Naval War College Review Volume 56 Article 23 Number 1 Winter
2003 Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’sIndispensable Man Frank C. Mahncke
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Recommended Citation Mahncke, Frank C. (2003) "Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’sIndispensable Man," Naval War College Review: Vol. 56 : No. 1 , Article 23. Available at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol56/iss1/23
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political dimensions of technological not seize “American garrisons at Shang- innovation. He is blissfully ignorant of hai and Tientsin,” since the 4th Marines a decade of writing about the process of and 15th Infantry had already departed military-technical innovation in the (p. 166); the 17 August 1943 Eighth Air twentieth century. The book has no Force raid on “Schweinefurt” [sic] was compelling theme or interpretive core. made by 230 B-17s, not 376, and Ger- Although this reviewer usually grimaces man flak accounted for only six bombers when graduate students invoke such de- from the 1st Bombardment Wing, which ities as Thomas S. Kuhn and Michel lost thirty B-17s to German fighters. In Foucault, this book would have bene- fact, the entire first paragraph of chapter fited from more theoretical structure. 7 is riddled with fiction. The sparse Terrors and Marvels might also have account of Allied military medicine ig- profited from more attention to inno- nores a central fact and accomplish- vations that did not involve the gallant ment—wounded survival rates were struggles of Nobel laureates in physics important but not as important as the and chemistry to convince know- number of American wounded who nothing politicians and generals to returned to a duty status of some sort. adopt their latest schemes to win the war. The number of wounded combatants Storytelling conquers all. From the per- who lived to fight another day is dra- spective of military logisticians and matized in the story of Company E, commanders, innovations in food pro- 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, cessing, materials research, automotive immortalized in word and videotape by engineering, computer technology, syn- historian Stephen Ambrose. Another thetics, and chemical explosives were slip is Shachtman’s sketchy account of war winners too. Schachtman gives the role of operations research and them all short shrift. His discussion on analysis mathematics; it ignores a mas- preventive medicine and the treatment sive literature on operations research in of combat trauma wounds is particu- air warfare, logistics, and antisubmarine larly limited, given the rich multi- warfare—a literature that Shachtman volume official histories of the U.S. apparently does not know. armed forces medical establishments in In sum, a single volume on the influ- World War II. ence of scientific and technological in- Part of Schachtman’s difficulty is that novation on World War II would be he really does not know much about welcome. Terrors and Marvels is not World War II, apparently alternating that book.
carelessly between the books of Martin ALLAN R. MILLETT Gilbert and Richard Overy—who, of Ohio State University course, are blameless for his series of gaffes. A few samples should suffice: Ishii Shiro’s final rank was lieutenant general, not major (p. 318); Iwo Jima was prized as a fighter base and emer- Norris, Robert S. Racing for the Bomb: General gency landing site, not a B-29 base Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispens- (p. 298); Japanese troops did not land on able Man. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 2002. 722pp. $40 Bataan in December 1941, and they did
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Today, when a major weapons system today. Based on theory and some criti- commonly takes decades or more to de- cal experiments at the University of velop, it is hard to imagine that the Chicago in the late 1930s and bolstered greatest weapon system of them all, the by a letter from Albert Einstein to Pres- Manhattan Project, took just three ident Franklin Roosevelt, the United years from start to detonation over Ja- States in 1942 committed itself to build- pan. Those three years were the stuff of ing an atomic bomb. high technical and engineering drama: Groves, who had had a distinguished vast new industrial facilities were con- career as an Army engineer and had structed in secret across the United been the overseer of the building of the States, two billion dollars were spent Pentagon, was selected to head the without congressional oversight, new Manhattan Project in August 1942. scientific laboratories were secluded in Within just a few months, Groves the high desert, and a unique U.S. brought together some of the best engi- Army Air Forces B-29 unit was created. neering officers in the Army, initiated All this took place under the direct vast land acquisitions for several large command of Major General Leslie industrial operations for the purpose of Groves, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, isotope separation, established the basic whose management style set a norm for technical compartmentalization policies large systems-development programs that shaped the entire project, and that persists today. brought into the program a number of In the popular recollection of the prominent industrial corporations to Manhattan Project, the physicists Rob- build and run the plants. As the project ert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo grew, Groves fought for and won the Szilard, Edward Teller, and the Los highest priority for critical materials Alamos Laboratory dominate. They are within the government’s wartime allo- attractive figures who have remained in cation scheme, cornered the world mar- the public eye. Yet Groves, never a pop- ket for uranium ore, set up the Los ular or sympathetic personality, was the Alamos Laboratory, and appointed man who put it all together. As such, he Oppenheimer as director. is worthy of serious attention. Groves was a technically shrewd and Robert Norris, research associate with aggressive man with complete confi- the Natural Resources Defense Council dence in his own judgment and will- and scholar of nuclear issues, has writ- ingness to take enormous technical and ten a long-overdue biography of Gen- industrial risks with untried processes. eral Groves. While the central theme of His most remarkable talent was the this work is Groves’s leadership of the ability to oversee and pursue alternative Manhattan Project, Norris does a thor- technical development lines until one ough job of integrating into the story or another was proven successful. In his formative years, family, Army career two important cases he made such prior to the project, and postwar role in high-risk decisions—isotope separation establishing a national policy for atomic and bomb design. weapons. Separation of uranium isotopes on an The sheer audacity and scope of the industrial scale was a critical step in the Manhattan Project remain impressive bomb manufacture. At the time, there https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol56/iss1/23 2 184 NAVALMahncke: WAR Racing COLLEGE for the REVIEW Bomb: General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project
seemed to be three competing methods: Again, Groves made the call, and both gaseous diffusion, thermal separation, avenues were followed, at great cost, and electromagnetic separation. Each until the TRINITY test at Alamogordo, method had its advocates and its vir- New Mexico, proved the plutonium tues. None was proven. While the sci- implosion, which was used in the “Fat entific community dithered over the Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki. best technical method, Groves charged Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, histori- in and, with real managerial brass, initi- ans have devoted nearly as much energy ated simultaneous and parallel develop- to debating who made the decision to ment of all three separation methods, use the bomb as was released in the making the largest bet on the gaseous- atomic explosions. Norris goes into this diffusion method at Oak Ridge. in some detail, looking specifically at As the engineering worked out, using Groves’s role in decision making. He the partially enriched product from the concludes that, as is commonly the case thermal and the electromagnetic sepa- with large weapons development pro- ration processes as feedstock for gas- jects in wartime, the momentum of the eous diffusion gave accelerated results, project drove the outcome. The bomb and the enriched uranium was ready on was ready, an invasion of Japan looked time for the bomb. to be murderously costly, momentum Initially, there were two quite different carried the day, and the bomb was design approaches to building the dropped on Japan. bomb. The most obvious was the gun Norris’s book is a fine complement to assembly technique, in which two Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the subcritical masses of enriched uranium Atomic Bomb (1986), in which Rhodes were explosively driven and held to- covers the physics of the bomb. Both gether until nuclear fission began and books chronicle events that changed the was sustained. This design became the world. “Little Boy” bomb that was dropped on FRANK C. MAHNCKE Hiroshima in the world’s first atomic Joint Warfare Analysis Center attack. However, theory held that the use of plutonium would produce a far more efficient means of nuclear detonation. Plutonium is an artificial element, bred Wright, Patrick. Tank: The Progress of a Mon- in a uranium-fueled reactor that is strous War Machine. New York: Viking Penguin, formed into a hollow sphere and 2002. 499pp. $29.95 implosively crushed with high explo- The tank constitutes perhaps the most sives until a nuclear detonation occurs. readily identifiable symbol of land war- This proved to be a demanding techni- fare. From its initial appearance during cal problem requiring massive indus- World War I to the final stage of the trial sites for plutonium production at Gulf War, its considerable impact on Hanford, Washington, and nearly all the outcome of some of last century’s the talent at Los Alamos to calculate most significant wars is not in doubt. and form the sphere and the surround- Whether battles were fought on the ing high explosives. plains of Eastern Europe or in the deserts
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