Harald U. Sverdrup and the War Years

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Authors

Walter Munk | Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

Deborah Day | Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

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Prologue

By 1940 the U.S. Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory at Point Loma in San Diego, California was working intensively on problems of anti-submarine warfare (ASW). It was a matter of great urgency; German U-boats were taking an increasing toll of allied shipping. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography involvement, starting informally as early as 1940, was part of a rapidly growing effort by the civilian science community to work with the uniformed Navy under the umbrella of the University of California Division of War Research (UCDWR). Collaboration between the civilian oceanographers and the uniformed Navy proved to be extraordinarily productive at Point Loma and elsewhere. The oceans are opaque to light and transparent to sound, and most of the progress in submarine detection had to do with ocean acoustics. The formation of a shadow zone in which submarines could hide, called the "afternoon effect," was the result not of lethargic sonar operators after a heavy luncheon at the Chief's mess, but could be traced to the refraction of sound by surface warming. Noisy shrimp beds could provide a haven for hiding submarines. A false shallow bottom indicated on fathometers at night was immediately identified by Scripps Professor Martin Johnson as related to a deep scattering layer associated with the diurnal migration of copepods.

Starting in 1941, a group of Scripps oceanographers reported daily at 0730 to the Navy Laboratory. Getting from Scripps to the Navy facility at Point Loma was not then an easy task. Gasoline rationing was in force during the war and car pools were the order of the day for the fifteen mile commute. The car pool started from Scripps campus each morning just after dawn when Scripps Director, H.U. Sverdrup, K.O. Emery and Gene LaFond piled into the Director's new Chevrolet sedan. Anthony Shepard recalls that his father, marine geologist Francis Shepard, had to wolf down his breakfast and rush to Torrey Pines Road where he waited, lunch pail in hand, for the sedan to pick him up.

On 1 March 1942 the Director's Chevrolet arrived as usual to pick up Shepard. Sverdrup was not in the car. "What happened to Harald?" Shepard asked. "They pulled his security clearance," replied LaFond, and he produced Sverdrup's I.D. card. "He was so upset he asked me to turn it in for him."

It was another fifty years until we learned what had happened.

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Full Article

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Citation

Munk, W., and D. Day. 2002. Harald U. Sverdrup and the war years. Oceanography 15(4):7–29, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2002.02.

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