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While Tibbets and his crew had been training, Allied bomber squadrons had undertaken major raids against both Germany and Japan, causing massive devastation and heavy casualties. At the Yalta Conference in early February 194c, the Russian high command asked for assistance from the British and American bomber commands to prevent the transfer of large numbers of German reinforcements to the eastern front. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed. The targets would be the transport hubs of Dresden and Leipzig.
Neither the British nor the Americans had previously targeted Dresden, a historic city with many fine baroque buildings. The British attacked first, in two waves on the night of 13—14 February, aiming at the marshaling yards and creating a massive firestorm with temperatures at its center of above eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The American writer Kurt Vonnegut, a prisoner of war in the city at the time, wrote that bodies dissolved in "the semi-liquid way that dust actually returns to dust." In the morning 450 American bombers arrived to add to the destruction. One survivor wrote, "Dead, dead, dead everywhere. Some completely black like charcoal. Others completely untouched, lying as if they were asleep." Another saw nothing but parts of bodies being shoveled into a big heap, then burned. The casualties numbered at least sixty thousand and perhaps significantly more, since the city was filled with refugees in addition to its recorded inhabitants. The inscription on one of the mass graves reads:
How manv died?
Who knows the number?
Some in the Allied command thought that, over and above its tactical benefits, the destruction had given the Russians a salutary demonstration of Allied air-power.
After a precision raid on a Tokyo aircraft factory on 4 March, the U.S. air force, under its recently appointed commander, Curtis Le May, decided on the carpet bombing of whole Japanese cities. The first target was Tokyo. On 9 March, more than three hundred bombers took off from Tinian, and at around 11 p.m. (Tokyo time) pathfinder planes dropped colored target markers illuminating the city. Then came the bombers, flying lower than usual because of the lack of antiaircraft fire. They dropped two thousand incendiary bombs, some containing, for the first time, a new American invention, "sticky fire"—napalm. The flaming napalm ran down the city's buildings, most of which were of wood. Fire was blown from one building to the next, creating a firestorm that destroyed sixteen square miles of Tokyo and killed more than one hundred thousand people. Tokyo residents followed government directions to form bucket chains, but many suffocated from smoke inhalation or from the deprivation of oxygen as it was burned from the air, even before the flames consumed them. One survivor sawr piles of blackened bodies piled outside the Meiji Theater, so burned and disfigured that she could not even identify their sex or anything else about them. Radio Tokyo condemned the attacks as "slaughter bombing."
Over the following three months Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya were destroyed by fire, and the death toll rose to at least a quarter of a million, but still the resistance of the Japanese government and its obedient, patriotic people did not seem to crack, although Emperor Hirohito was said to have known the war was lost when he saw charred corpses heaped by the side of the river in Tokyo. In a later raid on Tokyo on 13 April an incendiary bomb set fire to the laboratory in wdiich Yoshio Nishina and his team were still trying unsuccessfully to persuade their thermal diffusion column to separate U-235 from U-238. The fire destroyed the laboratory and in the ashes perished any faint, lingering hope that Japan might progress toward a nuclear weapon.
Hiroshima remained intact, but the authorities were nervous. Most of the city's houses were timber-framed writh wooden walls and paper partitions under a tiled roof and so were highly inflammable. At the beginning of 194c the government ordered the mayor of Hiroshima to begin demolishing buildings to construct firebreaks against incendiary bombing raids to supplement the natural barriers afforded by the city's rivers. Both adults and schoolchildren went at the demolition work with a will. Wood from the fallen buildings could be used for fuel in the winter cold or, if a few nails could also be salvaged, turned into wooden sandals for the many who by then lacked them.
In April 1945 the Japanese authorities cut food rations again for all citizens, including the inhabitants of Hiroshima. The rice ration of three bowls a day had for a long time been routinely mixed with soya, but rice was henceforth provided on only twenty days out of any month. However, one resident recalled that the continued availability of tea was consoling, providing "comfort and a reminder of the rituals of prewar life." That same month, the evacuation of some of Hiroshima's schoolchildren began. They were sent to rural temples and assembly halls. Older pupils of no more than sixteen or eighteen years of age supervised those who were left in order to free teachers for war work. They were given the briefest of training and instructed not to use the same toilets as their pupils since, as "higher beings," they should not be seen by them to perform basic bodily functions. They were also told that in the event of an attack "their first priority, even before the safety of the pupils, should be to protect the portraits of the emperor and empress" that hung in every classroom.
Hiroshima had still not, however, been attacked. Inhabitants speculated about why the much-feared "B-San" or "Mr. B."—as the B-29 Super Fortress bombers were known—had not visited their city as they had so many others. In earlier years lack of viable agricultural land had forced many people from the area around Hiroshima to emigrate to Hawaii and California. As a consequence, some Hiroshima residents accepted as true the comforting speculation that President Roosevelt had agreed to spare Hiroshima from attack in response to petitions from Japanese Americans, many of whom still had relatives in Hiroshima. Others thought that the city was being saved to serve as U.S. headquarters when the Americans conquered Japan. Such defeatism was becoming more common, so the secret police, the Kempei-Tei, based in Hiroshima castle, began a roundup of dissidents and defeatists in early May. Among the more than three hundred people swiftly detained in Hiroshima was the diplomat Shigeru Yoshida, later to become prime minister of Japan.
Fire drill to prepare for air raids
A few weeks before, Hiroshima had welcomed a new arrival: Field Marshal Shunroku Hata. The sixty-five-year-old veteran of the wars in China had been given the task of defending Japan against invasion and chose to make the city his base, establishing the Second General Army Headquarters there. He immediately gave orders for further military drills for all ages and both sexes.
Scarce fuel was set aside so that children could make Molotov cocktails to be stockpiled for use against the invaders. Even the infirm and wheelchair-bound were put to work making booby traps to protect the beaches. The many Koreans transported from their homeland to undertake forced labor in Hiroshima's factories were compelled to work longer hours despite reduced rations. In the dockyards the Japanese began assembling suicide craft to defend Hiroshima Bay. They packed small boats with explosives and a motor sufficiently powerful to speed them on a one-way mission to explode against the invaders' landing craft. Suicide divers, known as Fukuryus or "crouching dragons," were trained to swim out to sea to attach limpet mines to ships. Experiments were made with concrete shelters in which squads of Fukuryus could lie concealed offshore for ten hours before rising to attack the incoming landing craft. Each day, the newspapers, all of which were state-controlled and strictly censored, urged their readers to give thanks for imperial benevolence and to be ready to die for Hiro-hito. Many of those in Hiroshima would have little choice in the latter.
*The prefix B in B-29 did not, as often thought, stand for Boeing, its manufacturer. Under a military naming convention introduced in 1924, B was for bomber, and 29 meant that the plane was the twenty-ninth model of bomber. Fighters had the designation P for pursuit, although they are now assigned the letter F.
*Serious consideration had been given to the use of the British Lancaster bomber, which would have needed less modification, but the proposal was rejected by Groves, who found it "beyond comprehension to use a British pl
ane to deliver an American A-bomb."
TWENTY-ONE
"GERMANY HAD NO ATOMIC BOMB"
IN JANUARY 1945 Walther Gerlach, the newly appointed German plenipotentiary of fission research, ordered Heisenberg and all remaining scientists to flee Berlin immediately. Otto Hahn had left a few weeks earlier. During 1944 Allied bombs had destroyed a wing of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and reduced his office to rubble. (Among the possessions he most regretted losing were letters from Ernest Rutherford.) He decided to send his team and whatever he could salvage to the small town of Tailfingen in southwest Germany, not far from Heisenberg's evacuated team under Max von Laue at Hechingen. He arrived there himself in late 1944.
Hahn watched uneasily as Allied bomber squadrons passed overhead, but no bombs fell on Tailfingen. In early 1945 he found himself in greater danger from the local Gestapo for trying to shield Frau von Traubenberg, the Jewish physicist wife of one of his team, when, after her husband died suddenly of a stroke, she was arrested. Hahn argued that the woman was vital to what he called "our secret work on uranium" but failed to secure her release. However, she was sent to the Theresienstadt holding camp, where she was given a small room in which to work, and survived the war. Hahn himself was by now under increasing surveillance from the Nazi authorities, to whom he had been denounced as hostile to the Third Reich and who subjected him to harsh interrogations.
Kurt Diebner had dispatched some members of his small, army-sponsored reactor project in Berlin to greater safety, choosing Stadtilm, near Weimar. Yet, like Heisenberg, he had chosen to remain in Berlin to continue working on his reactor model. Neither of their programs had yet yielded significant results and certainly no chain reaction. Paradoxically, Diebner, with the least resources, had made the most progress. The rivals had been experimenting with different configurations of uranium to see which produced more neutrons. Diebner's trials using cubes of natural uranium suspended on wires in heavy water had generated more neutrons than Heisenberg's use of uranium plates. However, still in Berlin with his reactor team, Heisenberg clung stubbornly to his preferred plate design until, admitting defeat at last in late 1944, he ordered the plates to be remade into cubes. But in January 1945, just as he and his team had finished attaching hundreds of cubes of uranium to aluminum wires and submerging them in heavy water, came Gerlach's order to leave. The next day, Diebner also departed, fleeing in a convoy of trucks containing both his own and Heisenberg's equipment.
Despite bombs and the strafing of low-flying Allied fighter planes, Heisenberg reached Hechingen safely, where he lodged directly opposite a house that had once belonged to Einstein's uncle. He was not, however, reunited with his uranium and heavy water until the end of February due to a squabble with Diebner, who had tried to appropriate them for his own experiments at Stadtilm. Heisenberg spent the last weeks of the war reassembling his reactor in a wine cellar cut deep into rocks in the village of Haigerloch near Hechingen. He was joined by von Weizsacker, who, as the Allies advanced, fled from the French city of Strasbourg, where since 1942 he had held the physics chair of a new university set up by the occupying Nazis. In their cave Heisenberg and von Weizsacker managed to generate more neutrons than ever before but, in these desperate, dying days of the war, could still not make their reactor go critical.
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Unaware of the small scale and technical failures of the German fission program, General Groves had long feared that "the Germans would prepare an impenetrable radioactive defense against our landing troops." In late November 1943 he had argued forcefully for a scientific intelligence-gathering unit to be set up and, as usual, got his way. The mission itself, without Groves's prior knowledge, acquired the name "Alsos"—ancient Greek for grove. No one was quite sure how.
Groves chose as the unit's military and administrative leader Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, an FBI-trained security officer whose Russian emigre father was the senior Eastern Orthodox bishop of North America. Partly as a consequence of his background, Pash loathed communists. In 1943 he had investigated Oppenheimer's alleged communist leanings. Oppenheimer had admitted to Pash that he and scientists at Berkeley had been approached by a Berkeley academic acting for the Soviet Union. He refused to reveal the man's name but insisted he had not divulged any information. Unconvinced by Oppenheimer's protestations of innocence, an alarmed Pash had told Groves that Oppenheimer could well be a spy. Only after Pash's departure to Alsos was the matter cleared up. Oppenheimer revealed to Groves that the mysterious academic was Haakon Chevalier, a left-leaning professor of French literature at Berkeley, who had been trying to recuit Oppenheimer's brother Frank to spy for the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer assured Groves that he had advised Frank to have nothing to do with Chevalier.
Sam Goudsmit (in the driver's seat)
Sam Goudsmit, the multilingual theoretical physicist who had left Holland in the 192 os to work in the United States, was appointed head of the Alsos scientific team. As a student in Amsterdam, he had studied scientific techniques for solving crimes. He had no detailed knowledge of the Allied bomb project, so that, as he later wrote, "I was expendable and if I fell into the hands of the Germans they could not hope to get any major bomb secrets out of me." He was also "personally acquainted with many of the European scientists, knew their specialities, and spoke their languages." Werner Heisenberg had been his guest in Ann Arbor in July 1939 during his final visit to the United States before the war.
Since then Heisenberg had, unknown to Goudsmit, been asked to help the latter's elderly Jewish parents. When the Nazis announced the deportation to concentration camps of Holland's Jews, the Dutch physicist Dirk Coster, who had worked so hard to save Lise Meitner, asked Heisenberg to use his influence to aid the Goudsmits. In February 1943 Heisenberg sent Coster a letter for him to show the authorities. It pointed out that the Goudsmits' son was an eminent scientist in the United States and that their fate would attract attention abroad. It also emphasized Goudsmit's supposed admiration for Germany. Heisenberg concluded that he personally "would be very sorry, if for reasons unknown to me" the Goudsmits suffered "any difficulties." However, the letter arrived too late to have any influence.
In March 1943 m America Sam Goudsmit received a note from his parents bearing the address of a Nazi concentration camp. After that he heard no more.
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On 25 August 1944 Boris Pash and an advance team from Alsos entered Paris with the first Allied troops. Dodging rooftop sniper fire, they found Frederic Joliot-Curie safe at the College de France and very grateful to see them. He told Pash he had been afraid for his life. Goudsmit followed two days later. The Frenchman claimed that German scientists had learned nothing of military value during their years working at his college, where, in the last days of the occupation, he had turned his hand to making Molotov cocktails.
By 7 September the Alsos team were in newly liberated Brussels. Pash was shocked to see alleged Nazi collaborators—"haggard and wild-looking" men and women—penned up in the zoo in cages whose original occupants had been destroyed or eaten. Finding their way through the shabby, war-sullied streets to the offices of the Union Miniere, the Alsos team were not surprised to find evidence that most of the company's uranium stockpiled in Belgium had been taken by the Germans in 1940. Searching through the paperwork for clues to where the uranium had gone, Goudsmit found references to a chemist employed by the German Auer Company but based in Paris. Following the trail back to Paris, Goudsmit discovered little about uranium but unearthed papers showing that, shortly before the liberation, the chemist had ordered a large stock of thorium to be sent to Germany. Since the Alsos team knew that thorium could be used to make fissionable material for an atom bomb, as Goudsmit later recalled, "this really scared us." Some weeks later Goudsmit discovered the farcical rather than sinister reasons for spiriting away the thorium. As he later wrote, Auer still had a patent on thoriated toothpaste, as used by James Chadwick, and "were already dreaming of their advertising for the future. 'Us
e toothpaste with thorium! Have sparkling, brilliant teeth—radioactive brilliance!'"
· · ·
While awaiting the moment when the Alsos team could enter the Reich itself, Sam Goudsmit, at last, had the opportunity to visit his childhood home in The Hague. He wrote:
Driving my jeep through the maze of familiar streets . . . I dreamed that I would find my aged parents at home waiting for me just as I had last seen them. . . . The house was still standing but as 1 drew near to it I noticed that all the windows were gone. Parking my jeep round the corner so as to avoid attention, I climbed through one of the empty windows. The place was a shambles. Everything that could possibly be burned had been taken away by the Hollanders themselves to use asfuel that last cold winter of the occupation. . . .
Climbing into the little room where I had spent so many hours of my life, I found a few scattered papers, among them my high-school report cards that my parents had saved so carefully through all these years. . . .As I stood there in that wreck that had once been my home, I was gripped by that shattering emotion all of us have felt who have lostfamily and relatives and friends at the hands of the murderous Nazis—a terrible feeling of guilt. Maybe I could have saved them.. . . Now I weptfor the heavy feeling of guilt in me. I have learned since that mine was an emotion shared by many who lost their nearest and dearest to the Nazis. Alas! My parents were only two among the four million victims taken inflthy, jampacked cattle trains to the concentration camps from which it was never intended they were to return.
The world has always admired the Germans so much for their orderliness. They are so systematic; they have such a sense of correctness. That is why they kept such precise records of their evil deeds, which we laterfound in their proper files in Germany. And that is why I know the precise date my father and my blind mother were put to death in the gas chamber. It was my father's seventieth birthday.
Before the Fallout Page 33
