silver platter,” Szilard remembers hearing Fermi say, “there would still be a fifty-fifty chance that they would mess it up.” But beyond debating the virtues of contractors and cooling systems only Szilard continued to rebel:
We may take the stand that the responsibility for the success of this work has been delegated by the President to Dr. Bush. It has been delegated by Dr. Bush to Dr. Conant. Dr. Conant delegates this responsibility (accompanied by only part of the necessary authority) to Compton. Compton delegates to each of us some particular task and we can lead a very pleasant life while we do our duty. We live in a pleasant part of a pleasant city, in the pleasant company of each other, and have in Dr. Compton the most pleasant “boss” we could wish to have. There is every reason why we should be happy and since there is a war on, we are even willing to work overtime.
Alternatively, we may take the stand that those who have originated the work on this terrible weapon and those who have materially contributed to its development have, before God and the World, the duty to see to it that it should be ready to be used at the proper time and in the proper way.
I believe that each of us has now to decide where he feels that his responsibility lies.
The Army had been involved in the bomb project since June, but the Corps of Engineers' Colonel Marshall had been unable to drive the project ahead of other national military priorities. Divided between the OSRD and the Army it began to look as if it might lose its way. Bush thought he saw a solution in an authoritative new Military Policy Committee that would retain the project under partly civilian control but delegate direction to a dynamic Army officer and back him up. “From my own point of view,” he wrote at the end of August 1942, “faced as I am with the unanimous opinion of a group of men that I consider to be among the greatest scientists in the world, joined by highly competent engineers, I am prepared to recommend that nothing should stand in the way of putting this whole affair through to conclusion… even if it does cause moderate interference with other war efforts.”
Bush had discussed his problems with the general in charge of the Army Services of Supply, Brehon Somervell. Independently Somervell worked out a solution of his own: assigning entire responsibility to the Corps of Engineers, which was under his command. The program would need a stronger leader. He had a man in mind. In mid-September he sought him out.
“On the day I learned that I was to direct the project which ultimately produced the atomic bomb,” Albany- born Leslie Richard Groves wrote later, “I was probably the angriest officer in the United States Army.” The West Point graduate, forty-six years old in 1942, goes on to explain why:
It was on September 17, 1942, at 10:30 a.m., that I got the news. I had agreed, by noon that day, to telephone my acceptance of a proposed assignment to duty overseas. I was then a colonel in the Army Engineers, with most of the headaches of directing ten billion dollars' worth of military construction in the country behind me — for good, I hoped. I wanted to get out of Washington, and quickly.
Brehon B. Somervell… my top superior, met me in a corridor of the new House of Representatives Office Building when I had finished testifying about a construction project before the Military Affairs Committee.
“About that duty overseas,” General Somervell said, “you can tell them no.”
“Why?” I inquired.
“The Secretary of War has selected you for a very important assignment.”
“Where?”
“Washington.”
“I don't want to stay in Washington.”
“If you do the job right,” General Somervell said carefully, “it will win the war.”
Men like to recall, in later years, what they said at some important or possibly historic moment in their lives… I remember only too well what I said to General Somervell that day.
I said, “Oh.”
As deputy chief of construction for the entire U.S. Army, Groves knew enough about the bomb project to recognize its dubious claim to decisive effect and be thoroughly disappointed. He had just finished building the Pentagon, the most visible work of his career. He had seen the S-l budget; it amounted in total to less than he had been spending in a week. He wanted assignment commanding troops. But he was career Army and understood he hardly had a choice. He crossed the Potomac to the Pentagon office of Somervell's chief of staff, Brigadier General Wilhelm D. Styer, for a briefing. Styer implied the job was well along and ought to be easy. The two officers worked up an order for Somervell to sign authorizing Groves “to take complete charge of the entire.. project.” Groves discovered he would be promoted to brigadier — for authority and in compensation — in a matter of days. He proposed to delay official appointment until the promotion came through. “I thought that there might be some problems in dealing with the many academic scientists involved in the project,” he remembers of his initial innocence, “and I felt that my position would be stronger if they thought of me from the first as a general instead of as a promoted colonel.” Styer agreed.
Groves was one inch short of six feet tall, jowly, with curly chestnut hair, blue eyes, a sparse mustache and sufficient girth to balloon over his webbing belt above and below its brass military buckle. Leona Woods thought he might weigh as much as 300 pounds; he was probably nearer 250 then, though he continued to expand. He had graduated from the University of Washington in 1914, studied engineering intensely for two years at MIT and gone on to West Point, where he graduated fourth in his class in 1918. Years at the Army Engineer School, the Command and General Staff College and the Army War College in the 1920s and 1930s completed his extensive education. He had seen duty in Hawaii, Europe and Central America. His father was a lawyer who left the law for the ministry and served in a country parish and an urban, working-class church before Grover Cleveland's Secretary of War convinced him to enlist as an Army chaplain on the Western frontier. “Entering West Point fulfilled my greatest ambition,” Groves testifies. “I had been brought up in the Army, and in the main had lived on Army posts all my life. I was deeply impressed with the character and outstanding devotion to duty of the officers I knew.” The dynamic engineer was married, with a thirteen-year-old daughter and a plebe son at West Point.
“A tremendous lone wolf,” one of his subordinates describes Groves. Another, whose immediate superior Groves was about to become, distills their years together into grudgingly admiring vitriol. Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols — balding, bespectacled, thirty-four in 1942, West Point, Ph.D. in hydraulic engineering at Iowa State — remembers Groves as
the biggest sonovabitch I've ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable individuals. He had an ego second to none, he had tireless energy — he was a big man, a heavy man but he never seemed to tire. He had absolute confidence in his decisions and he was absolutely ruthless in how he approached a problem to get it done. But that was the beauty of working for him — that you never had to worry about the decisions being made or what it meant. In fact I've often thought that if I were to have to do my part all over again, I would select Groves as boss. I hated his guts and so did everybody else but we had our form of understanding.
Nichols' previous boss, Colonel Marshall, had worked out of an office in Manhattan (where in August he had disguised the project to build an atomic bomb behind the name Manhattan Engineer District). But decisions of priority and supply were made in wartime in hurly-burly Washington offices, not in Manhattan, and to fight those battles the colonel had chosen the capable Nichols. Groves therefore sought out Nichols next after Styer. And found the project in even worse condition than he had feared: “I was not happy with the information I received; in fact, I was horrified.”
He took Nichols with him to the Carnegie Institution on P Street to confront Vannevar Bush. Somervell had overlooked clearing Groves' appointment with Bush and the OSRD director was infuriated. He evaded Groves' questions brusquely, which puzzled Groves. Controlling his anger until Groves and Nichols left, Bush then paid Styer a visit, which he describes in a contemporary memorandum:
I told him (1) that I still felt, as I had told him and General Somervell previously, that the best move was to get the military commission first, and then the man to carry out their policies second; (2) that having seen General Groves briefly, I doubted whether he had sufficient tact for such a job.
Styer disagreed on (1) and I simply said I wanted to be sure he understood my recommendation. On (2) he agreed the man is blunt, etc., but thought his other qualities would overbalance… I fear we are in the soup.
