The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  And what of the V-3—Hitler’s high-pressure “Busy Lizzie” gun, which the Allies feared might be atomic? At almost the same time Sandys made his announcement, Patton’s armies overran Mimoyecques and made a sickening discovery. The place was a sham. Beneath the impressive façade the Americans found not a single working rocket. It turned out that the earthquake bombs and other explosives had done far more damage than the Allies realized, battering delicate equipment and filling underground shafts with rubble. Nazi officials decided to abandon the site, but Hitler had kept a skeleton crew in place to fool reconnaissance planes and divert Allied attention: every bomb that fell there, he figured, meant fewer bombs falling on Berlin. In short, he outfoxed the Allies. Given the low likelihood of the Busy Lizzie ever working anyway, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Joe Kennedy died on a futile mission.

  Futile, at least, in a military sense. From a different perspective, the mission was quite consequential. Before the war the Kennedy family had the stink of defeat on them; Joseph Kennedy Sr. was the appeaser-in-chief, an American Neville Chamberlain. Jack’s heroics with PT-109 counterbalanced that view, and Joe’s death washed away the stigma completely. No one could question the family’s commitment to fighting Hitler now. Kennedy Senior all but withdrew from public life after Joe’s death, rarely writing letters or going out. But his sons emerged as heroes, and an American dynasty was born.

  CHAPTER 50

  The Quisling Zoo

  After Paris quieted down, Alsos set up headquarters in a grand hotel near the Arc de Triomphe. The Royal Monceau had fallen on hard times recently, but the staff was determined to put on a good show for the Americans. The waiters served meals in tuxedos and dished up army K-rations, said Samuel Goudsmit, “as if [they] were filet mignon aux champignons.” The chefs even turned a detestable army dessert, the prune bar, into a delectable treat they dubbed “whip-a-fluffy.” Still, Goudsmit couldn’t help but notice that the waiters were mostly teenagers, and that the tuxedos hung loose on their adolescent frames. Apparently the men who’d once owned the suits, the original waiters, had all died at the front. It was a small, unforgettable reminder of the sadness of war.

  Alsos had no time to grieve, however—there was too much work to do. Goudsmit’s team began sifting through the mountain of documents that the Germans in Joliot’s lab had left behind, searching for clues about progress on the atomic bomb. Boris Pash, meanwhile, turned to a sexier assignment—hunting down German uranium. In conquering Belgium, Germany had acquired the largest stockpile of uranium in Europe. So when Allied troops began liberating Belgium in early September, Pash and his Lightning-A team hopped into their jeeps—the license plates emblazoned with alphas now—and took off.

  The two-day journey to Antwerp was forgettable, but once Lightning-A arrived, Pash encountered one of the most shocking scenes of his life. Over the previous year, the starving people of Antwerp had eaten most of the animals at the municipal zoo, a common occurrence during the war. What shocked Pash was that the cages hadn’t remained empty: the people of Antwerp had filled them back up with Nazis. Few if any were German. Rather, these were Belgian collaborators, the men and women who’d sold their country’s soul to Hitler.

  “We walked into the lion house,” Pash recalled, “[and] in each cage were from six to twelve prisoners.… Some looked defiantly at the tormentors, but most had the appearance of frightened, cornered animals. Men and women moved up to the bars to spit at the ‘animals’ and shout insults. Some poked canes or sticks into the cage, trying to jab the prisoners.” Pash considered intervening, but several Belgian soldiers with tommy guns warned him off, and he left the “animals” to their fate.

  Pash soon traced the Nazi uranium—much of it in the form of yellowcake, a powdered mineral—to a refinery town twenty-eight miles southeast of Antwerp. The refinery was surrounded on three sides by brick walls and on the fourth by a canal. Because the Germans still controlled the land across the canal, the Alsos crew had to dodge machine-gun fire as they approached. They zipped past one stronghold by gunning their jeeps and using an elevated railroad crossing as a ramp; it sent them “sailing through the air like water-skiers,” Pash recalled. Entering the refinery was even more dangerous. When the Germans saw American troops poking around, they began sending shells over, forcing Lightning-A to dive for cover. They resumed the search on their hands and knees.

  Eventually the crew located the uranium, or at least part of it. Records indicated that nearly two million pounds (a thousand tons) had been shipped via railroad to France, but sixty-eight tons remained somewhere in town. Pash’s crew spent the next few weeks searching and finally unearthed the ore in an abandoned warehouse. It was packed into barrels, and as the Germans continued to shell them, they loaded the barrels into trucks. By late September Alsos had moved all sixty-eight tons beyond the reach of the Reich.

  As for the yellowcake shipped to France, Alsos traced several tons of it to Toulouse by tracking the serial numbers of railroad cars. (This was the uranium that, during the takeover of his lab in 1940, Joliot had claimed was in North Africa.) Its presence in France should have been good news for Alsos—France was an American ally, after all—but French troops gave Pash almost as much trouble as the Nazis had. At the plant where the barrels of yellowcake were stored, Pash had to threaten the manager with a jeep-mounted machine gun before he surrendered any of it. Then, after loading the eighty-one barrels onto trucks and taking off for Marseilles, Pash’s team got stuck behind a streetcar that refused to pull over and let the convoy pass; the streetcar would in fact speed up to block the trucks if they tried. (In contrast to Parisians, the people here resented American troops.) A fed-up Pash finally gunned his jeep, swerved in front of the streetcar, and slammed on his brakes. Both vehicles suffered heavy damage in the wreck, but the convoy got past.

  Pash ran into another sticky situation at the Marseilles harbor. To load the barrels onto a ship, he recruited some American soldiers, who of course were told nothing about the top-secret material they were handling. They just knew that it was back-breakingly heavy and that handling the barrels left a metallic yellow film on their hands. They quickly deduced that they were stealing French gold—a rumor the French readily accepted. This didn’t reflect well on America, but Pash judged it better to let them believe that than to violate security and reveal the truth.

  The thirty tons of Marseilles yellowcake was shipped to Boston and then Oak Ridge, and the uranium-235 inside them ended up in the bomb that later devastated Hiroshima. The sixty-eight tons of Belgian ore met the same fate. That added up to roughly a hundred tons total—which in most circumstances would have been a fantastic haul. But records in Belgium had spoken of a thousand tons of uranium. Where was the rest? As long as it remained at large, the Allies couldn’t shake the fear of waking up one morning to a mushroom cloud.

  That autumn also witnessed the notorious Rhine wine fiasco. It all started with a half-cocked idea of Robert Oppenheimer’s. The Manhattan Project had recently built a reactor in Washington State that used water from the Columbia River for cooling. Oppenheimer reasoned that a German reactor would likely use river water, too, and he proposed monitoring the Rhine River for clues. A lack of winter ice near an industrial plant, for instance, would indicate that something inside was pumping out vast amounts of heat. Even in the summertime, the river might be contaminated with radioactive isotopes, and he suggested securing some water to test it.

  Given his other responsibilities, Oppenheimer likely forgot about the idea, but General Groves’s office didn’t. The Rhine flows north through Germany before emptying into Holland, so as the Allied army pushed through Belgium and entered the Netherlands, the Alsos mission received an urgent pink radiogram to beat cheeks over there and take a sample. Problem was, the Allies had conquered only one side of the Rhine at that point. The Reich still controlled the far bank, with the bridges between considered no-man’s-land. So when some poor Alsos sap showed up with a bucket and a rope one day and as
ked an American captain for permission to crawl out onto a bridge, the captain said that if he was stupid enough to go out there, no one would stop him. Indeed, a crowd soon gathered to watch—on both sides of the river. The German rubberneckers even decided to get some target practice in and began taking potshots. But the Alsos soldier kept his head down and crept out far enough to lower the bucket into the water; he then scrambled to safety without spilling too much.

  Back at Alsos headquarters, scientists sealed the water in bottles and boxed it up for Washington. At the last minute, as a joke, someone included a bottle of Roussillon, a local red wine, with a note to test that for “activity,” too. Unfortunately the officers under Groves lacked comic sensibility. Upon receiving the package, they dutifully poured the wine into test tubes and broke out the Geiger counters. To their dismay, they discovered radioactive isotopes in it.

  A dispatch soon reached Alsos headquarters in Paris: “Water negative, wine positive. Send more.” Samuel Goudsmit and company had a good laugh at that. (You know, those military folks aren’t so bad.) Goudsmit crumpled the message up and got back to work. But a second telegram arrived a few days later, demanding to know where the wine was. A confused Goudsmit tried to explain the joke, but to no avail. An order’s an order, Washington said. Send more wine. So to his disgust, Goudsmit had to pull a scientist away from examining German documents—actually valuable work—and send him on a ridiculous ten-day errand to gather bottles from around the region.

  It turned out that grapevines there were probably sucking up naturally radioactive atoms from the soil and concentrating them. (Tobacco plants do something similar.) Knowing that it was futile to explain this, Alsos gathered an entire case of red for Washington and shipped it off. Goudsmit did make the most of things, however. He insisted that his errand boy grab two bottles of every vintage he came across—one for Washington, and a “file copy” for Alsos. They too would test the wine for activity, the old-fashioned way.

  In addition to humorless officers, Goudsmit had something else to worry over as the Allies pushed into Holland—the fate of his parents. Before the war, Goudsmit had feared he would never see his homeland again, and when he finally entered Holland on September 29, he found it in a grim state. The tidal battle between advancing and retreating armies had laid waste to huge areas, and thousands of people had no food or water. But there were moments of hope, too, like when a small boy gave him an orange bow to wear. “It makes me feel as proud as if it was a real campaign ribbon,” he wrote his wife. He pinned it to a picture of her.

  Goudsmit was traveling to Holland to examine the records of an electronics plant that had once supplied Peenemünde with vacuum tubes; he suspected the Uranium Club had ordered parts, too. The plant was located just eighty miles from Goudsmit’s boyhood home in The Hague, and while he couldn’t make it all the way there (the Germans controlled the land in between), he hoped that someone in the area had heard some news.

  Sure enough, he ran into a young Dutch physicist at the plant, a student of his friend Dirk Coster. The student confirmed that Goudsmit’s parents had indeed been deported; the postmark on the last letter Goudsmit had received, from the concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, had been accurate. Still, Coster hadn’t given up. He’d been sending them care packages of food in the camp, to help them get by. Even better, the student mentioned that Coster had appealed to “influential German colleagues” to intervene on their behalf.

  It’s not clear whether the student mentioned that Werner Heisenberg was one of these colleagues, but it seems likely. If so, Goudsmit must have felt a pang. Earlier in the war he’d suggested kidnapping Heisenberg, and now that Joliot was in custody, Heisenberg had become Alsos’s top target. Nevertheless, this tidbit must have given him hope. After all, he and Heisenberg had been good friends once—Heisenberg had even dined at his parents’ home. Surely, surely he’d help if he could.

  CHAPTER 51

  Healthy Rays, Healthy Teeth, Healthy Paranoia

  Goudsmit’s team of technical sleuths consisted of thirty or so scientists ranging in age from grad student to retired. Most wore military uniforms on the job, although they didn’t have to drill or salute anyone. Misfits abounded. Several of them took advantage of being separated from their wives to experiment with growing mustaches.

  They spent most days examining documents, which they raided from labs and industrial firms around Paris. Technical reports were the most valuable items, but they also paid close attention to personal papers and office detritus, which helped them piece together the social networks of scientists. If you knew Fritz worked on fission, the thinking went, and Fritz had taken a train to visit Dieter, then Dieter probably worked on fission as well. No piece of paper was too trivial to escape scrutiny: over the next few months, Goudsmit’s team gleaned clues from desk calendars, appointment books, bills of lading, streetcar stubs, office seating charts, and bookstore receipts. Goudsmit was especially giddy to find a sheaf of used carbon-paper inserts for duplicating typewritten letters. He’d read a trick once in a detective novel, and sure enough, by holding the sheets up to the sun, he could read the original messages. (They looked like photograph negatives, white text on black paper.) Watching the scientists work, Boris Pash would chuckle to himself as they gathered around some catalogue or address book, reading it with all the zeal, he said, of “a spicy French novel.” Sometimes they got so caught up in work they’d forget to eat, letting their fancy K-ration dishes grow cold.

  Occasionally what they uncovered made them chuckle. In one letter the wife of a German scientist ordered him to bring some Chanel No. 5 home from Paris—or face her wrath. They also got a kick out of German research into invisible inks and amphibious cars (which looked like VW Bugs crossed with motorboats). The U.S. military provided plenty of mirth as well, albeit inadvertently. Analysts in Washington were always sending psychological profiles of German physicists in which they’d emphasize how so-and-so “engage[d] in beer-drinking jousts” or had “an atrophied right testicle”—as if those traits held the key to hunting them down. Other reports were straight-up phrenology, instructing Goudsmit on how to unlock people’s true characters by examining the warts and knobs on their faces. This was what passed for military intelligence.

  Still, after years of feeling useless, the scientific sleuthing reinvigorated Goudsmit, and he broke his first big case in mid-October 1944. From seized documents, he learned that a Nazi-run company had stolen a huge cache of thorium in France and hidden it deep inside the Reich. Thorium did have industrial uses in making gasoline and ceramics, but only in tiny quantities; the amount stolen would have fulfilled any one firm’s demand for decades. To Alsos, that left only one explanation. The main isotope of this element is thorium-232. When exposed to neutrons, thorium-232 becomes thorium-233, which undergoes two beta decays and becomes uranium-233. Uranium-233 was every bit as fissionable as uranium-235 and therefore seemed promising as bomb material. And unlike the uranium-235 in natural ores (which is mixed with other uranium), the uranium-233 would be easy to separate chemically from thorium. Accumulating a large store of thorium, then, was a quick way to produce bomb cores.

  The firm that stole the thorium had an office in Paris, so Goudsmit’s team raced over to raid it, taking a new staff car. (One of Pash’s less scrupulous officers had illegally commandeered several civilian cars and forged dummy registration tags for them, so Goudsmit didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of begging rides everywhere.) Alas, the Germans had cleaned out the office before abandoning it—a sign they were hiding something big.

  Given the stakes, Goudsmit observed, “the thorium mystery became an obsession.” Among the few papers that remained in the office, Goudsmit found references to a chemist named Jansen and his secretary, Ilse Hermanns. Cross-checking a telephone log revealed that Hermanns had made several long-distance calls on Jansen’s behalf. Considering the expense of such calls during wartime, Jansen was clearly someone important. What’s more, by examining lists of corresp
ondence, Goudsmit determined that Jansen had sent a registered letter to Hermanns in Eupen, a town in Belgium, just before the fall of Paris. Perhaps she was still there. So as soon as the Allies secured control of Eupen, in early November, the Lightning-A crew hopped into jeeps and took off.

  When they reached the address on the registered letter, Boris Pash knocked sharply on the door. To his surprise, Frau Hermanns answered. Pash bullied his way inside and discovered that she lived there with her parents, upper-middle-class folks with a grand piano and handsome furniture. Hermanns’s father objected to Lightning-A searching the house but was helpless to stop Pash, who uncovered a suitcase full of documents addressed to Jansen. Even better, they came across a locked closet door upstairs, which the father refused to open. Instead he pulled Pash aside and, man to man, appealed to his sense of decency. A special admirer of his daughter’s was in there, he confided. Her beau. Couldn’t Pash just leave things be and spare the couple some embarrassment?

  Pash could not. Raising his voice, he announced that either they could open the closet door or he’d shoot the lock off. As he hoped, the man inside heard this and began fumbling with the knob. The door swung open to reveal none other than Jansen himself. Hermanns, evidently, was more than his secretary.

  Pash arrested Jansen and hauled him back to Paris for interrogation—a big moment for Goudsmit. One of his first jobs for Alsos had been to interrogate Frédéric Joliot several weeks earlier, and he’d botched it royally. Alsos had learned a few nuggets from the Frenchman, especially about the shocking success of Kurt Diebner’s experiments. (They’d never heard of Diebner before.) By feigning ignorance, though, Joliot had successfully drawn Goudsmit out on certain points, and he ended up learning far more from Alsos about American nuclear science than Alsos had learned from Joliot. Boris Pash had not been pleased.