War, service, and the line
This lineage can be described as a chain of dissertations and questions. It is also a chain of people who served the nation in wartime, though not always in the same way. Five of the ten nodes carry that thread, and five do not. Only three of those five wore United States military uniforms. The other two were civilian scientists mobilized under national emergency. The five who carry no wartime thread were no less devoted to service. Theirs ran to the university and to the scientific community rather than the nation at war, and the absence of a uniform says nothing about the depth of that commitment. The pattern is not a unit roster. It is a reminder that physics departments and national laboratories have long been shaped by wars their members helped fight, supply, or measure.
The thread begins in the nineteenth century, below Rowland. Hermann von Helmholtz came from modest financial means. To afford higher education he entered the Friedrich-Wilhelm Medicosurgical Institute (Königliches Medizinisch-chirurgisches Friedrich-Wilhelms-Institut) in Berlin in 1838, a Prussian Army medical scholarship that required eight years as a physician-surgeon after graduation. From 1843 to 1848 he served with cavalry regiments in Potsdam, using spare hours in Gustav Magnus's Berlin laboratory to test whether muscle force obeyed physical law. His 1847 memoir on the conservation of force was drafted under that military obligation and published the year he left the service to teach anatomy. It is a striking precedent, science pursued between barracks duties, a century before radar and route clearance entered the vocabulary of this line.
Two generations later, across the Atlantic, Joseph Sweetman Ames was a civilian physicist and Johns Hopkins professor appointed by President Wilson to the founding board of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1915, when American aviation was still a wartime emergency rather than an industry. During the First World War he served through the National Research Council and led scientific liaison to France while Allied aircraft programs lagged behind need. In the spring of 1917 the NRC sent him to head its Scientific Mission to France and England, a civilian commission charged with learning what Allied laboratories had already done for the war and offering American scientific help in return. The report he brought home, a Johns Hopkins colleague later recalled, dwelt on those features of fighting planes that needed study and correction. He also wrote publicly that the government's own aircraft program was far behind schedule. Secretary of Commerce William C. Redfield treated the statement as treasonous; Ames was right, and the judgment that got him into trouble is part of why his standing on the NACA rose after the war. He chaired the NRC's Foreign Service Committee, directed educational work at the United States Bureau of Standards, chaired the NACA from 1927 to 1939, and accepted the Collier Trophy on the Committee's behalf in 1930. In 1935 the Smithsonian awarded him the Langley Gold Medal for aerodynamics, and the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in California was named for him in 1939. His service was institutional and civilian, and it was indispensable.
A generation after Ames, the Second World War pulled Gregory Breit, Charles Kittel, and Albert Overhauser into this thread. Breit remained a civilian physicist, supervising early atomic-bomb design at the University of Chicago before moving to naval degaussing, proximity-fuse work at Aberdeen Proving Ground, and exterior ballistics. He resigned the Metallurgical Laboratory bomb-coordination post in May 1942, citing security breaches and frustration with the pace of the work; Arthur Compton transferred that role to J. Robert Oppenheimer, who later directed Los Alamos. The irony is hard to miss in hindsight. Breit walked away over security concerns, and twelve years later, in 1954, the man who inherited his post had his own security clearance revoked in the hearing that became the defining loyalty case of the Cold War. The same currency he cited on his way out the door in 1942 is what ended Oppenheimer's access to the program he went on to lead. The Navy and Army Ordnance departments later cited Breit's wartime performance as exceptional, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson awarded him the National Medal of Science in 1967 partly for that ordnance work.
Kittel served in the United States Navy as a research physicist and naval attaché in London, with earlier work on degaussing and magnetic mines at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and later antisubmarine operations research with the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG) under U.S. Tenth Fleet, noted on page 478 of R. V. Jones's Most Secret War (1978).
Besides our co-operation in scientific and technical matters, where the superiority of American production engineering was often a powerful—even vital—aid, we also shared our experiences in Operational Research. One salutary incident that I recall concerned a British mathematical physicist and an American theoretical physicist, Dr. Charles Kittel, who had been set together, side by side, to work on the problem of deducing the characteristics of German magnetic mines laid at sea, especially the sensitivity and polarity of the ring mechanism. The data from which the characteristics were to be deduced were the reports of our minesweepers as they exploded the mines, with the positions of the explosions being reported as ranges and bearings from the minesweepers. The first thing that Kittel wanted to do was to take a few trips on a minesweeper to sample the data for himself. The British theorist refused to do this, on the argument that he could only make a few trips, and therefore any experience so gained might be heavily biased, and therefore much too dangerous as a basis for generalization. So he stuck to his desk while Kittel went out minesweeping. What Kittel immediately found was that the reports from the minesweeping crews were wildly inaccurate as regards both range and bearing, and the only item of data on which one could rely was whether the mine had exploded to port or starboard. Simplifying all the later reports down to this extremely limited observation, he nevertheless succeeded in deducing the answer; but the British theorist went on accepting the data as accurate and never reached an answer.
The incident shows the importance of personal reconnaissance before taking a decision. Kittel had exemplified exactly what Isaac Newton had said in a letter to Nathaniel Hawes:
"If, instead of sending the observations of able seamen to able mathematicians on land, the land would send able mathematicians to sea, it would signify much more to the improvement of navigation and the safety of men's lives and estates on that element."
R. V. Jones, Most Secret War (1978)
On a broader scale, naval mines were among the most devastating weapons of the war. Over 550,000 submarine mines were laid by Axis and Allied nations combined during the conflict. Great Britain, the United States, and their allies lost over 1,118 vessels of various classes (including merchant ships, warships, and auxiliaries) exclusively to naval mines. Minesweepers bore the brunt of clearing these hazards, resulting in heavy localized casualties in high-traffic corridors like the English Channel, the North Sea, the Mediterranean, and Pacific invasion routes. This is why it was very courageous for Kittel to take an active role in ordnance disposal.
Overhauser interrupted his studies at Berkeley in 1944, enlisting in the Naval Reserve rather than wait to be drafted into the Army. He qualified for the Eddy Test, the Navy's Radio Technician Selection Test devised after Pearl Harbor to find sailors capable of the war's newest specialty; only about 86,000 of the more than 500,000 who took it passed, and those who did scored in the top three percent of the general population. Passing put him in the Electronics Training Program, widely regarded as the most demanding technical course in the enlisted armed forces. The course was a month of boot camp at Great Lakes, a month of preliminary electronics instruction in Chicago, three months of intermediate training at a converted hotel in Monterey, and six months of advanced radar, radio, and sonar repair on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. He finished in the summer of 1945 and shipped out to Subic Bay in the Philippines. He spent his remaining service doing the practical work the training had built toward, at one point tracing twenty-seven separate faults in a ship's radar set that, in his own recollection, had never worked once since it was installed. Discharged in 1946, he reenrolled at Berkeley that fall to finish the physics degree the Navy had interrupted, and he called the wartime training valuable to him as a scientist.
The thread does not end in the twentieth century. Tyler Grear served as a United States Army combat engineer in Afghanistan, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) executing route clearance and explosive-hazard work. That ground was what the United Nations was still calling, in 2008, one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. By the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, over four million Afghans lived on contaminated ground, a scale that dwarfs even the world wars. Rommel's engineers laid an estimated 500,000 mines at El Alamein, the densest Axis field of the desert war; the Soviet-Afghan war alone seeded an estimated 10 to 15 million nationwide, twenty to thirty times that total, across a country rather than one defensive line. Deminers have since removed over 18.6 million explosive remnants of war, including roughly 743,000 anti-personnel and 30,000 anti-vehicle mines, with more than 3,700 hazards still known to remain. Grear would later describe his motivation for the mission as "These devices do not discern between man, woman, child, combatant, or non-combatant, somebody has to do it". That work put him in line with two men decades removed who had also specialized in explosive ordnance neutralization. Breit wrote the ordnance side from Aberdeen in proximity fuses and exterior ballistics, and Kittel was doing route clearance before the Army even called it that, hunting magnetic mines at sea. Decades and services apart, all three treated explosive hazards as problems to be solved under time pressure, not avoided.
