Scientists Against Time

This book reveals the official inside story of OSRD (Office of Scientific Research and Development). It tells of the plans, the hopes, the endless experiments, the unremitting labor that lay behind the ultimate success of our scientists in outstripping the enemy.

Here for the first time is the whole story of the development of each new instrument and weapon as each new emergency demanded it: how Anglo-American radar finally surpassed the German; how we struggled to withstand the U-boat packs and what devices enabled us to turn from defense to offense in two years' time.

Here is the true story of the rocket; of why gas was not used; of the incendiary and the flame thrower. Here is the comedy of the Dukw and the Weasel, which proved such life-savers on the beaches; here is a chapter, previously unwritten even in medical books, on the history of Aviation Medicine. Here, naturally, is the record of those two climactic instruments, the proximity fuze, which helped to stop the break-through in the Bulge, and the atom bomb.

In Washington that fateful June of 1940, an anxious group of men, the President and Cabinet and Chiefs of the Services, and a small knot of scientists knew the true state of our defenses. We were two years behind the Germans in the race for new weapons. The President appointed Dr. Vannevar Bush, President of Carnegie Institution, as head of a new agency, the National Defense Research Counsel, later to become the Office of Scientific Research and Development.

A list was immediately drawn up of leading physicists, chemists, engineers, doctors, psychologists, and within a year six thousand of these scientists, working in college laboratories and in our great industries the nation over, were pitting their brains against the German and the Jap. This book tells of what they did and by how close a margin they won.

Though his operations were wrapped in secrecy as impenetrable as any that existed in America, Dr. Bush had looked forward from the outset to a history of the mobilization of civilian science for war. In February, 1943, he persuade Dr. James Phinney Baxter 3rd, President of Williams College, the Deputy Directory of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, visited many laboratories and service tests, and interviewed many scientists. He is chairman of the Board of Advisors to the Historical Division of the War Department Special Staff and of the Board of Cosultants of the new National War College.