Memorial to Sherman Kennerson Neuschel1913-1991

FRANK C. WHITMORE JR.U.S. Geological Survey, MS NHB 137, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560

Sherman K. Neuschel was bom in Buffalo, New York, on December 21, 1913, the son of Percy J. Neuschel and Anna Becker Neuschel. He grew up in nearby Hamburg, and, after graduated from high school, entered Denison University in Granville, Ohio. At Denison, in addition to much involvement in extracurricular activities, he soon decided to become a geologist. During his senior year he taught all laboratory sections in physical and historical geology, conducted field trips, and graded all papers for the chairman of the geology department.

In college Sherm met Virginia Smith, a Granville girl, classmate, and fellow geologist. They were married, and in1937 they went to New York City, where Sherm was in graduate school at Columbia University studying geomor­phology under Douglas Johnson.

As it did for many of his generation, World War II altered the course of Sherm’s career. He completed the course and language requirements and passed the oral exam for his Ph.D., but before he could undertake his thesis, the exigencies of war placed him in the Strategic Minerals Program of the U.S. Geological Survey. From 1942 to 1944 he did both surface and subsurface mapping of strategic minerals, principally manganese, in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Montana.

Although she was not employed by the Survey, Ginny Neuschel worked with Sherm on the mapping project. Harry S. Ladd, Sherm’s supervisor, later said “They took turns running the ali­dade. We got two geologists for the price of one.”

In 1944 the USGS had established the Military Geology Unit, a group of geologists, soil scientists, hydrologists, engineers, and botanists who prepared terrain intelligence reports for the armed services, principally the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. These classified reports dealt with present or potential combat areas, presenting in maps and text the locations of landing beaches, suitability of ground for cross-country movement, construction materials, water supply, airfield siting and other applications of natural science to military operations. By 1944 the demand for these reports had escalated, and many geologists were transferred from the Strategic Minerals Program to the Military Geology Unit. Sherm was one of these, joining the unit in July 1944. The Strategic Engineering Studies, as the unit’s reports were called, had proved so useful that the Corps of Engineers asked the USGS to furnish consultants to theater headquarters and troops in the field. Sherm was assigned to one of the consulting groups, the Engineer Terrain Intelligence Team headquarters, Pacific Ocean area, in Hawaii, from this post he was assigned to the Eighth U.S. Army, reporting for duty on Guam and accompanying the Eighth Army as it secured the island of Okinawa, recently wrested from the Japanese. When this job was finished he moved to Korea with the advance echelon of the Eighth Army. It was September 1945; the war had ended and it had been decided that the U.S. Army would accept the Japanese surrender south of the 38th Parallel and that the Soviet Army would accept surrender north of that line. Thus, North and South Korea were bom, and the U.S. Army was suddenly faced with the task of

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organizing a country that had been under Japanese subjugation for fifty years. Sherm’s duties in Okinawa and Korea were to advise both headquarters and field units of the Engineers about such matters as location of construction materials, road repairs, and the extension of airstrips to accommodate U.S. aircraft.

In the fall of 1945 Sherm returned to Washington, where he spent about a year as research supervisor in the Military Geology Unit, completing reports begun during the war. Meanwhile, the continued American presence in the western Pacific led to further demands for geological work there. Wartime intelligence studies had demonstrated the dearth of knowledge about the islands. The inclusion of many of them in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, a United Nations mandate under American administration, made it clear that this gap must be filled quickly.

Harry S. Ladd, assistant chief geologist of the USGS, had worked for many years in the Pacific islands. In 1946 he presented to the Office of the Chief of Engineers a long-term plan for geologic and soils mapping of the major islands of the western Pacific. The plan was approved; it was to be financed by the Corps of Engineers, staffed by the U.S. Geological Survey, and administered by the Military Geology Branch (formerly Unit) from an office in Tokyo, attached to the Office of the Engineer, Far East Command.

Sherm was appointed chief of the Pacific Island Mapping Program, and in the fall of 1946 he went to Tokyo to establish the new office. Ginny joined him in August 1947; they lived in Tokyo until 1953, and their children Erik and Kristen were born there.

The mapping plan derived from the method of preparation of the wartime Strategic Engi­neering Studies. First a geologic and a soils map (and sometimes a vegetation map) were pre­pared. Using these for basic data, along with topographic maps and aerial photographs, maps were compiled showing the engineering characteristics of the terrain.

The program was designed to produce two types of reports: applied earth science and basic research. In the first category a military geology study was prepared for each island or island group, and published by the Office of the Engineer, Far East Command, U.S. Army. These were quarto volumes accompanied by maps at a scale of 1:25,000 or 1:50,000, covering the basic and applied subjects mentioned above. In the basic research category, scientists in the program were encouraged—and allowed working time—to write scientific papers on significant aspects of their island work. The most comprehensive of these were published as U.S. Geological Survey Professional Papers; many were published in scientific journals. The list of such publications is too long to include here; they covered a wide range of subjects including Cenozoic stratigraphy, fossil faunas and correlation, and petrography of limestones and volcanics.

Sherm’s office in Tokyo was the hub of this complex operation, and he performed admirably in a demanding job that blended pure and applied science, logistics, and diplomacy. There were usually two, and sometimes three, island parties in the field at a time. Each con­sisted of a party chief, two or three other geologists, and a soil scientist. This cadre would spend one to three years on an island. They were joined for shorter periods by specialists as needed for such subjects as engineering geology, vegetation, and coral reefs.

Personnel for the island parties were recruited in Washington and sent to Tokyo, where the parties were organized and dispatched to the islands. This was where both logistics and diplo­macy came into play. Sherm’s office was a part of the Intelligence Division, Office of the Engi­neer, Far East Command. He was thus with the U.S. Army but not of it. All USGS personnel in the program traveled on military orders, and supply of the field parties was through military channels. But once in the field, the parties operated like any USGS field party; the army never interfered in how they did their work. Maintaining this balanced state of affairs was an impor­tant part of Sherm’s job, and he did it superbly. Sherm and Ginny participated in the life of an army post; Sherm played tennis with the colonel, and Ginny joined the Engineer Officers’

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Wives Club. Meanwhile, at the office, Sherm constantly had to explain the program to officers who tended to regard it as academic; the chief of engineers, who had approved the program, was far away in Washington.

The enormous area of the Pacific Island Mapping Program included the Ryukyu, Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Island groups. During Sherm’s tenure as chief of the program, the fol­lowing islands were mapped: Amami-O-Shima, Okinawa, Ishigaki, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Palau, and Truk. On several of these islands, geological and ecological studies were made of offshore reefs.

As backup to the island mapping, Sherm established a staff of translators to make Japanese geological literature available to the field staff. This led to the establishment of Operation RAG- MAN-KO (Research and Analysis, Geology of Manchuria and Korea). This project, pursued jointly with the Tokyo Geographical Society, supported Japanese geologists who had worked for the South Manchurian Railway while, using their field notes, they compiled geologic maps of the areas where they had worked. These were later published by the Tokyo Geographical Society.

In 1953 the Neuschels returned to Washington, where Sherm as appointed assistant chief of the Geochemistry and Petrology Branch of the USGS—a group of 300 or more people including geologists, chemists, mathematicians, and laboratory assistants. He held this position for five years and then, in 1958, returned to field work. The Geophysics Branch of the USGS, on behalf of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, had recently initiated the Aerial Radiological Measure­ment Survey I (ARMS I), whose mission was to measure gamma-ray background radiation for areas in and adjacent to nuclear facilities. The USGS had been a pioneer in airborne geophysical observations: first in aeromagnetic surveys, a technique developed from antisubmarine opera­tions of World War II, and later in aeroradioactivity surveys. Sherm joined this program with the assignment of examining the possible correlation between airborne geophysical measurements and the geology of the area observed.

The ARMS I program covered some sixteen areas throughout the United States. Of these, preliminary observations indicated that the best correlation between bedrock geology and air­borne observations might occur in the Piedmont province of the eastern United States. Sherm undertook to test this hypothesis by field study of fourteen 7.5' quadrangles in the Spotsylvania area of northern Virginia. The possibility of airborne data for geologic mapping is especially attractive for the Piedmont because of the depth of weathering and the paucity of outcrops.

Sherm began his survey in a sensible and interesting fashion, with a two-week canoe trip, accompanied by Jean Blanchet, down the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers. Using this as a baseline, he tied in an extensive sample series covering the area. In the complex geology of the Piedmont, the correlation between lithology and airborne data (both gamma-ray emission and magnetic measurements) proved to be high. Lithologic boundaries could be more accurately located, and some previously unknown granitic intrusives were delineated.

Sherm’s last assignment, beginning in 1971, was the study and mapping of the environ­mental geology of Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fauquier County, Virginia. These coun­ties are two of the principal centers of rapid urbanization in the metropolitan area of Washing­ton, D.C. This was a subject to which Sherm had given much thought. Although the phrase “environmental geology” had not been coined in the 1950s, this was what the Pacific Island Mapping Program did—a combination of geology, soils, and vegetation applied to mankind’s impact on our world.

Sherm retired in 1974. Ginny, who had worked at the Survey since their return from Japan, continued as chief of the Public Inquiries Office. They lived in Bethesda, Maryland, where Sherm was active in community affairs and continued, as always, his voracious reading of his­tory and biography.

In 1979 the Neuschels were invited by the International Institute for Mineral Research and

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Development to spend a year in Japan teaching English to young geologists and metallurgists. The Institute was a Japanese organization supported by mining companies, and its campus was in a small village on the south slope of Mount Fuji. As Ginny put it, their Japanese students knew more English grammar than the Neuschels did, but had no training in spoken English. During the year, Sherm and Ginny were able to renew old friendships.

After their return to Bethesda, Sherm’s health began to decline, and in 1991 they moved to Clemmons, North Carolina, to be near their children. Sherm died shortly after their arrival there, on June 30, 1991. Besides Ginny and their children, Erik and Kristen, Sherm is survived by three grandchildren.

1964 (with Pitkin, J. A., and Bates, R. G.) Aeroradioactivity surveys and geologic mapping, in Adams, J. A. S., and Lowder, W. M., eds., The natural radiation environment: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, p. 723-736.

1965 Natural gamma activity of the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia: U.S. Geological Survey Geophysical Investigations Map GI-475.

1970 Aeroradioactivity survey and areal geology of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, Minnesota- Wisconsin (ARMS I): U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civil Effects Study CEX 51.7.1, p. 1-24, map, scale 1:250,000.

------ (and Bunker, C. M.) Correlation of uranium, thorium and potassium radioactivity over ahigh-thorium pluton in the Berea area, Salem Church quadrangle, Virginia [abs.]: Geolog­ical Society of America Abstracts, v. 2, no. 3, p. 234.

------Correlation of aeromagnetics and aeroradioactivity with lithology in the Spotsylvaniaarea, Virginia: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 87, p. 3575-3582.

1971 (and Bunker, C. M., and Bush, C. A.) Correlation of uranium, thorium and potassium with aeroradioactivity in the Berea area, Virginia: Economic Geology, v. 66, no. 2, p. 301-308.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF S. K. NEUSCHEL

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