Memoirs: Rad Lab

"...Because we had a large group, I was often able to take on tasks of particular interest to me when they came along. For quite awhile I worked with a friend, Herb Weissl who was equipping a squadron of Navy fighter planes for night combat. The planes were to be flown from an aircraft carrier and were intended to challenge night attacks from the Japanese zeros.
"It was through this project that I first met Commander Lloyd Berkner, the chief of the avionics group of the naval aircraft division, who was to become a good friend of mine. Berkner was one of the Radiation Lab's most ardent customers. It was his idea to design a small, helically-scanning radar to go into the nose of a Navy fighter plane. Consequently, Herb and I saw him frequently during the months the radar was being built and tested.
Berkner was one of a vanishing breed of adventurer-scientists. Because he was a Naval Reserve commander he had been mustered into the service, into a position for which he was ideally suited. He was not only a flyer but also an electrical engineer who had been the radio operator for a year on one of Byrd's expeditions to the South Pole in the 30's. --->
He had also done research on the electrical static that made early aircraft radios so unreliable and consequently he knew, or thought that he knew, what the Navy needed at any given time, and most often he was right.
Berkner not only fit his position well but he looked the part, too. He was over six feet tall, handsome in a rugged kind of way, and with his well-fitting uniform and booming voice he looked and sounded every inch the commander. As a consequence, people paid attention to him, both at the lab and, more importantly, within the Navy.
One night he came to our house for dinner. I had told our young son Stephen that he was a Navy flyer. Lloyd showed up looking as impressive as ever, in full uniform. All through the dinner I noticed that Steve was paying close attention to him. When we moved to the living room for coffee, Steve followed closely behind, apparently afraid to take his eyes off Lloyd. When it was finally time for him to go, I got Berkner's coat and we walked to the front door, where Steve was already standing, wideeyed with anticipation. "Why are you looking so excited, Steven I said. He was waiting, he told me, to watch Berkner fly away. His expression was heartrending when I explained that Lloyd was not that kind of flyer. Walking down the drive to his car Berkner said that, seeing the look on Steve's face, he'd never felt so inadequate in his life.

For a number of months I worked part time with Herb on the night fighter project. Much of that time we were at the Quonset airfield in Rhode Island. We spent most of our daytime hours repairing the experimental radars and most of the nights watching mock intercepts. During the whole period we worked on the radars an aircraft carrier stood by, waiting for the time when we and the pilots felt the equipment and crews were ready to go. When that day finally came our jubilation was cut short by the discovery that the manufacturer hadn't delivered any of the test equipment needed by the carrier's technicians to maintain the radars. Herb and I rounded up all the test equipment that we had in our shack; the voltmeters, oscilloscopes, our precious home-made spectrum analyzers and all of our tools.
When we realized that all this would hardly outfit half of the maintenance groups we did something not entirely honest. That night we went back to Cambridge to see what could be scrounged there. To our joy we discovered that we had accumulated several shelves of extra test gear that wasn't being used,

as well as some not quite so extra. When we told our problem to the guards they looked the other way, and so our squadron sailed with almost everything it needed. Several months later when I asked someone in the Navy how the carrier had been doing I was shown a fleet report that said that thanks to the equipment stolen from the Radiation Laboratory the radars had performed well and the zeros were no longer able to attack the U.S. ships at will.
The report also said that our planes had made an unexpected contribution to the sailors morale. From time to time one of the night fighters would be flown during the day at high altitude with a can of ice cream mix substitued from its rotating antenna and the the crew would be treadted to a batch of homemade ice cream.