“My U-boat men,” he said. “Six years of U-boat warfare lie behind us. You have fought like lions. A crushing superiority has compressed us into a narrow area. The continuation of the struggle is impossible from the bases that remain. U-boat men, unbroken in your war-like courage, you are laying down your arms after a heroic fight which knows no equal.”
Several members of the U-boat crew argued for ignoring the order and hiding out in Argentina or on an island in the South Pacific, using their military cargo as something to trade for food and new clothing. Captain Fehler saw things differently. The sub would be considered a pirate vessel if he did not surrender it at the first opportunity. But to whom? Russia was out of the question. The Red Army was known to be vengeful for all the misery it had suffered at Hitler’s hands; its cruelty to surrendering troops was already legendary. Britain was also rejected, due to the ferocious blitz bombings it had suffered earlier in the war and the suspicion that the British would turn submarine POWs over to the French. The United States was seen as the best choice. It had no long history of militarism, and its soil had been unsullied by German bombing.
Fehler changed his course and started heading west across the North Atlantic. This decision did not sit well with the two Japanese officers, for whom surrender was considered a great dishonor. The war may have been over for the Germans, but it was not for them. Emperor Hirohito had not given the order to quit, and the homeland was still under attack. Shoji and Tomonaga each took an overdose of sleeping pills and died quietly in their bunks, family photographs at their side. Their German companions did not interfere with their hara-kiri (“It was their right,” one reasoned) and buried them at sea.
On May 12, after radioing a set of false positions to the Canadians, Fehler’s submarine officially surrendered to the USS Sutton and was boarded by a squad of soldiers, many of whom were amazed to see a German U-boat up close. The vessel, its crew, and all of its contents arrived at the Portsmouth Naval Yard on May 19. Newsreel photographers filmed the crew being escorted off the giant submarine, with General Kessler getting most of the attention on account of his iconic Prussian bearing, complete with monocle, Iron Cross, and long leather coat.
Fehler protested the media circus around the gangplank, and a U.S. Navy captain showboated in front of the newsreel cameras by yelling at the “Nazi gangsters” to “get off my ship!” The crew was taken away to prison cells for interrogation. Almost immediately, the submarine watch officer, Karl Pfaff, revealed what he knew about the uranium, which he believed to be “highly radioactive.”
After hearing of this, the Office of Naval Intelligence radioed an order to Portsmouth on May 27: “Uranium oxide loaded in gold-lined cylinders and as long as cylinders not opened can be handled like crude TNT. These containers should not be opened as substance will become sensitive and dangerous.” The shipment was apparently taken off the ship without incident. A translated version of the official manifest shows “560.0 [kilograms] uranium oxide, Jap Army” among the contents. The containers were shipped to a navy lab at Indian Head, Maryland, for testing, and Pfaff later acknowledged he was on hand to help American crews safely open the containers with blowtorches.
At that point, the uranium disappeared from the record. A curtain of secrecy descended, and the navy issued no further documents about the cargo. The transcript of the radio call to Portsmouth marks the end of the paper trail.
What happened to Germany’s twilight shipment of uranium? There is no definitive consensus among historians of World War II who are familiar with the incident, but one logical outcome seems to be that it was delivered to the Manhattan Project for use in weapons development. There would have been no other use for such cargo, particularly at a time when America’s atomic effort was scrambling for every last crumb of the element it could find. Physicists had discovered just two months earlier that they would need even more of it than forecast—up to 110 pounds—to achieve the necessary yield in the first blast. General Leslie Groves would have certainly been notified by U.S. Navy officials once the submarine cargo’s true nature was discovered. His voracious appetite for uranium would have made storage or destruction an unlikely possibility. The unexplained information blackout after May 29 also bears the marks of his characteristic insistence upon secrecy at every level.
A possibility thus hangs over the uranium cargo: It may have become part of the bomb detonated over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and thus Japan would have eventually received its uranium, albeit three months late and in a different form.
In 1995, the chief of security for the Manhattan Project came forward and acknowledged that he had indeed ordered the uranium to be delivered for use in an atomic weapon.
John D. Lansdale was a native of California and a graduate of Harvard Law School. He had been working as an attorney in Cleveland at the outbreak of the war, when he joined the U.S. Army as an officer. Groves eventually chose him to be the head of security and intelligence for the Manhattan Project, and Lansdale spent much of the war trying to determine the extent of the German bomb program. He also gave security clearances for top personnel, including Paul Tibbets, the Army Air Corps pilot chosen to fly the B-29 that would drop the first bomb on Japan. When the Nazi submarine was escorted into New Hampshire, Lansdale said he became the man in charge of disposing of its unexpected gift of uranium oxide. There was no doubt in his mind as to what happened to it.
“It went to the Manhattan District,” he told William J. Broad of the New York Times. “It certainly went into the Manhattan District supply of uranium.”
Lansdale could provide no documentation to support his claim, but he elaborated further in a videotaped interview given to a documentary filmmaker shortly before his death in 2003. He was in frail health at the time, and barely audible at points, but he was unequivocal about what had happened to the cargo.
“When I heard about the uranium aboard the German submarine, I got very excited because I knew we needed it all,” he said. “I made arrangements with my staff to retrieve and test the material. I sent trucks to Portsmouth to unload the uranium and then I sent it to Washington. After the uranium was inspected in Washington, it was sent to Clinton. . . . The submarine was a godsend because it came at the right place at the right time.”
By “Washington,” Lansdale was likely referring to the U.S. Navy Ordnance Investigation Laboratory at Indian Head, Maryland, where Pfaff had helped unseal the containers. “Clinton” is a clear reference to the Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. If the uranium had been shipped by mid-June, there would have been ample time for technicians to process it into components that made up the world’s first atomic bomb.
But a brief note in Leslie Groves’s administrative diary on August 13, 1945, seems to suggest that while the German uranium was indeed sent to the complex at Oak Ridge, it never made it into the Hiroshima bomb, which had been exploded seven days earlier. The entry for 10:33 a.m., typed by Groves’s secretary, summarized the contents of a telephone call from a top navy officer: “Admiral Edwards just called to ascertain if the material we got from the German submarines was of any use to the program. General advised it wasn’t of any help as yet, but that it would be utilized.” As a compulsive micromanager, Groves certainly would have had knowledge of such a detail, and he would have had no known motivation to hide the truth from a U.S. Navy admiral during a secure phone call.
Though he had no knowledge of the ultimate fate of the Nazi uranium, the Manhattan Project physicist Hans Bethe believed that nobody would have objected if it had been put into the production stream for the Hiroshima weapon. The race to build America’s bomb was closely linked with the hunger for its basic material.
“We wouldn’t care where the uranium had come from,” he said. “We wanted all we could get.”
The scientific laboratory of the Manhattan Project was the campus of a boys’ school in the mountains of northern New Mexico. It was in the midst of the favorite horseback-riding country of the head of the scientific tea
m, thirty-eight-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had grown up in a privileged household on New York City’s Riverside Drive. He was a self-described “unctuous, repulsively good little boy” who went on to teach physics at the University of California at Berkeley. “Oppie,” as he was known, was lanky and blue-eyed, with a taste for martinis, cigarettes, and spicy food. He could be callous to men he considered lesser than he, but he harbored delicate passions: Renaissance poetry, Eastern mystical religions, and the yawning beauty of the deserts. His first words upon hearing of the discovery of uranium fission in January 1939 had been “That’s impossible!” But within the afternoon, he had grasped the possibilities and agreed that such an event would have enormous capabilities. Within the week, a crude sketch of a bomb was on his blackboard.
He and General Groves recognized something in each other—a supreme competence—but clashed on some of the details of exactly how the best scientific minds in the world would be assembled in a remote location and set to work on the mechanics of the atomic bomb. Groves was not shy about sharing his opinion of the physicists under his command. He thought they were mostly “crackpots” and “prima donnas” (and he harbored an intense dislike of the unruly Leo Szilard), but he agreed to purchase the campus of the defunct Los Alamos Ranch School on top of a piney mesa to keep his scientific chief happy. “I am the impresario of a two-billion-dollar opera with thousands of temperamental stars,” he liked to brag. Oppenheimer managed to talk him out of making all the scientists wear military uniforms, as well as a daily bugle drill in which everyone—Nobel laureates and all—would have been roused at dawn to scan the skies for enemy parachutists.
A small army-built city with laboratories, a mess hall, a movie theater, and apartments rose on the mesa. Some local Zuni Indians were hired for construction tasks, inspiring curiosity among some of the foreign-born contingent of academics who staffed Los Alamos. “There they were, the oldest peoples of America, conservative, unchanged, barely touched by our industrial civilization, working on a project with an object so radical that it would be hailed as initiating a new age,” recalled the wife of one scientist.
All the mail was sent to a catchall address—PO Box 1663—and residents were strictly cautioned against telling their relatives exactly where the army had relocated them. “A whole social world existed in nowhere in which people were married and babies were born nowhere,” noted one observer. The patriotic sensibilities of the times meant that the locals asked few questions about the explosions echoing off the canyon walls. They were really tests of the conventional dynamite needed to trigger atomic fission in a plutonium bomb, but the general assumption was that Los Alamos must be a secret munitions plant or a factory for poison gas. When Thomas Raper, a vacationing reporter from the Cleveland Press, showed up at the gates to do a story, he was firmly turned away by the guards. But it did not stop him from assembling a pastiche of local rumor under the headline FORBIDDEN City once he returned to Ohio. He wrote, “The Mr. Big of the city is a college professor, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, called ‘the Second Einstein’ by the newspapers of the west coast.” Groves reacted with his usual asperity and made inquiries about having the reporter drafted for military service in the Pacific. He gave up when he learned that Raper was almost a senior citizen.
An office on the plaza in Santa Fe was a discreet welcome center for the professors who stepped off the Super Chief streamliner, blinking in the bright sunshine at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Among them was Otto Frisch, the Bach-whistling physicist who had sat on a log in Sweden and drawn the first pencil sketches of uranium shattering when hit by a neutron. He had also been instrumental in helping the British untangle the problem of separating U-235. Now he was given the opportunity to see his vision through to its inevitable violent end. Frisch had taken the ocean liner Andes over from Liverpool. Before boarding a westbound train in Virginia, the sight of a pile of oranges in a farmers’ market sent him into a fit of laughter. He had not seen such fresh fruit for several years. Once he arrived in New Mexico, he could not contain his awe at being “among steep-walled canyons, accessible only by one rutted road; as isolated a place as one could wish for the most secret military establishment in the U.S.A.” He received the customary greeting from J. Robert Oppenheimer: “Welcome to Los Alamos, who the devil are you?”
Most of those who arrived before Frisch had been welcomed with a series of blackboard lectures from one of Oppenheimer’s favorite colleagues from Berkeley, Robert Serber, who laid out the task everyone faced in a series of chalked equations. The lectures were classified for years afterward, though they were legendary among those who heard them. Serber’s opening words were the thesis of the entire Manhattan Project, and the culmination of an era in physics that had begun when a chemist accidentally left his uranium-coated photographic plates inside a drawer on a cloudy day in Paris.
“The object of the project,” Serber began, “is to produce a potential military weapon in the form of a bomb in which energy is released by a fast neutron chain reaction in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear fission.”
In other words, the point4 was to vaporize Japanese lives and cities with uranium. In the midst of the lecture, Serber was passed a note asking him to please refrain from using the word bomb. He instead should use the more innocuous gadget. This would become the accepted Los Alamos euphemism.
The simplest way to build this gadget, Serber went on, was to machine-craft two different assemblies of pure uranium metal and then slam them together with great force. Within a fraction of a second, the scattering neutrons would trigger a chain reaction, ripping apart all at once. Adding a reflective tamper shield around the uranium would bounce the escaping neutrons back into the swarming beehive of the ultrahot core and boost the explosive power of the device. It would also decrease the likelihood of a fizzle and allow the team to get away with using less uranium, which was in preciously short supply. Serber included a crude sketch of a uranium metal slug being fired with a mini cannon into the curved receptacle of a receiving piece of uranium, as a penis enters a vagina. In the usual mechanic’s vernacular, the convexity was termed the “male” part of the device, and the concavity the “female.” (This is the most basic architecture of an atomic bomb, and the type of design experts say would most likely be used in a terrorist attack today.)
Otto Frisch started experimenting with assemblies of uranium that came within a hairsbreadth of becoming critical. He rigged up a small tower that looked like an oil derrick and dropped a precisely measured plug of uranium down a central shaft so that it would slide briefly through a block of uranium with a corresponding hole cut in the middle, much as a firefighter passes through a hole sawed in the floor as he slides down a brass pole. The idea was to measure the neutrons that poured outward in the split second before gravity pulled the slug through the gap. The temperature rose several degrees in the room with each drop. The sardonic twenty-six-year-old physicist Richard Feynman likened this exercise to “tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon,” and it became known on the mesa as the dragon experiment, or the guillotine. A vital exercise, but one that could have turned Los Alamos into a smoking ruin.
“Of course,” said Frisch, “they quizzed me what would happen if the plug got stuck in the hole, but I managed to convince everybody that the elaborate precautions, including smooth guides and careful checks on the speed of each drop, would ensure complete safety. It was as near as we could possibly go towards starting an atomic explosion without actually being blown up, and the results were most satisfactory.” As it turned out, the basic design of his dragon was a mimic of the gadget eventually dropped on Hiroshima.
But another of his experiments almost went horribly wrong. Frisch had been stacking blocks of enriched uranium without a reflective assembly—they were “naked,” and so he called this the Lady Godiva experiment—when he leaned over the bricks to holler an order to a nearby graduate student. The red light on the neutron counters started glowing continuous
ly, and Frisch realized what was happening: the white cloth of his lab coat and the water inside his chest were reflecting neutrons back into the uranium blocks. Frisch immediately knocked several of the blocks onto the floor with his forearm. After checking the meters, he saw he had already given himself a full day’s allotment of radiation. Two more seconds and he would have been dead.
More than almost anybody else at Los Alamos, Otto Frisch had an intimacy with uranium. He had spent the last six years pondering its interior and envisioning its shape. The evocative term fission, suggesting a living being, had been his coinage. His pencil diagrams on the log in Sweden were the first crude etchings of the awesome powers coiled within uranium. There was a fearsome animal caged in this exotic metal, hot as the sun, but one whose instabilities could be accurately charted and precisely aimed. When the initial shipments of U-235 arrived at Los Alamos from the enrichment plant in Tennessee, Frisch had been among the first to hold the samples in his bare hands.
There had been a hundred or so blocks of the uranium, and they had gleamed like bright silver jewels in the box as an army sergeant looked on. Frisch had watched as the skin of the metal began to react with the oxygen in the dry Southwestern air, turning the blocks a sky blue color, and then purple. In their own way, Frisch had thought, they were beautiful.
“I had the urge to take one,” he remembered. “As a paperweight, I told myself. A piece of the first uranium-235 metal ever made. It would have been a wonderful memento, a talking point in times to come.”
But every speck of it had to be counted and hoarded; it was, at the time, the most valuable matter on the planet. Most of it was crafted into the protean sexualized parts that would constitute the heart of the first uranium bomb, code-named “Little Boy.” The design was simple and elegant: When the bomb fell to a certain altitude (at about nineteen hundred feet for maximum destructive impact), a radar unit would close a relay and trigger a cordite explosion near the bomb’s tail that sent a plug “bullet” of pure uranium down a steel barrel at a rate of 684 miles per hour into a series of uranium rings where the neutrons would shower uncontrollably. Frisch’s “tickling the dragon” experiments had been invaluable in working out the calculations of speed and size. There would be no test of the U.S. uranium bomb before it was dropped; the science was reliable beyond a shadow of a doubt. There was also no more uranium metal to spare; every last ounce of it had gone into Little Boy, in which a total of 141 pounds was packed.
Tom Zoellner Page 8
