by Lynn Vincent
At times, the fear swirling around these questions nearly paralyzed U.S. researchers. Very little information about the enemy effort abroad filtered stateside. The Brits, who had entered the war with a superior intelligence service, passed along an occasional nugget. But they were war-weary, focused on driving back the Axis powers, and had little manpower to devote to the collection of intelligence in so new and narrow a field. Groves, though, was a determined man. He had been charged with delivering a functional atom bomb. If that meant setting up his own intelligence apparatus, then by God that’s what he would do. In August 1943, he began engineering foreign intelligence collection aimed at drilling down to the truth about the German atomic program.
That was when he summoned Major Robert Furman. A twenty-eight-year-old with cinnamon hair and a serious disposition, Furman already knew the general, having worked for him in 1941 overseeing the final stages of construction of the Pentagon. Furman had studied civil engineering at Princeton, where he became accustomed to spotting Albert Einstein’s wild mane floating across the campus like dandelion fluff. For many students, Depression-era Princeton was less a laurel than a refuge. With jobs scarce and their fathers out of work, they went to college to kill time. Furman paid for his own education by working side jobs—running a theater and managing a sandwich shop. After graduation, he suffered a series of employment setbacks as three jobs in construction and civil engineering fell through.
In 1940, he was called up for Army service, where he finally realized his dream of becoming a builder. During the Pentagon project, he worked under General Groves, who remembered Furman when he needed a key man who was both tenacious and discreet.
In early autumn 1943, Furman took a seat across the desk from Groves at his office on the fifth floor of the new War Department building on C Street in Washington, D.C. The general turned to open his office safe. Inside, Furman glimpsed manuals, stacks of paper, and, oddly, a little cache of hard candy. Groves extracted a book, opened it to the final page, and directed Furman to read the last paragraph.
The major saw that the text involved the potentiality of “fission,” the theory that all matter had an equivalence in, and was potentially convertible to, energy. When fission occurred layer upon layer, the theory went, in a kind of kinetic avalanche, it would produce an explosion of unprecedented magnitude. Furman was first exposed to atomic theory in the late thirties, while still at Princeton. In 1939, Dr. Otto Hahn of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had bombarded uranium with neutrons, achieving the first laboratory example of fission. Since then, Time and other publications had speculated about the possibility of ripening this nascent force into an apocalyptic weapon.
Furman finished reading the passage and looked up at Groves, whose eyes were bright with the expectation of shared revelation.
“Yes,” Furman said simply. He thought Groves seemed rather disappointed at his lack of surprise.
At that first meeting, Groves briefed Furman on the Manhattan Engineering District, as the project was technically known. The general explained that he needed to know what the Germans were doing in the atomic field. But he could not very well set up something so bold as a “department of atomic intelligence” without giving away the existence of the American program, even within the U.S. government itself. Instead, he wanted Furman to meet with the various intelligence agencies—Army, Navy, OSS (Office of Strategic Services)—and find out what those agencies knew without revealing why he wanted to know it.
Furman accepted the assignment and began a crash course in atomic science. Among his tutors were Dr. Richard Tolman, a mathematical and physical chemist who had influenced Einstein’s thinking on the physical dynamics of the universe, and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Groves’s lead scientist at Los Alamos.
Oppenheimer told Furman that any effort to collect intelligence on the German atomic program would begin by pinpointing the whereabouts of the country’s leading scientists. Find them, Oppenheimer said, and Furman would find the Nazi program. Furman made a list of every European scientist with credentials in the atomic field, a fairly simple task in so new and exclusive a discipline. Working with members of the OSS, he led missions to capture and interrogate every one of them.
For the next eighteen months, Furman proved himself intensely secretive, a quality Groves prized, and as unswerving as a bullet. Both traits cost Furman a woman he loved. When he entered the Manhattan Project, he was engaged to be married. But as he canvassed the world, he was unable to tell his fiancée where he was or what he was doing. Finally, the engagement was called off and the relationship melted away. He would later say his fiancée “suffered greatly.”
By the spring of 1945, there was no one in the world apart from Groves who knew more about every facet of the Manhattan Project than Robert Furman. Now, in April, the Alsos mission was accelerating. Furman and Goudsmit had missed Kurt Diebner at Stadtilm, but other Alsos agents were closing in on Werner Heisenberg, the top scientist on Furman’s list.
For Groves, the possibility of a German bomb had always been a matter of percentages. If there was even one chance in ten that the German program could produce a usable weapon, Groves was determined to obliterate it. Now that possibility had dwindled to a pinpoint, and the general was turning his attention to the mission he had long known would be the Manhattan Project’s ultimate endgame: to complete the world’s first atomic bombs and use them to end the war in the Pacific.
11
* * *
MAY 1945
USS Indianapolis
Mare Island, California
ON MAY 2, CAPTAIN McVay spotted the Farallon islands, dark dollops of igneous rock that pierced the mist just thirty miles outside the Golden Gate Bridge. Indianapolis was almost home.
McVay was taking her to Mare Island shipyard, where he had first taken command in November 1944. The repair period was expected to stretch into months. With the war winding down fast, it seemed Indy wasn’t likely to see combat again. Still, armed forces recruiting continued apace, and McVay was slated to receive a slew of new sailors while in the yard. In all, about a third of the crew would turn over, and whatever the state of the war, these new men would need to be trained before the ship went back to sea. After yard workers repaired the damage inflicted by the kamikaze (and installed a few new bells and whistles), McVay planned to scoot down the coast to San Diego for some refresher training.
Indianapolis had gotten under way from Guam on April 15, after dropping two crew members for good: Harpo’s buddy, Mike Quihuis, and Marine Corporal Donald Miller, an orderly to Spruance and McVay. Quihuis had been invited to lead a boxing program for local kids on the island. He got McVay’s permission to accept, then packed his seabag and went ashore so quickly that he barely had time to say goodbye. Miller had volunteered to go help at an engineering facility. Most fellows knew that volunteering for anything in the military was a bad idea, but after the kamikaze strike Miller decided he wanted to get off the ship.
Down by two screws, Indy could only chug along en route to the States, but at least she was running under her own power. The freshwater evaporator was down. That meant drinking water was on rations and the crew had to make do with saltwater showers. At Kerama Retto, repair crews had been able to reduce the list to three degrees, but the men still felt as if they were walking in a funhouse all the way home.
Days out of Guam, grim news descended on the ship. President Franklin Roosevelt was dead. The loss of America’s longest-serving president was felt around the world, but aboard Indy, where the stewards had turned down his bed and served him his meals, it felt a little more personal. Captain McVay ordered a memorial service for Monday, April 16, 1945, at 4:30 in the afternoon. Father Conway presided, and Indy’s crew reflected on FDR’s legacy.
Roosevelt had been president for so long that he already occupied the Oval Office when the youngest of Indy’s crew were still in kindergarten. Some of her oldest hands remembered crossing the equator with Roosevelt aboard. “Crossing the line�
� was always a momentous event for “pollywog” sailors who had never ventured so far south. But that was the first time an American president ever served as King Neptune during the colorful initiation rite held topside, after which the “slimy wogs” were accepted into the order of “trusty shellbacks.” Roosevelt even signed their shellback certificates.
This man, who insisted that all people in all nations shared Americans’ entitlement to basic freedoms, was the same man who had sent this crew to war against the Nazis and the Japanese to defend those freedoms. Now he had passed on, and as the men of Indianapolis mourned him, the mantle of commander in chief passed to Harry S. Truman. A World War I combat veteran, the new president had a reputation as a man of moderate temperament and deep integrity.
During Indy’s passage home, another pair of deaths triggered celebration on the ship. First, news flashed across the world that Benito Mussolini was dead at the hands of partisan executioners. One U.S. newspaper reported that Il Duce’s corpse had been hung upside down from the rafters of a gas station and its face kicked until it was “a toothless, pulpy mass.” Then, about a week later, der Führer himself, Adolf Hitler, did the world a favor and shot himself in the head. When the news was announced on Indianapolis, cheers rang out all over the ship.
After Guam, with the war zone several hundred miles astern, the men began to relax. On April 22, Kasey Moore and a few other men, including the ship’s dentist, Earl Henry, shot trap off the fantail, using a hand trap and a shotgun. Several men proved to be sharp shots.
After reporting aboard Indianapolis at Saipan in 1944, Henry, who was from Knoxville, Tennessee, had been surprised to run into Moore. The two already knew each other: Moore, the former newspaperman, had profiled Henry for the Knoxville Sunday Journal way back in 1933. Already an ornithologist of note at just twenty-one, Henry was about to hang up his hobby of bird taxidermy in order to begin practicing dentistry. After mounting a collection of 137 specimens, Moore wrote, Henry was “going to quit stuffing birds to begin filling teeth.” The reason: Young Henry did not think people would patronize a dentist who handled dead birds in his spare time.
Still, Henry yearned for a creative outlet. He began sketching birds and soon could produce textbook-quality drawings in chalk and pencil. Later, he graduated to painting and began committing images to canvas—belted kingfishers, ruby-throated hummingbirds, purple gallinules. His work began as anatomically accurate and graduated to the quality of fine art. One of them, “An American Eagle in the Pacific,” was painted aboard Indy and reflected Henry’s sentiments on the war. In it, a fierce bald eagle spread his wings across a backdrop of the Stars and Stripes, its claw clutching a bloody serpent whose tail was wrapped in a tattered Japanese flag.
One officer told Henry that while he was a fine dentist, it would be his bird paintings that would make him famous. But not at the rate he was going now, Henry feared. His wife, Jane, was pregnant with their first child and due to give birth in August. Henry had waited longer than some men to start a family and it was practically all he talked about. He had not forgotten how to paint, but with the baby due soon, he felt an urgency to finish his magnum opus, a scale model of Indianapolis.
Around the ship, Henry’s model was famous. It was a precise duplicate of the real ship. Six feet long, this masterpiece perched on a peg that fastened it to a polished teak base. Henry had fashioned the hull and superstructure from a newer material called plastic and strung lifelines along rails formed from dental silver.
On the day of the trap shoot, McVay saw a large bird glide in on the sea breeze and land on the fo’c’sle. Birds were rare this far from land, and McVay could see that Henry was enchanted with the visitor, which had a long, snowy breast, chocolate wings, and webbed feet the color of robins’ eggs. As the dentist approached carefully, drawing to within an arm’s length, the bird seemed almost tame, sitting still and calmly picking its feathers.
Later, McVay phoned down to dental and asked Henry what kind of bird it was. A blue-footed booby, Henry said. McVay was surprised. Most of the men had thought it was an albatross, a sign of good luck.
• • •
At 6:19 a.m., the OOD directed the helmsman to enter the channel to San Francisco Bay and soon the ship passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. Not yet ten years old, the bridge was an engineering marvel, and passing under its signature red-orange expanse felt like a gathering in, a return to safe pasture. McVay looked forward to getting home to his wife, Louise. She was his second wife, after a marriage to Kinau Wilder, who was by marriage a Hawaiian aristocrat and the mother of his two sons, Charles B. McVay IV (known as “Quatro”) and Kimo Wilder McVay.
A descendant of the original Hawaii missionaries, Kinau had been a whirling socialite. By contrast, Louise Graham Claytor, the daughter of a prominent physician, was quiet, warm, and gentle. McVay met her while serving in Washington, D.C., as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Staff and courted her assiduously for a year. When he took command of Indy, they had been married for only a few months. During the ship’s brief stopover in Guam, McVay had run into Louise’s cousin, Lieutenant Commander W. Graham Claytor, captain of the destroyer escort USS Cecil J. Doyle. Now McVay was ready to get home and resume his honeymoon.
The wind clipped down the channel at twenty knots, but it was not of the brutal variety that usually leeched the warmth from a sunny San Francisco day. Visibility was unusually good, the city skyline crisp against a cloudless sky. At half past eleven, McVay directed his OOD to moor the ship port side to the Mare Island ammunition depot. The slim cruiser slid gently pierside and a line-handling detail passed down ropes thick as a man’s leg. Yard workers made fast the lines to bollards, mooring Indy to offload her ordnance.
Finally, on May 5, tugs nudged the ship gently through the dry dock gates. By 9 a.m., she was suspended in dry dock No. 2, her hull cradled in custom V-shaped keel blocks. Then the gates squealed shut and the water was pumped out, exposing all of Indy’s wounds.
12
* * *
MAY 1945
Union Pacific Rail Line
Chicago, Illinois
KATHERINE MOORE SQUEEZED INTO the crowded dining car aboard the San Francisco Challenger, elated but exhausted. The Allies had just declared victory in Europe, and the headlines still blared in her head. In a nation exploding with champagne corks, confetti, and returning soldiers, it had been almost impossible to get a ticket on anything going anywhere. From Chicago, she had peppered her husband, Lieutenant Commander Kasey Moore, with a hail of telegrams. She had gotten a train . . . no, she got bumped . . . she had gotten a train . . . no, she got bumped. Finally, she managed to secure a seat on the Challenger, a Union Pacific/Southern Pacific line that had been upgraded to attract female passengers. But Katherine didn’t care about the lounge cars and porter service, only that this Challenger seemed to be the slowest train ever to crawl across a continent. At times she wanted to get out and push.
Mary Moore, Kasey’s eleven-year-old daughter by his first wife, would join Katherine and Kasey at Mare Island once school let out. Mary’s mother had abandoned the family when the girl was two years old, and neither Kasey nor Mary had seen her since. With her mother gone, Mary’s father became her whole world. Now, the war had left the girl in Katherine’s care.
An attendant came by. Katherine ordered lunch and thought about San Francisco. Kasey had written to say that he’d secured for them a “house” in the Mare Island Navy Yard, really one half of a furnished Quonset hut. The other half was occupied by a new ensign, John Woolston, and his wife.
The best piece of news—Kasey was to have twenty-one days’ leave.
Leave. Finally. Some time away from the other woman.
That was Katherine’s nickname for Indianapolis—and it was not without a salting of real jealousy. Moore had joined the ship in the Aleutian Islands in 1942, seven days after Katherine married him. Since then, their marriage had been a series of brief interludes snatched from Indy’s domineering schedule. Thre
e months in the spring of 1943, and then that Christmas. A week in April of 1944, along with a week in November of the same year. That was all.
Two years into his tour, Moore was offered a transfer to another ship—Katherine had jokingly called it a newer, younger love—but Moore refused to leave his first love, the sleek, clipper-prowed mistress Indianapolis.
“When I’m with you,” he told Katherine, “my heart is filled with joy, and I wonder how I can ever leave you. But when I’m with her, she fills my mind. She is always there. You do understand, don’t you?”
Katherine did, but still eyed the other woman warily.
When she met Moore in college, she was an accomplished violinist with ambitions of her own. She wanted to learn to fly a plane, study at the Sorbonne and Juilliard, trek the sand around the pyramids by moonlight. Getting married was not a high priority. But when the war hit, Moore joined the naval reserve and life accelerated. With their futures now uncertain, securing their love suddenly eclipsed all else, and they made wedding plans.
At first, Moore was assigned to a public relations unit in Nashville, Tennessee. Katherine thought it was a wonderful assignment. Moore did not. One day, sitting on their front porch swing, he put his arm around her.
“I’ve applied for sea duty,” he said.
Katherine was incredulous. She pointed out that he was thirty-three years old and didn’t have to do that, being past the draft age.
