Oral-History:Ernest Pollard
About Ernest C. Pollard
Pollard studied nuclear physics under Chadwick at Cambridge. English by birth, his citizenship, wife, and children were American, so he was happy to be seconded to the Rad Lab in 1941 and get his family out of England. He first went to work in Tom Barker’s indicators group, floated up to the steering committee. His thoughts on the Rad Lab include: there was a great resolution to win the war; making decisions on the Steering Committee was as tense work as anything; components groups had disproportionate influence vis a vis systems groups; DuBridge was a hands-off manager; the pay system was based on your pre-war job, not your present job, and hence was screwy and created strains; his most important work was convincing the Navy that navigational microwave radar was possible, and getting MEW towards production; friend or foe transponders had to be built on the sly, around Rabi’s objections; mainly security didn’t inhibit research. He took the Rad Lab group-wisdom model with him after the war; e.g., when setting up the Yale biophysics department.
About the Interview
ERNEST C. POLLARD: An Interview Conducted by John Bryant, IEEE History Center, 11 June 1991
Interview # 079 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Ernest C. Pollard, an oral history conducted in 1991 by John Bryant, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
Interview: Ernest C. Pollard
Interviewer: John Bryant
Date: 11 June 1991
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Family and Education
Bryant:
This is John Bryant, member of the IEEE History Committee, representing IEEE Center for History. This is Tuesday afternoon, June 11th. I am talking to Dr. Ernest C. Pollard. Dr. Pollard, would you start briefly by giving us some background? Perhaps you could tell us about your father and why you chose to become a scientist?
Pollard:
My parents were missionaries in China. During my formative years-from ages six to ten-I lived in a very remote, primitive part of China. I disliked all that. I reacted very much against it. I couldn't stand their superstition. For example, an old, old city in China was in the middle of a fertile plain. They used up half the plain for graves. I didn't like any of that. So right from the very beginning I wanted to get into engineering. My desire has never left me. By age 11, I was determined to be a scientist. After my father died in 1915 we were poor, and I had to earn my entire way. I got all the way through my undergraduate work and started my Ph.D. at Cambridge. There was no other option than nuclear physics. My boss was Chadwick. I've written a little about him. I didn't particularly choose nuclear physics; I didn't have a choice, but I liked it. When the opportunity came along in World War II and Ernest Lawrence spoke to my boss and asked if I could be released to work in the Radiation Lab, it didn't take me more than a couple of days to decide yes, I would. Besides my family was in England. I am English by background. I was then an American citizen and I'd married an American wife and had American youngsters. I could foresee that being at the Radiation Lab would be a very good thing indeed, during the war. So going in to help in the war was a good idea, and I took it. That is where I started, just as Norman Ramsey described this morning. I had no knowledge of radar. I was using my wits. I loved it. It was a very great experience to get started there.
Radiation Laboratory
Arrival
Bryant:
You were at MIT Radiation Lab from January 1941?
Pollard:
January, 1941, yes.
Bryant:
Whose group were you in?
Pollard:
Tom Barker's group, the indicators.
Bryant:
I think, that the technical side has been fairly well recorded. I'd like to concentrate today more on the personal and the sociological side of working at the Lab. Compose it however you'd like to.
Jane and Bill Fairbank
Pollard:
It was a big experience. In my little book there, I described Jane and Bill Fairbank. I put them in that order.
Bryant:
This is the book "Radiation."
Pollard:
The "Radiation" book. They were wife and husband. Many years later, Jane Fairbank told me she was honored by it.
Bryant:
She's being interviewed back there.
Pollard:
I haven't seen her. What she said was very significant. She was always treated as a scientist and not as a woman. She said it was probably the first time she had encountered that kind of an atmosphere. I think, sociologically, that's extremely important. She was an attractive young woman, but nobody treated her as such. They treated her as a research scientist. Obviously everyone has their personality. Everyone is liked, disliked and so on, in varying degrees. We all interact that way. She wasn't treated differently specifically because she was a woman. I think the Radiation Lab was well ahead in that respect. So that's one thing I would think about.
Commitment to Winning War
Pollard:
I spoke to Norman Ramsey this morning and said that I thought he had missed one very important thing in his talk. He took it for granted. That was the extreme resolution with which the Radiation Lab fought the war. All the people that mattered in the Lab had only one single objective: to use the radar for the purposes of the war. If something wasn't suitable for the war, it was dropped pretty fast, even if it was interesting. Ramsey himself said it was a surprise to him that the shorter wavelength — the 3-centimeter wavelength — actually got developed. It turned out to be an extremely useful thing. He pointed out that it was probably a marginal decision to go ahead with this more fundamental research rather than pursue the absolutely practical thing. The "What-do-you-need-now?-Let's-get-it-for-you" sort of attitude was very strong. It came down from DuBridge, Loomis, Rabi, and Ridenour. They all had that attitude. As a group leader first and a division head later, I had no difficulty whatsoever riding that momentum. It was a very good thing. I think that's interesting in itself.
Bryant:
The momentum kept going?
Pollard:
I think right toward the end in 1945 it perhaps did falter. But my goodness, the Germans were already licked. The war with Japan was not going to depend nearly so much on radar as perhaps we had thought. I mean, it was different. Now, of course, we also had no knowledge of the work at Los Alamos. We didn't know. We all suspected what might be happening. What was interesting was, although a good many of us were nuclear physicists — I mean, at least a dozen were basically nuclear physicists — the amount we talked about nuclear weapons was essentially zero. We never brought it up among each other. We sort of quickly decided: Yes, it's possible. It would be very expensive. It's doubtful, so we forgot it.
Bryant:
Those are extremely important points that need to be documented.
Pollard:
We did see people go. I saw Bainbridge go. I didn't know exactly what Bainbridge was going to do, but I knew very well what must have happened. They must have seen that there was some sort of success in making a nuclear weapon. They knew it was possible. Now they needed to take a few of our people and use them. They took Bacher, Alvarez, Bainbridge, and some others.
Steering Committee
Bryant:
You were on the steering committee that ran the place?
Pollard:
I was on that committee toward the end.
Bryant:
There's two or three things I'd like to get at. Tell me about the type of meetings you may have had for instructional purposes. I think there was a Monday evening meeting or lecture. There were the William Hansen Lectures.
Pollard:
Yes. And Slater, Condon.
Bryant:
What time of the week did the steering committee meet?
Pollard:
Saturdays at one o'clock.
Bryant:
That's very interesting. On the sixth work day, Saturday afternoon, you'd have the important meeting.
Pollard:
Yes. There was a certain amount of impact of the British here. The British didn't have the equivalent lab. There was no exactly equivalent lab because the English didn't have the fire control and the radar in the same lab. The Army had a fire control lab, which was different. It was in the same town, but the normal place for us to interact was with TRE. They worked Sundays. They had Saturday off. People could enjoy the things they could do on Saturday, and then go back to work on Sunday, which wasn't such a good day for shopping or going to the movies or whatever you liked. The English were a little different. This system also allowed them to hold what they called Sunday Soviets. That meant that the lab management — the top people in the lab, the equivalent of our steering committee — were free to invite people from the RAF, to come to the lab. They took advantage of this by scheduling their equivalent of the steering committee meetings on Sunday. Now, we didn't organize Sundays that way, but the whole Lab worked until one o'clock Saturday. The steering committee was the only part of the Lab that worked Saturday afternoon. We worked until five and [everybody] worked 'til one o'clock on Saturday.
The steering committee took advantage of Saturday afternoon a little bit like the British did, but they didn't invite people from outside. It was all very much a family affair. The only person I remember addressing the steering committee was Lloyd Berkner. He was very close to the Radiation Lab. He was himself a physicist, and he worked, I think, for the Naval Air arm. The airplanes were a bit complicated, and we hadn't settled our relationship with the U.S. Air Force yet. He was one who had the voice in it. He did, I think, on one occasion talk to the steering committee. I wasn't there when he did, but I think he did. Otherwise, we [made] our own decisions.
Bryant:
In the steering committee?
Pollard:
In the steering committee each of us would have our chance to bring up our particular area of interest. We all understood, explicitly understood, that DuBridge made the decisions. The only thing you could do in the steering committee was to advise him. Loomis and Rabi acted as advisors. So there was dictatorship, if you wish, in management. Now, of course, DuBridge [Chuckling] never interpreted it in a dictatorial way at all. This was only for the purpose of getting things done with little debate. Every now and again complicated issues would arise, and it wasn't clear which way to go. I was a loser in some of those debates. I have no ill feeling about it. I recognized that there were balance points. By my very nature I automatically favored my side of the balance, which perhaps was not where the push ought to be. After the meeting it was up to DuBridge and he would decide. It wasn't up to me. That was the one side of the steering committee. There were some very rough afternoons. I was worn down more by the Saturday afternoons, which used to go from one 'til six, than the whole of the rest of the week. The issues we discussed affected a lot of people. For example, if a project involving 50 of your people was put into low priority and was essentially sent down the tubes, you couldn't relax. You knew the 50 would get employed in good projects. They were not going to lose their jobs or anything like that. But you still knew that they had invested a great deal of ingenuity and inventiveness into their work. Knowing that was going to be lost hurt a great deal.
Bryant:
That sounds tense.
Pollard:
Yes. It was very tense. I wouldn't want to live through those afternoons again.
Bryant:
This created an atmosphere of tenseness for the managers.
Pollard:
Yes. It did for the division heads. Are you interviewing Getting at all?
Bryant:
Yes. Someone else is interviewing him tomorrow.
Pollard:
He was also on the steering committee. He could understand what I'm talking about because his area and my area were close. His was a much better area. They had a much more firmly set up system, due to him. I give him credit for that. He was an extremely good manager. You might have called him a project engineer. I would say he was the best of all.
Bryant:
I'm curious to know what was the recourse if you felt that there had been a miscarriage of justice or a mistake had been made.
Pollard:
The office of the three people in charge of the Lab was wide open. Anybody who was on the steering committee could essentially get instant access. Any member of the Lab, any technician — which was the lowest of all: the red numbers on the badges, (which they finally gave up) could always talk to the management. There would always be a chance. Now you might have to wait two or three days. But if I felt on Monday morning that there'd been something done wrong on Saturday afternoon, I would be in one or another of those offices-probably DuBridge's-before lunch. I couldn't reverse a decision, but what I could do was to give him the extra information that I thought he should have had, and he might choose to act on it.
Management Style
Bryant:
Right. Doing justice to the subject.
Pollard:
Yes, that's right. Once in a long while you did feel that the personalities of some of the advocates had undue influence and were more persuasive. Somehow Rabi and Zacharias nearly always could put a point over very well. It isn't that they were more skilled. The Laboratory set-up was such that they were physically closer. As a member of a systems group, I was often out in the field. When I came back, I was always listened to most closely. But the point is that I was also away, and I wouldn't always know the sorts of things that were burgeoning in the minds of the people that were running the Lab. And also you could perhaps fault the designer of the Lab in one way. I wouldn't fault him, but I think you could. They divided the Lab into components groups and systems groups. While those systems divisions were very important, we never quite had the strength of manpower that the two component systems had. In a way that seemed a little unfair. It used to bother us that we would not get the talent that we wanted in the systems. But I think this is normal management paranoia. Almost any management person, no matter who he is, has the feeling the system isn't working quite as well as it should. I don't think there's any difference. But the truth is that the numbers of people that worked in the components systems did get very large. But otherwise I would say the Radiation Lab was a model that other big outfits could follow. I think it was. I learned a lot.
Bryant:
Did DuBridge spend much of his time supervising the various divisions and departments?
Pollard:
Very little. DuBridge was somebody you went to. That's a very sensitive question that you've asked. It's one that I want to answer right. First of all, I had never any feeling that DuBridge was not in touch with what was being done. But I think he also felt that he wanted to be "hands-off." I don't think he felt it was his place to wander down the hallway into my department and then take a look at it. I don't think he felt that. Here I think is a rather an interesting and sharp division between a lab with a practical purpose, such as the Radiation Lab, and a research lab. Only, I would say, 15% of our work was research. 85% of our time was devoted to development and production. Our ethos was: get it to work and get it to work simply and reliably. In a research lab you keep asking questions of nature, doing experiments and then facing what you get. Now, I think in a research lab a director goes around asking: "What are you doing?" "What luck have you had?" "How is it going?" "Do you need a little more of this and that?" But we were more formally organized, and none of those questions were significant. When the director goes into somebody's office and sits down and talks with that person, it impacts everyone. I don't think DuBridge wanted any part of that.
Bryant:
How many people did he know by name?
Pollard:
He knew at least a hundred well, I would say, out of one thousand. We were divided into groups of engineers, scientists and people helping. We had a total of three thousand people at the Lab. About a thousand were engineers. Out of that group he would know a hundred, maybe more.
Bryant:
Would Wheeler Loomis have known more of them?
Pollard:
He might.
Bryant:
Did he make a practice of going around checking on people's progress or finding out the results of what was talked about in the last meeting?
"L'il Abner"
Pollard:
No. If anybody came around, it was in the stage when Louis Ridenour was also one of the directors. DuBridge was the director. Then Loomis and Rabi entered the scene, but Ridenour was also there for a while. There were three co-directors. Louis Ridenour was one, and he played his part quite differently and very effectively. I had quite a lot to do with this moving target indication in the very early stages. One day Louis Ridenour came up through the stairs into the lab and looked around. He didn't ask any questions about what we were doing or anything like that. He came in and said, "Ernie, there's a thing that the British are doing which looks as though it might have some importance. It's possible that it's more than important for us because we may have to fight the war in China. And China's full of mountains." Of course, I knew that it was full of mountains. That was my birthplace. I knew it well since Kunming (where we were fighting) was where the Burma Road was built. I worked and grew up in Yunnan, the province of Kunming. So I recognized the fact that our ground radars were going to be useless in the mountains. So he gave me this as a sort of a project. He said, "Why don't you work on it, think about it, consult your group about it? Above all, make dead certain nobody has the slightest idea what you're going to do. This is a higher level security than anything." And he was right. That was very perceptive. The highest level of security comes when you start. Because if it's blown then, you give the other fellow an equal chance to compete. If you blow security when you've already developed the components and made the parts and so on, the competitor has got to do all that in order to catch up. So I prepared a report showing various ways to improve on ground radar, one of which proved to be MTI. Another idea of mine was a rapidly up and down radar.
Bryant:
The Beavertail?
Pollard:
It turned out to be the Li'l Abner. That's the only one I ever won a patent on.
Information and Decision-Making
Bryant:
I have a question here. To what extent did the flow of information follow the channels defined by that formal organization?
Pollard:
That's a hard one to answer. There were two kinds of information. Information about the radar systems and what the Army was going to do with them and how many they were going to make and all such filtered down from the directors. Information about production techniques spread out more freely. For example if someone came up with a much better brand of crystal that gave you three more db's of sensitivity, that news went — whooosht — around. You'd get information like that by word of mouth all over the place.
Bryant:
This would be shared around by person-to-person — networking? [Chuckling]
Pollard:
Yes, that's right. Questions like whether the Navy would order 100 sets or not came from the top there. I can't answer exactly how it went.
Bryant:
- Audio File
- MP3 Audio
(079 - pollard - clip 1.mp3)
Do you have the feeling that you had sufficient input on decision-making? If that's a fair question. If not, why, we'll go to the next one.
Pollard:
Oh, it's a very fair question. Not always. Sometimes you inherited a program that you would have liked to alter. In my case I inherited the problem of ground control of interception from Bainbridge. Bainbridge had a developed attitude towards this ground control of interception. It derived from the approach taken by the R.A.F. For that they had Ground Control of Interception and radar, which was more precise. That was what Bainbridge had decided to develop. He concluded the job could be done using two 584-type sets: One on the fighter and one on the bomber. Then he shrank that down to one precision radar going from one to the other. The high-power ground group was initially supposed to develop this concept. It was a smash hit on our aircraft carriers. Bainbridge was exactly the engineer for the job. He knew all the detailed things that he needed to know to make it work. He knew how to work the pitch and the roll and the yawl. He also understood how the stable element worked and all of that. They did build the radar for aircraft carriers, calling it SM. That went on all of the new large aircraft carriers. It was wonderful! It was high-priority work.
After that he tried to sell it to the Army and the Air Force. But the Army and the Air Force wouldn't buy it. You see, you can't put two big sets on one of the aircraft carriers. The aircraft carrier's loaded already. They're almost ready to go over anyhow. Instead, the Army wanted a thing that would give them a good plan position with range and bearing, and they wanted a separate set to find height. He resisted that. After he left for Los Alamos I found myself having to maintain his policy, and I didn't like it. I would have given the Army what it wanted. In the end we did. The thing they called the MEW has become the model for all radars you see in the airports.
Bryant:
But the MEW was already under development.
Pollard:
It was under development, but I would have pushed it harder. Also, I would have developed it differently. I would have worked it out so it had the height-finding in it as well. But I didn't get a chance to get that across. It would have been useless anyway. If you start changing an important policy in the middle of a war, that suggests something is not working and delays will be the result.
Internal Conflicts
Bryant:
What internal conflicts were you aware of?
Pollard:
Oh, they were personal. I don't know if you're going to record this. I don't know that I would like to have too much of that kind of information written down. Alvarez was very bright and ahead of many in practical thinking. I think he didn't feel he was appreciated enough. I think he left with a little bit of a bad feeling on his part. I got on fine with him, and there was no trouble. He was in our car pool. Car pools were quite important. I remember there were five in the car pool. They traveled to and from the Lab once a day and once on Saturday.
Bryant:
Were you aware of the presence of Alfred L. Loomis? He was absent most of the time, right?
Pollard:
Yes, he was. On the other hand, he was obviously on our side. He would let people use his apartment in Washington on occasion. But, no, he didn't show up. I would expect Alfred Loomis to want to have more contact with DuBridge and Rabi than with us, the Indians. He would rather consult with the chiefs than the Indians. So the Indians wouldn't see him very much.
Bryant:
Alvarez talks of spending a whole evening with him and ironing out the GCA problem.
Pollard:
That would be quite in keeping with Alfred Loomis.
Bryant:
We've heard about informal groups of employees — some people called them gangs. I assume these groups were social. Jolly Boys and things like this. Purely social?
Pollard:
I never got anywhere with those. That's something that I've never been involved in. We had plenty of social life, but none of that kind. It didn't come my way anyway.
Bryant:
Earlier I read an oral history by L. C. Marshall that's recorded in here.
Pollard:
Larry Marshall might easily have been involved with that.
Bryant:
He makes a statement that sometime in '43 the organization was growing and there was a growing set of demands for liaison and making hardware and applications. There was a lot of pressure to bring in a sizable number of engineers. But Rabi opposed that. There's also statements made that RL management, namely DuBridge and Loomis and Rabi, initially opposed doing fieldwork.
Pollard:
The latter would be very difficult to document. I can't remember my dates. Fieldwork in the very early days made no sense. We didn't have anything to go in the field with. But when they did have things to go in the field with, I don't remember being conscious that DuBridge and company were stopping it. I mean, I myself spent considerable time in Panama in 1942. We had people in England. In fact, we had cheery names for these places. Panama was Yellow Jack, and Florida was Orange Crush, and these were designated names for the different sets. I don't think you can say that field work was discouraged. I believe there probably was some objection to the engineers. It's possible that the ultimate cause of resentment was financial. One of the things you ought to understand was the way people were paid at the Radiation Lab. It was really pretty crazy.
Pay System
Bryant:
The compensation system was crazy?
Pollard:
It was the absence of system. I was hired at my Yale salary plus $150 a month. Then every so often — I think every six months — Loomis would call me in and review my salary. The basis on which he reviewed it was more or less: Would Yale be promoting you if you'd been there? What would you do if they did? He interpreted this very liberally on his part. So he would jack me up a little bit. Ultimately the base pay that I got was an assistant professor at Yale plus $150 a month plus a few raises. At that stage I was actually on the steering committee and running a division. In an ordinary outfit, I would certainly expect to be getting three times the average salary. I wasn't. It was perfectly clear that full professors who were hired well after me were being paid in a similar fashion. They were getting more money than I was and not doing work that required as much responsibility. I think cost could have been a factor in Loomis's feeling. If you bring engineers in, they're going to want to be paid. He might have thought that, paying them more would cause jealousy inside the place. These guys would be getting the extra three or four thousand a year that should have gone to the university people. Rather than just saying it was prejudice, it might have been an informed decision based on the people that Loomis had to work with. I give you that suggestion. In my little "Radiation" book, I do discuss this in a page or so. It was very tricky one to write.
Most Important Work
Bryant:
What do you regard as your most important work in Rad Lab?
Pollard:
I think convincing the Navy that the navigational radar using microwave radar was possible. I was one of that group working on the Semmes. I was also very seasick. Nevertheless, I navigated them through a fog for the weekend by watching my radar.
Bryant:
This was the U.S.S. Semmes, the Navy's test ship?
Pollard:
That's right. I was a very impressive demonstrator. I am proud of the work I did later on bushing the set they called the MEW, which is now the airport radar.
Bryant:
I used MEW when I was in uniform.
Pollard:
Alvarez was the original designer. Two or three people died, nearly all valuable. Sam Simmons and Mort Kanner died there. The people who actually developed MEW were Ed Schneider, Mike Chaffee, Al Bagg, and Bob Watt I mentioned them in the book. It came into my division when Alvarez left for Los Alamos. I immediately put everything I could behind it. I think I did all right on that.
Bryant:
It paid off?
Pollard:
That's right. I think I didn't do too badly with the little height-finder.
Bryant:
The TPS-10 project?
Pollard:
You can't isolate one contribution, however. You contribute all the way around and never quite know how your efforts add up. Strange people come up to me and say, "Remember me?" I didn't realize my work even impacted on them.
Teaching vs. Compromise
Bryant:
You were a teacher of course before you went to the Radiation Lab?
Pollard:
Yes.
Bryant:
You felt you were able to continue instructing people?
Pollard:
That's a very sharp question.
Bryant:
You were accustomed to summarizing information and giving it to people for their use. Of course, you were on an informal day-to-day basis there. You did prepare for classes? No? How did you schedule a project? Did you have a formal scheduling?
Pollard:
That's a terribly sharp question! That's a most interesting question, too. I do love teaching. I am a good teacher, and in fact I've done some innovative teaching, which has proved to be a success in its way. Part of my life now is living out that teaching. I'm trying to get science more widely understood by people. That's what that little book of mine you were very kind to buy is all about. But now you ask me that question in reference to Radiation Lab. I'd have to answer you quite differently for that time of my life. I'm beginning to see why I'm having a little trouble telling you this. I'm beginning to realize that the pressures were different. When you're teaching, your pressure is to get that class to understand what it is they've got to know. That's your pressure. You judge yourself in terms of whether you succeed or fail in that. As soon as you apply this to the Radiation Lab, the pressure becomes knowing the right thing to do. It's knowing the right thing to do. It's not so much telling people the right thing to do. It's knowing the right thing to do.
Bryant:
It's solving the problem.
Pollard:
Yes. The issue was making the compromises you needed to get the thing to actually go. One of my failures was using too small an antenna. Basically it should have been as big as the MEW. It wasn't. It was six feet long. You see, the wrong compromise was reached on that project. All of those mistakes eat away at you. All day long we were making decisions. Somebody would come up to you and say: Look, I can get this little sweep to go out on the tube all right, but to do that I've got to have 350 volts. Now the only way I could easily get that within the weight limitations and the size limitations was to throw something else out. But if I could have that work at 200 volts, in which case it would be a little smaller, I would be quite all right. So now he would come to me with this. So I would sit down and, almost like a doctor, try to weigh all the factors in my mind. I had to decide what the compromise would be and how I could maximize all of it together. That's not exactly teaching, is it?
Bryant:
No.
Rad Lab and Los Alamos
Pollard:
You don't prepare and explain. You assess and aid decisions. Those, I think, are the words. You know a person who's never been justifiably seen properly, is Robert Oppenheimer. I understood exactly the position that Robert Oppenheimer found himself in. I think he did magnificently in that position. I don't think too many people give him credit for it. He discovered almost nothing, but he had all these great minds there coming to him with problems. He understood exactly what they were trying to tell him. He had the kind of mind that could do it. I don't. He did. He could understand the ways in which they would have to work together to get the result. He was extremely good at that. There's almost no category you can put that person in.
Bryant:
Well, that's quite a contrast to the Radiation Laboratory management you were talking about because Oppenheimer knew all the details.
Pollard:
Yes. Absolutely. I think he was needed.
Bryant:
But he could also allow other people to work.
Pollard:
Yes, yes.
Bryant:
That's quite a talent.
Pollard:
Yes, it's really a talent. He had an easier job than the Radiation Lab because his attention was not divided. He had a single job.
Bryant:
He had one customer.
Pollard:
He had one customer. That's right. It was easier. In many respects, I think, the Rad Lab was the greater of those labs, though it hasn't the reputation of Los Alamos.
Bryant:
Some writers have said that Oppenheimer, in the beginning of Los Alamos especially, used a lot of the Rad Lab know-how for his organization.
Pollard:
He did.
Bryant:
He consulted heavily with DuBridge and others who were already recognized as successful.
Pollard:
He talked with Rabi in particularly. Rabi was the only member of the Radiation Lab who was consistently in on what was done in Los Alamos. Of course Rabi would have carried over his ideas about management to Los Alamos. But Los Alamos did have that miserable infliction of having the Army run it. I think one of the great credits to Oppenheimer was his ability to get along with General Groves. May I say also that great credit should go to General Groves [Laughter], that he could get on with Oppenheimer. I think the country owes those two people a lot.
Bryant:
Oppenheimer had to keep all of the military at bay and at least settled down if they were not happy.
Pollard:
That's right.
Bryant:
That was a talent in itself.
Pollard:
It was. He did very well.
Bryant:
So someone in our government — very high up — did an awfully good job of selecting the right kind of person.
Pollard:
They did. I don't know who did pick Oppenheimer. It was a good pick.
Bryant:
I suspect that Compton, Stimson and Loomis were in on it. Stimson was probably the strongest member in government.
Pollard:
Yes, Stimson was a really remarkable man.
Relations with Military
Priorities
Bryant:
I'd like to ask some questions about Radiation Laboratory-military relations. How were military needs communicated to the Radiation Laboratory?
Pollard:
They were communicated to us as directly as possible. Quite early on we had two avenues of approach to Washington. First of all, Stimson had an office — I've forgotten the name of this, but it was run by Edward L. Bowles who was at MIT. He had several very good people working with him, including Julius Stratton of MIT and one or two other people. One of those, I think, was Ramsey. I can't name them all. That office was a very important liaison place between the Rad Lab and Washington. I wouldn't be able to work through that office, but DuBridge, Rabi, Loomis, Ridenour-all of them-could phone up Bowles and go at it. That's was the first avenue. The other one was that we would set up appointments with the sort of lieutenant colonel type of individual who was knowledgeable in radar. I won't call our contacts low level. Sometimes we met with captains. Captain Fogle was one contact. I can't think of the name of the lieutenant colonel I got very friendly with.
Bryant:
You were in a position to make these appointments yourself?
Pollard:
Yes.
Bryant:
Could you travel on your own?
Pollard:
Yes. I could.
Bryant:
I think that's very important that you were delegated that privilege.
Pollard:
I was. I had to consult with either Loomis or DuBridge. Anybody out of my group could visit, but they would have to check with me. The only reason I had for saying "no" to anyone would be: Was he going to see the right person for the thing that he had scheduled? Secondly, was he a person I could trust to present it correctly? Otherwise, they went.
Bryant:
You've described some rules and regulations. Were these codified, or were these just understood?
Pollard:
Understood.
Bryant:
Yes. You had no handbook of instructions [Chuckling] or procedures or anything?
"Rosebud" Transponder
Pollard:
No. A very, very interesting thing came up today. He mentioned a Rosebud. This is a little transponder.
Bryant:
Right.
Pollard:
Now this Rosebud was the product of a young man in my division named Robert T. McCoy. The beacon group did not build this. The British IFF (Identification of Friend and Foe) was tied up in a dreadful political entanglement. If you want to put your finger on a point of prejudice, here's a good one. Rabi in particular couldn't see this deal with the British accomplishing anything. Mark V IFF, as far as Rabi was concerned, was silly, and a waste of time.
Bryant:
That was his feeling toward IFF in general?
Pollard:
No, toward that particularly great big project the English were running.
Bryant:
Was this because they had an adequate IFF system already?
Pollard:
I don't know what stroke of genius operated in Rabi's mind. I think he felt that when you had precision radar, you probably didn't need something else to tell you whether it was the other guy or not. I think he felt that you were more in control of the situation that you could direct what would happen. But now I'm speaking as though I knew what Rabi thought. The point is that because of Rabi's prejudice there wasn't the development of this transponder, which would have been helpful. This guy, McCoy, from Rosebud, Texas, assembled the necessary parts by going around the Radiation Lab until he built one or two of these. The MEW group got hold of one, and it immediately glowed, and they wanted more. They were moonlighting making Rosebuds.
Bryant:
My MEW set in France and Germany had one. Yes, sir. It was good.
Pollard:
That's right. Oh, you had one of them?
Bryant:
Yes.
Pollard:
They're great. Oh, it was largely McCoy, and bless his heart. I'm happy I backed that project although it hardly entered the books as a project.
Bryant:
What was the usual procedure for choosing and planning RL projects? How many were internally generated and how many were direct responses to needs expressed in the military? In the course of a project was there consultation with the military?
Pollard:
Up to, I'd say, 1943 about half were internally generated and the rest were external. After '43 the military largely initiated our projects. You've got to realize that having decided on a project it took about two years to get it out. So that's a hard question to answer. The question is whether up to '43 most of it wasn't internal. But after '43 if it didn't somehow jive with what the military wanted, it didn't get done.
Bryant:
How did dealing with the Army compare to dealing with the Navy?
Pollard:
It would depend a great deal on the local conditions and who they were. I got on fine with my particular group in the Army Air Force. They then separated off and became the Air Force. Then they had their own procurement things.
Bryant:
That was at Wright Field?
Pollard:
Yes. I think this didn't happen until late '44. Our relations immediately deteriorated when that happened. Up 'til then they'd been very good.
Bryant:
This was the Signal Corps Aircraft Radio Laboratory at Wright Field?
Pollard:
The Signal Corps was not too bad. When the Air Force took over, they essentially built their own signal corps. The people assigned to them didn't seem to me to be the best. The Army was a bigger outfit, and they had all the clout. And the ones that were assigned were down lower and now became up there. The new Air Force procurement people were the ones that went by the book. Rad Lab never went by the book. Rad Lab was always concerned with whether it could be done and whether it could be engineered well and what was the best way. The others were looking at the specification books a lot of the time.
Bryant:
You mentioned one difference between the situation here and the British. Their Navy operated quite differently. The radar operated separately.
Pollard:
Yes.
Bryant:
Even the Army and the RAF — Royal Air Force — had separate research establishments, even though they were both eventually located in Great Malvern.
Pollard:
That's right. They did talk to each other. They were, nevertheless, separate.
Impact of Rad Lab on Postwar Career
Bryant:
What effects did your Rad Lab experience have on your subsequent career?
Pollard:
Lots. The biggest single thing I learned from that experience was that if you wanted to achieve something, you did it better with group wisdom than with single wisdom. When I set up a biophysics division, as I did at Yale, right away those of us that were working in that group met every so often — once a week, to hash out what would be done.
Bryant:
By group wisdom you're saying that at least the professional people on the staff influenced each other and the final decision, too.
Pollard:
Yes. I made as sure as I could that everyone had input. They interacted not only in things I cared about, but in things they cared about too. The curious thing is that I steadily ran into opposition as time passed. It became distasteful to the university faculty members not to be regarded as single experts. I ran into trouble because of that. I still want to say that my way — the Radiation Lab way — is better. You get to achieve more. Then of course Radiation Lab taught me, as Norman Ramsey said, to think big and to get on with it. You didn't sit around. Once we decided on a project we immediately set it up and did it.
Bryant:
You were more accustomed to goals.
Pollard:
Yes.
Bryant:
You kept a goal in mind.
Pollard:
As soon as the goal was established, you went right to work on it. You didn't question. In some ways, for research purposes, that's not all that productive. You may set a goal and you may follow it but it doesn't work. So you've gone all the way down and then you have to go back. I think my faculty people didn't like my weekly committee meetings. They may have had a point, but I wasn't easily convinced.
Monday Night Meetings and Hansen Lectures
Bryant:
Could we go back a moment to the operation of the Radiation Lab and some of the more, maybe, informal and formal instructional events. Was there something like a Monday night lecture?
Pollard:
Every Monday night, without fail, from seven-thirty 'til nine o'clock, some person gave a talk. Sometimes a person in the Lab would speak. For instance, I gave a talk on MEW. But mostly the series would be planned educational lectures. Slater wrote a little book on microwaves. He introduced that bit by bit on Monday night. I think he had ten sessions. Hansen gave a number of sessions. Edward Condon gave a number of sessions as well. I don't remember Pound participating, but the people in those component groups would give sessions on the particular components they were working on.
Bryant:
Where were these meetings held?
Pollard:
One of the big rooms at MIT was made available on Monday nights.
Bryant:
Did this include a dinner?
Pollard:
No. You managed dinners on your own. You all went out to dinner. Nobody went home. There wasn't enough time.
Bryant:
What compelled you to attend? Apparently attendance was very good.
Pollard:
Yes. But it wasn't super. You'd expect 200 to attend. There was a committee that organized the series. I think Sam Seely was on that committee. The people that were chosen to talk considered it a great honor. So they would come.
Bryant:
This was a committee that actually scheduled it and made arrangements and so forth.
Pollard:
I wish I knew more about that, but I'm sure there was such a committee.
Bryant:
Were DuBridge and Loomis and Rabi much involved in these? Did they attend?
Pollard:
Oh, yes! All of them would attend almost every time.
Bryant:
What kind of discussions did these things generate?
Pollard:
It varied with the speaker. You wouldn't expect too many Q&A's for Slater or Hansen. You could buttonhole Hansen afterwards and go at him. Let's see, who was the other one? You could have Q&A on Condon. He'd [Chuckling] bounce right back at you. These sessions were pretty open and fun. I have a set of them. At one stage they gave 30 sessions going through all the different aspects of the Lab. This became a Radiation Lab book, available internally. I was one of the editors of that.
Bryant:
That exists, filed away I assume.
Pollard:
I'm not sure whether it's in file or not. Ten years after the war. MIT was not too interested in that.
Bryant:
There's lots of archives over in the Federal Archives in Washington. I'm pretty sure there's a lot there.
Pollard:
Yes. I may have one myself. It was classified. They were invariably classified. Very few were "Secret." They were mostly "Confidential" or restricted.
Bryant:
Who was in charge of security as far as classification of documents on confidential projects?
Pollard:
The people that had the stamps.
Bryant:
Were they technical or administrative people?
Pollard:
It got more elaborate as the war went on, and I think there were people who decided. Originally, they wanted to stamp everything "Secret." Of course in the first nine months security was maintained entirely inside the Lab. It was very good. Norman Ramsey's point about not talking to anybody was followed. Later on they initiated a new security system.
Bryant:
How much did security requirements and regulations hamper your operation of a project?
Pollard:
Very little. When I came to start work on the Moving Target Indicator, I ran into a little bit of a trouble with security. I mean, if you ever went into anything concerned with counter-measures, you had an awful time of it. Essentially, they wanted state-of-the-art anti-jamming devices. Well, you had the devil of a time finding out what the jamming was [Chuckling], you see. You couldn't really do the state-of-the-art anti-jamming.
Bryant:
Your counter-counter-measures involved hardening your radar to be not vulnerable to their jamming.
Pollard:
Yes. That's right. We had some trouble with that. But we licked it. We did reasonably well by being our own counter measures people and figuring out what you had to do and so on.
Bryant:
I'd like to find out one more thing. You mentioned William Hansen. I looked him up in the biographies of Rad Lab, and I found that he had a badge from November of '40 right through '45. Did he lecture each week?
Pollard:
Oh, no!
Bryant:
Well, what were the Hansen Lectures then?
Pollard:
The Hansen Lectures were one of those sets I've described. I think there may have been 15 of them.
Bryant:
He didn't lecture on a regular basis then?
Pollard:
Over one particular period he gave these lectures.
Bryant:
But these were in the Monday Night Lectures.
Pollard:
Yes, they were all on Monday nights.
Bryant:
So the Hansen Lectures were only a part of that. They were not very distinctive at all. Guerlac's book doesn't seem to interpret them this way.
Pollard:
They are in collections. You could find all of Condon's lectures. Those should be in the collection there. You can find all of the Rad Lab discussions I described to you. You ought to be able to find Slater's book. You know, we didn't have Xerox. It would all be dittoed. You ought to be able to find Slater, Condon, and Hansen's lectures all in ditto.
Bryant:
I've seen Hansen's. It's about three volumes. It's very extensive. I thought he gave it pretty much on a regular basis.
Pollard:
He didn't stretch out his lectures through the entire time. I think Hansen was early. I think Hansen came before Slater.
Bryant:
Of course the whole thing comes down to people and what they did. Right?
Pollard:
Yes.
The Military, Security and Research
Bryant:
You mentioned when Edward L. Bowles got down to Stimson's office, he had a good role to play.
Pollard:
Yes.
Bryant:
He actually didn't go down there 'til '42.
Pollard:
I think that's right.
Bryant:
So he was in his MIT office during the last part of '40 and '41.
Pollard:
Yes. In that time, we were not so dependent on the military arm. After all, the Army really got into the war at the beginning of '42.
Bryant:
Right.
Pollard:
Here's the way the impact on the Lab went. It was begun when Taffy Bowen brought over Airborne Interception. The idea was to put this in the fighter planes so the pilots could see the target. You couldn't use the longer-wave radar on anything higher than ground level. From the air, the ground wiped out the signal.
Bryant:
You just got a big ground signal message?
Pollard:
That's right. So if the enemy was flying low and all of that, it was no good. The idea was to have the narrow beam which would not hit the ground. So everything we did in the initial stages was in terms of airborne interception. A month after that, Project 2 began, which was the SCR-584. I don't know who presented the need for gunlaying. By about the end of January 1941, there were two projects in the Lab: AI and then the beginning of Project 2. I was in one of the first flights when they tried an experimental AI. We noticed we could see a ship very clearly with the airborne — the AI — radar. Very, very crude radar. Horribly crude radar! But we could see a ship. Actually Bowen was navigating along with the pilot, and he saw it. He said he wanted my notebook, and he wrote in the notebook the course that the pilot was to fly. He pushed that over to the pilot. The pilot flew this course back and forth, and all the while the radar echo showed where the ship was. He knew he'd got the ship. As soon as that came back to the Lab, we got to work on an Air-to-Surface Vessel, ASV. Simultaneously, they decided to put a set a destroyer on the Semmes. Instantly, the trees started to set out branches. But, you see, we didn't need any military input for this. The Semmes was perhaps military, although you could hardly say it was. So all through that year we were riding along on the AI, ASV, the Naval thing "SG" and the 584. You noticed that Pound gave his badge number as 311. That was in '42. So the Radiation Lab wasn't up to very big numbers. We even ran out of money, too, as you know. And Rockefeller kept the lab afloat for six months. So we weren't a very big lab.
Bryant:
I assume that Rockefeller got reimbursed.
Pollard:
I assume that. Sure. It was in '42 that Bowles would become important to the Lab.
Bryant:
Bowles never had a badge at Radiation Lab as far as I know.
Pollard:
I think he did.
Bryant:
Did you see him physically in the place? Were you aware of his presence?
Pollard:
Yes. Not very often. That's a good question, too.
Bryant:
In the L. C. Marshall interview it's stated that sometime, I think probably in January and February, DuBridge and John Trump took a trip to Washington to get Bowles removed from the activity. I just make that as an observation.
Pollard:
Let me add my little bit to that. Mind you, I was not as high up in the Lab as Larry Marshall at that time. When the Lab activities were diluted, I floated to the top. That's, in truth, a very good statement of my position. Consider my role on the MEW. Bowles had a committee called the Stratton Committee. They examined all the options on radar that were being presented to the armed services. They concluded that the MEW was not needed.
Bryant:
This was after he was already down at the Pentagon?
Pollard:
Yes. This was a great thorn in all our sides because he had also castigated several other things from the Radiation Lab. I don't know what those were. At the same time they were testing an early version 15-foot of the MEW down in Orlando at the Air Force test site. They'd run some tests on the MEW. It detected all of the aircraft without the slightest trouble. It recorded all those distances with beautiful plots and everything. It was extremely accurate. The officers down in Orlando had never seen any radar come close. The Pentagon got the word: YOU DON'T WANT THIS THING? [Laughter] IF YOU DON'T GIVE US THIS YOUR'E CRAZY.
Bryant:
Increase the funding, don't cut it off.
Pollard:
That's right. Before the report came out, there had been bad feelings. If you want my calibration on Larry Marshall it is that he added color to anything. If it the issues were black and white, he'd illuminate the differences a bit more.
Bryant:
Well, I certainly do thank you.
