General Leslie Groves, Bringer of the Bomb
When the atomic bomb dubbed “Little Boy” detonated above Hiroshima with the force of 15,000 tons of TNT on August 6, 1945, it changed warfare like no other technological advance, before or since.
The bomb’s scientific author, J. Robert Oppenheimer, has today achieved a level of fame commensurate with his achievement, in large part due to the blockbuster film bearing his name. The man who hand-picked Oppenheimer, Major General Leslie Groves, if anything deserves greater credit.
Groves was not a scientist. The luminaries he directed during the war outshone him in intellectual wattage. Many actively hated him for his ego, sarcasm, and authoritarian style. But whatever his shortcomings, Groves was a loyal soldier, a shrewd judge of character, and, above all, a master conductor of vast bureaucratic endeavors. As director of the Manhattan Engineer District, these skills would be strained to the limit.
Leslie Groves was given a task thought to be impossible. He did it anyway, ending the world’s most titanic struggle and changing the nature of war forever.
Groves was a military man from the start. The son of an Army chaplain, he spent his early years on a succession of bases, stateside and overseas. In his memoirs, he recalls talking to old Indian fighters on the frontier and “wondering what was left for me to do now that the West was won.” Much later in life, he would learn there were frontiers left to explore.
Groves finished fourth in his class at West Point and was commissioned into the Army Corps of Engineers. Although he missed out on World War One, he was quickly identified as a dynamo of activity and a doer, including by Brehon Somervell, who at various points would be his commander, patron, and rival. When Somervell took charge of the Army’s Construction Division and cleaned house in what became known as the “Somervell Blitz,” Groves was his trigger man, firing complacent officers and hiring hard-charging replacements like a machine.
His ruthless style made few friends, but it commanded respect and got results. As his aide, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, put it: “General Groves is the biggest SOB I have ever worked for. He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organizational channels. He is extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make timely, difficult decisions. He is the most egotistical man I know … I hated his guts and so did everybody else, but we had our form of understanding.”
Somervell rewarded Groves with greater responsibility, including the world’s largest construction job at the time: the Pentagon. This project accustomed Groves to the consequential, split-second decisions that executives must constantly make. “It is no exaggeration to state,” Groves later wrote, “that during this period decisions involving up to $5,000,000 were made at the rate of about one every 100 feet of corridor walked.” The job also inured him to the diplomacy such jobs required. Groves spent a great deal of time keeping congressional investigators at bay. He had just finished testifying before Congress in 1942 when Somervell blindsided him with his next task.
Groves, sensitive to his lack of combat experience, yearned for an overseas post. No dice. Somervell informed him he was needed on the home front to oversee a top-secret engineering project that the Army had just acquired. “If you do the job right,” Somervell said, in what he hoped was consolation, “it will win the war.” “Oh, that thing,” Groves responded.
He had heard about the effort—up to that point academic, and quite small—to split the atom and produce a superweapon. From a managerial standpoint, it seemed like a demotion from overseeing thousands of people on the Pentagon project. From a scientific standpoint, it seemed about as likely to succeed as spinning straw into gold. Groves accepted the assignment with stoicism, but secretly felt that Somervell had picked him to sabotage his career.
Certainly, it seemed like a fool’s errand if not a catastrophe from the start. Nuclear physics was then a field at the bleeding edge of science. Until the moment of the Trinity test in 1945, no one, scientists included, knew if detonating an atomic bomb was even possible. If it was, many thought the resulting blast would be far smaller than what the U.S. government hoped. On the opposite pole, a few believed the blast could ignite the Earth’s atmosphere, creating an extinction-level event.
Setting aside such remote speculation, Groves was presented with the immediate challenge of producing large quantities of nuclear fuel without knowing what methods were best for producing such fuel. Because of the compressed time schedule, decisions would have to be made before it was clear whether a method would work. Making matters worse, no one had any idea how much fissile material a bomb would require. His scientists provided an estimate accurate “within a factor of ten.” After the war, Groves wrote with grim humor that, “My position could well be compared with that of a caterer who is told he must be prepared to serve anywhere between ten and a thousand guests.”
Despite these misgivings, Groves threw himself into the project with the same doggedness he had shown in other endeavors. Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, Oppenheimer’s biographers, give a sample of his frenetic pace of activity:
On September 18, 1942, Groves formally took charge of the bomb project. … That very day, he arranged to buy 1,200 tons of high-grade uranium ore. The next day, he ordered the acquisition of a site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the uranium could be processed. Later that month, he began a tour across the country of all the laboratories engaged in experimental work on uranium isotope separation.
Days after that, he met his bombmaker: Oppenheimer.
Accounts of the two men always stress their differences. Oppenheimer, then a professor at Berkeley, was intellectual, cosmopolitan, gangly, frail, a secret member of the Communist Party. Groves was practical, nationalist, burly, rugged, a conservative who could barely stomach the New Deal much less the Reds.
Yes, the two were different, but there was at least one critical similarity: ambition. It was partly in recognition of Oppenheimer’s ambition that Groves chose him to lead the team of scientists building the bomb. He sensed Oppenheimer would devote his all to the project—whether for his country, for hatred of the Nazis, or for his own glory, it scarcely mattered.
Groves selected Oppenheimer over the objections of the scientific and military establishments. Said objections were many and diverse. The scientists complained that Oppenheimer was not a Nobel Prize winner and had limited management experience. The military objected that Oppenheimer was a security risk, unreliable due to his intimate connections to communists.
Groves took these concerns seriously, but took his mandate more seriously still. “All procedures and decisions on security, including the clearance of personnel, had to be based on what was believed to be the overriding consideration—completion of the bomb. Speed of accomplishment was paramount.” He believed Oppenheimer was the man to deliver the train into the station. It was possibly his gutsiest call, but it produced a bomb.
Los Alamos now looms large in the popular narrative about the Manhattan Project, but in fact, Los Alamos was one node in a complex, nation-spanning network that worked together to produce the bomb. Groves was effectively city planner, mayor, and dog catcher of them all, from the Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge (which produced uranium), to the Hanford Works in Washington State (which produced plutonium), to countless lesser labs and factories making components for the bomb. Some days were spent obsessing over the most efficient method of isolating U-235, while others were spent obsessing over the environmental impact of the project’s work on fish in the Columbia River or the morale of the thousands of scientists, construction workers, secretaries, and families now living in the remote, often grim settlements of Nuketown, USA. These priorities “were not of equal importance,” Groves recounted. “But they all mattered to the job we were trying to do.”
The unique nature of the job also required Groves to make decisions of great strategic and political significance. He served as diplomat and prospector, striking deals with Belgian mining companies for uranium ore from the Congo and negotiating limits on British access to nuclear secrets. He served as spymaster, in charge of counterintelligence on his bases and espionage in Europe, including a 1944 plot to assassinate Werner Heisenberg at a lecture in Switzerland. He even served as targeting officer, preparing the list of Japanese targets for the bombs and their military rationale.
Groves was involved in so much, and gained so much implicit knowledge, that he made himself indispensable—more so perhaps than any person in the war. Secretary of War Stimson denied his request to travel by air to Britain on the grounds that he couldn’t be replaced if he died in transit. “You do it, and General Marshall does it; why shouldn’t I?” Groves huffed. Stimson responded, “You can’t be replaced, and we can.”
By VJ Day, Groves’s empire of atoms spanned the globe, from Congolese uranium mines, to internment camps for German scientists, to the forward operating base on Tinian from which the nuclear raids on Japan were launched. Six hundred thousand people had worked on the project, most without the slightest clue what they were building. Against all odds, this venture produced three bombs, with more in the pipe.
Two were enough to prove to the Japanese leadership, as Groves put it, the “utter hopelessness of their position.” And to usher in the new world that Groves had muscled into existence.
Further Reading
Now it Can Be Told by General Leslie Groves
Racing for the Bomb by Robert S. Norris