Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [61]
Departing the Navy yard, the camouflage-dappled Juneau steamed around the Battery and headed up the Hudson River for the Iona Island ammunition depot, where she would load her magazines for battles unknown.
BOB HAGEN’S OWN first shipboard assignment after his tour at Great Lakes was over was the Aaron Ward, a new destroyer headed to the Pacific. Commander Orville F. Gregor was reputed to be the dictatorial type. Hagen’s new duties as assistant communications officer included filling a new job that few officers, not even the Aaron Ward’s captain, yet understood—the job of radar officer.
The idea of aiming a pulse of radio energy at a target and measuring its range and compass bearing by the nature of the echo had the potential to revolutionize the ancient art of ships putting ordnance on target. Radar, or “radio detection and ranging,” was first put into practice by the Royal Navy. The technology came to the United States eventually through the Naval Research Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in partnership with engineers in private industry, Bell Labs and RCA earliest among them. Two opposite misconceptions impeded its introduction. The fleet’s Luddites clung to the idea that because radar had not figured in World War I’s Battle of Jutland, which was the textbook case study at the Naval Academy and the war colleges, it must not be terribly important. Against them railed evangelists who believed radar was, as a historian of the technology put it, a “magic box on which one need only press the button and the battle was won.”
The first officers to be selected for MIT’s fire-control course had helped design the technology for naval use and knew its potentials and limitations. Alfred G. Ward, who would join the battleship North Carolina, had helped develop electric-powered, servo-controlled guns. Lloyd Mustin, the debate opponent to Lewis “Chesty” Puller and range instructor to Joseph Wylie, had conceived of gyro-stabilized antiaircraft guns. As a graduate student in MIT’s electrical engineering program, he and Lieutenant Commander Rivero of the San Juan helped develop the computer that calculated how far an antiaircraft gunner had to lead his target to hit it. As the assistant gunnery officer on the Atlanta, Mustin would have ample time to refine his theories. As the first radar officer at the Bureau of Ordnance, Rivero had the job of routing new radar sets from the factory to whichever ship was on hand, in port for overhaul or repair, to receive it.
Installing technology was one thing. Encouraging warriors to discover a second-nature knack for using it was another. The Navy was slow to move beyond the period of high secrecy that surrounded the research. “There wasn’t any real training program,” Rivero said. “That’s one mistake we made. We didn’t think that far ahead.”
In 1942, the attitudes of most line officers toward this fledgling technology spanned the full range of know-nothingdom, from raw ignorance to well-considered dismissal. Hanson Baldwin regarded the typical naval officer of the day as “a narrow man, with fixed and unassailable ideas of politics, life, and society; too often—though master of the details—he cannot see the woods because of the trees.” The problem ran straight to the top. “Our flag officers and senior captains are old compared with those of other navies; far too many of them suffer from nervous or heart disabilities; to stand the great strain of heavy responsibilities they should quite clearly be ten years younger.” As Kelly Turner admitted, “Neither I nor any of my staff knew anything about radar, except by reputation.” By the time the technology