by Sam Kean
Even before this point, the war had been a disaster for Pashkovsky. Although born in San Francisco in 1900—one of his earliest memories was of the 1906 earthquake—his family had roots in Russia and had returned to Moscow in 1913 when his father, a Russian Orthodox bishop, took a post there. Boris had just turned fourteen when World War I started, but this short, moon-faced, bespectacled lad joined a Russian artillery unit and fought in several battles against the Germans.
Confusingly, in the midst of the world war, a civil war broke out within Russia in 1917. On one side were the Bolsheviks, who commanded the Red Army. Given his religious roots, Pashkovsky despised these godless commies, and he rushed to join the opposition White Army, making him a two-war veteran by age eighteen. Over the next few years he served in various ground and naval campaigns, helping to capture the city of Odessa and suffering a five-inch bayonet wound on his left leg that left an impressive scar. He was also taken prisoner by the Reds and eventually won the Cross of St. George for his bravery.
But the war ended for Pashkovsky in 1920, when he married a young blue-eyed woman named Lydia and resigned from the army. By that point the White cause was looking grim anyway. While the Reds had ideological unity, the Whites were a loose confederation of tsarists, religious zealots, and Tolstoyan feudal lords—all of whom mistrusted each other almost as much as they did the Bolsheviks. Pashkovsky continued to support the Whites by joining the Red Cross and doing relief work in Crimea, but by the time he married Lydia, he said, the White Army “had degenerated into a rabble.” Meanwhile the ranks of the Red Army continued to swell as they conquered city after city, leaving behind an appalling trail of dead and mutilated bodies.
In November 1920 the war came to a head. Two million Reds had pinned the remaining 60,000 Whites into Crimea, in the extreme southwest corner of Russia. Crimea connects to the mainland via an isthmus surrounded by swampy marshes, and despite the disparity in the size of the armies, the White generals judged the terrain favorable for a last stand, to halt the Reds’ progress.
It was not to be. Like Moses parting the, well, Red Sea, an unlucky combination of strong winds and extremely low tides in early November all but drained the marshes; a cold snap then froze the ground, making it suitable for marching across. The battle was pitched and bloody, and the Whites absorbed several haymakers in a row, but their ranks eventually broke. More than 100,000 refugees and soldiers began retreating pell-mell into Crimea. They came on foot, on donkey carts, on camels. Many were ruined aristocrats, forced to steal boots and coats from not-quite-dead bodies. Cholera ran rampant. Because Crimea stood at the sea’s edge, there was no more land to retreat to, and relief groups like the Red Cross tried to evacuate whomever it could—loading people on dinghies and coal barges, on yachts and rowboats and trawlers, anything that floated; passengers sometimes tore up their own clothes to make sails. At last, even the Red Cross could do no more, and its employees received orders to pack up and flee. Pashkovsky was ready to, until he found Lydia missing.
When he declared that he was going after her, the captain warned, “We’ll not wait for you. You just better forget about her.”
Pashkovsky knew this was prudent advice. Assuming he even found her, the screaming, spitting mob would block his path back to the ship. He’d be trapped in Theodosia, and when the Reds finally caught up with him, they would hang him as a White Army veteran—if he was lucky. Thousands of others had endured worse deaths.
“I’ll take my chances,” he told the captain.
He had an idea which friend she’d run off to, and after fighting through the mob, he arrived at the woman’s house. There Lydia was. When she saw her husband—saw that he’d returned for her—she was no doubt overwhelmed with emotion. But there was no time for tenderness. Riots had already broken out within the city, killing several, and other people had committed suicide rather than face the Reds. The young couple ran back to the wharf to find that the crowds had swelled even more, now packed forty yards deep around the barbed wire. The din was such that Pashkovsky didn’t even bother shouting for help. Being rather short—he stood five-foot-five—he had no hope of someone spotting him amid the throng either. He finally climbed on top of an abandoned wagon and began waving his arms, hoping the sailors preparing to launch could see him.
After several minutes the captain spotted him—or so Pashkovsky thought. He couldn’t tell in the confusion. But he saw the captain pull an officer aside and gesture in his direction. Sure enough, the captain was growling, “There’s that damn fool.” Despite his disgust he gathered his troops and ordered them into an assault column. Then they flung open a gate and went plunging into the crowd, rifles and bayonets at the ready.
The scene had all the makings of a massacre, and a few people did challenge the sailors. But upon seeing a group of bluejackets in formation, most of the crowd fell aside. And after several tense minutes of shoving and shouting, the sailors managed to corral the Pashkovskys and bull their way back inside the barbed-wire perimeter.
The young couple no doubt got an earful from the captain at this point. Eerily, though, the mob had fallen quiet. Two people outside the barricade had been rescued, and the rest of them were left to fend for themselves. Thousands upon thousands of people now knew for certain that no one would save them, and they fell silent in despair.
In the weeks after the Pashkovskys sailed, the Red Army shot fifty thousand people in and around Crimea, and although skirmishes continued in Siberia and elsewhere, the losses there effectively eradicated the White cause. Pashkovsky later described his last days in Russia as every bit as traumatic as those after the San Francisco earthquake—filling everyone present “with a lifetime of dread that it ever should happen again.” From that day forward, Boris Pashkovsky was a dedicated foe of communism.
After a few years in Berlin, Pashkovsky and Lydia, with a newborn son, struck out for the United States in 1924. As part of the immigration process, he shortened his name to Boris Pash. Although he first settled in Massachusetts, where he picked up a teaching degree, Pash longed to return to California, and in 1926 he landed a job at the world-famous Hollywood High School.
The contrast with his hardscrabble war days could not have been more stark. Hollywood High was one of the most affluent schools in America and definitely the most glamorous. California had strict child-labor laws, including for movie stars, so teenage actors and actresses had to attend classes between shoots, and Hollywood High was the most convenient location. An arrogant Mickey Rooney used to park his blue convertible on the school lawn and exit amid throngs of adoring girls. Classmates remember Lana Turner as so bewitching that even teachers stared. Judy Garland was crushed when a publicity tour prevented her from walking the stage at graduation. (Maggie Hamilton—the Wicked Witch of the West herself—appealed to MGM on Garland’s behalf, but to no avail; the teenager got her diploma in the mail.) Other Hollywood High alums starred in King Kong, It’s a Wonderful Life, Psycho, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Scarface. It wasn’t just starlets, either. Olympic gold medalists, a Nobel Prize winner, Judge Wapner—no school in America could boast of more famous alumni.
Boris Pash, however—known to students as Doc—kept a lower profile. He taught physical education and science (mostly physiology), and tried his hand at coaching every sport the school offered: football, basketball, soccer, swimming, volleyball, track. He seemed especially smitten with baseball, that all-American game. Hollywood High teams were known as the Sheikhs (after a Rudolph Valentino flick), and while his Sheikh squads often had lackluster records, Doc regularly appeared alongside them in yearbook photos in ball caps or letter sweaters, grinning like a fool. (Comically, many players in the photos towered over him, even those on sophomore teams.) Little did Pash suspect that coaching baseball would again entangle him in war.
Pash led something of a double life in Hollywood. He joined the U.S. Army Reserve as a second lieutenant over summer break in 1930—his third professional army—and started taking classes in mil
itary intelligence, including scouting, patrolling, sabotage, and document analysis. These skills became unexpectedly relevant in the late 1930s. By then, Pash’s hair had grown sparse and his belly rounder. He’d become chair of the physical education department, and in 1938 his Sheikhs put together one of the best baseball nines in school history and won the conference title. Riding the momentum, he decided to organize an extracurricular trip for some of the students. Unusually for the time, Hollywood High’s student body included a mix of ethnicities, and over the years Pash had coached several Japanese students on the baseball diamond. A recent tour of Japan by Major League baseball players (including Moe Berg) had proved quite popular there, so Pash decided to gather up a dozen Nisei (children of Japanese immigrants) from Southern California and tour the island as well.
While Doc was planning the trip, a student named Hashimoto pulled him aside to warn him off. The Japanese military was expanding rapidly, Hashimoto explained, and the government there still considered young men of Japanese descent to be citizens, no matter where they’d grown up. Any boy over the age of eighteen on the Hollywood High team would probably be seized and impressed when he set foot in Japan.
Pash, dumbstruck, didn’t believe Hashimoto. Japanese people weren’t belligerent—they were some of the sweetest people he knew. Nevertheless, he contacted an FBI agent, who interviewed Hashimoto at the Hollywood High gym under the guise of being a sponsor for the traveling team. Then, putting his military intelligence training to work, Pash began his own investigation. The local Japanese consulate revealed that it kept lists of all young Nisei men and, creepily, tracked their movements. Pash also discovered that many of his former Nisei students had picked up Japanese passports after graduation and joined the Japanese military, considering it their duty. Even Hashimoto succumbed to the pressure: not long after graduation, Pash got a postcard from him that read, “Banzai. I am in the Japanese navy.”
These defections troubled Pash. He loved the Nisei boys: they were fine ballplayers, sharp and easy to coach, and fine citizens to boot. Still, he couldn’t help thinking that Japan and the United States were quickly becoming adversaries.
CHAPTER 5
Division
Otto Hahn was convinced that the Joliot-Curies, or whatever the hell they called themselves, had bungled things once again. Which meant that he would now have to waste several months proving them wrong.
The trouble started in early 1938, when Irène Curie (now working without her husband) began a series of experiments on two obscure metals, uranium and thorium. In the first decades of the twentieth century, if you thought about radioactivity at all, you thought first of radium. Scientists coveted radium for its ability to produce a steady stream of alpha particles for experiments. Element 88 won fame beyond the lab as well: because it glowed alluringly in the dark, it found its way into watch dials, pajama buttons, roulette wheels, and fishing lures. Ingesting it even became a health fad, a supposed cure for everything from bad breath to depression, and drugstores carried radium-infused hair tonics, bath salts, face creams, condoms, and suppositories. (It got you coming and going.) At peak demand its price reached $180,000 per gram. In contrast, a metal like uranium was junk—the mineral cruft you sifted through to get at the precious radium.
Still, as junk, uranium and thorium were cheap, and Irène began bombarding them with neutrons to transmute them into other elements. There was just one problem: she had a devil of a time determining what elements they were changing into. Some tests indicated actinium, element 89. Others pointed to lanthanum, element 57. Then her results transmuted yet again, and she claimed to have found so-called transuranic elements, artificial elements heavier than uranium.
All this back-and-forth looked dubious to Hahn, the premier nuclear chemist in Germany, if not the world. Hahn had a wicked tongue, and upon seeing all the elements Irène claimed to have found, he suggested that maybe she’d actually discovered a magical new element, “curiosum.” Things got even testier when Hahn bumped into Frédéric Joliot at a conference in Rome in early 1938. Hahn had previously torn Irène’s experiments apart in a private letter; especially galling was his accusation that she relied on outdated methods to detect radioactive species—methods pioneered by Marie. The Joliot-Curies didn’t bother responding, which irked Hahn, and at the conference he aired his frustrations. If Irène doesn’t retract her work, he warned, I’m going to expose her. With his wife’s scientific honor at stake, Joliot couldn’t back down, and he dared Hahn to try. As a Nobel Prize winner Joliot had more cachet, and Hahn realized he’d walked into a trap. As he grumbled to a colleague, “This damned woman. Now I have to go home and waste six months proving that she was wrong.”
As it turned out, it took longer than six months. Hahn worked in Berlin with a brilliant physicist named Lise Meitner—the woman who’d stood up at the conference in 1933 and slammed the Joliot-Curies. It was an odd collaboration to say the least. On the one hand, they were quite devoted to each other. When Hahn’s institute had denied Meitner lab space simply because she was a woman, he’d defiantly nailed a shack to the side of the building and worked with her in there; he later asked her to be godmother to his son. On the other hand, the two had stiff, even stilted personal relations. In several decades as colleagues, Hahn remembered, they’d never once shared a meal or even taken a walk together. In the scientific sphere, though, they were every bit as intimate as the Joliot-Curies: Hahn the chemist specialized in finding and isolating radioactive elements and Meitner the physicist in interpreting what it all meant. In this capacity, everyone regarded her as the “intellectual leader” of the team. After he’d walked into that trap in Rome, Hahn knew he’d need Meitner to unravel the mystery of curiosum.
But before they could get started, Adolf Hitler ruined everything. Meitner was part Jewish, and when Germany annexed her homeland of Austria in March 1938, she found herself subject to Hitler’s racial laws. She considered fleeing, but her passport was now worthless, and Jews like her couldn’t obtain new ones. Things finally came to a crisis in July 1938, when a Nazi flunky denounced her at a scientific meeting—pointing a finger at the sixty-year-old Meitner and sneering, “This Jewess endangers the institute.” He demanded her arrest.
Hahn was also at the meeting, and by any standard of decency he should have loosed his wicked tongue upon this toad. Alas, though, Hahn himself was in trouble with the regime. Although impeccably Aryan, he’d been berating the Nazis for years and had gone out of his way to aid Jews. As revenge—and a warning—the Nazis had included a caricature of Hahn in a crude, hateful art exhibit in Munich titled “The Wandering Jew.” Hahn got the message: lie low or else. So when the flunky denounced Meitner, his longtime partner, he stayed silent, and even met with institute leaders about her behind her back. As Meitner wrote in her diary, “[Hahn] was, in essence, throwing me out.”
Luckily, Meitner had friends with more backbone. Within days of her condemnation a scientific journal editor named Paul Rosbaud and a Dutch physicist named Dirk Coster had converged on her Berlin apartment to help her escape. It was a ticklish situation, since Meitner actually lived next door to the Nazi who’d denounced her at the meeting. What’s more, he’d warned the Gestapo (the secret police) that she might flee. On the night of her escape, she stayed at her institute until 8 p.m. correcting proofs of a paper, as if this were a normal night. Then she slipped back home, where Rosbaud helped her pack two small suitcases. You can imagine the tension they endured that night, peeking out the windows and flinching at every noise. A little sheepish, Hahn showed up as well and, trying to make amends, gave her a diamond ring he’d inherited from his mother, which she could sell or use to bribe someone in an emergency. She slipped it on her finger, as if they were engaged. They then drove to Hahn’s house to hide out.
As they passed through the dark streets, Meitner began seeing Gestapo agents in every shadow. “One dare not look back,” she later said, “one cannot look forward.” The next morning they drove to the train st
ation, which was swarming with guards. Meitner had always been tough—female scientists had to be tough in that era—but after several days of unrelenting stress she broke down on the platform. Rosbaud and Coster had to drag her aboard the car, and when the train pulled out, a Nazi porter began harassing her. To ease her mind, Coster had her remove Hahn’s diamond ring and hid it in his pocket.
After several hours of torment they finally reached an obscure border crossing in northeast Holland. Coster had made arrangements with Dutch officials there to let her in without a passport, but she probably got past the German guards only because they assumed that “Frau Professor Meitner” was a professor’s wife, and therefore no one important. From Holland, Meitner fled to neutral Sweden, where she knew not a single soul. Over the next few months Hahn tried to ship her clothes, books, and linens to Stockholm, but German authorities—furious she’d escaped—blocked the items from leaving the country. Not even a toothbrush holder would reach the Jewess, they declared.
Understandably, Hahn didn’t get much research done during the middle of 1938. He’d lost his scientific better half and intellectual leader, and the ongoing political crisis in Germany banished all thoughts of chemistry anyway. What finally spurred his return to the lab was, once again, Irène Curie. On October 20 she published yet another iffy paper on uranium transmutation. Hahn was exasperated, and he and an assistant decided to redo her experiments and put an end to this curiosum nonsense.
Instead, the experiments left Hahn more muddled than ever. After bombarding a sample of uranium with neutrons, he began searching for new radioactive substances inside. He found something that resembled radium, and dashed off a paper to let everyone know. After spending more time on the problem, though, he disavowed the paper, claiming instead to have found elements that behaved like lanthanum and barium. But that discovery only raised more questions than it answered. He knew these elements weren’t really lanthanum and barium, because that was scientifically impossible. In every other case of transmutation so far, the original element had turned into another element nearby on the periodic table. Uranium (element 92) might spit out a bit of atomic shrapnel, for instance, and become thorium (element 90). In contrast, lanthanum and uranium sat thirty-five boxes apart on the periodic table—an impossible leap, since no known piece of atomic shrapnel was that big. Barium was thirty-six boxes distant.