The Apocalypse Factory

by Steve Olson

  Many of the construction workers chafed at the primitive living conditions. Still, many remember the experience as a great adventure and as their own contribution to winning the war. “It was exciting,” said one many years later. “I had three hots and a cot. I had a good-paying job that wasn’t too hard. I was free to come and go as I pleased, and nobody was shooting at me.” They were patriotic about what they were doing, even though they had no idea what the gigantic plants they were building would make. In 1944, the craft unions organized a campaign to ask everyone for a day’s pay, raising $162,000 in seven weeks. With the funds, the unions bought a four-engine B-17 bomber for the US Army Air Forces. Named “Day’s Pay,” the bomber flew from Boeing Field in Seattle to the Hanford airstrip to be presented to the Fourth Air Force. “This activity, conceived by the workmen and handled by them, . . . was the most effective single morale booster during the job,” Matthias recalled. It did more “to develop an attitude of teamwork and desire to help the war than any other thing.”

  Matthias sometimes used workers’ patriotism to sway labor disputes. Once he was fishing with a friend off the mouth of the Columbia River when a patrol boat came alongside and told him that he needed to call Hanford—the pipefitters were threatening to go on strike the next morning. Matthias drove all night and the next morning was on the auditorium stage in front of 500 union workers. “We have a contract with you that you do not strike,” he argued. “There must be some people that are leading you into this, and they’re wrong and they’re against us, and I’d like to have them all be picked up and sent back to Germany where they belong.” At this point, given the crowd’s antagonism, Matthias thought he was going to be shot if one of his listeners was armed. “Look, take it easy,” he continued. “I’m not calling you traitors, but some of you are acting like it. Now how about going back to work and doing what you promised, and what we need badly?” The reworded appeal worked. The men dispersed and the strike was canceled.

  Harry Petcher and his wife Maxine arrived at Hanford on July 3, 1943, just as the construction camp was taking shape. Ineligible for the draft because of flat feet, Petcher had been managing a nightclub in Chicago while Maxine worked as a cocktail waitress. “We got off that train and I looked around and I said, ‘Honey, I don’t know if we’re going to make this or not.’ She was a pretty sturdy girl, and she said, ‘No, we’re going to do it.’” The next day it was 105 degrees as they watched a seven-horse parade commemorate Independence Day. By the end of the week, Maxine had a job as a mess hall supervisor; Harry went to work as a butcher.

  Hanford camp eventually had eight football field–sized mess halls that could each serve 2,700 people three times a day. Tables were set with silverware and napkins, after which they were covered by butcher paper to keep the sand off until right before the meal was ready. Workers sat at long tables and served themselves from bowls and platters. When a pot of coffee or platter of fried chicken was empty, someone held the container in the air and a server would rush to replace it with a full one. Men ate quickly and banged their hands on the table when they were waiting to be served. “It looked like a prison camp to me,” Petcher recalled.

  Once, one of Petcher’s subordinates put sugar instead of salt in the meatballs. “Everything was fine until we got a police call,” said Petcher. “There was a riot in the mess hall. Everybody was standing on their benches, picking these meatballs up and throwing them at the cooks. Getting hit by one of them was like getting hit by a golf ball. We had to call the riot squad.”

  Eventually, Petcher was put in charge of the box lunch department, which at its peak was making more than 50,000 box lunches a day. The lunches contained sandwiches, fresh fruit, sometimes a salad or cold baked potato, and, in the summer, a couple of salt tablets. A big problem for the cooks was spreading mayonnaise on the sandwich bread, which slowed down the entire operation. The husband of one of Petcher’s employees solved the problem by putting electric heaters in a paint gun and spraying mayonnaise onto the bread.

  Eventually, the Petchers moved to a ranch outside the small town of Connell about 30 miles northeast of Hanford. They had friends over to the ranch for barbecues. They bought horses from the Wanapum and ate fruit from the orchard on their property. “I hate to say I was a rancher, because I’m not, I’m a nice boy from Chicago,” Petcher recalled many years later, when he was retired and living outside Seattle. Still, he remembered, “the life was good.”

  HANFORD CAMP WAS BRASH and unapologetic. When problems arose, its occupants moved quickly to solve them. The workers came there to do a job, and they worked hard until the job was done. They didn’t ask what they were doing or question whether something was necessary. In all these ways the camp and its residents reflected the attributes of the man who was responsible not only for Hanford but for the entire Manhattan Project, the only other man, besides Enrico Fermi and Glenn Seaborg, without whom nuclear weapons almost certainly would not have been ready by the end of World War II: Leslie Richard Groves.

  The son of a restless army chaplain, Leslie Groves—Dick to his friends—spent the first part of his life, from 1896 to 1901, in army housing in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland. His father, a strict and austere man, was away for much of that time, in Cuba, the Philippines, and China. He returned to the United States when Dick was five and quickly imposed his rules on the household. After church on Sundays, Dick and his two brothers had to stay inside to read religious books. In the evenings, Chaplain Groves and his sons studied The World Almanac so rigorously that all three boys could name not only all the presidents and vice presidents but also the populations of the country’s hundred largest cities. Chaplain Groves and his wife pitted their sons against each other and against the world. “Second best in class is good,” Groves’s mother once wrote to his brother. “Next year we will try hard for first.” Years later, Groves’s own son, who was raised the same way as his father, recalled, “If it is a game, you win it. If there is a class, you stand number one.”

  While Groves was in the first through tenth grades, his family moved six times, ending up finally in Altadena, California, with summers spent in Fort Apache, Arizona, where Chaplain Groves was stationed to recuperate from the tuberculosis he had contracted overseas. The summer he turned 15, Groves spent the summer alone with his father at Fort Apache while the rest of the family stayed in California. On the days when his father worked at the fort, Groves played tennis at the Indian Agency, often not leaving the courts until after dark. He came to love the game and was a formidable player his whole life, even when he was carrying some extra pounds, which was most of the time. On his father’s days off, they rode horseback into the surrounding scrubland and wooded hills, fished for trout, and often just sat in the shade of a tree and talked. Groves always admired his father, despite his severity and long absences from the family. His father taught Groves to excel in whatever he undertook, and Groves never let his father down.

  Halfway through Groves’s junior year in high school, his father’s regiment moved to Fort Lawton on a wooded point of land extending into Puget Sound just north of downtown Seattle, and Groves entered nearby Queen Anne High School in January 1913. By this time, he had decided, under the influence of a family friend and his father’s military heritage, that he wanted to attend the US Military Academy at West Point, even though his parents disapproved of the idea and he had not previously been much of a student. But a traumatic event the summer after his junior year changed Groves’s approach to life. His mother, at the age of 47, died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Chaplain Groves was away again and could not get back in time to bury his wife, so his son handled the funeral. “Dick has been a wonder of thoughtfulness and ability,” his aunt wrote in a letter, “and has tried to save all of us from anything harrowing.” For the rest of his life, his mother’s portrait hung on the wall above Groves’s dresser.

  That fall, Groves enrolled at the University of Washington while simultaneously completin
g his senior year at Queen Anne High School. He worked incredibly hard and earned a high school diploma with his classmates, but his scores on the West Point entrance examination were not high enough for a presidential appointment. Groves was undeterred. He won acceptance to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, in the summer of 1914, endured a long and sweltering trip to the East Coast on the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was filled with Englishmen trying to get home to fight in World War I. Living in a fourth-floor walkup near Copley Square, he allotted himself $3.50 per week for food, with which he could buy two hot dogs and two slices of bread with mayonnaise for lunch, if he skipped breakfast, and a 35-cent dinner at the student dining hall.

  The next time he took the entrance exam for West Point, during the spring of his sophomore year at MIT, he was much better prepared. This time his scores were exemplary, and on July 15, 1916, he trudged up the hill from the train station on the western shore of the Hudson River to the West Point campus. As he later wrote to his grandchildren:

  Entering West Point fulfilled my greatest ambition. I had been brought up in the army, and in the main had lived on army posts all my life. I was deeply impressed with the character and outstanding devotion of the officers I knew. I had also found the enlisted men to be good solid Americans and, in general far superior to men of equal education in civil life.

  At West Point, Groves entered a world of regimentation, discipline, and competition—and he thrived in it. Though his grades had not been particularly good at the University of Washington or MIT, he excelled academically at the Academy. Ranked twenty-third in his class during his first year, he ranked second the following year. He did not socialize much and had few close friends. The evenings he devoted to studying and writing letters to his family.

  Groves’s time at West Point was cut short by America’s entry into World War I. His class graduated on November 1, 1918, more than a year and a half early, to meet the demand for wartime officers. Ten days later the armistice ended the war. As was the case for almost all the top-ranking cadets at the Academy, Groves had chosen to join the prestigious Corps of Engineers. Now he found himself in a peacetime army swollen with young officers looking to advance.

  Groves spent the next 22 years alternating between the educational institutions that prepare aspiring young officers for high command and postings where he could hone and display his skills. Between his stints at school, he built camps and a railway in Georgia, oversaw the construction of a mountainous military trail on Oahu, improved shipping channels in Texas, helped survey a possible canal route across Nicaragua, and supervised the building of the massive Fort Peck Dam in Montana. During a stint at Fort Worden on the Olympic Peninsula across Puget Sound from Seattle, he wooed and married Grace Wilson, whom he had met on an army base when he was 15 and she was 14. Over the next decade, they had two children and traveled even more frenetically than Groves had as a boy.

  Groves had an odd combination of characteristics. He was smart, organized, and ambitious. But he also could be fantastically rude, arrogant, and condescending. As Matthias said, “He was really a genius, but he didn’t spend much time trying to make people like him.” He never raised his voice, but he openly and harshly berated people with whom he disagreed or was disappointed. He struggled with his weight throughout his life and often had candy and chocolate nearby except when he was on one of his 1,000-calorie-a-day diets. He was targeted for leadership and rose more rapidly through the ranks than any of his West Point classmates. But he made many enemies along the way who worked to undermine his successes. A colleague recalled, “No one took this man lightly. I was careful to have no trouble whatsoever with him. When you looked at Captain Groves, a little alarm bell rang ‘Caution’ in your brain.”

  Most profiles of Groves mention his role in the construction of the Pentagon right before he took on the leadership of the Manhattan Project, but an even more important experience came right before that. When war broke out in Europe in 1939, the US military was undermanned and poorly armed. Sensing that the country would likely be drawn into the growing conflict, US officials started preparing. As special assistant in the army office that oversaw construction, Groves was the point man for a massive national construction program. He managed the building of army camps and facilities around the country, including the many factories needed to produce tanks, ammunition, TNT, rifles, small arms, explosives, and other war munitions. He also learned how to manipulate the priorities and allocation system to his advantage so that he could secure the materials he needed. By the summer of 1942, with work on the Pentagon winding down, Groves had done almost everything an ambitious Corps of Engineers officer could do.

  GROVES WAS IN A GOOD MOOD the morning of September 17, 1942, a typically warm and humid late-summer day in Washington, DC. A few days earlier he had been offered an attractive overseas position. It was just what he wanted. He was tired of Washington and its endless paperwork and politics. As he later said, “I was hoping to get to a war theater so I could find a little peace.”

  General Leslie Groves ran the Manhattan Project from his office on the fifth floor of what is today the State Department in Washington, DC. Courtesy of the US National Archives and Records Administration.

  That morning he testified before the House Military Affairs Committee in Room 1310 of the New House Office Building. At 10:30, as he was leaving the hearing, he encountered Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell in the corridor. Somervell said, “The secretary of war has selected you for a very important assignment.”

  “Where?” Groves asked.

  “Washington,” replied Somervell.

  “I don’t want to stay in Washington.”

  “If you do this job right, it will end the war.”

  Groves suddenly realized what Somervell was talking about. “Oh, that thing.”

  Groves already knew about the Manhattan Project. Since that summer he had been hearing about a program that involved building massive production plants and a new kind of bomb. Groves had even been the one to propose calling it the Manhattan Project after its original headquarters in New York City.

  He couldn’t hide his disappointment. The project was expected to involve only about $100 million—less than he had been spending per week over the past few years. He would have to deal with a group of scientists whom he knew to be headstrong and vain. He had heard that the project was unlikely to work, and if it didn’t work he would be blamed. Who knew how many times he would be testifying before Congress if that happened?

  That afternoon he argued with the general who had issued the order, Wilhelm Styer. Groves said that he wouldn’t accept the assignment. Styer told him that the decision could not be changed and that Secretary of War Stimson had asked specifically for Groves. Groves said that he had been promised an overseas posting. Styer said that President Roosevelt had already approved Groves’s appointment.

  Arguing wasn’t going to work, Groves could see. He was trapped. He would have to make the best of it. Improvising quickly, he told Styer that he should be appointed to brigadier general so that the scientists would have more respect for him. Styer said that he would be promoted within the week. Groves said that he would need a higher priority rating to get materials for the project; Styer promised him that, too. Styer told Groves that he would be free to run the project however he wanted and that the War Department would give him its full support. It wasn’t much, Groves knew, but it was all he would get. By the time he left Styer’s office, Groves was already thinking about what he would have to do to build atomic bombs.

  Chapter 10

  THE B REACTOR

  AS WAS THE CASE WITH MANY OTHER PEOPLE WHO MOVED TO HANFORD, Leona Woods was appalled by the dust. It got onto her face and hands and blew into her eyes and mouth. After each windstorm, a crescent of sand extended across the floorboards from the bottom of her front door on Armistead Avenue in Richland. Woods was in general unimpressed by the desert: it struck her as gray and monotonous, occupied only by rabbits, coyote
s, and magpies. But on the rare occasions when rain clouds skittered across the countryside, the scent of the sagebrush was delightful.

  Woods was a child prodigy from La Grange, Illinois, who graduated from high school at age 14 and earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago at 19. Initially, she had asked Nobel laureate James Franck, who had emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1934, if he would be her PhD advisor. But when Franck had been a graduate student and had made a similar request of a professor, he had been told, “You are a Jew, and you will starve to death.” Franck responded to Woods the same way: “You are a woman, and you will starve to death.” Woods looked at the well-fed Franck and decided that she could do better for an advisor. Instead she worked with Robert Mulliken, who had served on the National Academy of Sciences committee the previous year. She was the last of Mulliken’s graduate students, the others having gone to wartime jobs, and her university laboratory was “rather lonesome and empty,” she later recalled. One day Herb Anderson stuck his head in the door and introduced himself. Would she be interested in coming to work for Fermi and his team? Woods was the only woman in the famous photograph of the builders of Chicago Pile 1, which might have seemed an intimidating situation. But nothing seemed to intimidate Leona Woods.

  Like the other scientists working on the project, Woods worried incessantly that Germany would beat the United States to atomic bombs. “Everyone was terrified that . . . the Germans were ahead of us,” she later said. “If they had gotten it before we did, I don’t know what would have happened to the world. Something different. They led the civilized world of physics in every aspect at the time that the war set in, when Hitler lowered the boom. They led, not we. A very frightening time.”