Bomber Command killed at least 45,000 Germans that night, the majority of them old people, women and children.
The bombing of Hamburg was hardly unique. It was one atrocity in a war of increasing atrocities. Between 1941 and 1943 the German Army on the Eastern Front captured and enclosed in prisoner-of-war camps without food or shelter some two million Soviet soldiers; at least one million of them died of exposure and starvation. During the same period the Final Solution to the Jewish Question — the vast Nazi program to exterminate the European Jews — began in deadly earnest after the Wannsee Conference of coordinating agencies met in suburban Berlin on January 20, 1942. Whatever moral issues such atrocities raise, they resulted from the progressive escalation of the war by all its belligerents in pursuit of victory. (Even the Final Solution: because the Nazis believed the Jews constituted a separate nation lodged subversively in their midst — nationality being defined in the Nazi canon primarily in terms of race — and as such the nation with which the Third Reich was preeminently at war. It was Hitler's particular perversity to define victory over the Jews as extermination; the Allies in their defensive war against Germany and Japan wanted only total surrender, in return for which the mass killing of combatants and civilians would stop.)
One way the belligerents could escalate was to improve their death technologies. Better bombers and better bomber defenses such as Window were hardware improvements; so were the showers at the death camps efficiently pumped with the deadly fumigant Zyklon B. The bomber-stream system and allowance for creep-back were software improvements; so were the schedules Adolf Eichmann devised that kept the trains running efficiently to the camps.
The other way the belligerents could escalate was to enlarge the range of permissible victims their death technologies might destroy. Civilians had the misfortune to be the only victims left available. Better hardware and software began to make them also accessible in increasing numbers. No great philosophical effort was required to discover acceptable rationales. War begot psychic numbing in combatants and civilians alike; psychic numbing prepared the way for increasing escalation.
Extend war by attrition to include civilians behind the lines and war becomes total. With improving technology so could death-making be. The bombing of Hamburg marked a significant step in the evolution of death technology itself, massed bombers deliberately churning conflagration. It was still too much a matter of luck, an elusive combination of weather and organization and hardware. It was still also expensive in crews and materiel. It was not yet perfect, as no technology can ever be, and therefore seemed to want perfecting.
The British and the Americans would be enraged to learn of Japanese brutality and Nazi torture, of the Bataan Death March and the fathomless horror of the death camps. By a reflex so mindlessly unimaginative it may be merely mammalian, the bombing of distant cities, out of sight and sound and smell, was generally approved, although neither the United States nor Great Britain admitted publicly that it deliberately bombed civilians. In Churchill's phrase, the enemy was to be “de-housed.” The Jap and the Nazi in any case had started the war. “We must face the fact that modern warfare as conducted in the Nazi manner is a dirty business,” Franklin Roosevelt told his countrymen. “We don't like it — we didn't want to get in it — but we are in it and we're going to fight it with everything we've got.”
The Los Alamos review committee headed by W.K. Lewis of MIT reported its findings on May 10, 1943. It approved the laboratory's nuclear physics research program. It recommended that theoretical investigation of the thermonuclear bomb continue at second priority, subordinate to fission bomb work. It proposed a major change in the chemistry program: final purification of plutonium on the Hill, because Los Alamos would be ultimately responsible for the performance of the plutonium bomb and because the scarce new element would be used and reused for experiments during the months before a sufficient quantity accumulated to load a bomb and would have to be frequently repurified. The Lewis committee also concurred in a recommendation Robert Oppenheimer had made in March that ordnance development and engineering should begin immediately at Los Alamos rather than wait until nuclear physics studies were complete. General Groves accepted the committee's findings; they dictated an immediate doubling of Hill personnel. Thereafter until the end of the war the Los Alamos working population would double every nine months. The dust of construction never settled; housing would always be short, water scarce, electricity intermittent. Groves spent not a penny more than necessary on comforts for civilians.
The bottom pole piece of the Harvard cyclotron had been laid on April 14; by the first week in June Robert Wilson's cyclotron group saw signs of a beam. The Wisconsin long-tank Van de Graaff came on line at 4 million volts on May 15 and the 2 MV short-tank Van de Graaff on June 10. In July the first physics experiment completed at Los Alamos counted the number of secondary neutrons Pu239 emitted when it fissioned. “In this experiment,” says the Los Alamos technical history, “the neutron number was measured from an almost invisible speck of plutonium and found to be somewhat greater even than for U235.” The experiment thus established what had not yet been confirmed despite the expensive rush of building: that plutonium emitted sufficient secondary neutrons to chain-react.
The speck of plutonium was Glenn Seaborg's 200-milligram sample of Met Lab oxide, which he had sent to Los Alamos at the beginning of the month. Seaborg had worked himself sick at the Met Lab that spring — an upper respiratory infection compounded with exhaustion and a persistent fever — and came to New Mexico with his wife during July to vacation. (“I guess I deliberately chose to be near the plutonium,” he muses. “I wonder why?”) Too much peace and quiet at a guest ranch threatened to exhaust him further and on July 21 he and his wife moved to the adobe-style La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe. Compartmentalization put Los Alamos off limits. The Seaborgs were ready to return to Chicago on Friday, July 30, and Seaborg proposed to carry the Pu sample, most of the world's supply, back with him on the train. Robert Wilson and another physicist made the transfer before dawn in the restaurant where the Seaborgs were having breakfast in Santa Fe, Wilson arriving in a pickup armed Western-style with his personal Winchester.32 deer-hunting rifle to guard a highly valuable but barely visible treasure. “Then I just put it in my pocket and then into my suitcase,” Seaborg remembers. He proceeded to Chicago unarmed.
To direct the expanded Ordnance Division Groves asked the Military Policy Committee in Washington to recommend a good man, preferably a military officer. Vannevar Bush knew a
Parsons had also worked on early radar development and served as gunnery officer on a destroyer and experimental officer at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. He was forty-three, cool, vigorous, trim, nearly bald, spit-and-polish but innovative; “all his hfe,” one of the men who worked for him at Los Alamos testifies in praise, “he fought the silly regulations and the conservatism of the Navy.” Groves liked him; “within a few minutes [of meeting him],” the general says, “I was sure he was the man for the job.” Oppenheimer interviewed the man for the job in Washington and agreed. Parsons was married to Martha Cluverius, a Vassar graduate and the daughter of an admiral; with two blond daughters and a cocker spaniel the couple arrived at Los Alamos in an open red convertible in June.
Parsons' first order of business was the plutonium gun. Because it needed a muzzle velocity of at least 3,000 feet per second it would have to be 17 feet long. It should weigh no more than a ton, a fifth of the usual weight of a gun that size, which meant it would have to be machined from strong high-alloy steel. It would not require rifling but needed three independently operated primers to make sure it fired. Parsons arranged for the Navy's gun-design section to engineer it.
Norman F. Ramsey, a tall young Columbia physicist, the son of a general, served under Parsons as group leader for delivery: for devising a way to deliver the bombs to their targets and drop them. In June he contacted the U.S. Air Force to identify a combat aircraft that could carry a 17-foot bomb. “As a result of this survey,” Ramsey writes, “it was apparent that the B-29 was the only United States aircraft in which such a bomb could be conveniently carried internally, and even this plane would require considerable modification so that the bomb could extend into both front and rear bomb bays… Except for the British Lancaster, all other aircraft would require such a bomb to be carried externally.” The Air Force was not about to allow a historic new weapon of war to be introduced to the world in a British aircraft, but the B-29 Superfortress was a new design still plagued with serious problems. The first service-test model had not yet flown when Ramsey began his aircraft survey in June; a flight-test model had crashed into a Seattle packing house in February and killed the plane's entire test crew and nineteen packing- house workers.
Ramsey did not have to wait for access to a B-29 to begin collecting data on the long bomb's ballistics, however. He mocked up a scale model and arranged to see it dropped:
