How the Last Piece of Little Boy Got to Tinian Island
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1 “From Us in Oak Ridge to Tojo”-NDG THE STORY OF LT. NICHOLAS DEL GENIO’S AUTOGRAPHED DOLLAR BILL WM. J. WILCOX JR. PREPARED FOR THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND ENERGY FOUNDATION OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE JUNE 15, 2000 2 HOW THE LAST PIECE OF “LITTLE BOY” GOT TO TINIAN ISLAND The Story of Lt. Nicholas Del Genio’s Autographed Dollar Bill 1 2 From Us in Oak Ridge to Tojo”-NDG William J. (Bill) Wilcox Jr., Oak Ridge City Historian Retired Technical Director for the Oak Ridge Y-12 & K-25 Plants [During the Manhattan Project (from May 25, 1943) a Jr. Chemist, Tennessee Eastman Corp., Y-12 Plant] The glass-framed one-dollar bill with its 34 autographs hung for years in Nick and Martha Del Genio’s living room in Chevy Chase, MD, a treasured remembrance of Nick’s part in the sudden ending of World War II. 3 Nick died in 1995 at 88, and as they had agreed, Martha made a gift of the treasured bill to the American Museum of Science and Energy (AMSE) in Oak Ridge, the town where they met and where the story of this treasured souvenir began. 4 Martha Farrar met Nick Del Genio when she worked in Oak Ridge as a dietician in one of the school cafeterias of that secret city during WWII. i Nick was an Army officer, and they married in 1949, four years after the end of WWII and the events described here. She learned from him after the War was over that Nick’s assignment was to serve in Military Security. In those days at Oak Ridge, Nick was an old-timer, having been on the job of helping to guard the secrets of the atomic bomb project since 1943.ii By mid-1945, he was 39 years old and a 1st Lieutenant, trusted enough to serve in the highly secret and vital job of delivering the precious product of the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant to Los Alamos. His home base was the “Castle” at the Townsite in Oak Ridge, the nickname civilians called the Headquarters of the Army’s Corps of Engineers that stood where the present DOE Offices are. [See Figure 2.] The reason for the huge wartime effort at Oak Ridge5 was to try to do something never before attempted, the separation of well over a hundred pounds of the light form of uranium, the rare U- 235 isotope from the heavier, 139 times more abundant U-238 form. Two huge plants were built 1 Copyright Wm. J. Wilcox, Jr., 2000. 2 Explanatory notes are numbered and appear on each page. References are lettered and appear at the end of the text. During WWII, the materials and the various locations were never spoken of except in secret codes, Los Alamos was Site Y, etc. Post-war names are, however, used in this paper for clarity. 3 Airmen during WWII often collected samples of the currency of the countries they flew to and taped them together end to end into long rolls they liked to keep as souvenirs. Sometimes they got their crews or pals to autograph them. They called them “short snorters”. Nick called this bill his version of a “short snorter”. In a PX or pub, one veteran said the man with the shortest roll had to buy the snorts. 4 Martha’s donation letter to AMSE was dated September 3, 1997. Gordon G. Fee, President of the AMSE Foundation, visited her in Chevy Chase, MD May 27, 1999 and she was very pleased to learn of the Museum exhibit plans. Martha died, age 81, after a long bout with lung cancer, August 24, 1999. Nick’s death was March 21, 1995. Both died in Maryland. 5 Oak Ridge’s wartime cost: the city + Y-12, K-25, S-50, and X-10 cost $1.106 billion, more than half of the total cost of the whole Manhattan Project. Wartime peak population of the city was 75,000, Y-12- 22,500, K-25- 12,000, and X-10- 1,234. ($ from USED report For Your Info, 1946), plants info from Robinson, The Oak Ridge Story, p.87, et al. 3 in Oak Ridge, first the Y-12 Plant for which construction started in early 1943 and operations began in early 1944, and the second K-25 Plant which followed about a year behind. Each involved untried methods of isotope separation, and because of the wartime urgency, were built without going through a pilot plant trial step to work out the "bugs" in the process. It was hoped that at least one of them could be made to produce the highly enriched U-235 needed in time to make a difference in this war. There were great uncertainties with each and there was a real urgency of beating Germany and Japan to the bomb, if indeed any country’s scientists and engineers could build such a thing. But the great technical difficulties were overcome in each method and both processes were eventually Figure 2. Headquarters of the U.S. Engineer District, Manhattan Project, in Oak Ridge. “The Castle” where Col. K. D. Nichols and staff, including Lt. Del Genio worked. 1945 or 1946. J. E. Wescott photo. made to work very successfully. The huge Y-12 plant with its 22,000 workers was producing enough highly enriched U-235 in the spring and early summer of 1945 to enable the weapon makers at Los Alamos to put together a bomb to bring the awful War to an end. [See Figure 3.] 4 Figure 3. The Y-12 Plant was the first plant in the world to separate the isotopes of uranium in pound quantities. Above is an overview of the Y-12 Plant, ca. 1945, three large “Alpha Calutron” buildings left foreground. Below: one of 9 oval shaped “Alpha tracks” of 96 “Calutrons;” the separator “Ds”, lying on their face plates in left foreground. OAK RIDGE TO LOS ALAMOS 5 Nick received orders on Monday, July 23, 1945 to travel out west to Site Y, a wartime code name for Los Alamos Laboratory. He very probably was asked to take with him one of the shipments of the super-valuable U-235 product from Y-12, standard procedure because he and several others assigned to “The Castle” had been making those train trips with increasing frequency. The precious green powder (UF4) product of all this wartime effort at Oak Ridge was not dangerously radioactive, though not at all safe if brought near other sizeable quantities because of the danger of a nuclear criticality reaction. It was carried from Oak Ridge to Los Alamos in a leather briefcase chained to the courier’s wrist. iii The briefcase was not removed till they were safely inside the fence on that mesa out in New Mexico. Inside the very ordinary looking briefcase was a wooden box holding the “green salt” packed in two coffee-cup-sized, heavily gold-plated, nickel cans with a cadmium sheath. Figure 4. 1st Lt. Nick Del Genio – October 1945 (Photo by J. E. Westcott) On Wednesday, July 25, now in Los Alamos with another Courier Mission accomplished, Nick opened his next orders and learned he was not going back to Dogpatch/Shangri La (code nick- 6 names workers called Oak Ridge during the War). He had been singled out for a secret, top- priority courier duty: the responsibility of guarding and escorting one of the three C-54 cargo planes which carried the last highly enriched uranium-235 metal parts for the first atomic bomb. The main parts of the "Little Boy" U-235 bomb had already been shipped to Tinian aboard the ill- fated cruiser USS Indianapolis – the gun barrel and the other U-235 parts. But Los Alamos did not have enough surplus U-235 from Y-12 to have it all finished and ready to ship on July 16th, so the last parts had to be delivered by air as soon as they were ready. The Indianapolis left San Francisco with that main shipment the same day as the Trinity test at Alamagordo, July 16th, and dropped anchor off Tinian on July 26th. This island, 6,000 miles across the Pacific, was now turned into a huge air base from which our heavy B-29 bombers could reach the 1,400 miles to the mainland of Japan. It had been wrested from Japanese soldiers less than a year before and turned into an air base in an amazingly short time. Urgency was the word of the day. Every day, newspapers and radio reports were full of the horror of the war in the Pacific and the dread of more horror yet to come. Drastic and widespread firebombing of Japanese cities had not shaken the Japanese military’s commitment to their cause. 6 The dreadful prospect was that the only way to force the Japanese Empire to surrender was to actually invade the islands, and that invasion was planned for November 1945. The prospect was for a repeat of the fierce fighting and awful casualties on both sides that occurred with the U.S. invasion of Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the other Japanese-held Pacific islands. Estimates of U.S. losses were up to 250,000 and Japanese losses 5 to 20 times that many. The bomb was a secret known but to a few; worked on for years in the hope of putting an end to the War just as soon as possible. LOS ALAMOS TO TINIAN ISLAND On Tuesday, July 24th, the Los Alamos metallurgists and machinists finished making the last three parts needed for Little Boy, and on Wednesday these three parts were separately packed into heavy steel containers, each two feet tall and a foot wide.