Here is a listing of links related to a talks I have given the last several months.
Ed Westcott was the photographer for The Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge during World War II. The Department of Energy has a Flickr site where you can look at over 1,400 of his photographs.
This is an amazing summary about the loss of life during World War II. The numbers are staggering. The video is only 18 minutes, but it is the most stunning introduction to World War II I have ever watched.
Alex Wellerstein is, for my money, the most interesting writer out there on the Manhattan Project. His blog, Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog is an amazing resource. He is a historian who focuses on the subjects of nuclear weapons and nuclear secrets. Sometimes his blog posts leak over into the Manhattan Project. The great feature of the blog is that Alex puts tags on all his posts. If you scroll down, on the right side column you can click on “post tags” and there are dozens of tags. If you click on the tag “Hiroshima” automatically all his 42 postings on the subject come up.
Alex also has an app called Nukemap. You can go there and go to a map, and say, click on the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge. It is now the target. Then you can select the size of the weapon you want to use, say a 100 kiloton bomb. Once you click the “Detonate” button a series of concentric circles appear which show the levels of destruction which would happen with a detonation. It also gives you an estimate of the fatalities and injuries. Whenever Kim Jong Un launches another test missile, Nukemap gets buried in searches.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer really fascinates me. A Lutheran pastor in Germany during the rule of the Nazi party, he openly opposed the regime. He believed, as a christian, he had to protest the treatment of the Jews. In 1939 he sought refuge in America, where he had gone to seminary. Within a few weeks he realized he had made a huge mistake and had to return to Germany. He must have known, as did his American friends, that returning was a death sentence.
He explained his thinking in a letter to his American friend, Rheinhold Niebuhr.
“I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people ... Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from security.”
He returned and became an active dissident. This short documentary tells of his work, his imprisonment and his execution. He had been actively working with a group of Germans, which among other things, was plotting to kill Hitler. In July 1944 an unsuccessful assassination attempt was made. Documents were discovered that evidently implicated many, including Bonhoeffer. He was killed on April 9, 1945. Two weeks later Allied forces liberated the concentration camp where Bonhoeffer was being kept. A week after that, Hitler committed suicide. Germany surrendered a few days later.
I have always wondered what Bonhoeffer would’ve thought of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He believed christians had to confront evil.
In 2008 the Methodist Church voted martyr status for Bonhoeffer. He was the first modern martyr to be given that status.
Father Wilson Miscamble teaches history at Notre Dame. In 2011 his book The Most Controversial Decision was published. It is available at Amazon. It is a great summary of the bombings from a writer who supports the decision. I like it because it is only 150 pages long. Miscamble is an academic so the writing is a bit stiff, but if don’t want to read a whole book he also did a five minute video on Prager University.
Marc LiVecche is scholar at The Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington D.C. He is Executive Editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy. His book Moral Horror: A Christian Defense of the Bombing of Hiroshima will be published in 2020. In 2018 he published in Providence an essay about Hiroshima which expanded on an earlier essay he wrote in 2015 .
D. M. Giangreco is a wonderful military historian who wrote Hell to Pay, which is an account of the American preparation for the invasion of Japan on November 1, 1945. This essay tells the story of the Purple Heart medals which were ordered for the invasion of Japan. The military used those medals from 1945 until the early 2000’s
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The Real Heroes of Telemark
In Norway there was an industrial plant which made, of all things, fertilizer. One byproduct of the process was heavy water. Heavy water is an essential product for one way of making an atomic weapon. Nazi soldiers guarded the plant. Norwegian resistance fighters planned to sneak into the plant and destroy the heavy water production laboratory. The Real Heroes of Telemark documentary tells the story. It is three hours long in a three part series. YouTube has, for some reason, has diced it up into mostly ten minute segments. I found this segment which is 50 minutes.
General Groves awarding Edgar Sengier the Medal of Merit for his efforts in helping end World War II. As with everything connected to The Manhattan Project, the awarding of the medal was top secret.
The Most Important Hero of World War II Who You Don’t Know
The following description comes from Stephane Groueff’s “Manhattan Project,” and Leslie Grove’s “Now It Can Be Told.”
Perhaps the most important ignored hero of World War II was an unassuming geologist from Belgium who took proactive steps to greatly enhance the success of the Manhattan Project…
Ken Nichols had only been on the job a few days, but his boss, General Leslie Groves, was a man on a mission. Things were happening quickly.
On September 18, 1942, Col. Nichols was in New York City to meet with a Belgium aristocrat, Edgar Sengier. Sengier owned a mining company, the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga which owned a mine in the Belgium Congo.
Sengier had been living in the United States since 1940. He fled Belgium after the Nazis occupation.
There wasn’t any time for small talk or pleasantries. Sengier wanted to see his military ID. When Nichols made the appointment he claimed he was with the United States military, yet this day he wore a civilian suit. Kind of set the tone for the meeting.
Nichols said he understood that Sengier was in possession of some uranium. Sengier asked him if he had authority to buy the ore. Nichols assured him he had far more authority than Sengier had uranium.
Then, Sengier put him on the spot. He wanted to know if the uranium would be used for military purposes. He wouldn’t sell the uranium for commercial purposes. Nichols couldn’t reveal or compromise the security of the top secret project, but gave his word that the ore was needed for war purposes.
Sengier asked how soon would the military need the ore. Nichols replied that yesterday would be fine.
Nichols couldn’t believe his ears when Sengier said that he was storing 1,200 tons of Congo uranium ore in a warehouse in Staten Island. He had the ore shipped from the Congo in the fall of 1940. He wrote the State Department several times about his drums in Staten Island. He never heard back. The State Department he no clue why uranium was important, nor why this man was writing them.
After scientists determined that uranium could be weaponized in late 1938, Sengier was contacted by scientists from all over the world who told him that Hitler must never, ever get his uranium ore. Most of the uranium ore found on earth, has a concentration of between .5% and 1.5% uranium. That range is considered a viable seam. The Shinkolobwe Mine concentration was 65% to 75% uranium. It was a freak of nature.
Sengier unilaterally shipped the ore to the United States to keep it out of Hitler’s hands and now, his ore would jump start America’s effort to make the first nuclear weapon.
Don Wilson Gets the Groves’ treatment
In September of 1942, Groves, like an unstoppable freight train, makes his second most important decision(#1 was hiring Robert Oppenheimer).
This quote comes from Stephane Groueff’s “Manhattan Project.”
Now fully aware of the urgency of his mission, Groves did not even wait for his appointment to become official before he began making decisions and sending a flurry of instructions right and left. His first concern was about the procurement priority that the Project had been given. “We’re not going to be able to get the materials fast enough with just this AA-3 priority,” he told Nichols.
Nichols agreed and showed him the draft of a letter, which had been prepared earlier, requesting the War Production Board to give AAA priority—the top—to the Manhattan Project. Groves took one look at the letter and shoved it aside. Then he took his pen and drafted a letter addressed to himself and to be signed by Donald Wilson, head of the War Production Board. When it had been typed, Groves himself took it to Nelson’s office.
“No! Absolutely not!” Nelson exclaimed after glancing at the letter and listening impatiently to Grove’s request for top priority. “We have too many other war projects of capital importance that are waiting desperately for higher priority ratings.”
Groves stood up to leave controlling his cold anger. “All right, Mr. Nelson,” he said sternly. “In that case, I must recommend to the President that the Manhattan Project be abandoned because the War Production Board is unwillingly to cooperate with his wishes.”
The bluff worked. A few minutes later Groves left with the letter signed by Nelson and authorizing AAA priority for the Project.
Groves admitted in his memoir “Now It Can Be Told”….
“Just why Nelson gave in so easily, I will never know. I would have been most unwilling to have had this difficulty brought up to the President: the problem was mine. To have admitted frustration so early would have been most distasteful.”
An interview by Charlie Rose of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates from January of 2017. Charlie Rose asks Warren what he thinks are the most important documents of American history. Warren’s answer had me fall out of my chair. The question starts at the 22:45 mark.
The American Military Cemetery in Margraten, The Netherlands
A story of devotion and gratitude.
This article is from The Washington Post from May of 2014. It’s about an American Military Cemetery in the Netherlands where the locals care for the graves of American service members. If you wish to care for some of the graves, the town officials would thank-you for your interest, but they would tell you there is a waiting list to care for the graves. Let that sink in for a moment.
“Borrowing” 14,000 tons of silver
Cadets from West Point load up silver destined for Oak Ridge. This photograph appeared in Life Magazine during the early days of World War II. The caption for the photo said something like “West Point cadets load up silver for the war effort.”
During World War II, The Manhattan Project “borrowed” 14,000 tons of silver from the United States Treasury Department. This article explains how it all happened. It’s a bit too technical for my tastes, but the essay gives you tons of facts and figures.