The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  Karl shook his head. “They must have assumed buildings of wood. There aren’t many in central Berlin.”

  “So a high air blast isn’t the best?” Reines looked surprised.

  “Not if the guy you want is under twenty meters of dirt, steel, and concrete,” Karl said.

  • • •

  General Groves said, “You guys get the benefit of having me make your case. I’ve been keeping this little army of prima donnas working harmoniously together for years. Now I can pitch for you. You did it! We’ve got Little Boy. Now you get to deliver the goods.”

  Karl did not like the idea of “delivering” anything himself, but it was impossible not to get swept forward by the tsunami of the French invasion. Back to the heart of Europe!—in a landing the Soviets had wanted since 1941. He could feel it in the airmen around them, a surging sense that this was the end of a terrible long suffering.

  There were just a few men in the room to hear Groves, who liked to keep things simple. He could control small meetings easier. Freeman opened mildly with his quite English, even-toned, polite phrasing. “I am given to understand that you have arranged a solution to the escort issue—”

  “Right!” Groves snapped out. “It’s the P-51 Mustang, a great long-range fighter. An American body and a British Rolls-Royce engine, all souped up even further now, by our teams. It’ll fly fast as a bat outta hell, get there to clear the sky ahead of you. Help out the Brit Lancasters, who’ll confuse the Kraut fighters too.”

  Groves loved to lecture, giving orders in short jabs. An American, Captain Paul Tibbets, would fly the bomb plane, with some Royal Air Force crew included. Usually the United States flew day raids and the British night raids, so this would be a mostly Brit crew, with the American Bill Parsons arming the bomb once they were on the approach. “You scientist guys, you’ll handle the dangerous or complicated tasks. “We can’t risk having Little Boy totally in the hands of the Brits, y’know.” A wink.

  “Our air force team shipped multiple parts for the gun assembly on different flights, so we have backups. The U-235 came separately too, on several flights. On my orders, all crates carried the code name Silverplate, which commands instant cooperation from all military personnel. You get trouble from any Brits, you tell ’em Silverplate, that’s the code.”

  Feynman leaned forward in his seat. “How’re we gonna deal with the radioactive fallout from this ground pounder?”

  Groves blinked. “I saw a report on that—”

  “It’ll shoot out a lot of fast decay isotopes, made from the dirt by the warhead itself. I’ve got a list. Where it goes depends on the wind.”

  Groves smiled. “You’re Los Alamos, right? You guys keep track for me.”

  Feynman nodded. “I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.”

  Even Groves laughed at this, though it took a visible effort. “Okay, we’ll look at where the dirty fallout lands.”

  May 17, 1944

  Karl learned that the Brits termed the rushed, hot-eyed fervor of these days a “ratfuck”—which meant a rat race, all bollixed up.

  The airfield sent squadrons of bombers out around the clock, hammering the Germans in France. This might help draw their fighters into the French coast and away from Berlin, but nobody knew the German mind-set on this.

  He walked out with Luis Alvarez on the next of the test flights of the following plane, which would drop the shock detectors by parachutes and take the photos. Luis wore a flying suit over GI pants, a tatty brown sweater, and his leather combat jacket. Karl took his picture for, as Luis said, “History, my parents, and my girlfriend back home.”

  The Lancaster took off on an easy glide. Groves insisted on some trial drops from the actual airplane, not the B-17s used Stateside that Karl had watched. The Little Boy pre-assemblies were designated L-1, L-2, and so on. They had big guidance fins, getting laughs from the Brit loading crews. “What, you want these to fly?” one of them yelled. No Americans answered these jests, because that would lead to talk about what was so special about this bomb.

  Most of his time got eaten up with details. The Los Alamos team was carefully assembling Little Boy, meticulous work, with Parsons in charge. The machined U-235 parts had to be fitted into the assembly, then the shaped charge explosives packed firmly into a frame. Checked and rechecked, then the whole thing had to be made rock solid, so vibrations and the buffeting during the fall would not misalign the firing.

  Through several days he had seen Luis take off to test-drop L-3, L-4, L-5, getting the guidance right. These fell into open pastures. Nobody in the RAF had ever done many test drops, and certainly not from nearly thirty thousand feet, which no bomber could reach until recently. The results now were better, with the newest, larger avionic fins; the crew Luis went with could hit the bull’s-eye within a hundred meters. “Good enough to blow old Adolf to atoms,” Luis said. “That’s why we should keep the A-bomb name.”

  “Atom bomb?” Karl asked.

  “Adolf bomb.”

  • • •

  The drop sequence was in good shape, so Luis could turn to getting the shock-wave detectors launched from the following airplane, and the auto-cameras. Karl saw right away that the man was a quick problem solver, catching snags and hitches nobody had thought of. The Brit and American techs held him in awe.

  Luis had worked on the “drop diagnostics” back at Los Alamos with some air force engineers. He had packed the boxy detectors in a frame that dropped them on parachutes, out the bomb bay. He even arranged to drop a small bomb below the test rig, to register a shock on the oscilloscopes back onboard, sent by small radio transmitters. Nobody had even done this sort of engineering before, since nobody cared what a bomb did far below; they couldn’t detect it.

  Then, on a run to checked the designed system, the takeoff failed. It turned out later that some thick oil had gotten into the Lancaster’s fuel lines, due to a mistake in the fueling routine. Karl was walking to the assembly bay to see how the Little Boy assembly tests were going, when in the distance the Lancaster took off. Its motors choked, stalled—and the plane nosed over. He watched it slam into the ground with a dull thump, about a mile or two out from the end of the runway. Everybody started running.

  No fireball, at least, Karl thought as he rode on the ambulance that wailed out to the wreck. The Lancaster’s entire nose was crumpled in, the wings snapped, the belly slit open as if by a knife. The pilot and navigator, both Brits, were dead. The medics got to them first, but Karl leaped off the rear bumper of the ambulance and ran to the midsection. The bomb bay was splayed out across a cow pasture like broken metal teeth. He got in through the busted loader. Inside was a mash of broken struts and gear. He found Luis unconscious on the deck. Shallow breaths whooshed in and out of his mouth, and his heartbeat was firm, but Karl could not get any other sign of life from him.

  It took him time to get out and find a medic among those dealing with the forward crew—who were dead too. Karl got one to come back in with him. The medic waved Karl away. “No bad bleeding. Knocked out. Looks like his leg’s messed up.”

  Karl helped get the limp body out and down. Then the stretcher guys carried Luis away, and Karl watched the ambulance drive off, five corpses on the roof. There were no other survivors.

  By then lots of people were around the site. The Brit damage team already had the problem isolated. “Damn crappy petrol!” one of them said, followed by some curses Karl had never heard before, and some he could not even understand. Obviously, he was not as sophisticated as he thought.

  • • •

  The next day Karl got in to see Luis, who was sipping some of the watery “orange juice” the RAF had in their mess. He was bitching about his broken ankle, and also the food, but that was nothing new.

  Karl told him a joke going around, supposedly from a German prisoner. Wehrmacht soldiers said, “If the plane in the sky is silver, it’s American; if it’s blue, it’s British; if it’s invisible, it’s ours
!”

  Luis laughed. “Hell of it is, I’m out of the action. No time to get this busted ankle to heal.”

  “Yeah, tough luck,” Karl said, not really thinking that at all.

  6.

  Freeman stood at the blackboard, his first time speaking to both American and Brit brass about his own expertise. The Los Alamos guys were there, including Luis on crutches, fulfilling the role Groves had assigned them: sitting in skeptical judgment on every aspect of Operation Goal, the Berlin bombing.

  The larger crowd was the true audience, hearing the mission plan in detail. Freeman looked calm and even graciously nodded to the RAF generals and particularly to General Groves, sitting in the back of the briefing room, as always. “I have all the Bomber Command statistics, gentlemen. I found that we could substantially reduce losses by ripping out two gun turrets, with all their associated hardware, from each bomber. That reduces each crew from seven to five. The gun turrets were costly in aerodynamic drag, as well as in weight. The turretless bombers will fly fifty miles an hour faster, the aircraft johnnies say. So—we do that, the Lancasters will spend much less time over Germany. Particularly, over Berlin.”

  An RAF general sniffed through a thick mustache. “What about defense? You’ll have none.”

  “I confess I had this idea several months ago, when I heard of the Yank ‘gadget.’ So I prevailed upon General Harris to try an experiment—a squadron of bombers with no turrets. The evidence of that experience was clear. That the squadron did not show more losses confirmed that the turrets were useless.”

  The RAF general said loudly, “You’re giving them no hope of getting those damn fighters off them!”

  Freeman nodded sympathetically and said softly, “The turrets did not save bombers, because the gunners rarely saw the fighters that killed them.”

  The RAF general said in a bark, “So our boys should go to Berlin, with this supposedly big bomb, unable to defend themselves?”

  Freeman drew himself up. “I realize this goes against the official mythology of the gallant gunners defending their crewmates. But the better answer is to strip the turrets from the delivery plane and its following plane, the diagnostic one. Send the slower planes ahead, and the true bomber then catches up at higher speed.”

  From the back Groves rose and said, “As commander of this bomb-building campaign, which has lasted years now, I support this idea. The less time over the target, the safer they are.”

  As he spoke, Groves strode to the front, beside Freeman. He scowled, sweeping the room with his steady gaze. “I’ll dismiss my men now, so we can talk war without the civilians.”

  Karl left with the others, oddly elated. He wasn’t going on the mission, so perhaps Groves would be agreeable to his returning to New York, out of all this. The landing in France was now a matter of weather, and certain to come within a week. Little Boy would neatly shut down the Germans. He could be home for summer. To see his girls.

  • • •

  He went into Groves’s office after the big meeting, to report on details of the Little Boy assembly. The general waved him into a chair. “Nearly done getting it together, right?”

  “Yes, a few more—”

  “Great work, ahead of schedule even. But sit down, got a problem.”

  Something about Groves’s voice he didn’t like.

  Groves got up with a sigh. “It’s Luis.”

  Groves came around his battered oak desk, leaned back against it, folded his arms. Karl recognized this posture, from seeing Groves use it along with his commanding voice. “I want you to take over for him.”

  “Huh? That’s a combat job. I don’t—”

  “Look, it’s a physics job. Something goes wrong, you’ll be there to fix it. No GI can do that.”

  “There’s no time to train, no—”

  “Same time as anybody would have. You know this gear as well as anybody we got. The shock-wave recorders, the photo rig to measure the light from the fireball.”

  “It was a stretch for me to even supervise the Los Alamos team, assembling Little Boy. You can’t—”

  “But I can, Karl. Think! This is our bomb, but we’re flying it in a Brit plane, from England. I want the core crew, like Tibbets, to be ours.”

  “I don’t have any exper—”

  “I want it so the whole damn world is gonna know it’s our bomb, our guys were in at the delivery, and it won the war. See?”

  Karl opened his mouth and then saw there was no way out of this. So he shut it.

  • • •

  He wondered for two days how he would tell Marthe about this. Venturing into actual combat, in a bomber, had never been on the agenda. She worried, naturally, about him even being in a war zone. Then the obvious dawned: he couldn’t tell her about it. Their letters were intercepted, so no hint of real war news could go through. It was a relief.

  The training was not hard, really. The Lancaster was fairly roomy, with its rectangular fuselage, and its mid-set wing and twin tail fins and rudders had a jaunty air. So did the ground crews. Karl liked working with men who used their hands and knew that this was even more important than the other bomber flights roaring off this field. The Germans had slammed them hard for five years now, and payback was a taste they liked to savor.

  He liked the blunt way they spoke, too. A squat, broad-shouldered pilot took an order, nodded, and later observed, “Yeah, royal cock-up, innit.” And when Karl discussed their fighter escorts, the pilot said, “The Heinie fighters stay down, thin on petrol they are—unless there’re good pickings, lower than we’ll be going. Those wankers get stroppy if ordered to go high, where it’s hard to see at night. The tossers will have to find us in the dark at more than four miles up, with not much city glow these days, on blackout. We’ll be chuffed to deliver the good news to Adolf, awright.”

  He let himself be lured out to a pub, to relieve the pressure mounting as the invasion approached. It felt odd to sit sipping lukewarm, tasty beer—a vast improvement on the bland, carbonated American product—and realize that those speculating on the coming brawl on the continent had no idea it was a one-two punch. The most apt statement he heard was, “Just because the newspapers say so, doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  The tiny language differences—like Luis using “smart” to mean intelligent, when to Freeman “smart” meant well dressed—caused amusing confusions, when well lubricated with beer. Pub music was less pleasant. He mildly enjoyed “Take the A Train” and hated “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”—both of which seemed to blare from every radio he passed.

  But one night, in the mess hall after a trial run of the diagnostic gear, a pilot next to Karl said casually, “We’re nutters to do this, y’know. You’re here one minute, then it’s a dirt bath the next.” Karl wondered if he was right.

  Little Boy

  • • •

  Groves held a little ceremony when the bomb was fully done, tested, ready in a loading pit. After he got through with a speech, Feynman said, “Gotta wonder how we did it, don’tcha? In three years, too.” He gave a lighthearted sigh. “Work is much more fun than so-called fun.”

  Groves even had champagne for the occasion. The scientists and flight crews crowded around the tables for a glass or two; it ran out fast. Freeman was in the small group, just in from London. He had been working with Bomber Command to coordinate the drop. It had to occur hours before the invasion, when the Mustang fighter planes were most needed over the beaches.

  “The Mustang groups will go in well before the strike bombers,” Freeman said, “in a fighter sweep—what we call an early supremacy action. We’ll nail them before they get their damned Gefechtsverband battle formations set up. I had to look that one up—means ‘task force.’ ”

  The Mustangs were American, more of Groves putting a firm American stamp on the operation. They would make systematic strafing attacks, using “Clobber College” graduates fresh in from the States and the new 150 octane fuel.

  At times i
t seemed there was too much coming at Karl now, quicker than he could handle.

  • • •

  Karl noticed that these days Groves wore his full dress uniform, with all medals showing. The general came around his desk, shook hands. “I hear you’re all trained on the detection flight. Good. Now read this.”

  It was a photocopy of a letter from Teller to Szilard.

  I have spoken to Oppenheimer here at Los Alamos—all letters are read, of course, and he got yours before I did. . . . I am not really convinced of your objections. I do not feel that there is any chance to outlaw any one weapon. If we have a slim chance of survival, it lies in the possibility to get rid of wars. The more decisive a weapon is the more surely it will be used in any real conflict and no agreements will help.

  Once again, our only hope is in getting the facts of our results before the people.

  Karl nodded. “More hand-wringing. Heard it before. So what?”

  “This, too.” Another sheet.

  Recommendations on the Immediate Use of Nuclear Weapons

  Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee

  “Here’s the main part of their report. General Marshall sent it.”

  You have asked us to comment on the initial use of the new weapon. This use, in our opinion, should be such as to promote a satisfactory adjustment of our international relations. At the same time, we recognize our obligation to our nation to use the weapons to help save American lives.

  (1) To accomplish these ends we recommend that before the weapons are used not only Britain, but also Russia, France, and China be advised that we have made considerable progress in our work on atomic weapons that these may be ready to use during the present war, and that we would welcome suggestions as to how we can cooperate in making this development contribute to improved international relations.