, May 1941. From left,
Clive Baillieu of the British Purchasing Commission; A. R. Glancy of the Office of Production Management; Brigadier General B. O. Lewis; Brigadier General Gladeon M. Barnes; and Rear Admiral H. A. Sheridan of the British Royal Navy. Commissioned in the
Coast Artillery Corps in 1910, Barnes transferred to the Ordnance Department in 1913. He was promoted to
captain in September 1916. During World War I, he was responsible for the design of
coastal and
railway artillery. Between the wars, he served in Germany and Italy. The name stuck and is still in use as a
generic term referring to any ground-to-ground
shoulder-fired missile weapon. Well aware of the dangers posed by German armor, Barnes was instrumental in getting the
90 mm gun in the
M36 tank destroyer and getting them shipped to Europe over the opposition of the
Army Ground Forces, which believed that the 75 and
76 mm guns were adequate. However, he did not approve of the idea of mounting a 90 mm in the Sherman; rather, he sought to develop a better tank. The
T20 Medium Tank, developed in May 1942, was faster, with more armor and a lower silhouette than the Sherman. Further development work led to the T23, which incorporated an electrical transmission. The electrical transmission made the tank easier to operate, but at a cost in weight and maintenance, and was therefore rejected by the Army Ground Forces. He therefore reverted to conventional transmissions for the improved T25 and T26 models, mounting the 90 mm gun, which would eventually become the
M26 Pershing. In January 1944, Devers, now commanding
ETOUSA, ordered 250 of the new T25 and T26 tanks, but as late as April 1944 Army Ground Forces was suggesting that they be armed with 75 and 76 mm guns. In the
Battle of Normandy, American armor came up against the
Tiger I,
Tiger II and
Panther tanks in large numbers, and the limitations of M4 Sherman and the 75 and 76 mm guns became painfully apparent.
The New York Times and
The Washington Post described the failure to develop better tanks a scandal. Barnes insisted that 20 of the first 40 T26s off the assembly line be shipped directly to Europe rather than conducting further tests at
Fort Knox that the Army Ground Forces wanted. They arrived in January 1945, and in February a special mission headed by Barnes known as the Zebra Mission went to Europe to instruct tank crews in their use and get the tanks into action as quickly as possible. They found that in the wake of the
Battle of the Bulge, tank crews regarded 75 mm Shermans as death traps. In 1943, Barnes launched a secret project to create an enormous electronic computer, which came to be called
ENIAC. He supervised its development by the researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Costing over $500,000, it used 17,000 glass vacuum tubes, occupied and weighed nearly . Barnes pressed the button that started it working at the formal dedication ceremony on 15 February 1946. While it was too late to perform ballistic calculations for World War II,
John von Neumann put it to work performing the complex calculations required by the
hydrogen bomb. In April 1946, Barnes was chosen as the chairman of a committee appointed to oversee experimental firing of 25 captured German
V-2 rockets. For his services during the war he was awarded the
Distinguished Service Medal and the
Legion of Merit. ==Later life and death==