Air Castle of the South by Craig Havighurst

Author:Craig Havighurst
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252094347
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Jack DeWitt was as pleased as anyone about the war’s end, but he was stuck at the Evans Signal Laboratory, living in a rented house with several other officers, and in a funk. Elise wouldn’t leave Washington. She said it was because she didn’t want to take Jack Jr. out of school, but in fact their marriage was on the rocks. DeWitt’s life on the coast of New Jersey was dull. There was little to do at night and one decent restaurant. Jack had no hope of accumulating enough points for discharge until the spring of 1946.

Orders came just after Japan’s surrender to develop methods for detecting and tracking long-range missiles, one of the most fearsome new weapons developed in the war. One of DeWitt’s projects in the latter half of the war had involved field radar that could track incoming mortar fire and deduce its point of origin, so he was qualified for the assignment. With no flying rockets to detect off the shore of New Jersey, DeWitt thought he could adapt his orders to an experiment that had tantalized him for years. In 1939, he and George Reynolds had tried to shoot a radar signal at the moon from a specially built antenna on the WSM tower grounds, but they found they had far too little power to produce a detectable echo. Now, Jack asked himself, what if we used the moon as a stand-in for a missile? It was a fast-moving body in the sky. And such an exercise could address some critical questions, chiefly: would radio waves cross the reflective ionosphere, travel through space, and return to the earth? The effort, dubbed the Diana Project, after the goddess of the moon, got the green light.

Over five months, DeWitt and a team of four men, all between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-six (Jack was thirty-nine), retrofitted a radar that had done service at Pearl Harbor, doubling its sending antennas. Their base was a twenty-foot by fifty-foot shack on a promontory out in the Atlantic ocean, with marshes of pine and scrub oak behind them. Towering over them was a one-hundred-foot tall antenna that resembled a giant, upended barbecue grill.

DeWitt wasn’t in the lab when the detector finally worked. At almost exactly noon on January 10, 1946, when the moon was suspended over the ocean like a scoop of ice cream in the blue sky, an oscilloscope began to wiggle exactly 2.4 seconds after the regular sending pulses. At 186,000 miles per second, that’s just how long they’d calculated the signal would take to travel there and back. Civilian scientist Herbert Kauffman proclaimed, “That’s it!” And the team went to fetch DeWitt.

The Signal Corps’ commander, General Van Deusen, after seeing a separate demonstration, made plans to personally announce the news at a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers meeting in New York on January 24. DeWitt sat at the back of the room, waiting for the general to follow the “exceedingly dull” president of Bell Labs.

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