an audience score of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes; and a 1981 New York Times bestseller entitled At Dawn We Slept, the first volume of a massive trilogy by a history professor named Gordon W. Prange, who devoted not years but decades to the study of a single day in history, generating thousands of typewritten pages of text that after his death were valiantly edited by two assistants-coauthors. (Lockard and Elliott make their first appearance 500 pages into the book.) The story even appears in wikipedia.

So why is it that so many of us still cling to the myth that the US was totally unprepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor?

Perhaps because the Japanese version of the story - that the attack on Pearl Harbor came as a complete surprise to the Americans - is the one that captured the world’s imagination. Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the first wave of Japanese fighters, famously sent the message “Tora, tora, tora!” to his superiors waiting on the aircraft carrier Akagi - making the communication (intentionally) puzzling to the casual listener since the word tora means "tiger" in Japanese. But “tora” was also a radio codeword combining the two Japanese words totsugeki and raigeki, a phrase meaning "lightning attack”; to those in the know, “Tora, tora, tora” had nothing to do with big cats and everything to do with having delivered a bolt from the blue. And why shouldn’t the Japanese have believed this? After all, from their point of view there was no indication that anyone had the slightest inkling that an attack was underway. No defense was mounted, no evasive action was taken, thereby allowing the Japanese to punch above their weight at Pearl Harbor.

Or perhaps it’s because we collectively prefer the metaphor of the sleeping giant awakened to the less heroic conclusion that three undertrained, inexperienced men had been entrusted with a new technology, and that but for human error, the encounter might have taken a somewhat different turn.

What is lost in the myth-making process is perhaps a minor footnote to the overall arc of the Pearl Harbor narrative but an important chapter in the history of radar. It was the first wartime use of radar by the US military, and, despite the series of mishaps that rendered it useless at Pearl Harbor, it was abundantly clear that this revolutionary new technology was poised to transform the way war was waged. Being neither a military historian nor a radar scientist, I will leave a fuller investigation and interpretation of these developments to someone more qualified than I.

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CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

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TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)

"GOOD MORNING, MOON"

D-DAY AND CAMP EVANS

A VISIT TO LITTLE GLEMHAM

edwin howard armstrong: DIANA's godfather

THE FAMOUS BEDSPRING ANTENNA

CELEBRATING DIANA DAY

THE MOON ENTERS THE COLD WAR

TORA, TORA, TORA?

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

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TO THE MOON AND BACK ​(ARCHIVED BLoG)

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

Archives

Categories

TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)