Everyone in the room has a top secret security clearance, allowing them to speak freely about a topic few in the world are aware of. With Germany all but defeated, these brilliant minds are divided between those who want to see the atomic bomb dropped on Japan and those who believe it is morally wrong to destroy a country so near to surrender. Some believe that dropping the A-bomb will lead to a worldwide arms race. Indeed, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard is making secret plans to meet with President Truman to discuss this troubling matter in person.2
The altitude in Los Alamos is 7,300 feet atop a desert mesa. Newcomers often find themselves unable to handle their liquor because the thin air brings dizziness. But Oppenheimer’s drinking stamina is legendary among his staff, surpassed only by his obsessive drive to create the world’s first atomic weapon. Even after this Sunday night of celebration, Oppenheimer will rise well before the 7:30 a.m. factory whistle blows.
* * *
“My two great loves,” Robert Oppenheimer wrote to a friend long before the war, “are physics and desert country. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.”
Now, thanks to Brigadier General Leslie Groves and the top secret Manhattan Project, they have been. It has been six years since Franklin Roosevelt’s Oval Office meeting with Alexander Sachs and its resulting call to action for America to pursue nuclear weapons. But it has been less than three years since Oppenheimer was tasked by the overweight army bureaucrat with not only building a state-of-the-art laboratory in the middle of nowhere but also convincing some of the world’s sharpest minds to put their lives on hold to spend the rest of the war here.
Oppenheimer was not the obvious choice to be in charge of the lab. His past indicated some trouble: the young professor from the University of California at Berkeley had a history of depression and eccentric behavior. In the late 1930s, Oppenheimer dated a woman known to be a member of the Communist Party, which concerned army counterintelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Also, Oppenheimer had no experience managing a large group of people, nor had he won a Nobel Prize. Many doubted that he had the experience required to build the world’s first weapon of mass destruction.
Yet the outspoken Groves was determined to hire him. “Oppenheimer can talk to you about anything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly.… He doesn’t know anything about sports,” Groves would later tell an interviewer, referring to Oppenheimer as “a genius.”
Word of a new laboratory devoted to splitting atoms eventually filtered into the scientific community. At the time of Oppenheimer’s hiring, in October 1942, some were shocked at the “most improbable appointment.” As one physicist noted: “I was astonished.”
A twenty-five-year-old boys’ school thirty-five miles northwest of Santa Fe with log dormitories and a stunning view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains was soon purchased to build Oppenheimer’s new lab. Included in the $440,000 price were 8,900 acres of land, sixty horses, fifty saddles, and one phone line. The school, named Los Alamos, was soon ringed with security fences topped with coils of razor wire and guarded by military personnel and attack dogs. Oppenheimer’s scientists begin to feel so secure that many stop locking their front doors when they leave for work in the morning. That safety, however, comes at a cost: each employee at the Los Alamos National Laboratory is subject to constant monitoring of his or her personal life by security personnel. News of the atomic bomb research must be kept from reaching Germany and the Soviet Union.3
What began as a theoretical laboratory soon became a small town. A theater group was formed, with Oppenheimer himself making a cameo appearance as a corpse in Arsenic and Old Lace. A town council was elected. Parties were common and lasted late into the night, sometimes featuring the world’s most learned minds playing piano or violin to entertain their friends. Some found the remote location to be claustrophobic, while others thought it romantic, leading to an extraordinarily high birth rate.
As 1944 becomes 1945, and the testing of an actual A-bomb begins, the physical and emotional toll of transforming a weapon that once existed only in theory into a violent force that could end the largest war in history has been debilitating. Oppenheimer stands almost six feet tall but has wasted away to just 115 pounds. His teeth are rotting. He smokes five packs of Chesterfield cigarettes a day and is prone to long fits of smoker’s cough that turn his face purple. He rarely eats, having abandoned his passion for spicy food in favor of a diet of gin, cigarettes, and coffee.
Worse, Oppenheimer’s wife of five years, Kitty, a genius in her own right in the field of botany, has broken under the strain. She has gone home to live with her parents in Pittsburgh, taking their four-year-old son, Peter, with her. Strangely, Kitty leaves their four-month-old daughter, Toni, behind. Knowing that Oppenheimer will not be able to care for the baby, she has entrusted the child to Pat Sherr, a good friend who has just suffered a miscarriage. The truth is that Kitty has never been a good mother to Toni, whom she sees as an unwanted burden, frequently abandoning her to the company of friends for days at a time.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Oppenheimer visits his daughter twice a week, though his own love for his daughter is just as precarious as that of his wife. Juggling parenting and the upcoming testing of the atomic bomb is too much for him. On one occasion he asks Sherr if she would like to adopt Toni, explaining that he “just can’t love her.” An appalled Sherr declines.
Robert Oppenheimer longs for Kitty’s return. She is his sole confidante and one of the few people he can trust.4
Yet in Kitty’s absence, there are rumors. Despite his cadaverous look and the smell of stale tobacco that clings to him like a shroud, some women are drawn to Oppenheimer. He is not oblivious to their charms; talk of affairs follows him throughout his time at Los Alamos. Among the rumors (although it appears to have been nothing more than that) is one of a liaison with a pretty blond twenty-year-old secretary, Anne T. Wilson, whom Oppenheimer handpicked for the job upon meeting her in Washington.
Oppenheimer’s relations with other women, however, go far beyond rumor. In June 1943, he rekindled an old romance with pediatric psychologist Jean Tatlock while on a business trip to Berkeley. Army intelligence agents, who were spying on Oppenheimer’s every move due to the high security surrounding the Manhattan Project, reported that he had dinner and drinks with Tatlock before spending the night in her apartment. Years before, in the midst of a torrid relationship, Tatlock had turned down Oppenheimer on three separate occasions when he asked her to marry him. It was a decision she would come to regret by 1943. Six months after Oppenheimer spent the night, Jean Tatlock drew a bath, swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, and died.
* * *
Another of Oppenheimer’s affairs is with Ruth Tolman, a psychologist for the Office of Strategic Services who is ten years older than Oppenheimer. This affair will continue long after the war’s end. Tolman’s husband is also employed at Los Alamos and soon learns of his wife’s infidelity. When Ruth’s husband, Richard, dies of a heart attack in 1948, some will claim that despondence over his wife’s love of Oppenheimer was a primary cause.
Right now, however, Robert Oppenheimer has little energy to stray. His “gadget,” as he calls the A-bomb, is almost ready for testing. The detonation, when it occurs, will take place in the nearby desert, the Jornada del Muerto—or “Journey of the Dead Man,” as this barren, windswept landscape is appropriately known. The site has been chosen because it is remote, unpopulated, and flat.
Robert Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard with honors in just three years and has a PhD in physics from Germany’s University of Göttingen. He is a natural leader who enjoys the spotlight but rarely shows his true emotions.
Among his varied interests, Oppenheimer is a believer in Eastern philosophy. His code name for the upcoming A-bomb test is “Trinity,” after the three Hindu gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.5 Oppenheimer can quote the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, at will: “If the radiance of a thousand s
uns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.… Now I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.”6
As his birthday party progresses, Oppenheimer shakes another martini with great flair. The cocktail is one of his personal trademarks. Although he drinks constantly, the scientist prefers to sip his libation slowly and rarely becomes inebriated.
Robert Oppenheimer’s life is full of contradiction. But as his favorite selection from the Bhagavad Gita suggests, this man who chose to play a corpse onstage, and whose body now wastes away as he deprives it of simple nourishment, is a real-life Grim Reaper.
And he knows it.
11
OKINAWA ISLAND, JAPAN
MAY 8, 1945
1600 HOURS
Five thousand miles away from Los Alamos, and just four hundred miles from Tokyo, the American marines know nothing about the A-bomb. “The Germans have surrendered,” they are told as the battle for Okinawa enters its sixth miserable week. The news quickly passes up and down the line, from foxhole to foxhole.
To a man, the response is the same: “So what?”
Adolf Hitler is dead. The marines are trying to survive. The worldwide war that the German führer started six years ago still rages in this corner of the globe. The American military is moving ever closer to the Japanese mainland, but there is a high price to pay for that progress—and the marines know it.
The American island-hopping strategy began with the capture of the island of Guadalcanal in 1942, which put American forces within 3,000 miles of Tokyo. Capturing Peleliu in late 1944 put the Americans within 2,000 miles. The surrender of Iwo Jima closed the distance to 750 miles. Okinawa is half that. The next obvious assault will be the southernmost islands of Japan itself.
The United States invasion of Okinawa brought American forces ever closer to the Japanese mainland. It would prove to be one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
“We were resigned only to the fact that the Japanese would fight to total extinction on Okinawa, as they had elsewhere, and that Japan would have to be invaded with the same gruesome prospects,” Marine Corps private Eugene Sledge will later write in a book about his experiences in the Pacific.
The closer to Tokyo the Americans advance, the more brutal the fighting becomes. The invasion of Okinawa is already turning into the bloodiest and most costly battle the US Army, Marines, and Navy will endure in either Europe or the Pacific. One notable casualty is legendary American journalist Ernie Pyle, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism in 1944, killed by a sniper’s bullet through the temple shortly after arriving in the Pacific, after four years covering the European theater.
Unlike the coral and jungle of Peleliu, or the remote black volcanic soil of Iwo Jima, Okinawa is a well-populated island full of farmers. Its citizenry is a mixture of Japanese and Chinese. Many have already committed suicide rather than succumb to the invaders. The verdant fields of okra and eggplant that should be carpeting the countryside have been trampled by soldiers, cratered by shells, and littered with the detritus of war: spent casings, empty food tins, burning vehicles, and, of course, dead bodies.1
The rich clay soil is now mud thanks to monsoon rains. For the first time in many months, the Japanese seem to have an endless supply of ammunition and the big guns with which to fire it. Poncho-wearing American fighting men cower in their flooded foxholes or attack in the slop, their minds and bodies concussed by ceaseless shelling. The stench of rotting corpses carries on the warm subtropical wind. Many a man has slipped in the mud and found himself covered in maggots, face to face with a half-buried, decomposing Japanese or American soldier.
“All movements,” Private Sledge will add, “were physically exhausting and utterly exasperating because of the mud … [and] the ever present danger of shells even far behind the lines.”
Sledge will note ruefully, “We tried to wisecrack and joke from time to time, but that always faded away as we grew more weary.”
* * *
Private First Class Desmond Doss would like to pray.
The sun is rising. The men of B Company, First Battalion, 77th Infantry Division are just moments away from assaulting the Maeda Escarpment, a four-hundred-foot-high cliff stretching the five-mile width of Okinawa. While the rest of the island consists of flat or rolling hills, the boulder-covered slopes are steep, and the last sixty feet are completely vertical. Within its limestone rock face the Japanese have concealed a network of tunnels containing machine guns and artillery. From this vantage point, the enemy can monitor American troop movements in three directions, allowing them to lay down pinpoint artillery fire.
It is vital that B Company capture the escarpment. Two full American divisions have failed to reach the cliff top. Now, instead of a full-scale assault, they will try stealth, concealing themselves among the boulders in order to reach the summit before they can be discovered.
Private Doss asks his commanding officer if he can pray. “Sir,” he says, “I believe that prayer is the biggest lifesaver there is. I believe that every man should have a word of prayer before he puts his foot on the rope ladder to go up that cliff.”
First Lieutenant Cecil Gornto nods. Doss is a devout Seventh-day Adventist who doesn’t eat meat, smoke, drink, or work on Saturday. When he was first inducted into the army on April Fools’ Day 1942, Doss’s behavior was seen as eccentric. Fellow soldiers shunned him. Doss was even offered a discharge on the grounds that he was mentally imbalanced. He refused the ticket out.
Since then, the rail-thin Virginian with the thick twang has distinguished himself at the battles for Guam and Leyte, in the Philippines. His gallantry has earned him two Bronze Stars for heroism under fire. The men of B Company are no longer wary of the twenty-six-year-old’s devout ways.
Doss prays aloud just moments before battle. Although some men do not join in the prayer, they respect the private; he is the company medic and the man who might save their lives today. On both Leyte and Guam, Doss amazed his platoon by running through thick enemy fire to drag men to safety.
For the same reasons PFC Desmond Doss has become a hero to the men of B Company, he is also a target. “The Japanese were out to get the medics,” Doss will recall of the white armband with a red cross on his left bicep. “They were taught to kill the medics for the reason it broke down the morale of the men. Because if the medics were gone they had no one to take care of them.”
Most remarkably, Doss is also a conscientious objector, meaning that he believes quite literally in the words of the Sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill. For PFC Doss, war does not excuse him from following this law that he believes was handed down from God. But he is a patriot, and turned down a job in a shipyard back home so that he might march alongside his fellow Americans.
Doss does not carry a firearm. While the other men of B Company attack the Japanese with grenades and carbines, and among the medical corps most carry a pistol, Doss does not.
“Amen,” Doss says, completing his prayer. He knows the men are looking at him, hoping to draw comfort from his normally calm demeanor. Doss, however, is terrified, and there is little he can do to hide it.
“Amen,” add the men standing around him.
It is dawn, and the temperature on Okinawa is still cool as the men of B Company move out. Within hours, having safely avoided detection, they reach the top of the escarpment, scaling the last fifty feet and then dropping ropes back over the side for other Americans to follow.
Not a single man is killed, and the men of B Company know the reason why: “Doss prayed,” marvels one incredulous soldier.
But suddenly, the first cry of “Medic!” echoes across the rocky hilltop.
* * *
As the rain continues to pour down on Okinawa, the rest of the world waits. Pockets of war still exist in places like Borneo and China, but Okinawa is the linchpin of the final American campaign against Japan. The last great battle of World War II cannot begin until this contest is settled.2
* * *
In Moscow, Russian leader Joseph Stalin is watching the Okinawa battle carefully. He is also making plans to transport a million men the width of the Soviet Union once the winter snows melt. Now that the war with Nazi Germany has ended, Stalin is free to attack Japanese-held Manchuria, in northern China. As American general George S. Patton has warned US leaders, the Soviet dictator is America’s next great enemy. He is proving this by his ruthless stranglehold on the nations of Eastern Europe, now occupied by Soviet forces. The Russian leader actually wants the war between America and Japan to drag on as long as possible, giving him more time to move his troops from Europe to Asia. It is becoming clear that as long as Soviet aggression remains unchecked, Stalin will expand his empire as he pleases.
* * *
In Washington, President Harry Truman is keeping a close eye on Joseph Stalin. Unlike his predecessor, FDR, he does not trust the Soviet leader. On May 11, Truman ceases the US Lend-Lease program with the Russians. The Soviet reliance on American trucks and other materials of war, which has been in effect throughout World War II, will soon come to an end. Though the United States and the Soviet Union still consider themselves allies, Harry Truman has given the first indication that America will not tolerate Stalin’s brutal global ambition.
* * *
An early casualty of the Okinawa battle is the USS Indianapolis, which now rests in dry dock at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California. Her crew of 1,196 is enjoying an impromptu break from the war. Some have traveled home to see loved ones, while others spend their days in the nearby barracks playing cards. All of them are lucky to be alive.
Indianapolis, a heavy cruiser, was nearly sunk by a kamikaze pilot off the coast of Okinawa on March 31, during the pre-invasion bombardment. Dropping down in a vertical dive, the suicide bomber loosed his ordnance just twenty-five feet above the ship. The kamikaze dropped only one bomb, but that was enough. The explosive penetrated the deck armor, then passed through the crew’s mess and the ship’s fuel tanks before exploding deep in the bowels of the vessel. Nine men died instantly.
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