Tuxedo Park

by Jennet Conant

  They had to prove first of all that it was possible to “talk” a pilot down—that he could land solely on verbal instructions from the ground. In the Logan National Guard hangar, now completely taken over by Rad Lab projects, they had a blindfolded pilot walk a line on the floor while a controller observed his deviation and instructed him how to correct his path. The results were encouraging, so they designed further tests, rigging a primitive radar set with optical sights. Alvarez also took lessons at the Squantum Naval Air Station several times a week to prepare for the navy instrument pilot’s exam, on the theory that he would better understand the challenge pilots faced in flying on their instruments alone and perhaps eventually learn to land by GCA himself. By late March, Alvarez and his small team drove to Quonset Point Naval Air Station outside Providence and began conducting trials of their makeshift blind-landing system. During several weeks of work with a navy test pilot named Bruce Griffin, Alvarez gained confidence in their “unorthodox” solution to the blind-landing problem:

  We improvised communications procedures as we went along, and after many landings under conditions of good visibility Bruce began to fly under the hood [with the hood literally over his head to prevent sneaking a peak] to lower and lower elevations before making a visual approach. His radioman acted as check pilot when he was under the hood. One day Bruce announced that he had flown under the hood all the way to touchdown. We cheered the first complete landing on GCA.

  In May, the navy invited them to test their radar system at the Oceania Naval Air Station near Norfolk, Virginia, offering an advanced SNJ trainer, considered by pilots to be one of the best planes ever built. “It was ideal for the aerobatics,” recalled Alvarez, who went along for the exciting ride as “Bruce brushed up on the loops, rolls, split-S turns, and Immelmans [reverse turns] he couldn’t attempt in his ungainly Duck.” Unfortunately, the XT-1, which had worked so beautifully in its one previous test tracking a low-flying aircraft, went completely “spastic.” Every time the plane approached the truck, the antenna would suddenly break away from the line of sight to the plane and point at its reflected image three degrees below the surface of the runway. They tried every trick they knew to keep the radar from locking in on the reflected image, but the equipment was unable to track planes near the ground. The GCA tests were “disastrous,” and Alvarez and his team returned to MIT thoroughly discouraged. He knew the most sensible option was “to give up and move on.” There were many other important radar problems that needed to be solved, and they were wasting manpower and resources. But they had “fallen in love with the GCA talk-down technique,” and it was the only hope they had of solving the problem of landing planes in fog and poor visibility conditions, which regularly grounded bombing and air reconnaissance missions.

  The crucial breakthrough came during a dinner with Loomis at his suite at the Ritz-Carlton in early June. Alvarez, who by then was feeling defeated, gave Loomis a frank assessment of the system’s shortcomings, and the two of them then analyzed the Quonset Point and Oceania events in detail. Loomis was obstinately committed to the idea that GCA was feasible and was ready to throw out the conventional ideas of what was possible in the existing art of radar. He was insistent and, as Alvarez later recalled, “did an amazing job of restoring my morale, which had hit a new low.” He also made it perfectly clear that neither of them was leaving until they had hit on some sort of solution. “We both know that GCA is the only way planes will be blind-landed in this war,” Loomis told the thirty-one-year-old physicist, “so we have to find some way to make it work. I don’t want you to go home tonight until we’re both satisfied that you’ve come up with a design that will do the job.” Together, they engineered a radical new form of radar, as Alvarez recounted in his memoirs:

  We both contributed ideas. The antenna configurations we devised departed completely from all previous designs. Out of the Ritz-Carlton discussion came a tall, narrow, vertical antenna that scanned by being mechanically rocked and a horizontal antenna that scanned its pattern left and right. The beaver-tail beam from the vertical antenna would be so narrow that when its main lobe pointed at a plane very little energy would spill even one degree away, eliminating the possibility that the system would confuse the plane with its reflections. Alfred suggested switching a single radar transmitter between the two antennas four times a scan cycle. The three principles Alfred and I came up with on that memorable evening have been basic to GCA technology ever since. I was allowed to leave for home just before midnight.

  Had it not been for Loomis’ challenge that night, there might not have been a blind-landing system in World War II. “I would have immersed myself in other interesting projects to forget my disappointment and embarrassment,” wrote Alvarez. “Many lives would have been lost unnecessarily.”

  Once again, the fact that Loomis had played a key role in the conception of the new GCA design had its advantages. He would often drop by Building 22 to offer encouragement, and after Alvarez and his graduate student Larry Johnston had worked out the kinks in the design, he urged them to build a demonstration model as quickly as possible, promising to use OSRD funds to have ten prototypes built by a small radio company on the West Coast. Loomis, who had honed his competitive skills on Wall Street, felt that farming out the contract to a small firm would yield both faster and better results, and as usual, he was hedging his bets by engaging in a little frontal maneuvering. He had for some time now been concerned about the wide gap between the physicists’ technological innovation and its effective production. Loomis wanted to see GCA succeed and was troubled by the bad case of “NIH” (not invented here) that the industrial engineers had developed after one of the Rad Lab’s previous airborne sets had failed to translate well in manufacturing. The “reengineered” model that they had finally delivered months late was so cumbersome, it never saw any action.

  Determined to avoid a repeat of this scenario, Loomis, together with Rowan Gaither, a very able San Francisco attorney who went on to become a close friend and business partner, created the transition office—known informally as the “hurry-up department”—to shepherd the lab’s creations through manufacturing and production and, in many cases, right into the field. The crux of the problem was that microwave radar was still so novel, few manufacturers had adequate facilities and trained personnel to produce the devices. Loomis, who always strove to keep red tape to a minimum and money easy, appointed Gaither as chief overseer and troubleshooter. To keep production problems to a minimum, Gaither would invite industrial engineers at companies of their choosing to come to the Rad Lab and receive training in the intricacies of the physicists’ creations and proper testing of the new equipment. In short, they would be educated in the Rad Lab way—which roughly translated as “our way or the highway.” This basic strategy proved such a success, it became a matter of laboratory policy to thus facilitate the transition from prototype to production model, much to the irritation of several industrialists, who again groused about Loomis’ unfair tactics.

  Loomis’ other reason for ordering the ten preproduction models of the embryonic devices, designated the Mark I, was to circumvent objections from the army and navy, as well as the RAF. According to Alvarez, they had all let it be known that their pilots would “never obey landing instructions from someone sitting in comfort on the ground,” and they preferred to wait for something along the lines of the ILS (instrument landing system). Loomis, with characteristic self-confidence, paid no attention and assured Alvarez that as soon as the three services had laid eyes on the Mark I GCA system, they would want working models “yesterday.”

  Leaving Loomis to fight the bureaucratic battles, Alvarez applied himself to building the Mark I. The system used two trucks parked halfway down the runway, the larger of the vehicles carrying a gasoline-driven generator directly behind the driver’s seat. Next came the azimuth antenna, pointing downwind at the approaching aircraft, rocking left and right, per their Ritz-Carlton epiphany. Bringing up the rear was the tall eleva
tion antenna, scanning up and down. Above the generator, he mounted the area search antenna, despite objections from the air force experts that it was unnecessary. Had he heeded their advice, the Mark I would have been a “dismal failure.” The GCA truck, parked in front of the antenna truck and facing the landing aircraft, contained the controller’s communication system and the screens displaying the radar signals. They completed their first successful trial run in November 1942. After several more weeks of testing at East Boston Airport, where Alvarez worked on improving his “talk down” technique through trial and error, they were ready. On February 10, 1942, General Harold McClelland, director of Air Force Technical Services, requested a formal demonstration of the Mark I to be staged at Washington National Airport.

  Four days later, on Valentine’s Day, a large group of high-ranking army, navy, and RAF officers assembled to view the test. Unfortunately, the long drive had loosened many of the connections, and Alvarez was forced to postpone twenty-four hours. The next day, the high-voltage tubes in the transmitters kept blowing, and he postponed another day. The following day did not go any better, and again he had to ask for their forbearance and invited them to return the next day. That night, he and his crew never went to bed, staying up to check and recheck every connection and vacuum tube. As Alvarez greeted the officers the next morning, he was pleased to see that the same group had gamely shown up once again. But just as he was about to begin, Larry Johnston whispered in his ear that the system was down again—more burned-out tubes. The only nearby source of tubes they knew of was Anacostia Naval Air Station, directly across the Potomoc. While Alvarez stalled for time, his pilot took off and flew across the river, returning in only a matter of minutes. With great relief, Alvarez ushered them onto the field, where the military brass listened in via loudspeaker and watched the planes respond:

  We demonstrated that the aircraft were really under my control even though I could only follow them on radar. The high point of the demonstration was the approach of a colonel whom General McClelland had told only to get up into the air, tune his radio to a certain frequency, and do whatever he was told by some voice on the ground. The colonel had never heard of GCA but was an experienced instrument pilot. He first checked me out by changing his altitude and his heading. After each change I told him what he had done. He made several perfect approaches and then landed under the hood.

  Just as Loomis had predicted, the three services rushed to order hundreds of GCA sets each. When they heard that ten preproduction units were available, they immediately called a meeting at the Pentagon to determine their equitable distribution in the United States and England. Loomis asked Alvarez to tag along to the meeting, and as he later recalled, although his demonstrations of the Mark I would continue for a week, Loomis’ sales campaign “succeeded that first day”:

  Neither of us said a word as the admirals, generals, and air marshals engaged in a horse-trading session that ended up with all ten sets allocated to the services, and none to MIT or to the NDRC. The meeting was about to break up when Loomis said quietly, “Gentlemen, there seems to be some misapprehension concerning the ownership of these radar sets; it is my understanding that they belong to NDRC, and I am here to represent that organization.” His training as a lawyer was immediately apparent, and after he had shown in his gentle manner that he held all the cards, an allocation that was satisfactory to all concerned was quickly worked out.

  After Alvarez’s success with GCA, he went on to invent two other closely related microwave early-warning systems: MEW, one of the Rad Lab’s most spectacular inventions; and Eagle, a blind-landing system that had more than its share of trouble getting off the ground but was worth it in the end. Loomis made Alvarez head of his own division, special systems, also known as “Luie’s gadgets,” and championed his ideas even when many others at the lab had their doubts. Alvarez set to work building a gigantic radar mounted on a circular track that would slowly scan hundreds of miles out over the Pacific to give early warning of the approaching enemy. He finally managed to get his monster antenna to work, and a MEW set with a fifteen-foot-long billboard antenna was operational by mid-1942. An improved set was demonstrated to the Army Air Forces board members in the summer of 1943, and as Fortune reported, for the first time they realized what the giant could do:

  They saw a novel array of six scopes on a single radar, with an observer at each. He looked not simply at a few course indications of aircraft, but at clear signals, small blips of light, from each bomber in flight as far as 180 miles on the line of sight from every direction. As each sweep came by, the blips could be seen to move, indicating the flight tracks of the planes. Bunched planes near an airport could easily be resolved into units. Each scope gave accurate, up-to-the-minute data on flights of a huge number of planes. Each operator could concentrate on an assigned wedge-shaped slice of his scope and easily vector (give directional orders to) a plane.

  The MEW program was immediately speeded up, and an improved, experimental set was rushed to England, where it was set up at Start Point, on the tall Devonshire cliffs overlooking the British Channel. Rad Lab physicists helped the army assemble the radar set in December 1943, and it was then entrusted to the RAF. The MEW system transformed the inaccurate technique of the old British filter center, allowing all planes to be tracked on the plotting screen, and the pilots linked to the operations room by radio phone. The MEW did not see service until 1944, when its performance exceeded all expectations and allowed the American scientists a moment of pride in the remarkable technological service they had rendered to the British in return for the cavity magnetron.

  OVER the course of 1942, the Rad Lab physicists also pushed ahead with Loomis’ Loran project. As was the case with most of the Rad Lab’s new devices, the navy and air force had little interest in Loran at first and were unimpressed with their initial tests. They blamed the new method for all the errors they found in position finding, even though most of them originated with the old system they used for comparison. In January, a month after Pearl Harbor, another field test was made using Montauk, Long Island, and Fenwick, Delaware, as transmission stations, and Bermuda substituted as a “ship.” The Bermuda test turned out to be decisive, establishing once and for all the reliability of sky waves. The average of all the readings agreed with the calculated figure within a microsecond, with an average error of only plus or minus 2.8 miles. They decided that the medium of frequency of about 2.9 megahertz worked best and headed back to the Rad Lab to develop new, higher-powered transmitters, along with improved and simplified transmitter timers. At this point, Loomis was finally able to persuade the United States Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy of the importance of Loran; as one of the physicists on the project recalled, “The submarine menace made it easier to persuade the two navies, particularly because the convoy route from Cape Sable to Ireland had some of the worst weather in the world.”

  One minor hiccup that occurred in the Loran tests that spring was when the frequency the group chose, 2.2 megahertz, turned out to be the same channel used by a local ship telephone link, and the Rad Lab’s powerful transmitter caused phones to ring off the hook all over the Great Lakes area. The navy was not amused and promptly instructed the Rad Lab to abandon the channel. After learning that the frequency of 1.95 megahertz was available—it had been used by ham radio operators before Pearl Harbor—the Loran group quickly claimed it for their own. On June 13, Loomis and the Loran crew conducted the first full-scale operational trial, using a navy blimp equipped with a Loran receiver indicator which was launched at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The trials were so successful in demonstrating the potential of a highly accurate navigation system that suddenly Loran was in great demand: the navy needed it right away for antisubmarine work; and the air force wanted it to help in the ferrying of aircraft across the Atlantic from Brazil to Africa.

  A high-level meeting in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Building in Washington was quickly arranged among representatives of the army, navy, and OSRD to disc
uss the most effective way to apply Loomis’ new navigation system to the war effort. Only a few Loran sets had been built by the Rad Lab for research purposes, and there were not enough to go around. It would take several months to produce more, so it was necessary to sort out who would have to wait. “The argument became warm,” recalled Bush, who was presiding, “and the officers ignored the chair and went after one another directly. So I tapped the table and said, ‘Gentlemen, you seem to overlook the point as you argue; I “own” these sets.’ The discussion then became more orderly, and an agreement was reached.” It was yet another instance when the military was forced, by the president’s mandate under the OSRD, to cooperate with the scientists. Despite the military’s reluctance, Bush noted, the final agreement they hammered out over the Loran system “moved us a long way toward mutual respect, out of which only can arise genuine concert of effort in a common cause.”