Man unlocks story of WWII radar school

NAPERVILLE, Ill. -- During Boy Scout outings in the 1960s at McDowell Grove Forest Preserve in Naperville, Tom Atkinson used to play on concrete ruins in the heart of the woods.

As a youngster, it was just something fun to do. Years later as an adult, finding out what buildings once existed on that site became a mission for Atkinson.

The result of his years of wondering and research culminated in a video titled "The Secret History of McDowell Grove" that premiered in August on Naperville Community Television.

Atkinson, who grew up in Naperville, heard a story from his mother, Rita, about a secret radar school hidden deep within the tall trees of McDowell Grove. When he visited the site, there was a short paragraph on a sign placed there by the DuPage County Forest Preserve saying that such a school had once been there. But finding additional information proved to be difficult.

"You can talk to people who lived their whole lives in the area, and they don't have a clue about it," Atkinson said. "The secrecy was well-maintained."

Last year, he appealed to the public with a letter in local newspapers asking to hear from anyone who knew anything about the school. He just happened to find two men, George Matthews and Joe Kresl, who live across the street from McDowell at the Tabor Hills Retirement Community. He also found Paul Giloth, a Glen Ellyn native now living in Wheaton, who also was trained at the site in the then-new technology known as radar.

The conversations proved to be pivotal.

"I started getting a glimmer of what it was about," Atkinson recalled. "Kresl pulled out old documents, orders and graduation certificates. The more we talked about it, the more he started to remember."

Atkinson learned that the men trained at the school were very bright.

"At that time, the radar equipment was so primitive the people who operated it had to have advanced trigonometry, calculus and electrical engineering. In 1941, it was pretty rare for people to have that kind of knowledge," he said. "They just found guys who were smart and put them through the training. They just found raw talent."

One of those men was Giloth, who had just graduated from Beloit College in Wisconsin. He wanted to enlist in the Army Air Corps, but was turned down because of a broken finger and a bad knee, results of a football injury. In June of 1942 he joined the Army's Signal Corps Reserve.

"I immediately went to school in Chicago," Giloth recalled. "We were taking special training in calculus, mathematics and physics."

Giloth said the students knew they would be working on a secret project, but they didn't have uniforms and didn't have to undergo military training at that point.

After three months in Chicago, the men took the electric train to the suburbs and were picked up by a military truck and taken to McDowell Grove. The barracks they moved into had been built by the Civilian Conservation Corps at the height of the Great Depression and hadn't been used in quite a while, so the men had to clean them out.

Matthews also went to McDowell Grove as part of the Signal Corps Reserve. He said the men were aware that it was a top-secret assignment, but they might not have appreciated that the Signal Corps Radio 268, which is what the rudimentary unit was called, would be the forerunner of modern radar.

It's been said that the atom bomb ended the war, but radar won the war.

Atkinson asked Giloth what he felt about that.

Giloth replied: "We did our small part, and that's about all we can say. It was a massive affair and there were so many people involved."