109 East Palace (39 page)

Françoise was not alone in receiving painful reports from home as the Allies penetrated German-occupied zones. Not long after the first troops had entered Rome in June, Oppenheimer had called Emilio Segrè into his office and gravely informed him that military intelligence had learned that although his father, a well-to-do Jewish paper manufacturer, was safe, his mother had been captured by the Nazis in the fall of 1943. Her fate was unknown. Segrè was too shocked to respond at first, and unsure he had made himself understood, Oppenheimer was forced to repeat the news to him several times.

In the days that followed the liberation of Paris, elation soon gave way to the familiar driving anxiety. Hitler had been dealt a major defeat, and for a brief moment, it had seemed that after years of devastation and struggle, Europe was finally rising up and shaking off the chains of German occupation. In the days that followed, Toulon, Marseilles, and Brussels were liberated in rapid succession, and the battle for France seemed almost over. Allied forces were poised to advance into Germany. But then, as so many times before when the scientists had allowed themselves to believe the end was in sight, progress stalled. American and British paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines at Arnhem were killed and captured in staggering numbers as the German reinforcements surrounded them. Their grief at the numbers of men who lay dead on the bridges over the Rhine was compounded by the losses on the beaches of Guam. In the last bittersweet days of summer, their spirits rose and sank with every new radio dispatch, and the slender hope that what they were working on at Los Alamos might not be needed after all flickered and went out.

FOURTEEN

A Bad Case of the Jitters

A
N EARLY
S
EPTEMBER
frost turned the aspens lining the road to Los Alamos brilliant yellow overnight. The summer holiday was over, and it was with a feeling of relief that Dorothy packed Kevin off to school. He and some teenage pals had recently gone joyriding around the Plaza and had been hosing down bystanders with large bottles of seltzer before being apprehended by two MPs. Dorothy had been called down to the local jail and had had to do some fast talking to smooth things over. It was Fiesta time in Santa Fe again. The scientists piled into cars and went to see the traditional Corn Dances in San Ildefonso, and the triumphant return of the conquistadors, a colorful pageant that was reenacted every year in the Plaza. The entire British mission, almost to a man, begged for that Saturday off so they could join in the ritual festivities. For three days, everyone in town donned costumes and their best silver and turquoise jewelry, including Dorothy, who raised eyebrows by coming to work at 109 in long, brightly patterned Navajo skirts and white fiesta blouses. Since the scientists were supposed to remain apart from the locals, they refrained from dressing up, but, as she pointed out, they looked more conspicuous than ever on the crowded streets among the Indians, señores, señoritas, singers, and dancing clowns.

For a few days, the Plaza teemed with carnival-booth hawkers, performers of every kind and quality, and hundreds upon hundreds of camera-carrying tourists. Then, thankfully, it was over and order was restored. The weeks flew by so quickly that it was only by these seasonal markers that Dorothy, looking back over the jumble of events, could fix them in her memory. There was never a moment to think about what they were doing, the real purpose of the research in the Tech Area, or the ramifications of the powerful “gadget” that was buzzed about on the grapevine. She barely had time enough at the end of each week to catch her breath, do the Sunday wash, and get ready for business on Monday.

Despite the feverish pace, there was one isolated moment that would always remain etched in her mind. It was on a serenely blue New Mexico afternoon that she got a call from the director’s office reporting that a Japanese fire balloon had been sighted. Her heart had skipped a beat. Any threat to the laboratory was taken seriously by security, which was always on the lookout for intruders. The idea that they would be under attack by Japanese balloons seemed incredible, but in her confusion and alarm, she did not know what to think.

She remembered noticing that it was five o’clock and, glancing out the window, seeing the sun was about to set. The sky was clear and would soon be studded with stars. She thought of the horrifying possibility of an enemy presence floating over the valley under the cover of night. The news had been transmitted to the Albuquerque Army Air Base, and a fighter plane had been dispatched on a search-and-destroy mission. In the meantime, the caller from the Hill persisted, wanting to know if Dorothy would leave the office and look around “to see if there was anything in the sky that might be a Japanese balloon”:

The object was situated so many degrees from the sun, etc., and they had been observing it from the site and would like to know how it appeared from Santa Fe. I bustled out and scanned the skies from the Plaza and then drove to the top of old Fort Marcy and looked and looked. There was a certain apprehension and fear that crept around the mind and heart in contemplating such a possibility, with full knowledge of the danger to the Project. I could not see the object in question, but I did see little puffs of cloud, very frail and tenuous, which formed and reformed like vapor, and each one I imagined to be a small parachute with missile attached.

Dorothy stood on Fort Marcy Hill searching the horizon in the deepening twilight. When it grew dark, she could make out the small cluster of lights of Los Alamos miles away. She thought of her friends who lived on the site and wondered if they were safe. She shivered, less from the cold than the dread of what might be passing silently overhead.

What American military intelligence knew, but did not reveal until close to the end of the war, was that a Japanese balloon bomb offensive against the U.S. mainland had begun in the fall of 1944. The first reported launch took place on November 3, when a navy vessel spotted a balloon floating off the coast of California. Another was spotted outside the town of Thermopolis, Wyoming, and exploded in the sky. A few days later, two woodchoppers found the remains of a large Japanese balloon in the forest near Kalispell, Montana. In the months to come, balloon debris was found in Arizona, Alaska, Iowa, and Nebraska. All that fall and winter, fighter planes scrambled to intercept and shoot down balloons, and the exploded remains were taken to military labs to be examined. By spring, there were several reports per day, and exploded and unexploded balloon remains were turning up everywhere from Alaska and Washington to Colorado, Mexico, and Texas. In January 1945, the government, as part of its policy of wartime censorship, instructed the news media to withhold all stories about the Japanese “inter-continental free-flight balloons” to avoid panicking the civilian population, and to prevent the enemy from learning about the success rate of its attacks. Three months later, a confidential note to editors and broadcasters stated:

Cooperation from the press and radio under this request has been excellent despite the fact that Japanese free balloons are reaching the United States, Canada, and Mexico in increasing numbers. … There is no question that your refusal to publish or broadcast information about these balloons has baffled the Japanese, annoyed and hindered them, and has been an important contribution to security.

The Japanese called the rubberized silk and paper balloons “Fu-Go,” and they were launched from sites along the east coast of Honshu. Filled with hydrogen, they would quickly climb to a cruising altitude of 16,000 feet, where the high-speed wind currents would carry them across the Pacific to North America. Each balloon was anchored to an aluminum ring that was wired with thirty-two “blow-out plugs,” each supporting a sandbag. The plugs were designed to fire whenever the balloon dipped below a predetermined altitude, cutting free two bags of ballast and thus propelling the lightened Fu-Go back up into the jet stream. The last ballast bag was a weapon. If the balloons survived the 6,200 mile trip across the ocean, and everything went according to plan, the flash bomb would detonate over U.S. territory, causing damage and at the same time incinerating all evidence of the mysterious weapon. As part of their ambitious war plan, the Japanese sent an estimated 9,000 Fu-Go firebombs raining down on North America as a reprisal for the bold “Doolittle Raid” in April 1942, when sixteen American B-25s under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle attacked Tokyo, and the subsequent escalation of the strategic bombing of Japan. Seven hundred of the lethal devices were launched in November 1944, and almost twice as many the next month, with an increasing number sent drifting over North America in the early months of 1945.

Designed as a terror weapon, the random attacks by the Fu-Gos were supposed to frighten civilians and ignite forest fires. The latter scenario was troubling, particularly in the dry summer months, when forest fires could endanger large portions of the Pacific Northwest. U.S. military intelligence was also afraid the balloons might be used as antiaircraft devices and, ultimately, in biological warfare. On the West Coast, the military organized the secret Firefly mission, at one point numbering three thousand soldiers, to put out fires started by Fu-Go bomb balloons. The closest the bombs came to wrecking disaster was on March 10, when a balloon descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project’s Hanford, Washington, production site. The parachute and cables caught on an electric line that fed power to the building containing the plutonium reactor, temporarily shutting it down.

In the end, because of mechanical malfunctions and the combined obstacles of distance and weather, only about a thousand Fu-Gos ever reached America. The Japanese ultimately considered the balloon barrage a failure, and it was halted after five months. Though it never became the propaganda weapon they had hoped for, the Fu-Gos succeeded in causing the only wartime fatalities within the continental United States. In May 1945, a balloon bomb in Oregon killed six members of a church picnic, five of them children, when it went off as they tried to drag it clear of the woods. Two weeks later, the War Department lifted the secrecy order, and the government issued a statement warning the public not to tamper with the hazardous balloons.

The Los Alamos project leaders had been informed that a number of Japanese fire balloons had landed in the Southwest. The laboratory staff knew little about the airborne threat but they were keenly aware that Site Y represented a vital target. With the approaching test, “people at Los Alamos were naturally in a state of some tension,” Oppenheimer admitted in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt written in 1950.
He added that the fact that they all immediately jumped to the conclusion they were under attack showed that “even a group of scientists is not proof against the errors of suggestion and hysteria”:

Almost the whole project was out of doors staring at a bright object in the sky through glasses, binoculars, and whatever else they could find; and nearby Kirtland field reported to us that they had no interceptors which had enabled them to come within range of the object.

Dorothy’s account confirmed that Oppie and company had a bad case of the jitters. “The entire staff,” she noted, “from the Director down, was in a dither that day.” Work came to a standstill. Some of the scientists were convinced they could see some sort of suspicious “gondola” hanging from the balloon. Not everyone was convinced that what they were looking at was a balloon, and a few cooler heads suggested the mysterious orb might be a new star. “The scientists spent the afternoon craning their necks and evolving fantastic theories about the phenomenon,” she reported. “The personnel director, an astronomer by profession, was called on in his dual capacity to settle the argument in order to get the staff back to work. Since he would not make a flat statement, the speculation continued.”

At noon the following day, the same luminescent object again appeared in the sky. “Only then did all the experts agree that it was nothing more or less than the planet Venus, rarely seen in broad daylight,” wrote Dorothy. “But it did give many of us a few hours of rather quiet terror.”

With the brisk fall air, a back-to-school feeling permeated the mesa. The transformation of the laboratory had been completed over the summer and had cleared the way for a fresh start. The work had been messy and painful at times, particularly since none of the scientists were used to subjugating their interests and instincts to a large, cumbersome framework. But a number of chronic problems had been fixed in the process, and those individuals who could not adjust, or were not team players, had been threatened with removal or transferred to other divisions. A lot of anger and frustration had been vented, and the great majority, who had come to Los Alamos in the first place because of a strong sense of patriotic duty, were ready to put aside their differences and plunge back into the fray. Most of the physicists seemed reinvigorated, and even the Tech Area administration, which had never really settled into any kind of rhythm but lurched from one crisis to the next, seemed to function better. The new work hours on implosion were more grueling, but the divisions and groups were operating better, and overall there was less griping. As work on implosion progressed, Oppenheimer devoted himself to coordinating the different parts of the bomb project and making preparations for the test detonation of the plutonium device, which had been set for July 1945.