According to Speer—he was convicted at Nuremberg and served twenty years as a war criminal—Hitler had sometimes mentioned to him the possibility of an atomic bomb. Speaking with the Führer on May 6, 1942, Speer raised the question of an all-out program to make one. He suggested that Göring be placed at the head of the Reich Research Council to emphasize its importance, and this was done.
On June 23, 1942, Speer reported to Hitler. The Führer was still interested, but he had no grasp of theoretical physics, and the project was shunted aside. German physicists were now talking to Speer of a three- or four-year project for bomb production. Instead, he recalls, “I authorized the development of an energy-producing uranium motor for propelling machinery. The Navy was interested in that for its submarines.” Speer leaves no doubt that had he dreamed of the Manhattan Project, he would have moved heaven and earth to catch up with the Americans. He continued to make periodic inquiries, but now Hitler was discouraging him. The Führer’s old party cronies were ridiculing America’s reputation for efficiency, and he had taken to describing all physics as Jewish physics (jüdische Physik). But if the German dictator had given his own scientists the blank check Roosevelt had given their colleagues in the United States, the maps of Europe and even of the western hemisphere might have been sharply changed.
None of this was known outside the Reich until November 23, 1944, when Patton took Strasbourg. The Alsos detachment headed straight for the university and its new laboratories. Sam Goudsmit was looking for Weizsäcker, Strasbourg professor of theoretical physics, but his quarry had flown three weeks ago, and while Goudsmit debated the propriety of questioning other Strasbourg physicists, the German scientists solved his problem by refusing to have commerce with the enemy.
Strasbourg looked like a debacle until the Alsos team stumbled upon Weizsäcker’s private papers. Translating them by candlelight, with GIs playing cards in the same room and the rumble of artillery from the right bank of the Rhine distinctly audible, Goudsmit and his assistant looked for this clue, that hint, for scholarly citations and casual references, until they leaped up with such triumphant cries that the edgy GIs reached for their M-1s and grenades. The scientists had just turned up a thick batch of closely typed pages—the full record of the Reich’s U project and the Uranium Verein. There were a few pieces missing, of course, and no entries had been made during the past three months, but this, by all evidence, was the most complete file in Europe on Nazi uranium research.
Until that night Allied scientists had assumed that German physicists led them by a wide margin. To Goudsmit, squinting at Weizsäcker’s manuscript in the flickering light, it was clear that the Nazis were two years behind the men at Los Alamos. The Reich lacked plants for the manufacture of PU-239 (Plutonium) and U-235. Apparently they didn’t even have any uranium burners worth mentioning. When he cabled Washington reporting his findings, he was reminded that Weizsäcker’s papers might be a hoax. He replied that the internal evidence was genuine; this was serious work. The Army suggested that other Germans, elsewhere in the Reich, might be manufacturing atom bombs. Goudsmit replied tartly, “A paperhanger may perhaps imagine that he has turned into a military genius overnight, and a traveler in champagne may be able to disguise himself as a diplomat. But laymen of that sort could never have acquired sufficient scientific knowledge to construct an atom bomb.”
Nevertheless, the hunt had to continue. Heisenberg had been an enthusiastic advocate of nuclear weapons; it was conceivable that he and other equally ardent scientists had been at work in secret laboratories, defying official indifference to the possibilities in fissionable materials. In fact, something very like that had happened. During the winter of 1943–44, working through air raids, Heisenberg and his staff had built a small reactor in the Dahlem Institute with three tons of uranium and heavy water. To elude the bombers they had then transferred their laboratory to a tall warehouse, owned by a Stuttgart brewery, in the foothills of the Swabian Alps. Moving out beer vats, they had papered the inside of the warehouse with silver foil, equipped it with a powerful electric plant, and built workshops in the wing of a textile mill.
Once Hitler’s Festung Europa began to break up, even this refuge wasn’t inaccessible enough for them. Like the Allies, Heisenberg and his colleagues were harried by worries about security, and they moved again, to a great cave hollowed out of rock near Tübingen. It was in this cavern, in February 1945, that the construction of a large pile—roughly comparable to the one Allied scientists had built on the abandoned squash court under Stagg Field—began in earnest. By spring there was an atomic burner comprising heavy water, cubes of uranium, and a graphite jacket. The Germans were moving swiftly toward the accumulation of a critical mass. Shipments of uranium cubes arrived daily from the Thuringian Forest, where a second uranium burner had been built by Dr. Karl Diebner. The gap between Oppenheimer and Heisenberg was still wide, but it was rapidly closing. To the intense annoyance of Goudsmit, who believed in the preservation of all experimental data, the U.S. Army colonel who served as nomimal commander of Alsos sent a small unit of Rangers to the grotto with orders to destroy the German apparatus. Sending troops had been a good idea, though. Members of Heisenberg’s staff were thwarted in a hasty attempt to smuggle the uranium cubes out under a hay load on an oxcart, and other cubes which had been filched by Hechingen peasants—the peasants didn’t know what they were, but had guessed that they were valuable and might be sold to the French—were recovered. Presently all Nazi physicists were in Allied custody, including the elusive Heisenberg. Goudsmit was ecstatic. To a regular Army major who had been detached to serve as a liaison officer with the Alsos group he said, “Isn’t it wonderful that the Germans have no atom bomb? Now we don’t have to use ours.” The major looked surprised. He replied, “Of course you understand, Sam, that if we have such a weapon we are going to use it.”
From that moment, the officers and scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project were divided into those who meant to use the bomb if it turned out to be practical, and those who were shocked at the thought. The split wasn’t always between soldiers and civilians—Edward Teller was a hard-liner from the beginning—but the first ban-the-bomb advocates were nuclear physicists. Even before the myth of a Nazi bomb had been dispelled, some of them had become convinced that the United States should share its discoveries with the world’s scientific community. At their urging Niels Bohr had called on the President at 4 P.M., August 26, 1944, to discuss that very issue. Bohr was an unwise choice. He was garrulous; he took a half-hour to come to the point, and the President’s time was precious. In any event, Roosevelt disagreed with Bohr and bade him good day. Bohr then tried Churchill. After listening to his guest for thirty minutes the prime minister turned to Lord Cherwell, who had introduced him, and inquired testily, “What is he really talking about—politics or physics?”
He was talking about both. Many—perhaps a majority—of the scientists believed that in building the bomb they had acquired a moral obligation to all mankind. To confront a Hitler in possession of atomic bombs was one thing, but the Japanese in 1945 were not that advanced in theoretical physics or technology. They were unable to build such weapons themselves, and so, the argument went, using one against them was unthinkable. To introduce such a question raised politics and physics to a level of scientific statesmanship. There were no precedents for it, and wartime was not the best time to think it through, especially when the enemy in the Pacific had opened the war with an unprovoked, devastating air attack. Alexander Sachs was a better emissary than Bohr. He was a close friend of the President, and five years earlier he had persuaded him to launch this two-billion-dollar search. Sachs shared Bohr’s convictions, and in December 1944 he called at the White House. It is known that he had a long talk with the President, but that is about all that is known. After FDR’s death Sachs said that Roosevelt had agreed that if any test succeeded a second rehearsal should be held, attended by Allied and neutral scientists; that a detailed report on
the weapon’s implications should be circulated among Allied and neutral scientists; that the enemy should agree to evacuate a given area; and that after a demonstration of the weapon’s power the enemy should be given an ultimatum to surrender or be annihilated.
Sachs’s minute, submitted to Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson a year later, is an extraordinary document. Roosevelt had signed nothing. The conversation had been unwitnessed. The President had not mentioned it to Stimson, then the Secretary of War and FDR’s liaison with X, as Stimson always called the Manhattan Project. Obviously a man of Sachs’s integrity would not invent such a tale. But the President had a genius for telling people what they wanted to hear and then hedging it—by hypothetical statements, say, or by skillful use of the subjunctive—so that he stopped just short of commitment. In this case he may have been undecided. That would have been like him; he rarely made up his mind until he had to. The Sachs minute seems less convincing than Stimson’s entry in his diary on March 15, 1945. That was the last time FDR and his war secretary talked of X. Stimson wrote: “I went over with him the two schools of thought that exist in respect to the future control after the war of this project, in case it is useful, one of them being the secret close-in attempted control of the project by those who control it now, and the other being international control based upon freedom of science. I told him that those things must be settled before the project is used and that he must be ready with a statement to come out to the people on it just as soon as that is done. He agreed to that.”
***
Like Stalingrad, which had been raging at the same time, the issue at Guadalcanal had remained in doubt for six months—from mid-August 1942 to early February 1943. The valor of the outnumbered marines captured the public imagination, but the decisive struggle was between the two navies. In six separate engagements—“fire-away Flanagans,” as nineteenth-century seamen would have called them—the admirals battled for command of the sea. Losses on both sides were shocking. Each lost an even dozen warships. To sailors the waters between the ’Canal, Tulagi, and Savo Island were “Iron-bottom Sound”; to marines, “Sleepless Lagoon.” If reckoned by tonnage lost, the naval struggle would be called a draw. It wasn’t, because at the end of it the marines still held Guadalcanal and its airstrip, and the Japanese troops were being evacuated, leaving behind twenty-five thousand of their dead. They still felt invincible. On New Georgia they reinforced their Munda base, a whistle-stop for Zeros and Zekes flying down the Slot to bomb the marines. But a corner had been turned. For the first time in the war the Jap had gone over to the defensive.
Nor was that all. Guadalcanal was one of two successful Pacific campaigns, waged at the same time and to the same end: the defense of Australia. The other was in MacArthur’s theater, New Guinea. The Coral Sea battle hadn’t discouraged the enemy there. In July 1942 he had seized a string of villages along the north shore of Papua, the New Guinea tail, and he was planning to envelop Port Moresby, on the south shore, in a land-and-sea pincer. Coast watchers—British colonial officials hiding in the jungle with radios—warned Americans that the sea assault was headed for Milne Bay, at the tip of the peninsula tail. U.S. warships arrived first and beat off that threat. The Japanese land drive took off from a village called Buna. It was only a hundred miles from there to Moresby as the crow flies, but the Nips had to cross the awesome 13,000-foot Owen Stanley Range on foot. Twenty miles from Moresby the Australians held them and, with the U.S. 32nd Division, began a counteroffensive.
This ordeal, costlier in lives than Guadalcanal, ended when the enemy was pushed all the way back across the mountains and General Eichelberger entered Buna on January 2, 1943. The Australians captured nearby Sanananda two weeks later, but the Japanese collected reinforcements and tried to land a counterattacking force with eight transports. On March 3, skip-bombing B-25s caught the convoy in the Bismarck Sea and sank all eight, together with their four escorts. In the grisly aftermath seven thousand Japanese were drowned or, if they reached land, beheaded by island natives, according to a local custom. Tokyo solemnly announced that Moresby had no military significance.
Rabaul did. The enemy wanted to keep Rabaul; had to, in fact, to hold the South Pacific. Rabaul itself was too strong to be assaulted, so the Americans neutralized it. GIs and marines began by moving into New Georgia in the summer of 1943 and pouncing at Munda. They had to attack through thickets and over flooded rivers, against pillboxed Nips in steel vests. Still, the airstrip fell in August, and American troops had a leg up the Slot. Vaulting to Vella Lavella and Kolombangara, they mopped up the central Solomons, and on November 1 the 3rd Marine Division steamed into Bougainville’s Empress Augusta Bay and landed under a three-day-old moon. This was a big step, as steps were measured that year in the Pacific. If Seabees and Army engineers could somehow build a large airfield in this green slime, U.S. fliers would be within fighter range of Rabaul.
The enemy thought it unlikely. He buffeted the invaders by air and sea but held back his best troops, thinking the Americans would use the bay to stage a push elsewhere. On Christmas Day U.S. engineers finished their big strip, Piva Uncle, above the forks of the Piva River. The Americal2 and 37th divisions ringed it with a perimeter of steel, and when the Japanese finally came howling down on it with their elite 6th Division they were stopped cold. By then Rabaul was just about surrounded. Emirau and the Green Islands had been occupied; the 112th Cavalry was in Arawe; the 1st Marine Division had taken Cape Gloucester in New Britain; and troopers of the 5th Cavalry, General Robert E. Lee’s old outfit, and the 7th Cavalry, General Custer’s, were ashore in the Admiralty Islands. Massive U.S. sorties from Piva Uncle were making Rabaul unlivable. The Japanese had no choice; they had to write Rabaul off. They evacuated what they called their “consolation units”—Korean whores—and left the garrison to suffer as U.S. bombers, unescorted and unchallenged, flew in daily and unloaded overhead.
Meanwhile, the character of the war was changing. It had to change; so far Americans had been only nibbling at the outer edges of the expanded Japanese Empire. They had spent nine months moving 250 miles in the central Solomons, and Tokyo was still five thousand miles away. But new equipment was arriving from home. Makeshift World War I weapons—which had been sent here because of ETO priorities—were now being replaced by rockets, amphibious tractors, boats with wheels—DUKWs (“ducks”)—and flamethrowers that could lick around corners. The Navy had more of everything: fifty carriers led by the fast Independence class, converted from cruiser hulls. If Nimitz could somehow get closer to Japan, his submarines, which had already sunk a million tons of enemy supplies, could destroy the Japanese merchant marine, and since Japan, like England, was surrounded by water, this would have the same impact as in the Battle of the Atlantic. With closer bases Tokyo could also be reached by air; the first B-29 Superfortresses, with a range of 1,500 nautical miles, would soon be on their way. The solution to all this was to open up a new theater of war, the Central Pacific, and on November 20, 1943, the 2nd Marine Division did that. It wasn’t supposed to be easy. Everyone knew the Gilbert Islands bristled with Japanese defenders. But no one anticipated a Tarawa.
Tarawa was the battle America almost lost. The enemy commander had boasted that Betio, the key island in the atoll, couldn’t be taken by a million men in a hundred years. “Corregidor,” said Samuel Eliot Morison, “was an open town by comparison.” The marines going in had other problems: the naval bombardment had been too light, the tides betrayed them, they missed H-hour, and at the end of the first day their beachhead was exactly twenty feet wide. Officers stood waist-deep in the water, directing the battle by radio and praying against a counterattack. Only the breakdown of Japanese communications prevented one. The next day the marines drove through and split the defenses, but the attackers had lost three thousand men. The following month Kwajalein and Eniwetok, in the Marshall Islands, were taken more cheaply. Nevertheless, from the very first, battles in the Central Pacific were short and terrible—the 4th Marine Di
vision, blooded on Kwajalein, was in action only sixty-one days during the entire war, yet it suffered 75 percent casualties.
There were several reasons for this sudden lengthening of casualty lists. On Guadalcanal the enemy had been taken by surprise. He would never be caught unprepared again. Furthermore, in storming the Marshalls and the Marianas, U.S. troops were attacking islands which had been mandated to Japan after World War I; the Japanese had been digging in for nearly a quarter-century. The greatest reason for greater bloodshed in the Pacific, however, was a dramatic change in Jap tactics. The Oriental masters of amphibious offense had gone over to an iron defense. Dai Honei, Imperial headquarters, radioed reminders to every outpost that they must prepare a last-man resistance. One of them did more than that. On Biak, an island near the tail of the New Guinea bird, the enemy had ten thousand men. Their commander, Colonel Naoyuki Kuzume, decided that while dying on the beach was all very fine, dying inland would be better; by skillful use of caves and cliffs, his men could prolong the slaughter of what one Japanese diary keeper contemptuously called “these blue-eyed Americans.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 51