War Activities
Munk applied for American citizenship in 1939 after the Anschluss and enlisted in the ski troops of the U.S. Army as a private. This was unusual as all the other young men at Scripps joined the U.S. Naval Reserve. Munk was eventually excused from military service to undertake defense related research at Scripps. He joined several of his colleagues from Scripps at the U.S. Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory, where they developed methods related to amphibious warfare. Their methods were used successfully to predict surf conditions for Allied landings in North Africa, the Pacific theater of war, and on D-Day during the Normandy invasion. Munk commented in 2009, "The Normandy landing is famous because weather conditions were very poor and you may not realize it was postponed by General Eisenhower for 24 hours because of the prevailing wave conditions. And then he did decide, in spite of the fact that conditions were not favorable, it would be better to go in than lose the surprise element, which would have been lost if they waited for the next tidal cycle two weeks."
Read more about this topic: Walter Munk
Famous quotes containing the words war and/or activities:
“I certainly know that if the war fails, the administration fails, and that I will be blamed for it, whether I deserve it or not. And I ought to be blamed, if I could do better. You think I could do better; therefore you blame me already. I think I could not do better; therefore I blame you for blaming me.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)