The Asbury Park Press
May 26, 2003 

     A beach parade at a secret Sandy Hook radar laboratory in the summer of 1941 would foreshadow the World War II victory parade down New York's Fifth Avenue four years later.
     The engineers, scientists, draftsmen and others on the beach that day were celebrating completion of a project that would be crucial to victory: design of America's first production radar.
     Little did they realize how soon their creation would come into play.  The attack on Pearl Harbor - and America's entry into World War II - were only months away.
     The team had worked in secret at Fort Monmouth until it was discovered that German spies were observing their radar antennas and reporting the information to Berlin.  Then they moved the

laboratory to isolated Sandy Hook.
     Peter Kennedy of Wall was a young draftsman when he joined Fort Monmouth's Squire Laboratories in 1940 and found himself in the middle of secret research.   Ironically, when it hired him, the government gave Kennedy the choice of two assignments: Go to New Jersey or go to Pearl Harbor.
     To create the radar unit, engineers had to make nearly everything from scratch.  For example, Dr. Harold Zahl had to hand-build the first 100 vacuum tubes for the first units.  The engineers tested the experimental units, modified them, tested them again and operated them for days at a time to be sure they were ready to meet the demands of battle.
     A natural gas tower across New York Harbor at Coney Island was used as a target when the Sandy Hook team tested the units, Kennedy said.
Once the director of the laboratory, Roger B. Colton, was satisfied with the prototype, Kennedy and other draftsmen created the production drawings. American industry would manufacture the radars by the thousands based on those drawings.
     To mark the completion of the Army's first production-ready radar, the SCR-268, Colton orga-
 

Fred Carl of Wall is director of Infoage Inc., a nonprofit group working to establish an information age learning center using historic buildings at Camp Evans.