The Special Projects Division

By January 1944 the CWS had already begun operations at Camp Detrick and at the field test station on Horn Island in Mississippi Sound, and was constructing the Granite Peak test installation, adjacent to Dug-way Proving Ground, Utah, and the Vigo plant in Indiana. 

The Special Projects Division was to develop measures for defense and retaliation against BW, to produce or procure the necessary material, to collect and evaluate intelligence on enemy activity, to maintain liaison with other military and civilian organizations concerned with biological warfare here and abroad, to prepare training publications and conduct instruction in biological warfare, and to supply technical advice to the armed forces. The division had an immense task and had to do the work hurriedly because of the urgency of the problem as understood at that time. Construction, research, and instruction were necessarily simultaneous operations at all installations of the Special Projects Division. 

In April 1943, a little more than two weeks after the Army began construction at Detrick Field, Camp Detrick was formally activated. The Horn Island installation, with its 2,000 acres of sand dunes and scrub, began operations in October 1943. These were restricted to preliminary small-scale experiments because the island was only ten miles away from the mainland and because it was belatedly discovered that for two-thirds of the year the prevailing winds blew toward the mainland. 

Biological Warfare Test Station, Granite Peak, Utah. 

To a greater degree, perhaps, than in any of the other CWS research programs, the one for biological warfare was a joint service undertaking. The Navy, for example, provided almost a quarter of the technical staff required at Camp Detrick and other test installations, drawing them principally from the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery and the Bureau 

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This action by the Secretary of War led the Chief, CWS, in January 1944 to raise the Special Assignments Branch to the status of a division. The new division, known as the Special Projects Division, was headed successively by Cols. Martin B. Chittick, J. Enrique Zanetti, and H. N. Worthley. In carrying out the main responsibility for biological warfare preparations the division supervised the activities of some 3,900 persons, of whom about 2,800 were Army personnel, about 1,000 Navy, and nearly 100 civilians. The majority of these were stationed at Camp Detrick, and the remainder were divided among the headquarters of the Special Projects Division in Washington and the other BW installations. The approved organization chart for 16 September 1944 listed 9 Army officers and 8 civilians and 6 Navy officers and 7 Navy enlisted men in the headquarters... 

This report proved inaccurate. See Research and Development in the Special Projects Division (i Jul 40-14 Aug 45), dated 20 Sep 45. CWS 314.7 R and D File. 

Administratively, Horn Island was a substation of Camp Detrick from its activation until June 1944 when it became a separate installation under the jurisdiction of the Special Projects Division, OC CWS. Because of its... 

With the transfer of the program to the CWS, the Army dissolved the War Research Service, and assigned the responsibility for civilian research and development to the OSRD. Mr. Merck was appointed special consultant on BW to the Secretary of War, with Mr. Fred and Mr. Marquand as scientific adviser and intelligence aide, respectively, to Mr. Merck. The ABC Committee was succeeded by the DEF Committee which was headed by Dr. O. H. Perry Pepper of the University of Pennsylvania, and which guided the technical program of the Special Projects Division, OC CWS, soon to be formed. 

Chief of the Special Projects Division, Office of the Chief of the Chemical Warfare Service... 

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. 

This arrangement was modified in October 1944, when the secretary of war established the U.S. Biological Warfare Committee with Merck as the chairman. The CWS assigned the biological warfare program to its Special Projects Division. At its peak, this division had 3,900 army, navy, and civilian personnel working on various programs.26106... 

When the War Department assumed control of BW research, the CWS s Special Projects Division took charge of intelligence. It sent War Department direaives to all theaters and commands alerting them to BW, describing defensive measures against possible sabotage, and recommend-... 

Vessels for high-temperature serviee may be beyond the temperature hmits of the stress tables in the ASME Codes. Sec tion TII, Division 1, makes provision for construction of pressure vessels up to 650°C (1200°F) for carbon and low-alloy steel and up to 815°C (1500°F) for stainless steels (300 series). If a vessel is required for temperatures above these values and above 103 kPa (15 Ibf/in"), it would be necessaiy, in a code state, to get permission from the state authorities to build it as a special project. Above 815°C (1500°F), even the 300 series stainless steels are weak, and creep rates increase rapidly. If the metal which resists the pressure operates at these temperatures, the vessel pressure and size will be limited. The vessel must also be expendable because its life will be short. Long exposure to high temperature may cause the metal to deteriorate and become brittle. Sometimes, however, economics favor this type of operation. 

In the spring of 1945, Captain Jake Nolen told me that a group from Bushnell was to carry out some special studies on a beach in south Florida. He suggested, and I agreed that I go to carry out basic meteorological measurements. Arthur Pardee was to work on a special project, members of NDRC Division 9 were to make measurements of mustard, and some army officers and enlisted men would be there to handle munitions and other matters. 

It is difficult to study directly a process of the drop fission in the laser torch plasma. The main obstacles are associated with the short duration of the fission process (less than 100 ns), the small size and high velocity of the particles. In addition, the charging and division of particles occur in high-density and hot laser torch plasma. The evidence for the process of microdrop fission was obtained in a special experiment when the substrate was mounted in a close vicinity of the target surface. As can be seen in Fig. 2., the surface of the substrate plaeed near the copper target is covered with submicrometer particles. Some particles have projections whose size is 10 times smaller than that of the main particles. The presence of such particles with projections can be interpreted as a consequence of rapid cooling and deposition onto the substrate of drops that are in the initial stage of fission. 

This effort was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Grant NNX07AB93A under a project entitled Basic Studies for the Production and Upgrading of Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis Products to Fuels and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. This research was carried out, in part, at the National Synchrotron Light Source, Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is supported by the U.S. DOE, Divisions of Materials Science and Chemical Sciences. Special thanks to Dr. Nebojsa Marinkovic (Beamline X18b, NSLS, Brookhaven) for help with X AFS studies and Joel Young (University of Oklahoma, Department of Physics) for XAFS cell construction. 

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