The Pentagon: A History (45 page)

I no longer consider the Pentagon a safe shelter

As the clock counted down to Trinity, Groves lowered his considerable bulk down onto the New Mexico desert, his feet pointing toward ground zero and his eyes covered by a welder’s mask. The thoughts of some of the men waiting to witness the first test of a nuclear weapon in the early morning of July 16, 1945, turned to God. Groves could think of only one thing: What if the bomb failed to explode?

In the nearly three years since Somervell had selected him to head the Manhattan Project, Groves had spent $2 billion overseeing the work of almost 200,000 people at eighty-seven secret plants and laboratories. “If our gadget proves to be a dud, I and all of the principal Army officers of the project…will spend the rest of our lives so far back in a Fort Leavenworth dungeon that they’ll have to pipe sunlight in to us,” Groves sardonically predicted to another Manhattan Project officer nine months earlier.

Somervell was no more sanguine, telling Groves he was thinking of buying a house about a block from the Capitol. “The one next door is for sale and you had better buy it,” Somervell added with a straight face. “It will be convenient because you and I are going to live out our lives before Congressional committees.”

No one could be sure what would happen when the plutonium bomb set at the top of a hundred-foot-high steel tower was detonated. During the tense hours the evening before the test—code-named Trinity—in the flat, scrub desert of the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico, Groves’s mood was darkened by wind and rain heralding an approaching storm. He was anxious not to postpone the test. The Big Three—Churchill, Stalin, and now, with FDR’s death in April, Harry Truman—were then gathering outside Berlin in preparation for the Potsdam Conference, where plans were to be laid for the defeat of Japan. The outcome of Trinity would be of utmost importance, particularly for the wording of an ultimatum to be delivered to Japan.

The weather worsened after midnight, with fierce thunderstorms, drenching rain, and wind gusts of thirty miles per hour. At the Trinity control center, Groves angrily confronted the project’s weather forecaster, Jack Hubbard, and complained about the weather. The storms would disappear by dawn, Hubbard insisted. “You better be right on this or I will hang you,” Groves said. It seemed he might.

Groves pushed back the time for the test from 4
A.M.
to 5:30
A.M.
He and project director Robert Oppenheimer spent the remaining time trying to calm each other’s nerves. “During most of these hours the two of us journeyed from the control house out into the darkness to look at the stars and to assure each other that the one or two visible stars were becoming brighter,” Groves later wrote.

Accompanied by Vannevar Bush and James Conant, the top two civilians overseeing atomic development, Groves returned to the base camp ten miles from ground zero to observe the test. When two minutes remained, the three men took their protective positions on the ground, lying down next to one another on a tarpaulin. Except for the countdown broadcast over a loudspeaker, the silence was total. “As I lay there, in the final seconds, I thought only of what I would do if, when the countdown got to zero, nothing happened,” Groves wrote.

Groves, as he said, “was spared this embarrassment.” His first impression was of a tremendous flash, “this burst of light of a brilliance beyond any comparison.” Groves and the others rolled over. Through the smoked glass of their welder’s masks, they could see a great ball of fire rising ten thousand feet in the sky, then mushrooming. Sitting on the ground, the three men silently clasped hands.

Groves felt enormous relief. “I personally thought of Blondin crossing Niagara Falls on his tight rope, only to me this tight rope had lasted for almost three years,” he wrote. Still, he kept his exuberance in check. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, the veteran engineer who had helped troubleshoot the early days of the Pentagon construction and later joined the Manhattan Project as deputy director, came over to congratulate Groves. “The war is over,” Farrell told him.

“Yes,” Groves replied, “after we drop two bombs on Japan.”

Groves boarded a plane that afternoon to fly back to Washington, arriving at noon the next day and reporting to the Pentagon. With Stimson in Potsdam, Groves briefed George L. Harrison, the secretary’s representative for atomic affairs. Cables had been sent to Stimson informing him of the successful test, but the curt and coded language—describing the bomb as a “husky” newborn baby—provided few details. Groves wrote a thirteen-page top-secret report to be taken by courier to the secretary of war in Potsdam.

In graphic and, for Groves, ebullient language, he tried to convey to Stimson the full magnitude of what he had witnessed. By conservative estimate, Groves reported, the bomb was as powerful as fifteen to twenty thousand tons of TNT. Light from the explosion had been seen as far away as Albuquerque, 180 miles to the north. The explosion created a 1,200-foot-wide crater from which all vegetation had disappeared. A forty-ton steel tower a half-mile from the test site had been torn from its concrete foundation, twisted, ripped apart, and left flat on the ground.

The results of Trinity prompted Groves to include this observation: “I no longer consider the Pentagon a safe shelter from such a bomb.”

I just plum forgot

On the morning of August 6, 1945, Groves was at the Pentagon before seven, waiting for General Marshall to arrive. The previous evening, just before midnight Washington time, Groves had received word from the Pacific that the mission to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima had been “successful in all respects.” Groves had stayed in his office in the New War Department Building in Foggy Bottom all night, preparing a report for Marshall and sleeping on a cot before hurrying to the Pentagon in the morning.

When Marshall arrived, Groves handed him the two-page report. Reconnaissance aircraft had not yet returned with photographs, but the preliminary reports from observers on the mission indicated the bomb had set off a massive explosion. General Hap Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, quickly joined the discussion. On a secure telephone, Marshall updated Stimson at his Long Island estate. The secretary of war, exhausted from the Potsdam trip, spoke to Groves and sent “very warm congratulations.” It was clear to all of them “that our hope of ending the war through the development of atomic energy was close to realization,” Groves later wrote.

Yet after the conversation, Marshall was somber. He cautioned against too much exultation, saying the bombing undoubtedly involved a large number of Japanese casualties.

Groves felt no such compunction. “I replied that I was not thinking so much about those casualties as I was about the men who had made the Bataan death march,” Groves later wrote.

Out in the hallway, Arnold slapped Groves on the back. “I am glad you said that—it’s just the way I feel.”

Marshall wanted Groves to stay close at hand and installed him in Stimson’s vacant office. The main issue now was announcing to the world that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan. A statement had been prepared in advance and approved by Truman. Groves was eager to put out the announcement as quickly as possible, part of a strategy to shock Japan into surrender. Others urged caution, suggesting that the announcement be delayed or the language softened until more details were known of the damage to Hiroshima. Bob Lovett, assistant secretary of war for air, reminded Groves that the Army Air Forces several times had claimed to have destroyed Berlin in bombing raids, only to be proven wrong. “It becomes rather embarrassing after about the third time,” Lovett said.

Groves agreed and urgently tried to get more information from Major General Curtis E. LeMay, commander of the 21st Bomber Command, who had overseen the mission from a B-29 bomber base on the Pacific island of Tinian. Groves finally reached LeMay at 10
A.M.
via teletype. LeMay said they still had no damage estimates, but he reported “the target completely covered with smoke and a column of dense white smoke rising to about 30,000 feet.”

Groves felt this was strong enough evidence to declare to the world that an atomic bomb had been successfully dropped over Japan. At 11
A.M.,
the announcement was released by the White House. It declared that a new weapon—“a harnessing of the basic power of the universe”—had been dropped on Hiroshima, and that if the Japanese did not surrender, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

Groves soon ran into Somervell, who had “this most pained look on his face,” Groves recalled. Somervell had been given no advance word of the attack on Hiroshima. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Somervell asked.

“I just plum forgot,” Groves replied. He later described it as “the perfect answer for Somervell because it was absolutely honest.” It also bespoke a change in their normal roles: Groves was the man of the hour.

How did you know Truman was going to be president?

Somervell waited in his office all day August 14, 1945, for official word of the Japanese surrender. He had arrived early, as usual. Somervell rose religiously at 5:45
A.M.,
no matter how late he had worked the previous night, and was out the door of Quarters Two at Fort Myer soon after seven. Usually he walked briskly through neighboring Arlington National Cemetery, an aide trotting at his heels as he occasionally veered off to hunt down historic graves. His driver, a square-jawed master sergeant, would be waiting at the cemetery gate to bring the general the rest of the way to the Pentagon.

His hours on the job were as long as ever, though he was again a married man. In 1943, a little over a year after Anna Somervell’s death, the general wed an old acquaintance, Louise Hampton Wartmann. She was from Arkansas and as a girl attended Belcourt Seminary, the finishing school Somervell’s mother had operated in Washington all those years ago.

Though only fifty-three, Somervell had aged visibly during the course of the war. His silver hair was now whiter, and the once-smooth skin on his face and neck was wrinkled. He was troubled by a hernia he had nursed through the war and never taken the time to mend. Just a few months earlier, in March, he had received his fourth star, despite concerns from Marshall’s staff that his promotion would “undoubtedly create a ruckus on the Hill.”

At 7
P.M.,
the announcement that Somervell had expected came. President Truman, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he had received a message from the Japanese government agreeing to “unconditional surrender.” The news flashed around the world. Somervell immediately signed a paper on his desk ordering his command—now known as the Army Service Forces, or ASF—to put its demobilization plans into action.

The vast supply empire he created and commanded had backed the landings in North Africa, Sicily, and mainland Italy, and made possible the greatest amphibious invasion in the history of the world, the D-Day landings in Normandy. In 109 days, they landed a million men and 100,000 vehicles onto the beaches of France. His supply lines—including the famed Red Ball Express—kept the U.S. Army rolling all the way to the Elbe River. “The only question we were ever asked was, ‘What do you want, and when do you want it?’” Eisenhower later said. In Asia, the ASF was a lifeline for American troops in New Guinea, New Britain, the Aleutians, China, India, Australia, and many way stations in between. After Germany’s surrender, the command had shipped 1.2 million men and five million tons of supplies from Europe to the Pacific, where they were still gathering for an invasion of Japan, which was no longer necessary.

Somervell signed a second paper that day, addressed to Marshall. “I feel I have discharged my obligations to the country and Army,” Somervell had written. Marshall himself planned to retire shortly, and Somervell requested permission to resign from the Army the same day as the chief of staff. He handed the memo to Marshall in person on August 18.

Miracle man or not, Somervell’s days in the Army were numbered. He had known it for months, since Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage while in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945. The next day, Somervell had called Groves into his office. Somervell “looked very sorrowful,” Groves recalled, but it was not simply because he was mourning FDR.

“Dick, how did you know that Truman was going to be president?” Somervell asked Groves.

The man Somervell told to “go piss up a rope” in 1941 was now his commander in chief. Somervell and Truman had continued battling through much of the war, and, if anything, their relations had grown worse.

Truman’s investigations of Somervell’s work—from his criticism of the camp-construction program in 1941 through his inquiry in 1943 and 1944 into Canol, a spectacularly ill-advised and expensive oil project in the Arctic wilderness—helped bring the senator to national prominence, changing his reputation from that of a run-of-the-mill Pendergast-machine politician to a respected and objective voice on national defense. His name was placed in contention to be Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944. In the Somervell family, it was an article of faith that Truman made his name with cheap second-guessing of decisions made by the general in the heat of war.

Despite all the criticism—over the Pentagon, over his management style, over Canol—rumors of Somervell replacing Marshall as chief of staff had persisted through much of the war. Somervell would have dearly loved to become chief of staff when Marshall stepped down. With the war ending, no other job in the Army offered remotely the same challenges as his current post. But any hope of becoming chief of staff was already slim after Canol, and died altogether with Roosevelt.