Word: sverdrup
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...This is the engineer soldier at his best," said Douglas MacArthur in 1945 when he pinned a Distinguished Service Cross on Major General Leif John Sverdrup, his acting Chief Engineer for the Pacific Theater. The D.S.C. was lean Jack Sverdrup's reward for leading the reconnaissance and capture of Lingayen airfield on Luzon. But he had long since won greater fame for his methodically frenzied hacking of airstrips, almost overnight, out of South Pacific jungles. At war's end Jack Sverdrup went back to his St. Louis engineering firm of Sverdrup & Parcel...
Last week the Air Force called Sverdrup to a bigger job. To Aro, Inc., a Sverdrup & Parcel subsidiary, it gave the task of operating its $100 million Arnold (for the late "Hap" Arnold) Engineering Development Center now abuilding at Tullahoma, Tenn. That was fitting enough; Sverdrup's firm drew the plant's blueprints five years...
...Tullahoma center, which will not be in complete operation until 1952, Sverdrup's men will test life-size mockups of jets, turbojets and rockets under conditions simulating altitudes up to 75,000 ft. They will operate the largest supersonic wind tunnel in the U.S., to reproduce conditions found at sea-level speeds of 2,500 m.p.h. A smaller facility will test guided missiles at simulated speeds up to 7,500 m.p.h.* To Sverdrup thus went one of the key jobs in keeping the U.S. ahead in the race for technical supremacy...
From Norway to New Guinea. That was just to Sverdrup's liking. As venturesome as an earlier Norseman named Lief, he was born with "a yen for the different." He quit Norway at 17 to study at Minnesota's Augsburg College, later got a degree in civil engineering at the University of Minnesota. After a World War I stint as a lieutenant (he got his citizenship while in uniform) Sverdrup teamed up with John Ira Parcel, one of his old professors at Minnesota, to tackle big construction jobs. They built nine bridges over the Missouri River, four across...
Sink or Swim. In the viscous gumbo, fighting was reduced to patrol actions. Off Leyte's western shore, Japanese reinforcement convoys appeared and were attacked by fighter bombers from Sverdrup's new strips. Some were burned and some were sunk. Thousands of Japanese troops on their way to reinforce the stubborn, holdout garrison at Ormoc died. How many thousands, no man knew, although the communiqués offered guesstimates in bold round numbers...