Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a great demand for Who’s Who in America arises from the mushrooming war agencies in the first half of the 1940s.

Only a fraction of government orders were met for Volume 22 (1942-1943), Volume 23 (1944-1945) and Volume 24 (1946-1947). One colonel calls publisher Wheeler Sammons Jr. and asks for 2,000 copies of Volume 23 for overseas use. With employee shortages, the company does not even have 25 copies at their disposal. In 1944, Sammons receives an emphatic demand for an inordinate number of books from a large new installation. Once again, he is not able to meet the demand and it is not until a year later, following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that a call comes from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a production site for the atomic bomb.