Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

In June 1942 the army appointed Colonel James Marshall of the Corps of Engineers to head the project and instructed him to form a new “district”—the unit of organization used by the corps. Marshall discussed his new role with fellow officers, including Colonel Leslie Groves, the corps’ deputy chief of construction, who had helped supervise the building of the Pentagon. Marshall set up his headquarters in lower Manhattan, sparking a debate on what the project should be called. One suggestion was the “Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials.” Groves wisely objected that this would only attract attention. He suggested, instead, that the project be named “Manhattan,” after the convention of naming new engineer districts after the city in which they were based. Groves also advised Marshall on how to seek approval for the purchase of a large site in Tennessee.

Groves was about to become far more closely involved with the Manhattan Project than he either guessed or desired. Marshall was competent, but Bush and Conant worried that he lacked suficient driving force. They suggested to Secretary of War Henry Stimson the appointment of a more energetic officer, and Stimson agreed. In September 1942 the forty-six-year-old Leslie Groves was confidently expecting a transfer to what he anticipated would be “an extremely attractive assignment overseas” in command of combat troops. All he needed was the approval of his commanding officer, General Brehon Somervell. Instead, Somervell told Groves that he could not leave Washington: “The Secretary of War has selected you for a very important assignment, and the President has approved the selection.” When Groves objected that he did not want to stay in Washington, Somervell replied, “If you do the job right it will win the war.” Groves’s spirits did not improve when he learned the nature of his assignment—“Oh, that thing,” he said.

Groves was by his own admission extremely disappointed, writing, “I did not know the details of America’s atomic development program…. what little I knew of the project had not particularly impressed me, and if I had known the complete picture I would have been still less impressed.” Groves’s pill was sweetened by the promise of promotion to brigadier-general, although, as Groves later observed, “It often seemed to me that the prerogatives of rank were more important in the academic world than they are among soldiers.”

If Groves doubted whether he was the right man for the job, so did Bush. Bush had wanted Somervell, but, as a three-star general, he was too senior. Somervell, meanwhile, had decided that Groves possessed the ideal qualities for the task and had not waited for Bush’s formal agreement before telling the disgruntled Groves of his selection. Unaware that Groves had already been appointed and anxious to appraise him as a candidate, Bush summoned him. The details of their uneasy encounter have become part of the folklore of the bomb. When Bush realized what had happened, he reacted angrily. His interview with Groves convinced him that Groves was tactless, aggressive, and unlikely to be able to deal with scientists. Furthermore, he felt he had been outmaneuvered by the army into accepting him. In a terse note to one of Stimson’s aides he wrote, “I fear we are in the soup.”

Time would, however, show that the stout, ebullient, rough-edged Leslie Groves was an excellent choice. He might not be particularly good with people, but he had an impressive facility for grasping essentials, identifying problems, and securing solutions. Born in Albany, New York, in 1896, Groves—known to his family as Dick—was the descendant, on his father’s side, of Protestant Huguenots who had fled religious persecution in France and emigrated to the United States in the seventeenth century. Their family name—originally Le Gros—became first La Groves and then simply Groves. On his mother’s side, Groves came from Welsh farming stock.

Groves’s father, also named Leslie, was a conscientious but indecisive man who attempted various professions with limited success, moving from teacher to lawyer to Presbyterian minister to army chaplain. His limited means made him frugal—a trait he passed to his son. He also bequeathed his son a distrust of the British. As army chaplain to the U.S. Fourteenth Infantry, he had marched with the international relief force sent to Beijing in 1900 to relieve the foreign legations under siege there during the Boxer Rebellion. The British contingent reached Beijing first, convincing Groves senior that they had selfishly kept to themselves intelligence about the best route into the city.

Early exposure to army life confirmed to the young Groves that it was the career he wanted. He worked single-mindedly to secure a cadetship at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, succeeding on his second attempt. He gained the nickname “Greasy Groves,” perhaps because of the sweet tooth he would retain all his life and his fleshy physique. However, he did well at the academy, graduating fourth in his class ten days before the end of the First World War. He chose a commission in the Corps of Engineers and moved on to train at the Engineer School, where the assistant commander noted his “very keen mind.” In 1922 Groves wed his childhood sweetheart Grace Wilson, who as a teenager had shrewdly captured two of his overriding characteristics—stubborness and love of sweet things—in a little rhyme:

In September 1942 Groves told Grace and their children that he had a new job, “that it involved secret matters and for that reason was never to be mentioned. The answer to be given if they were asked what I was doing was, T don’t know, I never know what he’s doing.’” Groves’s passion for secrecy would be a hallmark of his running of the Manhattan Project.

Groves embraced his new role with energy and resolve. The very day after his appointment he took steps to secure stocks of uranium ore, dispatching a subordinate to New York to see Edgar Sengier, managing director of Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, which owned the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the Belgian Congo. Sengier had left Brussels for the United States in October 1939. Toward the end of 1940, fearing that the Germans might invade the Belgian Congo, he had ordered his staff to ship to New York all the uranium ore in storage there. As a result, more than 1,200 tons of ore were sitting snugly in two thousand steel drums in a warehouse on Staten Island. Groves immediately arranged to buy the entire stock, as well as a further three thousand tons to be shipped from Africa, thereby securing two-thirds of the U.S. bomb project’s required stock of uranium ore.

Two days after his appointment, Groves authorized the purchase of the site in Tennessee on which a few weeks earlier he had been advising Marshall. On 23 September, the day his promotion came through and he formally took charge of the Manhattan Project, Groves caught the train to Tennessee to see the fifty-six-thousand-acre site for himself. It lay along the Clinch River in rolling hills near the small rural town of Clinton and would soon be named Oak Ridge after the ridges overlooking the site. It would eventually house the project’s massive U-235 production plants.

Groves returned to Washington and moved into an austere suite of rooms in the War Department Building. As he later wrote, “It was undoubtedly one of the smallest headquarters seen in modern Washington. Nevertheless, I fell far short of my goal of emulating General Sherman who, in his march from Atlanta to the sea, had limited his headquarters baggage to less than what could be placed in a single escort wagon.” He organized his small team on “simple and direct” lines so he could make “fast, positive decisions.” Realizing that delays in obtaining resources could prove fatal, he insisted on being given a top-priority—AAA—rating. When officials objected, he threatened to advise the president that the project would have to be abandoned. The threat worked.