THE MANHATTAN PROJECT – REMEMBRANCE
Several Post readers shared their observations about the Manhattan Project and people they knew who engaged in creating the bomb.
Stan Ulam[i], a Polish mathematician, and his wife spent their winters at the University of Florida while I was on faculty there. They left Poland at the onset of WWII. A professor at the University of Wisconsin, he developed the “Monte Carlo” method, and he was at Los Alamos. In an excellent documentary on the bomb, The Day After Trinity, Stan tells many of the stories he shared with me. He authored a book - Adventures of a Mathematician[ii]. He and another Polish mathematician were not in the movie Oppenheimer, but the picture of the gate at Los Alamos in his book is exactly what we see in the movie. B.F.
I don't remember much about WW II, certainly not anything about the Atomic Bomb. My only recollection is the strange language I heard from the trainees at the Jackson, Miss. Army Airfield, near our rented home. I told my mother that I could not understand what the men were saying, she replied that they were Dutchmen learning how to fly. I had two uncles in the War. My Dad's younger brother joined the Army right from high school in 1938 and, as a Sergeant, went to England in 1943, served at Normandy, and was in the European Theater until the War ended, returning in late 1945. Mother's younger brother was a Seaman on a destroyer in the Atlantic and saw much action in the Mediterranean and offshore Normandy, survived the war, and returned home. The little college I attended in Jackson, Millsaps College, had a Navy V-12 officer training program and sent many underclassmen and graduates off to war. The most noted Millsaps men were Marine Captain Lewis Wilson[iii], who won the Medal of Honor on Guam, and later became Commandant of the Marine Corps and David L Hill[iv] who transferred to Cal Tech, majored in Physics, and joined the Manhattan Project. I believe he was portrayed in Oppenheimer. Thanks for your reflections of events and people in that great period in American History.
G. A.
My Uncle lived in Knoxville and was an Engineer who worked at Oak Ridge. He was also in WW II in the Air Force. A. D.
Having seen the movie, on a recent trip to Europe I read a book by David Montagni, Oppenheimer and Heisenberg[v]. Very interesting perspective on what the Germans did prior to the War’s end - even a successful test bomb on an island in the Arctic. And ongoing production of U235 with the goal of getting a significant amount to Japan. A U-boat had departed Germany for Japan when the war ended with Germany, carrying hundreds of kilos of U235. The decision was made after the Allies arrived in Berlin for that boat to go to the US, taking no chance that it might get to Russia. According to the book, it went to the US with materials needed for future testing. Fascinating hypotheses: the author raises some interesting questions. G. W.
I knew Mr. Greenewalt when he headed The American Philosophical Society. His nickname in Wilmington was “d’état c’est moi.” A promising engineer, and an impressive looking gentleman, he had been told he would have a bright future if he married a member of the Du Pont family, which he did. Also, a “man of parts,” he had a photo collection of hummingbirds in flight, which he had taken – almost impossible to do with the cameras of the time because of the birds’ wing speed. (In person, he had other characteristics which reminded one of Louis XIV, and, as you mention, he did become the CEO of DuPont.
The original New Mexico site was a tony private school in Los Alamos for easterners. However, they had to vacate suddenly and totally. My friend was a student there and head of the senior class. He remembered the arrival of the olive drab military autos giving them the bad news. Later, his brother returned as a senior laboratory fellow to the Los Alamos National Laboratory and had a role in the development of the hydrogen bomb. My ex-wife’s mother, from Omaha, was a student at the girls’ equivalent school in the same vicinity. The Enola Gay was built at Offutt AFB, named after her uncle, an airman who died in France in WW I. J. H.
My fleeting footnote to the Manhattan Project: The headmaster at my Roman Catholic boarding school was a Yale educated Ph.D. in chemical engineering who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, as well as Chicago. He never spoke about this experience. However, from the other monks we learned that he had join the priesthood because of the moral issues surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He hated being headmaster, but he was good at the job - we were scared stiff of his demeanor and intellect. B. C.
Interesting perspective on this pivotal period in history. With the pervasive access to social media, it is impossible to imagine today that such a project could be kept truly secret. M. L.
The Manhattan Project has always fascinated me. So many groups worked on various aspects, and it came together in the end. R. R.
And this was most surprising:
A person you know - Wynona Arrington Butner - was a “Calutron Girl” during the Manhattan Project. Afterward, she was a “no nonsense” teacher, known to us at Old Richmond School as Miss Arrington. W. M.
She married and transferred to nearby Clemmons School where she taught chemistry during my high school years. I did not know that she worked at Oak Ridge. In 2016, Ms. Butner gave an extensive interview about her time as a Calutron operator.[vi]
[i] Stanislaw Ulam (Wikipedia)
[ii] Adventures of a Mathematician
[iii] Louis H. Wilson Jr. (Wikipedia)
[v] Oppenheimer and Heisenberg
[vi] Oak Ridger – Wynona Butner – Calutron Girl