* * *
As the weeks passed, Rosa Oliphant’s anxiety grew. She had heard nothing from, or of, her husband since his cable from Glasgow. Each day without news rendered her privately more fretful. She even wrote to Rivett, who erroneously advised – based on his knowledge of Oliphant’s communications from Cape Town – that he believed her husband was in the process of returning to England.
Then, on the evening of 27 May, ten weeks after Mark set off, Rosa’s telephone rang and he crackled down a faltering line from Fremantle, where he had made safe landfall. He advised that next morning he would board a plane for the 2700-kilometre onward leg to Adelaide, before the call cut out. It had been almost two years since she had heard that voice.
Rosa’s relief paled alongside six-year-old Michael’s unrestrained glee. He greeted his mother’s revelation with his own announcement: ‘when I see daddy, I’ll run and run’.4 Next morning, Rosa rang Baron and Beatrice Oliphant to share the news, and the entire family – including four-year-old Vivian – drove to Parafield Airport, beyond Adelaide’s northern fringe, to await Mark’s homecoming.
The DC-3’s whirring twin propellers shut down and it taxied to a standstill at the apron of the windswept tarmac, where a cold south-westerly howled to herald the imminent arrival of winter. As the familiar frame of Mark Oliphant eased itself down the rear stairs and onto home soil, none of the waiting welcome party could quite believe their eyes.
In the years since his family had last seen saw him, his woolly shock of auburn-brown hair had turned totally white – a fact he had neglected to share in his regular written communications. Baron subsequently told the family he himself had undergone a similar transformation early in middle age, but as Mark walked towards the group it was clear that the stress of work and war had taken their toll on the forty-one-year-old professor.
Once reassured that the obvious change did not mean his father was suddenly ancient, Michael made good his earlier promise and raced towards him, before being scooped up in his father’s arms and clinging tightly to his neck.
The young boy’s euphoria would be short-lived. When Rosa suggested they squeeze back into the car and return home for a proper reunion, Mark looked at her quizzically.
‘Oh no,’ he said, apparently unaware that full details of his schedule had not been shared. ‘I have to go on the plane to Melbourne.’
Once the DC-3 was refuelled and the children told that their father, two years absent, would not be coming home with them after all, Mark climbed back aboard and disappeared into the scudding clouds.
As stunned and disappointed as she was, Rosa’s immediate empathy lay elsewhere. ‘His poor parents,’ she would recall with the stoicism demanded of wartime wives. ‘He was on duty.’5
* * *
After Melbourne, where he convened briefly with Rivett, Oliphant was again on the move. An overnight train took him 900 kilometres to Sydney and a meeting with the radar research division of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. It became immediately obvious that, during the course of his voyage from Britain, plans had moved on and he was essentially surplus to requirements.
It was not the only development he had missed while captive aboard the SL-4.
Days out from his disembarkation at Fremantle, a letter addressed to Oliphant at Birmingham University arrived from the British prime minister’s private secretary at 10 Downing Street. If Oliphant’s weakness for revealing secrets was causing heartburn within the security and science communities, it had clearly not been relayed to the top office. As Charles Wright had foreshadowed, Oliphant was indeed being considered for ‘some reward’. Winston Churchill had agreed that Oliphant’s name should be submitted to George VI for inclusion in the forthcoming King’s Birthday Honours List for appointment as Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
The problem for colleagues of Mark Oliphant, prospective OBE, was that none of them quite knew where he was. Or how to alert him.
Robert Nimmo, one of the unfortunate research assistants to have had his legs broken in the cyclotron’s construction mishap, stalled for time with Downing Street, which required confirmation that the honour would be accepted. Nimmo fired off an urgent cable to Rivett’s office in Melbourne, pending Oliphant’s expected arrival there. ‘Your name to be submitted Birthday Honours Officer Order British Empire if you agree. Awaiting your reply.’6
A week passed before Nimmo received word from Oliphant, in a terse telegram that reflected his state of mind after meetings in Sydney: ‘Honours belong laboratory so please refuse my behalf. Position here very unsatisfactory. Regards Oliphant.’7
That response was then reframed in suitable diplomat-speak and Churchill’s office advised that, while Oliphant was deeply appreciative of the recognition afforded by the Prime Minister’s suggestion, he believed any success his work had brought was a team triumph, and deserved to be rewarded as such.
The next day, Churchill’s secretary responded: ‘The Prime Minister is very sorry not to be able to include the Professor’s name in his list of recommendations to the King but he will, of course, respect Professor Oliphant’s wishes and proceed no further with his proposal.’8
* * *
For the next two months, Oliphant’s annoyance simmered. Suggestions that it had been the input of radar research supremo John Madsen that saw him deprived of air transport to Australia fed his discontent. And not even the acclaim with which he was greeted when he was invited to visit Rutherford’s homeland on radar business ameliorated the view that he had wasted much time and effort. In more celebratory times, a sojourn in New Zealand might have afforded Oliphant a chance to see the country and gain insight into the experiences that had shaped his mentor’s life. But Oliphant’s focus remained strictly business; his fleeting trip took him directly to Wellington, where he addressed a meeting of New Zealand scientists engaged in radar work, and then straight back to Australia.
So desperate had Oliphant become to make up for the lost months that he secured passage back to Britain for himself, Rosa and the children – whom he had seen only on occasional visits during his stay in Australia – upon the Desirade. The vessel was operated by Free French interests, but crewed by a hybrid of Vichy Government supporters and those loyal to Charles de Gaulle’s alternative administration. Conditions aboard the vessel were equally chaotic, with the Oliphants offered no fresh towels or clean bed linen throughout the weeks it took to reach Durban on South Africa’s east coast. Naval authorities there promptly deemed the Desirade unfit for onward passenger travel.
While the family took accommodation in South Africa’s inland hills, where they celebrated Christmas 1942, Oliphant wired another plaintive request to his Admiralty contacts for urgent alternative transport. However, it took a further month for that to happen, and it was not until the final day of northern winter in February 1943 that the family landed at Glasgow, then headed to their beloved Peto at Barnt Green.
Almost eleven months had elapsed since Mark Oliphant had left Britain on his misguided patriotic mission, of which almost half he had spent in transit.
* * *
Morale in Britain had shifted notably in his absence. The German threat remained, but vital victories had been won in North Africa and the airborne radar Oliphant had helped beget was guiding Allied bombing raids on targets across Western Europe. The air-raid shelter that Oliphant had built at Peto at the height of the Blitz was now appropriated by Michael and Vivian as a playhouse. And the only visible hints of imminent peril in rural Worcestershire were the occasional barrage balloons that still appeared above the Lickey Hills’ treeline during the family’s weekend walks.
If a benefit other than reunion had emerged from this trying chapter, it was that Oliphant’s enforced confinement at sea had – in the great Rutherfordian tradition – afforded him much time to think. It also meant that when he re-entered his Birmingham laboratory, which had continued to be consumed by radar work throughout his absence, he was in a characteristic rush to
get things moving.
Due to his voluntary relocation, he had lost touch with work being carried out under the Tube Alloys program. But once back home, it didn’t take long for him to establish that progress on the uranium issue in Britain had been minimal. He believed a key reason was that the gaseous diffusion method of separating the uranium-235 isotope recommended in the MAUD Report was too technically cumbersome. Oliphant now believed the method he had discussed with Lawrence under the shadow of the giant cyclotron at Berkeley eighteen months earlier was more feasible.
Within weeks of returning to Birmingham, where he felt the radar program had served its purpose and ‘shot its bolt’, Oliphant informed vice-chancellor Raymond Priestley as well as Tizard that he wanted his laboratory team and resources to be directed to nuclear physics and, in particular, how that might help with the bomb project he had so passionately championed. While it seemed an abrupt decision, it was another that he had reached during his lengthy confinement at sea.
On 26 May 1943 he penned a confidential letter to Sir Edward Appleton, upon whom he had unloaded his frustrations at the establishment of the Tube Alloys project eighteen months earlier, suggesting this new large-scale means of isotope separation ‘might remove the [uranium] project from the realms of gigantic chemical engineering and render it a more practical proposition in this country’.9
Oliphant understood that the bomb program had become essentially an American enterprise, from which British expertise had been conspicuously excluded. However, his need to be at the heart of the biggest issues as they related to his field of inquiry, coupled with his belief that the progress of science should not be constrained by cultural or geographic boundaries, meant he pursued his new quest with trademark vigour.
His vision was to employ electromagnetic separation techniques to isolate quantities of the desired but elusive uranium-235. Firing charged uranium atoms into a magnetic field that bent them at high speed around a circular track meant that those with the heavier atomic mass (uranium-238) would gravitate to the outside, while the lighter 235 particles would travel in a beam closer to the centre, where they could be harvested.
The hope was that the still-unfinished sixty-inch cyclotron at Birmingham could be reconfigured to conduct this work. According to Oliphant’s upbeat estimates, if sufficient power were applied to his giant magnet then the apparatus could yield around a kilogram of enriched uranium within a couple of weeks. There would then be enough to form the required critical mass for an atomic bomb inside a few months, and that would surely reinvigorate the nuclear program in Britain.
While the legitimacy of these numbers raised eyebrows among some, the premise was deemed worthy of further investigation by Tube Alloys’ hierarchy.
Yet Oliphant’s hasty decision to terminate his laboratory’s involvement in radar and direct those resources to the question of nuclear fission was not warmly welcomed by Henry Tizard, or by Birmingham’s vice-chancellor. Having seen his physics professor take a year’s sabbatical to pursue an unnecessary (as it transpired) cause in Australia, Raymond Priestley noted sourly that Oliphant had promptly ‘ratted’ from the radar work in which Birmingham had been heavily involved to the Tube Alloys program soon after his return.10
Part of Priestley’s disquiet stemmed from the fact that Oliphant’s laboratory had been fitted out and funded by the Admiralty, to enable the upscaling of the radar research program. Not only had that delivered valuable financial benefits to the institution, but it had also earned Birmingham a measure of wartime prestige.
However, once Oliphant made it clear that there was little more he could add to the already substantial capabilities of radar, and that the war effort might benefit more from his uranium endeavours, the differences were sorted out. Despite having been such a strident critic of the Tube Alloys structure when it had first been unveiled in late 1941, less than two years later he became part of its machinery.
Not that his past imprudence was completely glossed over. In June 1943, Wallace Akers – whose Tube Alloys appointment Oliphant had previously savaged as ‘disgraceful’ – wrote to Appleton to query the specifics of their agreement with the Australian, whom Akers suspected might still be tempted to split his time between nuclear and radar research.
I must say that we were most definite that Oliphant whole-time would be a most valuable addition to our effort but if he proposes to work part-time on this we would certainly not want him. Such an arrangement would be ineffectual and dangerous. I say the latter because Oliphant is, as you know, impetuous and none too discreet, so we would not want to let him in on all the secrets of TA work unless he is properly tied to us.11
But before Oliphant could set up his cyclotron to make meaningful headway on electromagnetic separation of uranium, politics once again intervened.
* * *
In the almost two years that had passed since Oliphant had toured the United States, beseeching all who would listen to pour their best efforts into realising a bomb, the power balance between the two nations had swung drastically. The leadership Britain had shown on the nuclear question had dissipated, despite Roosevelt’s suggestion of a ‘co-ordinated or even jointly conducted’ approach, while America’s commitment to an atomic weapon had forged forward at pace.
Crucially, it was Roosevelt’s decision to entrust the project to the United States Army Corps of Engineers, rather than a privately led enterprise like Tube Alloys, that had brought such decisive progress. By August 1942, the corps had established a dedicated engineers’ precinct to deliver the president’s aim. While that jurisdiction would eventually spread out to a number of secret locations across the United States, its heart was an office building on Broadway in New York City’s downtown Manhattan. As a result, the entire operation was given the nondescript code name ‘Manhattan Engineer District’, even though it transcended all geographical boundaries, before it became known simply as the ‘Manhattan Project’.12
The ground that Oliphant had so assiduously tilled in the hope that America might help sow it had, in the space of barely a year, been summarily claimed by Britain’s ally. And by late 1942, when it had become obvious that the United States had both the will and the manufacturing capability to complete the project they had for so long regarded with scepticism, Britain realised it was in danger of being excluded.
The demarcation became more pronounced when the highly abrasive but hugely effective General Leslie Groves – previously in charge of construction for the entire United States Army, and fresh from completion of the Pentagon – was installed as the Manhattan Project’s overlord.
The impasse was formally breached in August 1943, when Churchill and Roosevelt met secretly in Quebec and agreed to a shared commitment to building nuclear weapons for the duration of the war. What it meant for post-war weapons development would only become public in the conflict’s aftermath.
Such was the hurry to insert themselves into the Manhattan Project that the first British delegation – led by James Chadwick, with Oliphant and Rudolf Peierls – was booked to fly to New York before the Quebec Agreement had been formally signed. It was an eagerness interpreted by some in the American science and military communities as representing ‘almost indecent haste’.13
Certainly that suspicion must also have weighed upon Rosa Oliphant, who had only just resettled into British life in 1943 and enrolled the children into new schools. Military protocols did not extend to transport and resettlement costs for next of kin, so they would remain at Barnt Green while Oliphant prepared for another absence of indeterminate length – and for reasons unexplained.
For Mark Oliphant, however, another great adventure suddenly loomed.
21
MANHATTAN
United States, 1943 to 1945
Rather than being airlifted by bomber, Oliphant and his colleagues would take the flying boat service from Foynes, on the banks of western Ireland’s Shannon Estuary. With their New York bound plane delayed, the group passed time at a cinema in nearby Lime
rick, where the feature film was preceded by a newsreel that included predictions of an atomic bomb made possible by uranium chain reactions.
The delegation’s initial forays into the United States were hardly spectacular. On their first day in Washington, Oliphant and Peierls were deep in discussion and crossed a street against a pedestrian light, which was noticed by a vigilant traffic policeman. The pair were only spared a fine after producing travel documents that proved their new-arrival status.
Chadwick – who, under the bilateral structure, had effectively replaced Akers as head of Britain’s nuclear research – was not so fortunate. Having not previously visited the United States, he received pre-departure eating recommendations from Lady Astor, the American-born socialite who became the first woman elected to British Parliament. Chadwick was told not to miss Harvey’s Oyster Bar in New York.
‘Soon after arriving, we took a taxi to the recommended restaurant where Chadwick ordered, and ate, a dozen oysters,’ recalled Oliphant, who was also sharing a hotel room with his former Cavendish colleague. ‘Later that night he became terribly ill, and in the morning was still obviously suffering. But he insisted we fly to Washington . . . I was very anxious as I saw an extremely sick but determined man into his car.’1
* * *
When Oliphant arrived with his colleagues at the Pentagon – which looked and smelled as pristine as the Quebec Agreement, now executed and delivered to the White House – he was pleased to be greeted by the familiar figure of Robert Oppenheimer. Less welcoming was the foreboding presence of General Groves, whose frightening reputation was well known within Washington circles and far beyond.
Son of a Presbyterian minister, Groves ran projects with a singularity that bordered on despotism. One of his key deputies on the bomb project, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, described him as ‘the biggest S.O.B. [son of a bitch] I have ever worked for. He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organisational channels . . . He is the most egotistical man I know. He knows he is right and so sticks by his decision.’2
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