A Passion For Gold: An Autobiography

6. Military Geology

Chapter 6 Military Geology War . . . is all Hell. —william tecumseh sherman The usgs was deeply involved in World War II. Survey geologists served as technical advisors, provided special reports and maps, and worked as consultants to field operations. Early on, the question was raised: Should usgs geologists be commissioned as officers in the various service branches that needed geologic help or advice, or should they be retained as liaisons? Sidney Paige, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a former commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, offered to look into this problem. The armed forces eventually decided that it would be simpler for the usgs to furnish specialists who would act as liaisons when and where they were needed. Some men were sent overseas as scientific consultants, but most were used in the United States. usgs geologists carried on a variety of investigations. For example, Kenneth Lohman, a usgs micropaleontologist, was asked to identify the source of ballast sands that had been carried by balloons released from Japanese submarines and retrieved near our Pacific Coast. Some of these balloons carried incendiary devices, designed to set forest fires, and others carried explosives intended to endanger or frighten residents who found them. The coastal forests were generally too wet to ignite easily, and the sparse coastal population did not scare easily. Although the balloons were never a serious threat, our military wanted to know where they had been assembled. It turned out that the ballast sand could be identified by microscopic Foraminifera (single-celled marine organisms) as coming from a certain beach in Japan. Had military leaders so chosen, they could have bombed the beach to destroy the factory involved. John McPhee, a writer who has produced many books and articles on the geology and environment of the American West, wrote a New Yorker article (January 29, 1996) about other unsung usgs heroes who worked quietly and anonymously behind the scenes to help the war effort. It was inconvenient to be assigned to Military Geology immediately on arriving in the United States, because I was attempting to write the report on my two years in Central America. However, this made no difference to the branch chief. It turned out that several geologists who had been working in Military Geology had been assigned as scientific consultants to General MacArthur in the Philippines. So help was needed on several ongoing projects. Military Geology headquarters were in the basement of the Old Interior Building (nicknamed “the dungeon”), where security and privacy could be easily maintained. I joined a group working under E. S. Larsen III. This group was small, averaging no more than eight scientists . Mark Pangborn of the usgs library staff was assigned to us as a librarian. When a new project came our way, he would quickly assemble all the pertinent reference maps and reports. Our group tackled two principal projects. One was an urgent problem in testing the scr-625 mine detector, which had not performed well in southern Italy and Sicily or in the Pacific Islands. We were charged with finding the reason. The other chore was the preparation of folios and reports for field operations of the armed forces (strategic engineering studies) as well as intelligence reports (janis, or Joint Army-Navy Intelligence Service). Mine Detector My first assignment was helping evaluate the scr-625. Mine detectors (metal detectors) of that time consisted of two coils of wire that were aligned at right angles to each other. When the coils were electrified, if a metallic conductor or magnetic body was brought into close proximity to the coils, a current was set up that could activate either an Military Geology 69 ammeter (a device to measure electrical current) or a beeper. For some reason, the scr-625 detector was not doing what it had been designed to do. We set to work preparing a facility for testing metallic mine detectors. The project had been started by Konrad Krauskopf (Stanford University), Edward Sampson (Princeton University), and M. M. (“Red”) Striker (U.S. Department of Agriculture). Ed Sampson was preparing to accompany U.S. troops who were returning to the Philippines with General MacArthur. He and Konrad gave us a quick rundown on the project status, having determined that the mineral likely to be the culprit was a magnetic iron oxide (such as maghemite or gamma-hematite). Maghemite was capable of affecting a...