Radar in World War II by Henry E. Guerlac

Abstract

technology and culture Book Reviews 707 pages 191 and 307. These errors are especially surprising in the context of this otherwise excellent volume. Susan E. Cozzens Dr. Cozzens is with the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Radar in World War II. By Henry E. Guerlac. New York: American Institute of Physics, 1987. Pp. xxvi+ 1,171 (in 2 vols.); illustrations, tables, notes, glossary, appendixes, indexes. $110.00. The “unpublished history of radar” has, at last, been published. It is volume 8 of the American Institute of Physics series on the History of Modern Physics. That publication should occur after a lapse of over forty years is in itself some indication of its worth. It is truly a pity that the author did not live to see it. In 1943, Henry Guerlac, a historian of science with a background in biochemistry, was recruited to prepare an official history of the MIT Radiation Laboratory by F. Wheeler Loomis, its assistant director. More precisely, it was a history of Division 14 (one of nineteen divisions and the one dealing with radar) of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) established by Franklin D. Roosevelt in June 1940. The Radiation Laboratory was the central laboratory of the division. During the following three years, Guerlac worked on this assignment. It is pertinent to bear in mind that the Radiation Laboratory was staffed primarily by physicists: “a physicist’s world, run for, and as completely as possible by, physicists” (p. 297). This was in part due to the facts that the country’s engineers were already attached to industrial laboratories and that the held of microwaves was then predominantly the domain of physicists. Apart from the liberal documentation available to him, Guerlac was in a unique position as a historian in that he worked in the midst of those who helped to create his history. While the war was still in progress, he interviewed some of the leading American and British radar scientists, including members of both the Tizard Mission to the United States in 1940 and the Compton Mission to Britain in 1943; he also visited installations in Europe in the spring of 1945. The book begins with a very clear exposition of pulse-radar principles. This is followed by a chapter giving a quite detailed account of radar prehistory and of the early work on radar in the United States, Great Britain, and France. Radar and television are seen as parallel, not successive, developments. Familiarity with iono­ spheric pulse-echo methods is considered to be a predisposing factor in the virtually simultaneous emergence of radar in the various countries. Microwaves and early microwave generators are then treated, and this leads in natural sequence to the inauguration of the 708 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE NDRC radar program, to the Tizard Mission from Britain with its disclosure of the cavity magnetron, and to the subsequent setting up of the Radiation Laboratory. Twenty chapters are devoted to the technological conquests of the laboratory: the emergence of a multi­ tude of ground, shipboard, and airborne 10-cm and 3-cm systems of increasing precision and reliability; the development of the compo­ nents and units that made these systems work and the solution of certain fundamental theoretical problems, principally in the areas of applied electromagnetic theory, electron tubes, and tropospheric propagation, which carried forward the development as a whole. In this section Project Cadillac is described. This was an Airborne Early Warning System, whose first production equipment was delivered to the navy in March 1945, and is referred to as “the most complex electronic undertaking of the war from an administrative as well as a technical standpoint” (p. 537). Guerlac then provides an insight into the working of Division 14, including its organization and staff training, its procurement and production policies, and its testing of radar sets under operational conditions. The operational use of radar on land and sea and in the air in the various theaters of war is comprehensively detailed in an eight-chapter section aptly subtitled “Radar as a Combat Weapon.” Radar’s vital role in defeating the U-boat threat is well underlined, as is the use of the H2S...