by Herman Wouk
“Before we get down to business,” said Peters, flushing a little, “let me say one thing. I have the greatest respect for you. Rhoda is what she is, a woman in a million, because of her years with you. I regret we haven’t yet talked about all that. We’re both busy as hell, I know, but one of these days we’ll have to.”
“By all means.”
“Do you smoke cigars?” Peters took a box of long Havanas from a desk drawer.
“Thanks.” Pug did not want a cigar, but accepting it might improve the atmosphere.
Peters took his time about lighting up. “Sorry I was slow getting back to you.”
“I guess the phone call from Harry Hopkins helped.”
“That would have made no difference, if your security clearance hadn’t checked out.”
“Just to shortcut this a bit,” Pug said, “when I was naval attaché in Berlin I supplied the S-1 committee, at their request, with dope on German industrial activity in graphite, heavy water, uranium, and thorium. I know the Army’s working on a uranium bomb, with a blank-check triple-A priority power. That’s why I’m here. The landing craft program needs those couplings I mentioned over the telephone.”
“How do you know we’ve got them?” Peters leaned back, clasping his long arms behind his head. A harder professional tone came into his voice.
“You haven’t got them. They’re still warehoused in Pennsylvania. The Dresser firm wouldn’t say anything except that they’re on Army order. The prime contractor, Kellogg, wouldn’t talk at all. I ran into a blank wall at the War Production Board, too. The fellows there just clammed up. The landing craft program hasn’t conflicted with the uranium bomb before. I figured it couldn’t be anything else. So I called you.”
“What makes you think I’m in the uranium bomb business?”
“General Connolly told me in Tehran that you were working on something very big. I took a shot in the dark.”
“You mean,” Peters asked, tough and incredulous, “that you telephoned me on a guess?”
“Right. Do we get the couplings, Colonel?”
After a long pause, and a mutual staring contest, Peters replied, “Sorry, no.”
“Why not? What are you using them for?”
“Jesus Christ, Henry! For a manufacturing process of the highest national urgency.”
“I know that. But is this component irreplaceable? All it does is connect pipes. There are many ways to connect pipes.”
“Then use another way on your landing craft.”
“I’ll tell you my problem, if you’ll listen.”
“Sure you won’t have coffee?”
“Thanks. Black, no sugar. This is a fine cigar.”
“Best in the world.” Peters ordered coffee over the intercom. Pug was liking the man better as he toughened up. This rapid exchange over the desk was a little like a long point in tennis. Peters’s returns so far were hard but not sneaky or tricky.
“I’m listening.” Peters leaned back in his swivel chair, nursing a knee.
“Okay. Our shipyards have gotten so jammed that we’ve subcontracted some construction to Britain. We’re sending sections which can be put together by semiskilled help and launched in a few days. That is, if the right components are on hand. Now, these Dresser couplings go in faster than welded or bolted joints. They require little experience or strength to install. Also, uncoupling them to check faulty lines is simple. The Queen Mary sails Friday, Colonel, with fifteen thousand troops aboard, and I’ve reserved cargo space for shipping that stuff. I’ve got trucks standing by in Pennsylvania, ready to take the lot to New York. I’m talking about components for forty vessels. If they’re launched on schedule, Eisenhower will hit the French beaches with more force than he’ll have otherwise.”
“We hear this kind of thing all the time,” Peters said. “The British will connect up those lines, one way or another.”
“Look, the decision to put these vessels together in England turned on hard specifications for speed of assembly. When we shipped the sections those couplings were available. Now you’ve overridden our priority. Why?”
Peters puffed at his cigar, squinted through the smoke at Pug, and replied, “Okay. For a very large network of underground water lines. Our requirements for speed and simplicity are the same as yours, and our urgency is greater.”
“I have an idea for solving this,” Pug said, “less messy than going to the President, which I’m also prepared to do.”
“Let’s hear your idea.”
“I checked all the stuff Dresser has on hand. They could modify a larger coupling to meet your specs. Delivery would be delayed ten days. Now, I have samples of that substitute coupling. Suppose I take them to your plant, and talk to the engineers in charge?”
“Christ, not a chance.”
“Why not? Peters, the fellows on the spot can clear this thing up, yes or no, in a few hours. President Roosevelt has other things on his mind, and anyway, General Groves wouldn’t appreciate being overruled by him. Why not try to avoid that?”
“How do you know what the President will do?”
“I was at Tehran. The landing craft program is a commitment not only to Churchill but to Stalin.”
“Clearing you for such a visit — if it could be done at all — would take a week.”
“N.G., Colonel. Those trucks have to load up and leave Bradford, Pennsylvania, Thursday morning.”
“Then you’ll have to go to the President. I can’t help you.”
“Okay, I will,” Pug said, grinding out his cigar.
Colonel Peters stood up, shook hands, and walked out with Pug into the long hallway. “Let me look into one possibility, and ring you before noon.”
“I’ll wait for your call.”
Peters telephoned Pug about an hour later. “Can you come with me for a little trip? You’d be away from Washington two nights.”
“Sure.”
“Meet me at Union Station at five to seven, track eighteen. I’ll have the Pullman berths.”
“Where are we going?”
“Knoxville, Tennessee. Fetch along that substitute coupling.” Match point, thought Pug.
Oak Ridge was a huge backwoods area on a little-known Tennessee river, cordoned off from the world, where a secret industrial complex had sprung up to effect mass murder in a new way, on an unprecedented scale. Some would therefore argue today that it was comparable to Auschwitz.
Nobody was being murdered at Oak Ridge, to be sure. Nor was there any slave labor. Cheerful Americans were working at very high pay, constructing enormous buildings and installing gigantic masses of machinery, with no idea of what it was all for. The secret of Oak Ridge was better kept than that of Auschwitz. Inside, only very high-level personnel knew. Outside, few rumors leaked.
As in Germany it was bad form to talk about the state of the Jews, so in Oak Ridge it was antisocial to discuss the purpose of the place. In Germany, people did know that something ghastly must be happening to the Jews, and the Germans in Auschwitz knew exactly what was happening; whereas the Oak Ridge workers were in the dark until the day the bomb fell on Hiroshima. In beautiful wooded country they drudged by day in ankle-deep mud, and amused themselves as they could by night in rude huts and trailers, asking no questions; or they passed jocular rumors, such as that they were creating a plant for mass-producing front ends of horses, to be shipped to Washington for assembly.
Still, the postwar argument goes that when one contemplates the results of Auschwitz and Oak Ridge, there is little to choose between the Americans and the Nazis; both were equally guilty of the new barbarism. It is a challenging point. After every war there is a great and sensible revulsion at the whole horrible bloodletting. Distinctions tend to blur. All was atrocity. All were equally criminal. That is how the cry runs. It was in truth a nasty war; so nasty that mankind does not want another; which is a start, anyway, toward abolishing this old human craziness. But it really should not be seen in remembrance as a mere blur of universal guilt.
There were differences.
The Oak Ridge effort, to begin with, broke new ground in physics, chemistry, and industrial invention by producing uranium-235. As a feat of applied engineering and of human scientific genius, it was remarkable, possibly unique in scale and brilliance. The German gas chambers and crematoriums were not brilliant innovative works of genius.
Again, once one is attacked in war one can either give up and submit to looting, or one can fight. To fight means to try to frighten the other side, by a lot of murder, into stopping the war. Political conflicts between states must occur; and certainly, in an age of reason and science, they should be resolved by some more sane means than wholesale murder. But that was the means the German and Japanese politicians chose, thinking it would work, and they could only be dissuaded by the same means. When the Americans began their race to make uranium bombs, they had no way of knowing that their attackers would not make and use them first. It was a scary and highly motivating thought.
So on the whole, the analogy between Auschwitz and Oak Ridge seems forced. Resemblances exist. Both were stupendous secret wartime improvisations for slaughter; both opened terrible new problems in human experience that remain unsolved; and if not for National Socialist Germany, neither would have existed. But the purpose of Auschwitz was insane useless killing. The purpose of Oak Ridge was to stop the global war unleashed by Germany, and it worked.
However, when Pug Henry came to Oak Ridge in the late spring of 1944, the Manhattan Project loomed as a vast wartime bust, the boondoggle of the ages. The whole thing was uneconomical to the point of lunacy. Only the rush for a decisive new weapon could justify it. Fear was fading in 1944 that the Germans or Japanese might beat America to the bomb; the new goal was to shorten the war. So on three different theories, the Army had built three different giant industrial complexes for making bomb stuff. The Hanford plant on the Columbia River was striving to produce plutonium. A dubious enough venture, it was a bright hope compared with the two colossal installations at Oak Ridge intended to separate uranium-235 by two different methods, both still sputtering and failing.
Few people even at the highest levels knew the extent of the threatening failure. Colonel Peters knew. The scientific mastermind of the bomb project, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, knew. And the resolute, thick-hided Army man bossing the show, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, knew. But nobody knew what to do about it. Dr. Oppenheimer had an idea, and Colonel Peters was going to Oak Ridge to meet with Oppenheimer and a small senior committee.
As against this crisis, Captain Henry’s request for the Dresser couplings was small potatoes. Rather than risk trouble with the White House, Peters was taking him along, since Pug’s security clearance was flawless. Oppenheimer’s idea involved bringing in the Navy, and Army–Navy relations were touchy. A cooperative gesture made some sense at this point.
Peters knew nothing about the Navy’s thermal diffusion system. “Compartmentalization” was General Groves’s first rule: noncommunication walls between sections of the bomb effort, so that people in one track would not know what was happening elsewhere. Groves had investigated thermal diffusion in 1942 and concluded that the Navy was wasting its time. Now Oppenheimer had written to Groves suggesting a second very urgent look at the Navy’s results.
Pug Henry had been passing through military checkpoints all his life, but the Oak Ridge roadblock was something new. The gate guards were processing a crowd of new workmen in a considerable uproar, letting them through one by one like counted gold coins, to buses waiting beyond the gate. The substitute coupling Pug had brought along was scrutinized by hardfaced MPs and passed before a fluoroscope. He himself went through a body search and some stiff questioning, then got back into Peters’s Army car, wearing various badges and a radiation gauge.
“Let’s go,” Peters said to the sergeant driver. “Stop at the overlook.”
They went bowling along a narrow tarred road through dense green woods, flowering here and there with redbud and dogwood.
“Bob McDermott will be at the castle. I phoned,” said Peters. “I’ll turn you over to him.”
“Who’s he? What’s the castle?”
“He’ll have to pass on your request. He’s the boss engineer. The castle is the administration building.”
The ride through wild woods went on for miles. The colonel worked on papers as he had on the train, and during the drive from Knoxville. The two men had scarcely spoken since leaving Washington. Pug had his own paper sheaf, and silence always suited him. It was a warm morning, and the forest scent through the open windows was delightful. The car climbed a twisting stretch of road through solid dogwood. Rounding a bend, the driver pulled off the road and stopped.
“God Almighty,” Pug gasped.
“K-25,” said Peters.
A long wide valley stretched below, a chaotic muddy panorama of construction centered around an unfinished building that looked like all the airplane hangars in America put together in a U-shape; the most gigantic edifice Pug had ever seen. Around it sprawled miles of flat-roofed huts, acres of trailers, rows of military barracks, and scores of buildings, clear out of sight. The general look, from this distance, was a strange mélange of Army base, science-fiction vision, and gold-rush town, all in a sea of red mud. A sense of an awesome future rose from this view like the shock wave of a bomb.
“The water lines are for that big plant,” said Peters. “Something, hey? The technicians get around in there on bicycles. It’s operating, but we keep adding units. Over the ridge there’s another valley, and another installation. Not quite as big, different principle.”
They drove down through the booming valley past rough huts interlined with wooden boardwalks built over the mud, past long queues of workingmen and women at bus stops and stores, past a hundred noisy construction jobs, past the gigantic K-25 structure, to the “castle.” Pug was not expecting to encounter a familiar face, but there in the corridor was Sime Anderson in uniform, talking to shirt-sleeved civilians. Sime returned a salute to Pug’s startled informal wave.
“Know that young fellow?” asked Peters.
“Beau of my daughter’s. Lieutenant Commander Anderson.”
“Oh, yes. Rhoda’s mentioned him.”
It was the first reference to Rhoda on the trip.
The walls of the chief engineer’s small office were covered with maps, his desk with blueprints. McDermott was a heavyset mustached man with a grimly amused look in bulging brown eyes, as though he were hanging on to his sanity by regarding Oak Ridge as a great mad joke. His neatly pressed suit trousers were tucked into rubber knee boots crusted with fresh red muck. “Hope you don’t mind walking in mud,” he said to Pug as he shook hands.
“If it’ll get me those couplings, not at all.”
McDermott looked over the substitute coupling Pug showed him. “Why don’t you use this on your landing craft?”
“We can’t accept the delay needed for modification.”
“Can we?” McDermott asked Colonel Peters.
“That’s the second question,” Peters replied. “The first question is whether you can use that thing.”
McDermott turned to Pug, and pointed a thumb at a pile of muddy boots. “Help yourself and let’s go.”
“How long will you be?” Peters asked.
“I’ll bring him back by four.”
“Good enough. Did the new barriers come in from Detroit?”
McDermott nodded. Grim amusement came on his face like a mask. “Unsatisfactory.”
“Jesus God,” said Peters. “The general will go up in smoke.”
“Well, they’re still testing them.”
“Ready,” Pug said. The boots were too large. He hoped they would not come off in the mud.
“On our way,” said McDermott.
In the corridor, a short bespectacled colonel, almost bald, with a genial very sharp expression, had joined Anderson and the civilians. Peters introduced Pug to the Army boss of Oak Ridge, Colonel Nichols.
“Is the Navy going to get those landing craft made in time?” Nichols asked Pug, his bluntness modified by a pleasant manner.
“Not if you keep preempting our components.”
Nichols asked McDermott, “What’s the problem?”
“The Dresser couplings for the underground water lines.”
“Oh, yes. Well, do what you can.”
“Gonna try.”
“Hi, there,” Pug said to Anderson. The junior officer diffidently grinned. Pug went off with McDermott.
A frail-looking, young-looking man smoking a pipe entered the building as Pug left. The prospect of addressing a meeting that included Dr. Oppenheimer had Sime Anderson shaking at the knees. Oppenheimer was, in Anderson’s view, probably the brightest human being alive; his mind probed nature as though God were his private tutor, and he was cruel to fools. Sime’s boss, Abelson, had casually sent Sime off to Oak Ridge to describe the thermal diffusion plant for a few key Oak Ridge personnel and corporation executives. Only on arriving had Sime learned that Oppenheimer would be there.
There was no help for it now. Feeling appallingly ill-prepared, he followed Dr. Oppenheimer into the small conference room, where a blackboard gave the place a classroom look. Some twenty men, mostly in shirtsleeves, made it crowded, smoky, and hot. Anderson was sweating in his heavy blue uniform when Nichols introduced him and he got to his feet. But chalk in hand, talking about his work, he soon felt all right. He avoided looking at Oppenheimer, who slouched smoking in the second row. By the time Anderson paused for questions, forty minutes had sped by, and the blackboard was covered with diagrams and equations. His small audience appeared alert, interested, and puzzled.
Nichols broke the short silence. “That separation factor of two — that’s the theoretical performance you’re hoping for?”
“That’s what our system is putting out, sir.”
“You’re getting that concentration of U-235? Now?”
“Yes, sir. One point four. One part in seventy.”
Nichols looked straight at Oppenheimer.