Lt. Col. Frank O’Sullivan, U.S.A., Retired
Development of the Atomic Bomb
Birth: December 2, 1911

Sound graphic


"Shadow Etched in Concrete"

 

Frank—Colonel O’Sullivan—it’s my understanding that in 1942 you reported to Knoxville, Tennessee, before there was an Oak Ridge. Colonel, will you tell us about those early days of atomic power?

Jim, I’ll be very happy to, especially because today is a day of significance to me. It is the 6th of August—thirty-nine years to the day after our first bomb exploded at Hiroshima, Japan. That was the culmination of years of intense effort conducted under the most extreme secrecy, under most adverse conditions. In essence, it was a period of terrifically hard work with a lot of routine boredom, interrupted occasionally by a moment of real terror when something seemed about to go wrong.

Our unit was initially composed of very few people. The nucleus of our organization consisted mainly of people who had already been associated with the Army Corps of Engineers1in rivers, harbors, and flood control work. When the White House decided to go ahead with the possible development of an atomic bomb, based primarily upon a letter which Professor Einstein2wrote to President Roosevelt, they decided that the only part of the government with the potential for undertaking a project of this magnitude and that could maintain the best government security was the Army Corps of Engineers.

At the onset of the war, I had been a civilian employee of the Corps. I enlisted in the military service, and shortly thereafter I was sent to the Engineer School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. After taking a very intensive short course there in January and February l942, right after our entrance into World War II, I reported to duty in the Lower Mississippi Valley Division of the Corps of Engineers.

The commander was Major General Max Tyler, a fine officer whom I had known before and who had requested my services. He made me the Camouflage and Passive Protection Engineer for the Middle Gulf Coast Region in the area composed of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the city of New Orleans, extending along the Gulf to the Sabine River, which separated Texas from Louisiana. There was a large number of rapidly developing military bases in this area to take care of our frantic mobilization. Also, there were a large number of industrial plants—chemical and petroleum. Of course, there was a big port of embarkation at New Orleans. We really feared these installations would be damaged by the German submarines beginning to congregate in the Gulf.

I was engaged in this mission throughout most of 1942. I was placed on flight pay, even though I wasn’t in the Air Force, because I had to fly continually. The only way we could establish how to conceal the identity of areas, and how to camouflage them, or to use any other form of “passive” protection was to use visual sighting ourselves from the air. Also, as an aside, during what spare time I had, I went along as bombardier on reconnaissance missions—“sub patrols.”

Fortunately—for me or the subs, I’m not sure which—I never did sight one, because I was the one who was supposed to sink them. I don’t know whether I would have remembered the correct procedure or not.

In the latter part of 1942, I received some very enigmatic orders from the War Department directing me to report for duty immediately to the Manhattan Engineer District in Knoxville, Tennessee. Well, this meant absolutely nothing to me. In the first place, I knew Manhattan was in New York City, not in Tennessee. I inquired of my contacts in the various personnel offices of the military, and none of them knew anything about it. I even got our executive officer to phone a buddy in Washington and ask him, and the answer he got was a flat “No comment.”

So, in the meantime, General Tyler said I had not finished my assignment on the Coastal Region yet, and he wasn’t going to let me go until I had. He didn’t know anything about this either. So, anyway, I went ahead and rushed my reports and submitted the necessary recommendations.

About this time I got a follow-up on my orders from Washington wanting to know why I hadn’t reported for duty. They told me I’d better leave before I got in hot water. I was married at the time, and my wife was pregnant. We got in our car, taking with us only the dog, a few miscellaneous things, and drove to Knoxville, Tennessee. We had some furniture, which we decided we’d ship to Tennessee, although we didn’t know where we were eventually going to wind up. I told the moving people just to put it all in storage when it got there.

Knoxville was not entirely strange to us because we had passed through there several years previously on our honeymoon en route to the Great Smoky Mountains. The only memory I had of Knoxville was that I had gotten ptomaine poisoning from eating in one of the local restaurants.

Huh.

So, we arrived in Knoxville. I had never intended to return, but there I was. It was a rather quiet, small city. There was a big aluminum plant there―the place called ALCOA, in the foothills of the Smokies just a few miles out of town. There were several little manufacturing plants that had been attracted there by the bountiful supply of power generated by the Tennessee Valley Authority.3 Other than this, you wouldn’t have known that there was any war going on. There were absolutely no uniforms in sight anywhere. And, for a few days after we got there, I was the only person that anybody had ever seen wearing a military uniform except people that were home on leave before being sent to a new duty station.

 We had a room in the Andrew Johnson Hotel, which at that time was the top hotel in Knoxville. They had plenty of room, the rates were low, and besides that, until I could find who to report to, I was on TDY4, so I had a little extra money. We inquired around, and nobody had ever heard of anything called the Manhattan Engineer District. I went to the Chamber of Commerce—no answer. I went to various other places― government offices and the Federal Building. They didn’t know what I was talking about.
Finally, one day my wife and I went to lunch in a restaurant, and the waitress in there told us, “Several other people in funny-looking clothes like you have been eating in here recently.” I said, “How do you mean, ‘funny’?” She replied, “Oh, those little funny houses you wear on your lapel.” She was talking about the engineer castles.5

So I asked her, “Well, do they come in every day?” And she said, “No, sir, they don’t come in every day, but they come in quite frequently.” She added, “They haven’t been in today yet, but actually it would be a little early for them.” So we decided to linger over our meal, and we were very fortunate because, before we left, in came three or four engineer officers. They saw me and I saw them, and they knew they didn’t know me and I didn’t know them. They came over to the table. The senior officer there, who was a Major Warren George, introduced himself, saying, “I’m the Area Engineer for the Clinton Engineer Works. What’s your name?” I told him. He said, “Well, we’ve been wondering where you’ve been.” I said, “I’ve been here in Knoxville trying to find you.” Well,” he said, “that’s understandable. We don’t exactly have a high profile. We have been granted authority to wear civilian clothes at our own discretion.” This was most unusual during a period of all-out war. So far as I know, we were the only outfit in the military during World War II where everybody had this prerogative.

Later on, several years later, it got me into trouble a couple of times. But that’s getting ahead of the topic. So, anyway, he said, “We decided we’d wear our uniforms for a while until more people got here, because your orders are very enigmatic.” He added, “Unless you can see somebody, you don’t know where to go.”

I told him, “My orders are ‘Report to the Manhattan District.’ “You said, “The Clinton Engineer Works.” He said, “This will be the Manhattan District, but the District Engineer hasn’t moved down here from New York yet.”

Then he said, “They are establishing an area office, and we’ve been doing some surveying on a site where we’re planning on putting a military facility. Until the District moves down here, we are the local command, as far as the project goes. I’ll tell them that you are reporting to duty, and that’s all that’s necessary.”

I said, “Well, I’d like to go to work. I’ve been bumming around here now for quite a while trying to find you.” And he said, “Well, that’s good. Come on out to where we’re working.” I had my car, and my wife was still with me, and he said, “You can’t take your wife.” And I said, “Well, what am I going to do with her?” He said, “Are you staying at the hotel?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, go back down to the hotel and drop her off.” [laughter] So, I did that. And then he said, “Follow us.”

I followed them down the street until they came to a big automobile dealership-garage that apparently had closed. It still had the old sign on the window reading, “Closing. Going out of business sale.” The windows were all white-washed. The front door was padlocked. We drove around to the back where the auto dealer used to keep the used cars, I suppose. We parked there and went in through a rear door that the Major had to knock on and somebody peeked through—like an old speakeasy—and recognized him and said, “Come in.” We went in, and there were quite a few people there. There were a number of civilians besides the military people. I later found out they were Corps of Engineers’ civilian employees. There were also quite a few young ladies, hired locally as stenographers, waiting for security clearances. They were not allowed to do any work until they received their clearances.

That was the case with most of the people there. I was put to work right away because I was one of the few people there who had “top-secret” military status.

Nobody else was even permitted to look at anything. People just sat around, smoked cigarettes, talked to one another, read the paper, and drank coffee, which I thought was a “helluva” way to run an urgent military project. But that was the way things had to be—I later found out.

Then things began to take shape. People began to get their clearances. We augmented the force. I was taken out to the project site, which was in a valley between two mountain ranges west of Knoxville, about fifteen miles along the river—a tributary of the Tennessee River—which is called the Clinton River. The place was an absolute madhouse. It was the rainy season. We were bogged down practically to our knees in mud. There was heavy grading equipment running all over the place, here and there, seemingly haphazardly, pulling down mountains and filling up valleys. It didn’t seem to make any sense at all. After I was shown the site plans, I realized that whatever was going to be built there was to be of enormous extent, because of the amount of level ground that was necessary.

We continued working in Knoxville, commuting to the site, because there was not only no place to live on the site yet, but also we had no space for our headquarters. The construction people were living in very, very primitive quarters. Word came through finally that the area was to be called “Oak Ridge.” The reason for this, I understood, was that one of the low mountain ranges on one side was “Black Oak Ridge.” And that’s how Oak Ridge was named, originally. We then began to refer to it as the Oak Ridge Project, instead of the Clinton Engineer Works, not knowing, of course, that in years to come that would become a very famous name.

We continued making our headquarters in the old garage building in Knoxville until the spring of 1943. They were doing everything under the sun simultaneously, under forced draft construction out on the site. The construction force had reached the enormous total of 50,000 people, and it is inconceivable how that many people could get anything done without getting in each other’s way, but they actually did.

We had nice quarters in the city of Knoxville. We lived in a large garden apartment project called Sequoia Village, which was located on a bend of the Tennessee River a couple of miles south of the University of Tennessee campus. Somehow or other, the government had gotten a large block of housing for the people who were connected with the headquarters. So we all lived there, more or less together. Later on I found out they wanted, as much as possible, to keep us from associating with anybody else. Even though we didn’t know anything, they were afraid we might learn something and let it leak.

We stayed in Sequoia Village, and in April 1943, realized that our daughter was about to be born. The military hospital had not been completed at Oak Ridge yet, so it was necessary for us to go to a civilian hospital in Knoxville. Our daughter was born in Knoxville, therefore, instead of Oak Ridge. There was no compensation at that time for military personnel who had to use civilian medical facilities. Fortunately, the obstetrician and the nuns who ran the hospital took pity on me—at that time I was a poor first lieutenant. Each cut their bill in half. I have often kidded my daughter in the years since then about being a “bargain baby.”

In the summer of ’43, our local headquarters was moved to Oak Ridge. Shortly thereafter I moved my wife and daughter there. As soon as possible, they wanted to get us all over there together. And at this time I began also to get a broader view of what was going on. The entire project was intricately compartmentalized. Some of the major contractors at Oak Ridge were the Tennessee Eastman Corporation6, Union Carbon and Carbide Chemical, General Electric, Dupont, a big construction outfit called Stone and Webster, and numerous others.

Each of them operated independently of the others. Our function in the military was to keep these people synchronized so their work would dovetail but without telling them the end mission—a very difficult job. As a matter of fact, it almost drove us nuts all the time. The contractors, the construction personnel, the designers, the architect-engineers, and everybody else would keep coming to us saying, “We’ve got to know what John Doe is doing or else we won’t be able to do our part right, in order to mesh with what he’s doing.” So, headquarters of the Manhattan District set up the Reports Control Office.

About this time, the top headquarters was moved from Manhattan down to Oak Ridge, and the Clinton Engineer Works became headquarters of the Manhattan Engineer District. The district engineer was Colonel Nickols. He was a man I had known years ago in the Corps of Engineers as Lieutenant Nickols and the one who selected me for the job. I didn’t know this until much later. He also brought in a number of other people that I already knew. Colonel Nickols came to Oak Ridge, and he had a very fine officer as his executive officer―his name was Earl Marsden.

Earl was a Yale graduate but not at all the stuffed shirt, Ivy League type—a real regular fellow. He was a very popular man and an extraordinarily competent officer and engineer. He was my boss and was the man who told me, ultimately, what we were doing―that we were going to develop an atomic bomb, and this secret was so important we had to operate under the stringent rules and regulations that made everything so much more infinitely difficult. But things ultimately had to be coordinated at some level so that the necessary command decisions could be made. He had been selected to establish a unit to do the coordinating. Colonel Marsden did a fine job. Regrettably, he was killed in Korea in 1951. So far as I have ever been able to find out, at the time I was the lowest ranking officer in the entire atomic bomb project who knew what was going on and who knew the ultimate purpose of the program. There were full colonels who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what was going on.

By that time, we had been granted what is called a “Q clearance.” This was super secret—we were above and beyond the military top secret. What is a "Q clearance"?

A "Q clearance" in the Atomic Energy Commission was considered the highest clearance, which stated that a person must be told whatever he asked about in the atomic bomb program.

That could mean that, if you were ever captured, you were supposed to commit suicide, weren't you?

That's right. But fortunately for me, I never got that close to any enemy.

So they couldn't question you and force you to give information.

That's right. I had reports coming in to me from all areas of the program. It was our job to correlate these, to combine them, and to continually prepare timely progress reports for Colonel Nickols, and, in turn, condense reports for him to send to the Commanding General of the Atomic Bomb Project, who was General Leslie Groves. General Groves maintained his headquarters in Washington in what, at that time, was called the New War Department Building. As a matter of interest, after World War II it was incorporated into the new State Department Building and constitutes just one portion of that building now. But at that time it was a brand new facility, separate from the Pentagon.

Groves had established his reputation for getting things done in a hurry, because he was the man who was responsible for the construction of the Pentagon. It was before the war started, but we knew we were going to get into it eventually. So it was made a rush job, and Groves finished it in just a matter of days after Pearl Harbor. That is how he earned his reputation for getting things done, completing the Pentagon over a year ahead of schedule. General Groves was placed in command of the atomic bomb project by President Roosevelt.

Groves came to Oak Ridge from Washington all the time. He was a very decisive individual, a very forceful man, not much of a “Hail fellow well met” person. He was all business, never had time for any pleasantries. People respected him, but I really don’t know of anybody that ever liked him. One couldn’t help but respect the man for his ability. In mind, in action, and in character he was the perfect picture of the forceful, authoritative commander. In personal appearance, he was one of the sloppiest officers I have ever seen in my life. He was fat, he had a big gut that hung out over his belt, his uniform was always rumpled, and he generally had coffee spilled on the front of his tie.


And you would never dream from looking at him that he was going to become a legend in his own time. I used to dread his visits because he’d always ask us questions we couldn’t answer. Then he wanted to know why we didn’t know that, and my boss would have to step in and say, “He had no need to know that.” [laughter] The net result was that Groves drove Nickols, and Nickols drove Marsden, and Marsden drove me, and I drove the contractors. By this time we had quite a program under way.

There were three major atomic production plants under construction. In order to play it safe, we decided to try to develop different methods of separation of the U235, which is a fissional uranium from the uranium ore, which is actually a common ore when mined. All of this was in theory, and we were continually operating right on the edge of theory and actually taking chances a lot of times, because we never knew if something was going to blow up in our faces, literally.

One system was the gaseous diffusion process where, due to differences in molecular weight, heavy atoms would sink to the bottom of the gas and the lighter ones would float to the top, and then they could be separated by a filter. This would concentrate, giving enriched uranium.

Another system was the electromagnetic process. This process involved using something called a “racetrack,” and literally it was a racetrack. It was a tremendous oval-shaped affair with an enormous number of electromagnets in it around this tubular concept. Uranium-enriched gas was placed in there, and by continually accelerating it around—the speed approaches some fantastic figure. I don’t know what it was, but it was thousands and thousands of miles an hour. The atoms would separate because some were heavier than others. Then they would bleed off the ones that were wanted.

Another process, the third one, was called “K25.” All of them had a code designation. This was the thermal diffusion process, where a huge quantity of water was heated, and it got so hot that the same thing happened—the heavier atoms and the lighter atoms separated.

There was a fourth pilot plant which, at first, I didn’t know the workings of because I wasn’t considered to need to know. But later on, when my job was extended to encompass all areas of the Manhattan Project, I found out that this was a pilot plant for the production of plutonium, which is actually an artificial, man-made element, which the scientists have found out, theoretically, should be capable of being man-made and, concentrated enough under a certain environment, would not separate because it is highly unstable. That’s the reason it doesn’t normally exist in nature. These plants were going to be built in a place in the state of Washington along the Columbia River, designated as the Hanford Engineer Works. It was a place where the Snake River runs into the Columbia River on a wide barren expanse of sand and desert. There were several little towns there, hardly more than villages. One was Pasco, Washington; another was Richland; and there was a third named Kennewick. They were all separated from each other, because they were at the mouth of the Snake River—one on each side of it and one across from the mouth of the Snake where it entered the Columbia River. The process for making plutonium, like the ones at Oak Ridge, needed a tremendous amount of water plus ample power.

As I stated before, Oak Ridge has the water from the Tennessee River and its tributaries and the power from the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the state of Washington, there was a huge volume of cooling water from the Columbia River and power from the Grand Coulee Dam, the great electric power project that had been built during the depression years. This site, too, was isolated from population centers because there was always the ever-present danger, when embarking on a program like this, of pushing the physical aspects of a theoretical concept right to the maximum of theory. We never knew when something might go wrong and we might have a premature “big bang.” This almost happened one time when I was on TDY at the Hanford Engineer Works.

I might mention, before I go into that, that my job had been broadened to involve a tremendous amount of temporary duty. I had to travel all over the country and abroad. It was necessary for me to wear civilian clothes many times because I went a lot of places [in which] the military wasn’t supposed to have any interest. I couldn’t tell my wife where I was. Sometimes I was gone for weeks and weeks at a time, and she didn’t have the foggiest notion where I was in the whole world. And, when I came back, I couldn’t tell my wife where I’d been. But she was a real good soldier herself. She’d never ask me during this entire period of time where I had been, what I was doing, after I had once told her I couldn’t tell her.

I was at the Hanford Engineer Works one time when we received an urgent request to slow down the activating processes that we were undertaking in what were called the Atomic Piles, which are used to make the fissionable plutonium. We were told that something had started going wrong with the one at the Oak Ridge pilot plant, and headquarters was afraid that the thing was about to become “critical.”

Oak Ridge was built in a long, narrow valley between two mountain ranges. All the plants and the housing areas were down in the valley. If one plant had ever gone up, the whole valley would have been wiped out, because the ridges on either side would have confined the blast to the long strip. All of us who were stationed there were apprehensive because most of us had family or friends there. Our headquarters was there. We figured that if all of a sudden something like that should happen, we wouldn’t have any place to go back to. It wouldn’t have existed. Well, this really shook me up. I guess my wife thought I was unusually glad to get back home, and she never did know why until after the war was over.

Another time when I was at Hanford, we had quite a few problems with the plutonium plant. This was after the full-scale activation of the first reactor at Hanford. I was there on TDY when the reactor started up. We all had to wear Geiger counters whenever we were in a facility where there was radiation, to make sure we didn’t get an overdose. But, anyway, the red warning lights went on, and our counters started clicking real fast, and we were all told to get out of there. This had happened to me before to a minor degree but never to this extent. When I got back to Oak Ridge, I was ordered immediately to report to the Medical Center to be examined. They figured I had gotten an overdose of radiation. This really scared me, but apparently it never affected me because in all the years since I have never had any repercussions.

Then there was often the problem of going around in civilian clothes in wartime when one was actually military. This was counter to all military regulations. One time I was in Chicago at one of the atomic development facilities located at the University of Chicago. Actually, I think the first nuclear reaction—chain reaction—took place there at a makeshift laboratory built underneath the stands of the stadium at the University of Chicago. There was still a lot of development work under way there, and I had to go there periodically.

Departing for one of these inspection tours, I was at a Chicago airport at the lunch counter waiting for my plane, and I pulled out my wallet to pay my check. Inadvertently, I showed my military Identification card. It turned out the man sitting next to me was an MP [military police]. He said, “I beg your pardon, sir, may I see that card?” I said, “Oh, yes.”

He looked at it and said, “This card says that it belongs to a captain in the Corps of Engineers. What are you doing with it?” I said, “I’m the captain.” He said, “What are you doing in civilian clothes? That’s against regulations.”

I told him I was on a special mission. He asked to see my orders. I said, “I can’t show you my orders. They’re classified.” He said, “I think you’d better come with me.”

I had several unpleasant hours. He took me to the MP office at the airport, and I couldn’t tell his immediate commanding officer what was going on. I said, “You’ve got to take me to the Chicago Area Command. That’s the only place that I can even begin to give them an inkling of what mission I’m on and explain what right I have to wear these.”

So he took me to downtown Chicago to this office. I recall it was in the Merchandise Mart—a big building in downtown Chicago. We went in, and I introduced myself to the colonel in charge of the Military Police in the Chicago area. And then, and only then, did I take out of the secret compartment in my wallet, the order signed by the Secretary of War granting me permission to wear civilian clothes whenever I deemed it was necessary. I showed these to the colonel; he took one look at it, and he said, “I’ve seen this once or twice before.” He said, “I’m sorry this has been an inconvenience.” I replied, “No, that’s all right; you people are doing your job.” That was the end of that episode. However, I missed my train.

On trips we weren’t supposed to use our overriding priority unless we were on a really urgent mission, not when we were going to make a routine inspection trip. We could “bump” anybody we wanted to, but it wasn’t deemed the proper thing to do. Once in a while, you get tired of flying around. In those days sometimes we’d fly military aircraft; sometimes we’d fly in civilian aircraft. And when we had time, [we’d ride] trains, which, back then, were pretty good. The railroad system was in high gear during World War II. I’d catch a train in Knoxville, go from there to Cincinnati, to Chicago, and change trains in Chicago and go on the Northern Pacific Railroad to the West Coast. And then I’d get off in a little town in Washington State. They had a local air patrol there, and I’d get a ride in a light aircraft from there directly to Hanford.

One time I took the train, and, when we got to North Dakota, we were caught in a blizzard. For three days and three nights, that train was stalled. We couldn’t see anything because the snow banks were all higher than the train. Actually, we were covered up until the snowplows came and rescued us. We ran out of food, but we had plenty of water because we melted snow. And the baggage compartment had a big shipment of liquor in it. Later somebody had an awful loss to charge the railroad with because they broke open the liquor and passed it around to all the passengers to keep us from freezing to death because they had run out of fuel to warm the coaches. This was a rather pleasant interlude. By the time we got out to the West Coast, everyone on the train had sobered up enough to go to work. This was known as the “Lost Weekend” in our project. Everybody thought it was a big joke.

Other than one short period of emergency leave when my father was critically ill, I had only one leave period during the entire war. I was on duty, literally, twenty-four hours a day around the clock.

This [project] went on until the spring of ’45, when we were sent on a particular mission to see if we could recruit some of the German scientific personnel from the clutches of the advancing Russian armies. [Operation Paper Clip] We knew from our intelligence that the Germans had been working on some aspects of nuclear fission because they had a "heavy water" plant, in Scandinavia—in Norway, which they had conquered. "Heavy water" is a primary shielding instrument used in the production of fissionable material. They also had the foremost experts in primitive rocket propulsion and, at that time, had been bombing London with "buzz bombs." We were still experimenting with primitive rockets at that time. We didn't yet know what method of delivery we would use when the atomic bombs were developed—if we would drop them from aircraft or whether they would be so potentially dangerous that we would use rockets, if we could find rockets that would work. So, we had the mission to go to Europe and try to take some of the German scientists—to get them in our custody before the Russians grabbed them. Fortunately, most of the Germans preferred to be captured by us, rather than the Russians.

This was a very awesome detail. It was a little gruesome because it was my first experience with the utter devastation of war. We were making a rapid advance. We had crossed the Rhine River and were entering the heart of Germany. The way the German cities looked and the way the people looked was something I'll never forget as long as I live.

The surviving population didn't even hate us anymore; there was just complete apathy. As strange as it may seem, apparently they wanted the Americans to capture them rather than the Russians. We had no trouble getting all the German scientists that we could find.

But even though the Russian army was advancing fast, we were advancing faster. I believe that General Patton had gotten all the way across Germany and into Czechoslovakia and Poland when, due to some arrangements our government had made at the time with Russia—primarily at the Crimean Conference—we withdrew and let them take all that territory, which, later on, formed their western satellites and came completely under the jurisdiction of Russia.At that time, President Roosevelt apprently felt he could trust Stalin.

We were Allies and all that sort of rot, so we pulled back and didn't get some of the German scientists, but we got a lot of them. I suppose the most noteworthy was Werner von Braun, who actually was the man who did more to develop the American rocket program than any other individual. He died just a few years ago. He was the one who set up the big facility in Huntsville, Alabama. Our present position in the space race may be due in some measure to our having gone to Europe and having secured these people before the Russians.

When I got back this time, I was utterly exhausted. As I have said, the only free time I had had in years had been the three days we were snowbound on the train, plus emergency leave to visit my sick dad. I had what was diagnosed as fatigue. Actually, I think it was a nervous breakdown. After I had taken my physical, Colonel Earl Marsden called me in and said, "Frank, I want you to take thirty days' leave." I told him I had too much to do, that I couldn't take that much time.

He said, "Well, I think you need it; you deserve it. I don't care where you go or what you do. Just don't leave the country. You can go anywhere in the States that you want to.”

When I prodded him for details, he said, "Well, your physical wasn't too good, and I'm going to need you very badly in the next few months because this is going to be a critical year. I don't want you operating at half speed."

I told him, "Okay." I took my wife and little daughter to St. Paul, Minnesota. It was the middle of winter—the winter of '43-'44, actually. We left before Christmas and came back after New Year's '44. We went to visit my wife's family. We had a good time, just getting away from some of the muck and mud that were constant problems in Oak Ridge. And seeing paved streets, for a change, was wonderful. In Oak Ridge, all except the main streets were nothing but muddy morass. The main streets were gravel. Sidewalks were narrow boardwalks, and cars just got sucked in the mud. Driving all winter long often involved being pulled out by a tow truck. As a matter of fact, the Corps of Engineers had tow trucks at the disposal of all military personnel all the time.

But, again, I digress. I have to get back to my story. It was a very cold winter in St. Paul. We had a lot of snow. It was a temperature that got as low as 35 degrees below zero, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was such a marked contrast with what I had been putting up with all the previous few years. Unfortunately, the baby caught cold. My wife and I took her to a pediatrician in St. Paul, who, in civilian life, was the partner of one of the doctors in the military hospital at Oak Ridge. The military doctor told me that if I needed to take the baby to a doctor while in St. Paul, to take her there. We took her to this doctor, and he said, "Oh, all she's got is a cold due to the change in climate." He gave us some prescriptions, and, when I asked what I owed him, he said, "Nothing. I owe you." I thought that was a very nice attitude.

When I got back to Oak Ridge, I was in good shape.

However, we had had a continuing problem at Oak Ridge ever since the early days of the project. The military were the minority there. I suppose, at the peak of the program, there must have been about 5,000 military and well over 50 or 60,000 civilians. There was not complete harmony between the civilians and the military. The military were the bosses—that had to be understood by everybody concerned, due to the nature of the work. And the civilians resented that.

Conversely, the civilians—people on a professional level with those of us who were officers—were very high-paid professional people, civilians. There was no comparison in our incomes. The civilian workers, construction workers, and people like that were paid premium wages for working at an isolated base without any of the usual amenities, and received as much overtime as they wanted. They were given the same type of quarters as the military. In order to promote greater harmony, the military was scattered throughout the area where we lived. On one side of me, I had an officer's family; on the other side, a civilian bricklayer who, at that time, was making about $1,000 a week, which was unheard-of wages back in the 1940s. But still, these people resented our military base facility.

Initially, we had a commissary and an exchange. Then the civilians wanted to shop at the commissary and the exchange. Well, this was out of the question. It just couldn't have been done. There was a lot of grumbling. The majority of these people were not of an intellectual or educational status to understand why this had to be. We couldn't take a chance of a strike on this project during wartime, though, so eventually the troubles reached a point where the commander, General Groves, decided to do away with the commissary and exchange. We said, "What in the world are we going to do for clothes and food and things like that?"

We were told to go to a base in Georgia just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was called Fort Oglethorpe. It was where the first women soldiers were trained—WACS, short for Women's Army Corps.7 This was the first place in my life that I ever saw women in military uniform.

We continued to be very busy and didn't have the time to go down there. The only time that I did was when I had run out of some clothing and I had to get some military shoes. Our gas was rationed, and we didn't have any more gas coupons than the civilians did. Everything else on the base was rationed, too. We had to shop in the civilian stores, and everybody was issued ration coupons. My wife had points for meat, etc., when available.

One time I came back from extended TDY to a mining facility in Canada where uranium ore was being mined. I walked in the house, and my wife was in tears. I said, "What's the matter?"

She said, "Well, I knew you were coming home, and I wanted to give you a nice steak. I saved my points, and I went down to this grocery store and bought this meat." It was always prewrapped—the shopper never got to pick it out. She said, "Look at it."

And it was nothing but bones and gristle. I hit the ceiling and said, "Give me that thing.” I went to the neighborhood market and demanded to see the manager. The clerk responded, "Yes, sir, just a minute." He took me back to the office; the manager said, "What can I do for you?" I said, "You can give me a decent piece of meat. Look how you cheated my wife!"

He looked at the meat and said, "Well, I'm sorry about that. It doesn't look very good, and it doesn't seem to be the quantity or quality that's written on the wrapper. But," he said, "that's not our wrapping paper. She didn't buy that here."

I responded, "Don't give me that crap. I'm sick and tired of putting up with all this stuff here. My wife has to stand in line in order to buy something to eat, when other women who live on military bases get some consideration. If you don't take this back and give me a good cut of meat, I'm going right to the District Engineer to press charges of fraud against you."

He said, "Oh, my God. All right. I tell you, it's not mine, but I'll give you a new cut." He took me out to the meat section and got me the best, biggest steak that we had during World War II. I took it home and told my wife, "Eureka! I have it."

She said, "What happened?" I told her. She said, "Where did you get this?" I said, "At the market—the closest market down the street, where you always shop." She responded, "That's not where I went. There was such a line standing outside that market, I didn't even go in. I got it from another market." The manager had been telling me the truth. He hadn't sold her that meat! [laughter] That's just a little anecdote to illustrate some of the annoyances of life that people had to put up with during this period of time.

We really had tight security that we were very proud of, as my office had a lot to do with maintaining security. It was a terrific blow to us, after the war, to find out that our secret had been leaked to the Russians. Primarily, I blame this on the attitude of cooperation fostered by some of the higher quarters in our government with Russia. Before Roosevelt's last term, he had a Vice President named Henry Wallace, who was very, very much to the left.

He was very much a liberal. At that time, he was Roosevelt's primary personal envoy to the Russians. He used to fly to Russia all the time, carrying messages from Roosevelt to Stalin and vice versa. Perhaps I shouldn't speculate, but I always will believe that part of the program, or at least the general concept of what we were doing was passed on to the Russians by Henry Wallace, vice-president of the United States.

When Roosevelt died in the spring of 1945, every one of us concerned with the atomic bomb program gave a sigh of relief when Harry Truman became president instead of Wallace. We didn't think that Wallace would ever have utilized the atomic bomb—that he would have let World War II drag on and on. We were preparing for an invasion of Japan that would have cost countless lives—both ours and the Japanese—because the Japanese were determined to resist the invasion of their homeland, and they would have done so to the bitter end. We had already found out what tenacious fighters they were. Thus, literally, we saved hundreds and [thousands]—probably millions—of lives by using the atomic bomb—which, of course, may be rationalizing it in order to get away with some of the guilt that we had over the slaughter of noncombatants, women, and children.8 But, at the same time, I do believe that it is true.

This was a time of extreme urgency. We were working posthaste. We had decided on a method of delivery. It would be by aircraft, by heavy bombers. We had gotten close enough to Japan to make this feasible. We figured it would take some tremendous shock like this to make the Japanese give up without any more resistance. The aircrews were already being trained full-time. I particularly recall the aircraft that was the first one to drop the first bomb—her name was the Enola Gay. I think it was named after the mother of the aircraft commander, Colonel Paul Tibbetts.

Meanwhile, we were making frantic efforts to detonate a test weapon on the desert in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the atomic proving ground. Everything was in high gear. We were literally working around the clock trying to do everything we could to shorten the war.

Germany had finally caved in, and we were beginning to ship our European armies to the Asiatic theater. There was tremendous troop movement going on across the country. Troop trains all day and all night were going everywhere from the East Coast to the West Coast with this enormous redeployment of men and matériel.

We knew that we had to hurry, hurry, hurry. So we did. Finally, in July, we tested the first bomb, and it had a tremendous impact on everybody. It was completely successful, and we knew we hadn't devoted all this effort and all those years of blood, sweat, and tears for nothing. Actually, we had accomplished our mission.

Due to necessity, the scientific community really became the governing force at this time. Most of us in the military were not scientifically versed enough in nuclear physics or chemistry or things like that to really guide the development of the program from here on out.

There is no doubt in my mind that we had been the right people to build and develop the facilities and to build the bomb based on the scientists' guidelines. But when it came to applications and to triggering systems and to things like that, we just weren't qualified. So we let the scientists have more and more say-so about things. These people were undoubtedly the only ones who could do it, but some of them really were weird.

A little example: J. Robert Oppenheimer9 was the foremost scientist who was directly employed by the military. He and others, like Fermi and Lawrence and Compton, were the ones guiding the project. But Oppenheimer was the only one, really, who had an obligation to report directly to us. He was sort of an overseer for the military.

When I was on temporary duty in the spring of '45, traveling on a military aircraft, among the passengers was Dr. Oppenheimer. You could talk to him about some aspects of life and he would use ordinary terminology, but, when he got involved in his subject, why, frankly, I couldn't understand what he was talking about at all. Sometimes he would stop and just gaze into space and be completely withdrawn.

On this particular trip, I noticed that he had on mismatched shoes. And that fascinated me. To me, there was no way they could have gone unnoticed, because one of them was a black and white saddle oxford, and the other shoe was a light tan. Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore. I got up out of my seat and walked over across the aisle where Oppenheimer was sort of leaning back—it was a bucket-seat job and these things are not very comfortable, and we had to shift around all the time. He was stretched out on his seat, and I said, "Dr. Oppenheimer, do you realize that your shoes don't match?" He looked at his shoes and looked at me and said, "What does it matter?" Well, I was completely nonplussed. I said, "Well, I just thought you'd like your shoes to match." He didn't say a word. He just looked at me and said, "Not at all. What does it matter?" And that was all he had to say. So I concluded that he was on an entirely different level than I was. [laughter]

Here is another anecdote. It was about a doctor—a real good fellow. His name was Stafford Warren. He had been dean of the School of Medicine at the University of California. When they were staffing our program, he had been tapped to become the medical officer in charge of the military medical facilities. He was as quaint as an old country shoe. He'd left his job in California and moved down to our headquarters. His office was down the hall from where my shop was. He was put in for a commission, and he was appointed a full colonel. My immediate superior, Colonel Marsden, took him to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. There he got a uniform and some insignia and accessories, and they brought them all back. Earl Marsden told me, "Now you're going to see the new Warren in the morning. He's going to come to work in his uniform." I could hardly wait for Warren to come to work because I really liked him.

The next day he came down the hall and was being congratulated by various people. And he stopped in my office and said, "Hi, Sully"—he always called me Sully. I looked at him, and my mouth dropped [laughter]. And I said, "Doctor, you're out of uniform." He said, "What do you mean? I've got on everything that Marsden told me to buy." [laughter] I said, "Your eagles10 are on backwards." [laughter] So he said, "Oh, my God. You military people! You've always got something you can trump a guy with." [laughter] "Will you fix them for me? I don't want people poking fun at me all day long." So, I said, "Yeah. I'll get up and switch them for you." It just goes to show that even those with the highest intellect were only human. [laughter]

Incidentally, I think he was the man who did more to develop the beginning of nuclear medicine than anybody else. Today most of the advances we have in nuclear medicine owe their origins to concepts that were begun under Warren's direction during the Manhattan Project.

Now, the initial bomb test was a success. One of my friends who had been at the test site as an observer was not very well versed in nuclear matters and wanted a souvenir. He brought back of piece of fused glass from the test site. It was formed from grains of sand on the desert site that were fused by the tremendous heat of the explosion. He brought this into my office to show me when he came back from TDY.

It was a great big chunk of greenish, molded congealed mass. Immediately a rapid clicking noise started as he set it on my desk. I had a Geiger counter in my desk drawer, and it had started registering radiation. For a moment, it didn't occur to me what had started this. My friend said, "Where is all that racket coming from?" I replied, "I don't know." And then it dawned on me, "I put my Geiger counter in the drawer here." I hadn't checked it in as we were supposed to do. We were supposed to check into Nuclear Medicine every time we came in and out of a "hot" nuclear area, but I had come directly back to my office in a hurry and had forgotten to turn my counter in. So that was how we found out that he had brought back a souvenir really laden with radioactivity. I said, "My Lord, man, that thing is really shooting out plenty of 'R's' [a unit of measurement for radiation]. He said, "Oh, I never thought of that," and he turned white clear to his shoes. "What do you think I ought to do?" I said, "I'd thank you to remove it immediately. I think you'd better take it down to Nuclear Medicine and tell them what you did and get an examination. And get out of my office as soon as you can." [laughter] He left in a big hurry. Fortunately, we hadn't gotten an overdose. It just goes to show how we had to be so extra careful about everything we did for such a long period of time that it was a tremendous nervous strain. We were always tense. And everybody, sooner or later, did something foolish like that.

Then came the word that the long-awaited time was coming, and I was ordered on TDY. Before I left home, I came the closest ever in my career to telling a secret that I wasn't supposed to tell. I told my wife, "I'm going to be gone for an indefinite length of time, and, as usual, I can't tell you where I'm going or when I'll be back. But starting the first of August, it will be interesting if you keep the radio turned on all day long, every day. Something of interest may be announced." That was as close as I could come to telling her that something was going to happen. So she kept it turned on, and she had it turned on the morning of the 6th of August, and there came the "flash" new program that an atomic bomb had exploded in Japan.

And that was what year?

 That was August the 6th, 1945.

And today celebrates…?

That is 39 years to the day, today. That's the primary reason that I wanted to have this discussion today.

Because it's the...

39th anniversary. And also, it happens to be my 44th wedding anniversary. We were married on the 6th of August in 1940.

Well, I'll be darned.

And five years thereafter, this thing happened...

 And you suffered no ill effects? No radiation?

No, not so far.  

I think the bomb exploded about eight o'clock in the morning or thereabouts, local Japanese time, on the city of Hiroshima. It's always amused me, because the Japanese that I've met always call it "Ha-ro-sham-ma," but most Americans say "Hero-she-ma." When we were briefed before we went there, our briefing office called it "Hero-she-ma." And when they gave the news on the radio—of course, we didn't have any television in those days—they called it "Hero-she-ma."

It was an industrial city in southern Japan. Most of it is situated on a delta, the alluvial plain at the mouth of the river, with low mountains or hills on both sides of it . But, primarily, it was a flat area, and the Japanese had a submarine plant there. Their submarines were giving us fits at the time. They also had a tremendous steel mill there. I think it might have been the Mitsubishi; I'm not quite sure now. It was also an important naval station, and all these combined to make it the primary target for the first bomb. Everything went off without a hitch. The Japanese air defenses were alerted when their radar indicated that American aircraft were approaching, but the alert was subsequently cancelled under the assumption that this was only a reconnaissance flight. We had only two aircraft up, and one of them, of course, was the bomber, and the other one was a scout plane. The planes met at a prearranged rendezvous. There was supposed to be a second scout plane, but I don't think it ever made the rendezvous, and so it had to return to Guam.

The weather conditions were ideal, and the bomb was dropped right above "ground zero," going off as planned. Except for the New Mexico test, that was the first time that anybody in the world had ever seen a mushroom cloud.

The Japanese couldn't believe what had happened, naturally. We demanded their surrender and told them what had happened. Their General Staff met and decided that something must have gone wrong at some of their big local military installations and that there must have been a tremendous local secondary explosion on the ground. They couldn't think that one bomb could have caused all this trouble. What happened was that in this city of a couple hundred thousand people, nearly l00,000 people were killed. Another 50,000 were injured. The devastation was incredible.

[At] "ground zero" explosive compression was so great that some steel and concrete columns in the buildings were driven down through their foundations into the ground. The heat was so great that a lot of metal construction frames, train rails, and things, were melted. The radiation effect gave people tremendous doses of radiation as far away as a mile and a half. Most of them beyond a mile and a half survived and didn't suffer primary radiation sickness. The utilities were all destroyed. Blast waves going out from the explosion blew buildings down as far as a couple of miles away. And then came the secondary blast waves, which were caused by air rushing in from the opposite direction into the vacuum created by the first explosion, blowing buildings in from the other side. In other words, they got a "one-two" punch—one from one side and one from the other. We were sent in there on an emergency mission to try to evaluate the damage from the engineering standpoint. It was absolutely devastating.

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, because three days later on—August the 9th, I think about noon, local time, we dropped the second bomb on the city of Nagasaki. It, too, was an important Japanese military center and major port. I recall it was the Japanese Naval District Headquarters. Though it had numerous war factories, it really was a secondary target, but I never could find out what the primary target had been. The explosion there was more confined than at Hiroshima. There were good- sized mountain ranges on both sides, closer to the river at Nagasaki. The force of the explosion was lengthwise up and down the river valley, and the hills shielded the area on the other side of the explosion. However, some of these hills were heavily wooded, and the most amazing thing in the world was seeing these huge trees—they were completely charred on one side and they were still green on the other side. It's hard to describe and hard to visualize because I never have seen anything else like it.

The Engineer Evaluation Team was to ascertain structural damage to utilities and the amount of residual radiation, which, actually, was not too much. The bombs had been designed to be so-called "clean bombs," and they actually were, so far as residual radiation goes. Some of the people, especially the casualties close to the bomb site, were unrecognizable. You couldn't tell whether they had ever been human beings, because they were just charred pieces lying on the ground. And the people who had been wounded were horrible, horrible, horrible.

We thought the Japanese population would be extremely hostile, and we were really apprehensive. They had fought fiercely for years, and we couldn't conceive of them throwing down their arms and saying, "We give up," and meaning it.

So we went on a dangerous assignment. I was scared stiff all the time I was there, because I expected to get shot in the back at any moment. They had every reason to hate us; however, we had some good guards. During the redeployment of troops from the European theater to the Asiatic theater, we had brought back some crack Japanese-American troops who had been fighting in Italy. And the powers-that-be decided they would detail some of these soldiers to act as our guides, protect us, and interpret when we went into Japan.

Nisei?

Nisei11 troops, yes. They were tougher on the Japanese than we ever would have been. I've seen an American Nisei in uniform kick a Japanese officer in the rear end. They were really hard to get along with. The Japanese were scared to death of these fellows. They interpreted for us and asked all the questions we couldn't ask, because none of us could speak Japanese. I think their very presence intimidated the people.

They certainly wouldn't have dared to try to do anything to us. They commandeered everything we needed in the way of food and supplies and equipment, although we had brought practically everything we thought we'd need with us, not knowing what the radiation contamination might have done to local supplies.

The assignment was very gruesome, and, fortunately, it lasted only a short period of time. One of the things that sticks in my memory, and always will, was something I saw in Hiroshima. There were a lot of little inlets there, and the river had a number of channels going into the bay, crossed by many bridges. On this particular concrete bridge, the bomb had exploded and had caught a man in mid-stride walking across the bridge, etching his shadow in concrete. There was a split second, a thousandth of a second, before he was vaporized by the explosion. The tremendous fireball had burned the concrete sidewalk on the bridge away from his shadow, which was in relief about an inch above the rest of the slab. He never finished his step.

Another thing of interest was in Nagasaki, which, unfortunately, was the only Christian city in Japan. It had been originally converted by St. Francis Xavier when he was a missionary to Japan in, I think, the 16th century. And even after the persecution of Christians started, there had been a large underground Christian community in Nagasaki. After Japan modernized and quit persecuting the Christians, they came out of hiding. There were a number of beautiful churches there, including a cathedral. It was in the center of Nagasaki and it caught the full force of the atomic bomb. I looked at that cathedral and saw the remnants of a crucifix on the wall inside of it, seemingly miraculously preserved, I do believe. Several times I literally got sick to my stomach. Then it was time to go home.

I got back home and hadn't been there more than a couple of weeks when one of my closest friends committed suicide. He was a Signal Corps officer who had been on this assignment. In common with many others, he couldn't get over the fact that we had literally incinerated hundreds of thousands of women and children—noncombatants ―as well as troops, and it preyed on his mind.

Of course, it worried everyone. We had a Commander's Call, and the head chaplain talked to us on the basic theme of, "Look, these people were trying to kill us, and we had to kill them. The only thing we can do is to look at that aspect. You're not personally responsible for starting this war, but you certainly did help to finish it." Still, though, the guilt got to my friend—he killed himself.

Frank, this has been most interesting, and I appreciate this. Thank you for this informative interview.

 

To learn more about the development of the atomic bomb and its aftereffects, see:


Antonucci, James A., and Charles W. Sweeney. War’s End: An Eyewitness Account of America’s Last Atomic Mission. New York Avon Books, 1999.


This 290-page volume tells the personal account of Major Sweeney, the pilot of the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. He takes readers on a five-year journey, all the way from his flight school training to his role as executioner of World War II’s last mission, and refutes historical revisionists.

Hersey, John. Hiroshima. New York Vintage, 1989.

In this 152-page volume, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author gives the moving accounts of six people who actually survived the atomic explosion in Hiroshima.

To learn more about the atom bomb and view pictures, visit:

www.atomicarchive.com

This site offers brief biographies of thirty of the key scientists and leaders of the Atomic Age, as well as important documents like Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt, the scientists’ test observations, a glossary of relevant terms, a timeline, and quotes from over twenty scientists involved in the project. It also provides an extensive color photo collection, including pictures of the tests, flight crews, scientists, replicas of the bombs, various museum exhibits, and freeze-framed pictures of a blast wave hitting a house.