When the U.S. Navy took over the barren 9-mile peninsula today called Island Beach State Park in February 1945 and drafted all of its adult citizens into government service, the only thing made public was that it would be part of a secret government project run by the Applied Physics Laboratory, a part of Johns Hopkins University. What was unknown was that the project was to develop a supersonic guided missile to shoot down enemy aircraft. Harold Dail worked on the project.

“When we first started, it was the only project in the laboratory that nobody else in the laboratory knew what we were…