The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  Freeman sat back and watched Feynman grin. “We can expect a probability of success quite high, then?”

  Feynman never let go of the grin. “I sure believe so—”

  The door opened and General Leslie Groves came in, with staff officers trailing. He was in full dress, not just field cap and khakis. Of course, Karl saw in an instant. This was the big show. Dress up. “You guys got a report for me yet?”

  “You’re here,” was all Karl could manage. I thought you’d stay in the States. . . .

  “Not gonna miss the first test, no sir. Best place for it too—in somebody else’s country.”

  The others around the table just gaped. Karl realized they were all in their twenties, with himself in his early thirties. Groves was maybe in his late forties. The Children’s Nuclear Crusade, he thought.

  Groves towered over the committee table, grinning. “Marshall finally let me get over here. This is gonna be fun! Gentlemen, I expect your summary report tomorrow morning on my desk. Funnel individual reports through Karl here, who will put it all together for me. In print, and in person.”

  After some handshakes and pleasantries, Groves was gone. None of his staff had even spoken. Without him the room seemed somehow smaller. The Los Alamos people and Freeman looked at Karl expectantly. They were waiting for some orders.

  “We have to assemble this gadget—hell, this bomb!—in a few days,” Karl said. “The Brits will carry it, but I know what Groves wants by being here—”

  “We take the credit,” Feynman said.

  “Or the blame,” Reines added.

  3.

  May 7, 1944

  Bomber Harris was overweight and tired. His eyes drooped, and out of his ears grew hair long enough to catch a moth.

  Karl sat with Freeman Dyson at the back of the small auditorium, whispering as high-ranking figures filled in the front. To get in, the two of them had to go through three security checkpoints and show that their briefcases held nothing questionable, like a recorder. Once in, they got thoroughly ignored. Karl said, “Good to be in the back. I’m far out of my depth here.”

  Freeman gave a wry smile. “I, more so. All the planning is going into Overlord—that’s the supposedly secret name for the French landings—and Bomber Command has kept our little gadget away from anyone but the highest officers. Harris met with Eisenhower, Churchill, the rest. Now we get their decision, I suspect.”

  “I hope they looked at everything,” Karl said. “I doubt any use against, say, tank divisions would have a big effect—they don’t bunch up all that much.”

  Dyson said, “And a tank is a good bunker against the shock wave. Aha . . . Note how the birds flock together.” The US Army and Army Air Forces wore khaki in various shades of brown, greenish, and tan: handsome jackets, creased pants, medals polished, shined black shoes, all very trim. They were few and sitting together, while the smart blue uniforms of the Royal Air Force surrounded them. “Nearly no civilians, just us.”

  Karl eyed the audience. There had been incessant talk about how to use the gadget, throughout the team of a few hundred Americans gathered around London. Karl had met with committees, argued in offices, learned to hold his peace in pubs and restaurants. Most of his work here was with the others from Los Alamos, some Columbia people, and Freeman. He eyed Harris and wondered what had come of the weeks of frenetic talk, up at the levels of the English Foreign Office and the American State Department, all under the distant brooding eyes of Roosevelt and Churchill and maybe Stalin. He had not heard that the Soviets knew anything about Little Boy. He doubted that the Allies told them something extra was going to arrive in the French invasion that the world had expected for years. He sighed and shrugged. “I think the right blow, a Berlin bomb and invasion of France at once, could knock the Germans out.”

  Freeman looked skeptical. “All the authorities say otherwise. Or so I gather.”

  “They’re wrong.”

  “They’ve all been knighted.”

  “Then it’s official.”

  This brought an outright laugh from Freeman. The lean, open face grew a thin smile, and there came a tip of the head in acknowledgment.

  Harris rapped his knuckles on the microphone before him, silencing the room. He said, “I thought it useful to assemble all working on this mission, this bombing, which I have named Operation Goal, in the same room. I will now announce the decisions I have made, in counsel with the proper authorities.”

  An expectant rustle. “Operation Goal will occur exactly at the same time as the first invasion phase, the establishment of a secure beachhead, code-named Neptune.” Harris paused, looking around the room, clearly relishing the moment. “Goal will target . . . Berlin.”

  A gasp from the audience. Harris added, “Operation Overlord, the landing of troops, will occur just after we drop it.”

  A thin, tall Royal Air Force officer stood in the front row. “Sir! I should think destroying the political heads of the German state will make it difficult to find anyone to bring about a surrender.” He sat.

  Harris nodded. His gravelly voice rang out, threaded with notes of strain. “I argued so too. But this is a political decision, after all. Winston and Roosevelt believe that as long as Hitler commands them, the government will never give up. I must say they could be right. Brilliant German military figures like Erwin Rommel, Heinz Guderian, or Erich von Manstein are in the field, fighting—not in Berlin. They could come to the fore, if the Nazi politicians are dead. Rommel is the most popular general they have. We do know, also, that their General Staff has long felt hamstrung by Hitler’s constant meddling. Add that to Der Führer’s rigid insistence on outright victory or total defeat.” He sighed heavily. “We are counting on the generals to be true patriots, I suppose.”

  The crowd rustled at the irony of this remark. Then the officer stood again. “But if we eliminate the government, sir—the Nazi Party officials, I mean—there may be a struggle for power, delaying any surrender.”

  Harris nodded to a lieutenant, who rolled down a map of Europe on a display. “They are holding the Soviets in eastern Poland. The Germans fear the Soviets far more than they fear us. Letting the Red Army into eastern Europe is their greatest fear—so I believe they will settle. So does Winston, I might add.”

  Over beers the day before, Freeman had explained to Karl that in the lead-up to the invasion, Harris had been ordered to switch targets for the French railway network. He protested loudly because he felt it compromised the continuing pressure on German industry. “They’re using Bomber Command for a purpose it was not designed or suited for,” Freeman quoted him. Harris tended to see the directives to bomb specific oil and munitions targets as a high-level command “panacea,” his word, and a distraction from the real task of making the rubble bounce in every large German city.

  “Berlin will be more than a bounce,” Karl whispered to Freeman.

  Harris looked out over the crowd, as though envisioning what was to come. “Our Lancaster bomber can carry the Grand Slam blockbuster. That’s our biggest, twenty-two thousand pounds. Your ‘gadget’ bomb will be in that class. We will fly Lancaster escorts all around the central two, the drop plane and the measuring plane. No other operations will occur in that zone, all planes above their ack-ack fire.”

  “Our estimate is about ten thousand pounds, so okay,” Karl whispered.

  Harris went on about coordination details as Freeman listened intently. Then Freeman rose and held up a hand. Harris peered out at him, seeming to be startled to see a civilian in the auditorium. “Yes?”

  “What altitude will the burst have?”

  “I think we will go after the rat in his rat hole,” Harris said. The applause was loud, startling, joyous.

  4.

  May 9, 1944

  As Karl got off the grinding bus that chuffed out a tang of diesel, he saw the big planes nestled like awkward animals among English farms and villages. Here was the airfield where the gadget would get assembled and flown off to its
target. Only two hours by train and bus ride from London, the countryside lush and sweet. He carried his suitcases beside Freeman as they walked among slow old men of the ground crew, doing cleanup and garbage disposal. Among their gray old heads, their hard and bone-bare domes, with liver-spotted ears, in shirts with collarless necks, he felt young and therefore vulnerable.

  Freeman observed the buzzing landing strips with an expression of wonder. “I’ve been doing the maths for all this, yet never seen the real, working thing.”

  Except for the long ride across the Atlantic, Karl hadn’t seen warplanes either. The Lancaster bombers seemed like immense, noisy birds, tended by insect-size crews attaching hoses, peering into the bellies with repair tools, guiding arrays of bombs out to the loading zones. They moved everywhere. From the flight line, engines purred as their props spun down. Others jockeyed for position as a formation buzzed into their places, shutting down with a flutter of coughs, then the crews getting out to smoke and jaw and move gear. This ferment stretched for a kilometer or more, a slow seethe dwindling away into the moist air, in air spiced with irritating fuel.

  Freeman said with a reflective air, “I calculated that a crew member on a British bomber had a lower life expectancy than an infantryman in World War I. For every bomber shot down, six crash in accidents. Usually the crew dies.”

  This bald fact made Karl look askance at the big war posters urging on the RAF. Obviously, these men needed morale boosters. In this war the flyboys were the most admired, even though it seemed to Karl the infantry fought in harder conditions.

  For the Operation Goal staging, the Royal Air Force had decided to use an RAF base north of London. They reserved fenced-off space for Operation Goal, staked out an area for bomb assembly buildings, and dug the loading pits. There were wooden warehouses and administration buildings, all war-worn and shabby from constant use.

  The Goal team each got what was, for the Royal Air Force, special treatment. Karl had a narrow room with a cot and wall pegs to hang clothes. A sergeant rounded up some clothes hangers, though. This was in a dull tin Quonset hut with a few rooms like his and the rest open cots in two rows. His room even had the luxury of a pine table smelling of turpentine and a bare bulb over it.

  His carry bag had toothpaste and a towel. Experience in the open barracks in London had taught him to carry it close at hand. There was a latrine not far away, and the mess hall was half a mile along the edge of the flight zone. Windows were blacked out but easily raised during the day to save on electric power for lights. By the time he and Freeman got squared away, twilight had settled and they went outside, both interested in the buzzing bustle from the night-flight squadrons assembling. A silhouette loomed, an American Jeep grinding along with maybe a dozen people on it, some on the hood, with the view clear only for the driver.

  “Going to the mess?” Karl called, and a voice answered, “Hop on.”

  They ran awkwardly along beside the slow Jeep, Karl not seeing how he could get on without knocking someone off. The Jeep stopped and an Irish accent said, “Come on now, you guys in those classified Quonsets. Green to our methods, I heard. Sit in the back, eh?”

  The men who clambered out of the rear seats were young and swore in accents both Australian and Canadian. They found a few inches on the mudguard, shoving, and the Jeep ground on. Karl felt odd to be privileged by these men who risked their lives every day, quite likely. They laughed merrily as the Jeep lumbered along the cinder path and planes taxied nearby, their choppy coughs seeming like mechanical laughter too.

  They piled out and lined up for the cafeteria, which featured some mystery meat and mashed potatoes in cream. Karl took some of the buttered rutabaga and wrinkled his nose at it, wondering if the coffee here would help his digestion cut through the meat, showing thick veins of fat and reeking of fried oil. There were omelets of powdered eggs and bacon that was all rind and grease, for those crews just getting up. The “American Mess” for Yanks had real ground coffee in tins and tinned butter, while the English had “national butter” that was mostly margarine. So Karl kept quiet.

  Still, by the time he and Freeman got to a table where a hand waved above the bobbing heads, he was hungry. Luis Alvarez was there with Feynman and Reines. Luis had a shiny brown quilted flight suit with him, slung across his lap in a jaunty way as he grinned. As Karl sipped the metallic coffee, Luis told them the latest hearsay about the invasion. It seemed Churchill wanted to go ashore in person, as soon as a few kilometers of perimeter were stable. Feynman said, “Dumb! The Germans will concentrate over the beach and hit anything coming ashore that’s escorted.”

  Reines said, “Brilliant, then. We send nothing like that and the light bombers keep their bombs ready, while we get to shoot at them at short range. Our ack-acks and .30 calibers can hammer them while they’re searching for a Churchill who isn’t there.”

  This was like much of the incessant gossip currents swirling around the invasion, possible and maybe real, but with no plausible way to tell. The scientists and engineers Karl worked with had no particular expertise, and of course speculated endlessly, but he soon realized it was much like the sports talk he had always ignored. None of them actually played the game, did they? They weren’t strategists. But here, that wasn’t quite true. Pilots and flight engineers knew the war firsthand. Maybe that gave them some insights, maybe not.

  The physicists and engineers didn’t have any special knowledge, though. Best to stick to what he knew—a narrow alleyway, but perhaps, if they played this right, decisive.

  5.

  May 13, 1944

  Feynman wasn’t in charge of the bomb assembly crew, Karl was—but he asked the right questions. “This is a huge cylinder. Big, ungainly thing. Falls from four miles up, say. How good are the bomb avionics? Accurate to what radius?”

  “Good question.” Karl rose to answer this. In any tech meeting, he now knew he would take some peppered questions from the Los Alamos guys, and he was ready for them, with slides and documents he had gathered through the last weeks before coming here. Dealing with these guys was like a PhD exam every hour, and he felt like the student. Maybe not now, though; he knew the subject well.

  In March, which seemed a long time past, Groves had brought him into the very end of the twenty-month-long testing about bomb dynamics. “I need one of my own guys to look over their work,” Groves explained in New York, before sending him all the way to the West Coast on an army Douglas airplane, filled with officers sporting lots of brass, clearly wondering why Karl was among them.

  All the bomb-drop work had been utterly unknown to the nuclear people. The classification bulwarks had kept parts of the Manhattan Project isolated, creating delays and errors. Avionics was another province of engineering no one he knew had even a nodding acquaintance with.

  When Groves gave his gruff orders, Karl had been quick to correct that. He used the methods he had learned since those distant days when he worked for Urey and was shy about even speaking to the Nobel winners. Now he knew that it was far better to find a savvy someone and ask them questions. That worked faster than plowing through the thick, already a bit moldy mimeographed reports that stood feet deep, when he asked a classification librarian for some basic background. When at first Urey had told him to check a number or detail from those mimeoed masses, he would look at them, and a particular drawing would bring memory flooding back. It was like a madeleine from that Proust novel he had tried to read, to go along with Marthe’s urging that he strengthen his French—and kept falling asleep over. The memos had a similar effect.

  The Army Air Forces had been testing proxies for the bomb for many months, dropping them onto Muroc Dry Lake in California. Karl passed around photos of big bombs buried in sand. “We checked the fusing gear, stability, ballistic characteristics.” Then he went to the blackboard and started drawing, talking, calculating. Feynman sat back and yawned. Freeman was next to him and stared attentively at Karl’s sketches.

  Karl decided not to tell the
m of the myriad troubles the Muroc team had. At first they used the aiming mechanism of a machine gun to track the falling bomb. It fell hundreds of yards from the bull’s-eye. Once the truck carrying the camera mount got stuck in sand near the middle of the target range. The driver decided to let the drop go on anyway, figuring that they had never gotten close. He was right, but not by more than a hundred yards. Those photos, sighting straight up, showed that the tail fins crumpled under the slipstream pressure, so bombs tumbled.

  “Ah, so that’s how you Americans discovered the cause of our inaccuracies,” Freeman said. “I heard of this, but not the source. Brilliant.”

  Karl was grateful for any positive comments. “The Muroc guys did test drops every day for months. The target area was extra hard, to avoid having to dig the concrete-filled dummies from many feet belowground. It was a major engineering job, with earth movers to get them out. We needed to know the true air speed and time of fall. They measured rotation, yaw, striking velocity. All this was to judge how accurately we could hit from twenty thousand feet. Also, to tell us how much time the Lancaster would have to make its escape.”

  “How’s it go off?” Feynman asked in his Brooklyn accent.

  “The fuse was—and will be—a radar-prompter. It closes a relay at the most destructive height.”

  Feynman leaned back and put his feet up on the battered oak table they clustered around. “This guy I worked for, Oppenheimer, he has a team that worked out the optimum. Their calculation says the most destructive altitude is five hundred eighty meters, about nineteen hundred feet.”

  Freeman turned politely. “Are they with you? If I could speak with—”

  “Nah, they’re in Los Alamos. Now they’re trying to figure out how to make a plutonium bomb.” Feynman sniffed skeptically. “They haven’t got more than a gram or two of plutonium so far, made in our reactors out in Washington. In a year or two they might have something that works.”