Interview with D

INTERVIEW WITH D. RANSOM WHITNEY Q. Tape 1, side 1. This is an interview of D. Ransom Whitney on first tape May 8, 2003. Interviewee is Tom Willke. A. I was born November 27, 1915 in East Cleveland, Ohio. After high school, I went to Oberlin College, majored in mathematics ending with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1936. I went to Princeton University from 1936 to 1939, with a major in mathematics and a Master’s Degree (all but dissertation). I married Marian Whitney, took a job at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. In the early part of 1942, I received a letter from the Navy asking me if I were interested in a position in the Naval reserve, where I would be teaching Celestial Navigation. I was well aware that this offer was subject to change depending on the course of the war. I resigned from Mary Washington College on March 1939. I was approved. First of all I was appointed as an ensign, provided that I fill all of the requirements after that. And the first thing was to go to an indoctrination school for officers in the Navy. This was in Chicago. It was accommodations for me separately and for my wife and child. They lived in a hotel while I was there. Following the indoctrination part, I was assigned to a similar station, that is in teaching people at a beginning school for newly appointed ensigns. These were ensigns. There I taught celestial navigation to these people. They were not exactly interested in celestial navigation, and after a little bit I found out why. These were lawyers who had joined the Navy. They were reserve I should say. And they found out that they were destined to be on a small ship that carried soldiers, marines to an island, and since the only distances from one place to another was a very short one, they saw no reason for celestial navigation. When the Navy wanted recruits, new recruits to come in who knows something about the sea. They like to send them out so they can get a taste of sea water if you will. And while it was in between times that I was teaching celestial navigation, I was put on a yacht that was obtained. The Navy needed small vessels and they confiscated yachts from all over and this one happened to come from the Great Lakes. I had heard that it was the largest yacht there. This particular cruise went down the coast, down from New York to essentially the islands down at the end, the keys, and then turned around the came back. The impression that I had from this particular cruise, the people that were running it didn’t really know much more then I did. And it was very fine that the Germans had been very successful in their knocking out the small ships that went up and down the coast. After a while they decided they had gotten all they needed to and the Germans disappeared from that. So on this cruise there was nothing to worry about. In fact, I was more worried that if they did shoot off something, something would go wrong anyway. Eventually the Navy decided that they didn’t really need anymore schools for new officers, so the one that I was in, located in Princeton, New Jersey, not on campus but very close to it. So this school was given up and they decided I ought to go in a school that was still in Princeton but a little different subject, namely radar. In the beginning of the war or prior to that, the Navy knew about radar but there weren’t many people who knew anything about it. To get people to fix something that goes wrong they thought their best source, in terms of enlisted men, were in people who had worked on radios. So they urged a number of these to join the service. One difference between radio and the radar, and incidentally, radar and TV’s can be put in the same category. With a radio you could go in with a wire and if you missed the place where you ought to put it or do something wrong, you’ll get a shock. But if you do the same thing in radar, you might kill yourself because the voltage is so high. Well, at any rate, my supposition is that they thought that in addition to the people they already had working on the radars, they ought to have one or two people at any rate, at least one, who knew something about the innards of the radar and could help these enlisted people who were doing the usual things. And this occasioned them to have this school for new officers, who needed something to do. The school in Princeton had done all it could for one. So they sent me around to a variety of places. These included MIT and Bell Lab, and I spent quite a bit of time at each of those places. Much of it was very theoretical and some was a simple enough problem, namely the instructor would take a radar and do something to it that made it not working, and then give it to you and say, “You fix it.” It was similar to some of the things they did in chemistry as I recall, but this constituted the part. I had been to these places. Then it was time they thought I ought to be on a ship. And they were building the USS Atlanta at the time and it was pretty close to being done. So I was actually assigned as a member of that ship. That was the place you call home but I couldn’t really sit there or even work there until we were through. So I was assigned to this light cruiser, the Atlanta. There had been a number of Atlanta’s. In fact, one at the beginning of this war was sunk, and this was a replacement. Once they got aboard and the ship was ready to go, we had a break down cruise going down south, presumably to get the things out. Don’t see any work in the business. And parenthetically, in all the time that it was on this ship, nothing went wrong that needed my presumed expertise. Then the enlisted men seemed to take care of everything. Now whether that meant they simply brought out a new set and put it in, rather than repairing it, I don’t know. And again, sort of beside the point, but if you’ve been teaching in school at whatever level, it’s true the teacher is in a sense a step ahead in some way over the students. In the Navy, if you’re an officer, whether you know anything or not, you’re over an enlisted man. And in this case, I was very happy that nothing seemed to occur that required me to say anything to the enlisted man, that he was wrong. That would be okay as far as the Navy was concerned. But I also had the feeling that maybe if I said something, the enlisted man would know more about it than I do. It was not a very nice teaching situation if you will. Well, once on the Atlanta, we finally got to sea and went through the Panama Canal and stopped at Floyee for a few hours, maybe a day, not long, and then went out to the South Pacific. Our destination was one of the atolls there. I don’t remember the name. We got there and everything was fine. Incidentally, I should have mentioned this before, with this specialty there was really nothing for me to do on the ship. We were just going along. So where I was to be stationed during the day would be in what they call the CIC, where they had all the radars things in this one building in this one room. And this was filled with people. Each machine had a person at it, an enlisted man. And I would be assigned to sit there while things were going on. The Navy had in a sense had one very large fleet, and they would call this the first one or the second one as the case may be. They were the same ships but when they changed the number, it was a different commanding officer. And when I got there, the one that we were connected with to begin with, the fleet was under Halsey. And we hadn’t been there very long before the orders came in that we should get up to the northern part of the place, in other words towards Tokyo as soon as possible. So we took off, again in a very peculiar way. This fleet I think was the largest fleet ever assembled and probably it was larger then the Spanish Armada that ran into trouble a long time ago. At any rate, the general theory prior to radar, etc., prior to this World War, the ships would be fixed, the big battle ships would be in the middle. They would be surrounded by cruisers and the one on the outer side was a small fast ship that could go around in a hurry. And that was the way the speeds were. The battle ship was the slowest one. By the time they were putting in new battleships, the battleship in this particular fleet, could go much faster than we could as a cruiser.

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