135
DisasterMan
The whole idea of an identifi cation friend or foe system was secret. It
was decided that no workable airborne transponder should fall into German
hands if a RAF or American plane were to be shot down. As it turned out,
hundreds of RAF and American aircraft such as B-17, B-24 and P-51 were
shot down. The Signal Corps asked Picatinney Arsenal, in New Jersey to
design and build little explosive devices which were mounted inside the
case of each SCR-695. If the B-17 was shot down, the pilot, if he were
still alive, could push a special red emergency switch on the instrument
panel to blow up the IFF set. This assumed he had time to do this before
he jumped out of the plane with his parachute. If the pilot and copilot
were killed in fl ight, there was a backup system of an accelerometer inside
the transponder which would activate a switch to blow up the set when
the plane crashed on the ground. I was invited to observe the test of this
explosive at the Naval Research Lab. We were on the roof of one of the lab
buildings because the explosive was not supposed to go through the case.
As it turned out, the Picatinny Arsenal engineers were very embarrassed
when the explosive detonated and the whole box was fl ung off the roof to
land in the street three fl oors down. The charge was about three times too
big.
The British were very anxious to receive the Royal Air Force's share
of the SCR-695 airborne transponders which were being manufactured
by Motorola in Chicago. As the Army's IFF project offi cer, I had to give a
progress report each week to my boss who forwarded it on to a Major
General in the War Department's Supply Service who passed it on to
the White House so that Roosevelt could tell Churchill what the status
of production was. Our goal was to send several hundred to England by
the end of December, 1942. I was sent to Chicago in December to go to
Motorola's factory to get the latest information. Fortunately, the factory
was making the desired goal. However, there were complications ahead.
The urgency and pressure on the production workers had apparently not
been communicated to the people who were in charge of shipping these
important sets to England. They treated this shipment as a routine matter
and did not even pick up the equipment from the loading dock for three
days. The workers understandably got upset at this. Someone fi nally found
out about this and the shipping people rushed over. The next mistake was
that they put all the sets together and put them on a single ship instead of
sending half of the sets on one ship and the other half on a different ship.
Summary :
The urgency and pressure on the production workers had apparently not been communicated to the people who were in charge of shipping these important sets to England. They treated this shipment as a routine matter and did not even pick up the equipment from the loading dock for three days. The next mistake was that they put all the sets together and put them on a single ship instead of sending half of the sets on one ship and the other half on a different ship.
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