engineering firm of H. K. Ferguson to build a 2,100-column thermal-diffusion plant beside the power plant on the Clinch River in ninety days or less. That extraordinary deadline allowed no time for design. Ferguson would assemble the operation from twenty-one identical copies — “Chinese copies,” Groves called them — of Philip Abelson's 100-column unit in the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
The general must have appreciated the fortuity of his decision when he learned the following month of the plutonium crisis at Los Alamos. But the thermal-diffusion plant was not immediately Oak Ridge's savior. Ferguson managed to build a capacious 500-foot barn of black metal siding and began operating the first rack of columns in sixty-nine days, by September 16, but steam leaked out almost as fast as it could be blown in and couplings needed extensive repair and even partial redesign. The gaseous-diffusion plant, K-25, was more than half completed but no barrier tubes shipped from Houdaille-Hershey yet met even minimum standards. The Alpha calutrons smeared uranium all over the insides of their vacuum tanks, catching no more than 4 percent of the U235; that valuable fraction, reprocessed and fed into the Beta calutrons, reached the Beta collectors in turn at only 5 percent efficiency. Five percent of 4 percent is two thousandths. A speck of U235 stuck to an operator's coveralls was well worth searching out with a Geiger counter and retrieving delicately with tweezers. No essence was ever expressed more expensively from the substance of the world with the possible exception of the human soul.
In the Pacific the island war advanced. As the Army under General Douglas MacArthur pushed up from Australia across New Guinea toward the Philippines, the Marines under Admiral Chester Nimitz island-hopped from Guadalcanal to Bougainville in the Solomons, north across the equator to Tarawa in the Gilberts, farther north to Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshalls. That brought them, by the summer of 1944, within striking distance of the Japanese inner defense perimeter to the west. Its nearest bastions were the Marianas, a chain of volcanic islands at the right corner of a roughly equilateral triangle of which the Philippine main island of Luzon was the left corner and the Japanese main island of Honshu the apex. The United States wanted the Marianas as primary bases for further advance: Guam for the Navy; Saipan and Tinian for the new B-29 Superfortresses that the Army Air Force had begun deploying temporarily at great risk and expense in China's Szechwan province, ferrying aviation fuel and bombs over the Himalayas to support their mission, which was the high-altitude precision bombing of Japan. By contrast, only fifteen hundred miles of open water separated Saipan and Tinian from Tokyo and the islands could be supplied securely by sea.
Nimitz named the Marianas campaign Operation Forager; it began in mid-June with heavy bombing of the island airfields. Then 535 ships carrying 127,571 troops sailed from Eniwetok, the largest force of men and ships yet assembled for a Pacific naval operation. “We are through with flat atolls now,” Holland Smith, the Marine commanding general, briefed his officers. “We learned to pulverize atolls, but now we are up against mountains and caves where Japs can dig in. A week from now there will be a lot of dead Marines.”
Intelligence estimates put 15,000 to 17,000 Japanese troops on Saipan, 10,000 on smaller Tinian three miles to the south. The marines invaded Saipan first, on the morning of June 15, and won a long but shallow beachhead onto which, by afternoon, amphtracs had delivered 20,000 men.
Nowhere have I seen the nature of the Jap better illustrated than it was near the airstrip at dusk. I had been digging a foxhole for the night when one man shouted: “There is a Jap under those logs!” The command post security officer was dubious, but he handed concussion grenades to a man and told him to blast the Jap out. Then a sharp ping of the Jap bullet whistled out of the hole and from under the logs a skinny little fellow — not much over 5 ft. tall — jumped out waving a bayonet.
An American tossed a grenade and it knocked the Jap down. He struggled up, pointed his bayonet into his stomach and tried to cut himself open in approved hara-kiri fashion. The disemboweling never came off. Someone shot the Jap with a carbine. But, like all Japs, he took a lot of killing. Even after four bullets had thudded into his body he rose to one knee. Then the American shot him through the head and the Jap was dead.
While the marines advanced into Saipan, fighting off the harrowing Japanese frontal assaults they learned to call banzai charges, 155-millimeter Long Toms brought ashore and set up in the southern sector of the island began softening up Tinian. That smaller island of thirty-eight square miles, ten miles long and shaped much like Manhattan, was far less rugged than Saipan. Its highest elevation, Mount Lasso, rose only 564 feet above sea level; its lowlands were planted in sugar cane; it had roads and a railway to recommend it to tank operations. To the disadvantage of amphibious assault the island was a raised platform protected on all sides by steep cliffs 500 to 600 feet high — The Rock, the marines would come to call it. It had two major beaches, one near Tinian Town on the southwest coast and the other, which the marines named Yellow, on the east coast at the island's waist. Navy frogmen explored both by night and found them heavily mined and defended.
Two other smaller beaches on the northwest coast hardly deserved the name; one was 60 yards long and the other 150 yards. The United States had made no division-strength landing across any beach less than twice the length of those two toeholds combined in the entire course of the war. The Japanese on Tinian accordingly defended them with nothing more than a few mines and two 25-man blockhouses. The marines coded them White 1 and White 2 and chose them for their assault.
The invasion of Tinian began on July 24, two weeks after Saipan had been secured. Because of the larger island's proximity the marines could deploy shore-to-shore rather than ship-to-shore, embarking in LST's and smaller craft directly from Saipan. A feint at Tinian Town beach decoyed the Japanese defenses and the invaders achieved complete tactical surprise, rushing ashore and pushing inland as fast as possible to escape the dangerously narrow landings. By the end of the day, when the advance halted to organize a solid defense against the Japanese troops rushing up the island from Tinian Town, most of the tanks had been brought ashore, four howitzer batteries were in place and a spare battalion was even at hand. The defenders had killed fifteen marines and wounded fewer than two hundred; the American perimeter extended inland more than two miles.
With the coming of darkness the Japanese began a mortar barrage. Near midnight their artillery arrived and they added it in. The marines answered with their howitzers. To watch for the expected Japanese counterattack they illuminated the area with flares. The attack started at 0300 hours, Japanese soldiers rushing the American lines head-on in the naked light of the flares. Against strong Marine defenses challenge quickly became slaughter.
The marines needed only four days to advance down the island. They encountered tanks and infantry and in the mild terrain easily destroyed them. They took Tinian Town on July 31, that night shattered a last banzai charge from the south and the next day, August 1, 1944, declared the island secure. More than 6,000 Japanese combatants died compared to 300 Americans. Another 1,500 marines were wounded. Soon the Seabees would arrive to begin bulldozing airfields.
Saipan before had been bloodier: 13,000 U.S. casualties, 3,000 marines killed, 30,000 Japanese defenders dead. But a more grotesque slaughter had engulfed the island's population of civilians. Believing as propaganda had prepared them that the Americans would visit upon them rape, torture, castration and murder, 22,000 Japanese civilians had made their way to two sea cliffs 80 and 1,000 feet high above jagged rocks and, despite appeals from Japanese-speaking American interpreters and even fellow islanders, had flung themselves, whole families at a time, to their deaths. The surf ran red with their blood; so many broken bodies floated in the water that Navy craft overrode them to rescue. Not all the dead had volunteered their sacrifice; many had been rallied, pushed or shot by Japanese soldiers.
The mass suicide on Saipan — a Jonestown of its day — instructed Americans further in the nature of the Jap. Not only soldiers but also civilians, ordinary men and women and children, chose death before surrender. On their home islands the Japanese were 100 million strong, and they would take a lot of killing.
“The view was stupendous, and the wind was bitter cold,” Leona Marshall recalls of a day at Hanford, Washington, in September 1944 when she, Enrico Fermi and Crawford Greenewalt climbed giddily to the top of a twelve-story tower to survey the secret reservation. They could see the Columbia River running deep and blue in both directions out of sight over the horizon; they could see the gray desert and the distant hazy mountains. By then construction was more than two-thirds completed and nearer at hand they overlooked a city of industrial buildings and barracks and three massive blockhouses, the three plutonium production reactors sited on the river's western shore. The number of construction workers had peaked at 42,400 the previous June. Marshall was working now at Hanford; Fermi and Greenewalt had traveled out to monitor the start-up of the B pile, the first one finished.
