American History Revised (8 page)

The race involved an enormous technological challenge, one for which many members of the American scientific team estimated the chances of success to be one percent. It required finding hundreds of tons of pure-grade ore normally found only in places like the Belgian Congo, then controlled by the Nazis. It required building an entirely new facility—Los Alamos—in a remote site, involving an infrastructure of roads and more than fifty buildings to accommodate tons of equipment and three hundred people—and do so without anybody knowing about it. It required creating a massive new organization and ensuring cooperation between academic scientists and army engineers not disposed to working together. It required integrating scientists of different nationalities, temperaments, and loyalties (two of whom eventually turned out to be spies).

The man chosen to head the project, General Leslie Groves (the man who built the Pentagon), almost didn’t get the job because he was considered too “blunt.”
*
In
a move that astonished everyone, he gambled on Robert Oppenheimer—a brilliant choice in retrospect—but at the time it was a decision that surprised and angered many people worried about Oppenheimer’s past affiliation with the Communist Party, and caused Groves lots of headaches.

One percent odds of success? That was just the science part. With all these other problems, try odds of a tenth of one percent.

To put this accomplishment in perspective, compare it with another of America’s great technological feats: putting a man on the moon. The moon race, from the time President Kennedy laid down the gauntlet to the time Neil Armstrong landed, took nine years. The Manhattan Project, from the time the scientists started work in earnest until the time the prototype finally was tested (April 15, 1943, to July 16, 1945), took only twenty-seven months.

Yet its success was by the narrowest of margins, aided by incredible good luck possible only in a country free and patriotic like America. Consider two stories from General Groves’s 1962 book,
Now It Can Be Told.
Now largely forgotten, they deserve to be retold.

Were it not “for a chance meeting between a Belgian and an Englishman a few months before the outbreak of the war,” wrote General Groves, “the Allies might not have been first with the atomic bomb.”

The Belgian was Edgar Sengier, managing director of Union Minière, the largest mining company in the Belgian Congo. Found here was ore containing 65 percent uranium oxide, compared with Canadian ore yielding only two tenths of one percent. The Englishman was Sir Henry Tizard, director of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Said Tizard to Sengier, “Never forget that you have in your hands something which may mean a catastrophe to your country and mine if this material were to fall in the hands of a possible enemy.”

With the invasion of Belgium by the Germans in 1939, Sengier fled to New York. But first, remembering Tizard’s warning, he ordered the company’s entire stock of 120 grams of radium to be shipped to the United States and England. He also arranged, under false names, for some 1,250 tons of uranium stored in the Congo to be shipped immediately to New York. There, for two years in a warehouse rented by Sengier, the uranium sat while Sengier tried to alert the State Department to the ore’s existence and how it could accelerate the country’s atomic bomb project.

The problem was, FDR was conducting his own foreign policy for reasons of wartime secrecy, and the State Department never learned about the Manhattan Project until 1945. Fortunately, General George Marshall’s deputy Kenneth Nichols heard
about Sengier and went to see him in hopes of making a deal. Surprise, surprise: “You can have the ore now,” Sengier told an astonished Nichols. “It is in New York, a thousand tons of it. I was waiting for your visit.”

So secret was this purchase that unusual measures had to be taken regarding payment. Sengier had to open a special account at his New York bank, receiving funds identified under a specific number. “It was arranged that the reports of the Federal Reserve Bank would not mention any of these transactions,” wrote Groves, “and the auditors were directed to accept Sengier’s statements without hesitation.” After the war, Sengier became the first non-American civilian to be awarded the Presidential Medal for Merit by the United States government.

Ever since ancient times, alchemists have tried to convert metal into gold by converting atoms of one element into atoms of another element possessing different chemical and physical properties. Developing the atom bomb required a similar transformation, this one from uranium to plutonium.

None of the scientists could agree on the amount of plutonium needed for a bomb; estimates varied from ten to one thousand pounds. It was, said General Groves, like being “a caterer who is told he must be prepared to serve anywhere between ten and a thousand guests.” What Groves and the scientists could agree on was that the proposed plutonium plant had better be big—far bigger than what a university lab or a government agency could provide. Only a multinational chemical company like DuPont could handle such an assignment.

DuPont, already stretched to the limit by wartime demands, was less than thrilled about taking on a project as large and dangerous as this one, let alone unpredictable. DuPont’s expertise was in chemistry, not physics, and it certainly had no experience whatsoever in the arcane world of nuclear physics. But then, neither did any other company, and Groves argued that if any company could do the job, it was DuPont. Groves added that the president, Secretary of War Stimson, and General Marshall all considered the project to be of utmost urgency.

The risks to DuPont were daunting: the project could be a complete flop, the plant could prove impossible to build, the plutonium could leak and cause serious health hazards to DuPont employees, the factory could explode. In a report to the board of directors, the company’s executive committee outlined these risks, concluded there was “no positive assurance of success” and that possible failure could bankrupt the company—yet recommended to the board of directors that DuPont take the job.

Then came the crucial board of directors meeting. On the table, in front of each chair, lay a set of papers, facedown. The president of the company summarized
the findings of the executive committee and told the directors that this was a top-secret project, but if they wished, they could read the facedown papers before voting.

Not a single man turned over the papers. They all voted yes.

It was, wrote Groves, “a true display of real patriotism.”

DuPont further agreed to do the job at cost, and to receive no patent rights for its R&D. It did insist, however, that the government provide it with disaster liability insurance, and that such insurance carry the personal initials of FDR. This was done, and to make it legally binding, DuPont was required to pay one dollar for the insurance. At the end of the war, though the contract had yet to be fully completed, the dollar was returned to DuPont. Sharp-eyed government auditors caught the discrepancy and asked DuPont to return a third of the refund—thirty-three cents—to the United States. The executives of DuPont did so, feeling bitter-sweet amusement that this was all the thanks they got for risking their company to help save America.

1945
At 12:14 a.m. on July 30, midway between Guam and Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, the USS
Indianapolis
was hit by two torpedoes fired by a Japanese submarine. The first blew away the bow, the second struck the starboard side adjacent to a fuel tank and a powder magazine. The resulting explosion split the ship to the keel, knocking out all electric power. She rolled sideways and went down by the bow. In just twelve minutes she was gone.

It was a tragic end for a magnificent warship. Built in 1932, the
Indianapolis
had served as President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Ship of State” and personal transport for transatlantic and South American travel before the war. At the battle of Okinawa in late March 1945, the Japanese had identified “the pride of the enemy fleet, the warship
Indianapolis”
as one of their primary targets and had succeeded in hitting her with a kamikaze plane, almost sinking her.

The
Indianapolis
was able to limp back to San Francisco for urgent repairs, then quickly got called to perform a top-secret mission: make a delivery to Tinian Island (near Guam), ten thousand miles away in the far Pacific. The delivery consisted of several wooden crates weighing a total of nine thousand pounds, to be lashed down to the deck and guarded by sentry twenty-four hours a day. In addition, there were two long metal canisters, to be stored in the luxurious private cabin reserved for the commander of the Central Pacific Fleet. Nobody, not even the captain, knew what this was all about. All they were told was that it was “top secret” and “every hour we save [getting it to Tinian] will shorten the war by that much.” “Oh sure,” joked the seamen, “it’s rolls of toilet paper for General MacArthur.” And just what was to happen to General MacArthur’s
toilet rolls if the ship got torpedoed? The Navy’s strict instructions: throw the canisters overboard, but make sure—no matter what—that the crates weighing two and a half tons got put on a lifeboat. (How this was to be done in the chaos of a sinking was never discussed.)

The
Indianapolis
raced to Tinian Island in ten days and dropped off her cargo. Inside the crates were the components of an atom bomb; inside the two canisters were the fuel cells containing uranium-235. In five days these components and fuel cells, assembled into a bomb called “Little Boy,” would be dropped on Hiroshima.

Having completed her top-secret mission, the
Indianapolis
was ordered to go to Guam and then to Leyte in the Philippines. Although there was no longer any need for secrecy, the ship was to continue traveling without convoy. Not only was this a violation of standard procedure that a warship always have escort when crossing the dangerous Philippine Sea, but the USS
Indianapolis
was particularly vulnerable: she lacked submarine-detection equipment and had a top-heavy superstructure, making her unable to “sustain even one torpedo,” according to the commander of the Central Pacific Fleet. Naval intelligence had just learned of the sinking of an American warship on the Guam-Leyte route and believed that several Japanese submarines were lurking in the area, but the Navy never changed the
Indianapolis’s
route nor warned the captain of this danger. The
Indianapolis
must continue her total radio silence, and no officers at the departing port or the arrival port were informed of this unusual blackout. With these instructions, the ship departed into hostile waters, an orphan.

Two days after leaving Guam, the
Indianapolis
ran into the Japanese submarine
I-58
, waiting for the kill. Two quick torpedo shots at less than 1,500 yards, and down went the
Indianapolis.
Out of 1,199 men, some nine hundred were able to jump into the water. But worse horrors were still to come. As the English say, “Worse things happen at sea.” The shark attacks began.

Back in port, nobody paid attention. The frantic SOS calls when the
Indianapolis
sank were so garbled they were ignored. An intercept of a Japanese message bragging of a “hit” was ignored as a ruse. When the ship failed to show up at Leyte on the appointed day, the port commander assumed her orders had been changed—same for days two, three, and four. Back in Guam, the marker on the plotting board for the
Indianapolis
was removed because it was assumed—having received no inquiry from Leyte—that the ship had arrived as expected. When a message was sent to Guam asking why the ship’s radio teletype wasn’t responding, Guam replied it was probably an equipment failure.

Nobody asked questions because they didn’t know what they were supposed to know and not a single officer had any curiosity or initiative.

Meanwhile, men were dying in the
ocean from wounds, dehydration, thirst, and shark attacks. The first day and night went by, no help. Day two, still no help. Day three, still no help. In late morning of the fourth day, a pilot on a routine patrol who happened to go to the back of the plane to check up on a problem looked down at the vast ocean and had the surprise of his life: a few men waving frantically in the water. He immediately sent out a rescue call. Only when a seaplane reached the survivors did the Navy learn they were from the
Indianapolis.
The men drifting in the sea hanging on for dear life were scattered over a line twenty miles long. The first rescue ship didn’t arrive until it was completely dark. Despite the danger of attracting the attention of an enemy submarine, it turned on all its searchlights to give hope to the men miles away that help was coming. By then, more than five hundred men had died. Out of an original crew of 1,199 men, 316 were left. Had it not been for the chance encounter of a plane finding men in the water and sending out the alert, everyone would have died. It was the worst disaster in the history of the U.S. Navy.