A Norseman Named Leif

"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 ago.

At the 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 the Mississippi, another over Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks and one over the locks of the Panama Canal.

Two months before Pearl Harbor, U.S. Army engineers asked Sverdrup to chart a string of air bases for a plane-ferrying route to the Philippines and Australia; he was in the Fiji Islands when war came.

Tobacco & Trinkets. Sverdrup, still a civilian, hopped to Australia to plan a vital supply highway from Melbourne to Darwin. Later, after donning a colonel's uniform, he led the building of 200 airstrips and airfields and scores of military roads and bridges. The landing fields on New Guinea were stamped out of jungle & tall grass by the bare feet of Sverdrup's loinclothed "Papuan Aviation Battalion," who were paid in tobacco and trinkets. After rising to brigadier, then major general, Sverdrup came back to Missouri to work harder than ever in peacetime. His firm designed a $30 million hydroelectric plant in Missouri, and helped build the world's largest oil-loading pier, in Kuwait.

So busy that he commutes between jobs in his own DC-3, Jack Sverdrup, now 52, was eager to tackle his new assignment in supersonics, happily described it as "waltzing around in unknown pastures."

* For another method of testing guided missiles, see SCIENCE.

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