San Jose Island, Panama

Photographs by Bill Shand. Provided by Mrs. Rene MUls. 

On June 14, 1944 Professor F.E. Blacet submitted a special report, a copy of which was sent to Edgewood Arsenal, that described the nature of the work being done by Division 10 of NDRC. I obtained a copy of this from Dugway in 1997. 

The activities and responsibilities of Division 10 and its group of twenty-two men in the Special Project are summarized in the following four paragraphs. 

The Division has undertaken to supply and maintain the non-persistent agent sampling equipment. To mention only a few of the most important items, it has supplied over one hundred recording milliammeters of the Esterline-Angus and General Electric types, 46 Dickinson meters, 

Professor Francis Placet, UCLA, Head of NDRC group. 

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I did not go to San Jose Island, Panama, and this chapter is built up mostly from quotations written in the 1940s by those who did go there and from pictures taken in 1944. 1 start with two quotations from W.A. Noyes, Jr., Head officer of Division 10 of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). 

Figure 5.1.A. Temporarily beached landing barge, which was used to unload lumber, machinery, weapons, vehicles, goats, etc. San Jose Island, Panama, 1944.

Figure 5.2.B. Blimp over San Jose Island, Panama, on cloudy, rainy day, 1944. Army warehouse in background. Tents for enlisted men in foreground.

In the late summer of 1944, W.A. Noyes, Jr. in Washington invited NDRC workers in Bushnell and on San Jose Island, Panama, to volunteer to go to New Guinea to join a chemical warfare station there. Robert Brinton and Bill Shand were the only volunteers. They traveled to New Guinea with a group of army officers, and they moved from station to station, presenting... 

During Roscoe Dickinson s trip to San Jose Island, he was escorted to Panama by his Caltech crew and shown the sights. As they were doing so, Professor Dickinson, to his surprise, encountered Commander Robert Dickinson, his son, who was also sightseeing in Panama and on his way to elsewhere. Neither realized that the other was anywhere near Panama. 

One legacy of the San Jose Island tests is that the Republic of Panama has declared to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) that it has abandoned chemical... 

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