Historic Navy Records Destroyed

Naval Research Laboratory records that “chronicle some of the most significant technical achievements in the 20th century” were inadvertently destroyed by the National Archives. They were “pulped beyond recognition,” the archives said. The archives and the Navy blamed each other. Fed into the pulper sometime last summer were 4,200 scientific notebooks and 600 boxes of correspondence and technical memos. Among the lost records, Gaffney said, were the correspondence of American pioneers in high frequency radio, work of the inventors of radar “and the war records of the application of these technologies in the campaigns against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.”