The Making of the Atomic Bomb

the bombers.

They came on in irregular numbers, dependent in those later years of the war not only on the vagaries of weather but also on the vagaries, enforced by the British blockade, of substandard engine parts and inferior fuel. A squadron flew against London by daylight on June 13, nineteen days after Folkestone, dropped almost 10,000 pounds of bombs and caused the most numerous civilian bombing casualties of the war, 432 injured and 162 killed, including sixteen horribly mangled children in the basement of a nursery school. London was nearly defenseless and at first the military saw no reason to change that naked condition; the War Minister, the Earl of Derby, told the House of Lords that the bombing was without military significance because not a single soldier had been killed.

So the Gothas continued their attacks. They crossed the Channel from bases in Belgium three times in July, twice in August, and averaged two raids a month through the autumn and winter and spring for a total of twenty- seven in all, first by day and then increasingly, as the British improved their home defenses, by night. They dropped almost a quarter of a million pounds of bombs, killing 835 people, injuring 1,972 more.

Lloyd George, by then Prime Minister, appealed to the brilliant, reliable Smuts to develop an air program, including a system of home defense. Early-warning mechanisms were devised: oversized binaural gramophone horns connected by stethoscope to keen blind listeners; sound-focusing cavities carved into sea cliffs that could pick up the wong-wong of Gotha engines twenty miles out to sea. Barrage balloons raised aprons of steel cable that girdled London's airspace; enormous white arrows mounted on the ground on pivots guided the radioless defenders in their Sopwith Camels and Pups toward the invading German bombers. The completed defense system around London was primitive but effective and it needed only technological improvement to ready it for the next war.

At the same time the Germans explored strategic offense. They extended the range of their Gothas with extra fuel tanks. When daylight bombing became too risky they learned to fly and bomb at night, navigating by the stars. They produced a behemoth new four-engine bomber, the Giant, a biplane with a wingspan of 138 feet, unmatched until the advent of the American B-29 Superfortress more than two decades later. Its effective range approached 300 miles. A Giant dropped the largest bomb of the war on London on February 16, 1918, a 2,000- pounder that was thirteen feet long; it exploded on the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. As they came to understand strategic bombing, the Germans turned from high explosives to incendiaries, reasoning presciently that fires might cause more damage by spreading and coalescing than any amount of explosives alone. By 1918 they had developed a ten-pound incendiary bomb of almost pure magnesium, the Elektron, that burned at between 2000° and 3000° and that water could not dowse. Only hope of a negotiated peace restrained Germany from attempting major incendiary raids on London in the final months of the war.

The Germans bombed to establish “a basis for peace” by destroying “the morale of the English people” and paralyzing their “will to fight.” They succeeded in making the British mad enough to think strategic bombing through. “The day may not be far off,” Smuts wrote in his report to Lloyd George, “when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of the war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate.”

The United States Army was slow to respond to gas warfare because it assumed that masks would adequately protect U.S. troops. The civilian Department of the Interior, which had experience dealing with poison gases in mines, therefore took the lead in chemical warfare studies. The Army quickly changed its mind when the Germans introduced mustard gas in July 1917. Research contracts for poison-gas development went out to Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale and other universities. With what a British observer could now call “the great importance attached in America to this branch of warfare,” Army Ordnance began construction in November 1917 of a vast war-gas arsenal at Edgewood, Maryland, on waste and marshy land.

The plant, which cost $35.5 million — a complex of 15 miles of roads, 36 miles of railroad track, waterworks and power plants and 550 buildings for the manufacture of chlorine, phosgene, chlorpicrin, sulfur chloride and mustard gas — was completed in less than a year. Ten thousand military and civilian workers staffed it. By the end of the war it was capable of filling 1.1 million 75-mm gas shells a month as well as several million other sizes and types of shells, grenades, mortar bombs and projector drums. “Had the war lasted longer,” the British observer notes, “there can be no doubt that this centre of production would have represented one of the most important contributions by America to the world war.”

Gas in any case was far less efficient at maiming and killing men than were artillery and machine-gun fire. Of a total of some 21 million battle casualties gas caused perhaps 5 percent, about 1 million. It killed at least 30,000 men, but at least 9 million died overall. Gas may have evoked special horror because it was unfamiliar and chemical rather than familiar and mechanical in its effects.

The machine gun forced the opposing armies into trenches; artillery carried the violence over the parapets once they were there. So the general staffs learned to calculate that they would lose 500,000 men in a six-month offensive or 300,000 men in six months of “ordinary” trench warfare. The British alone fired off more than 170 million artillery rounds, more than 5 million tons, in the course of the war. The shells, if they were not loaded with shrapnel in the first place, were designed to fragment when they exploded on impact; they produced by far the most horrible mutilations and dismemberings of the war, faces torn away, genitals torn away, a flying debris of arms and legs and heads, human flesh so pulped into the earth that the filling of sandbags with that earth was a repulsive punishment. Men cried out against the monstrousness on all sides.

The machine gun was less mutilating but far more efficient, the basic slaughtering tool of the war. “Concentrated essence of infantry,” a military theorist daintily labeled it. Against the criminally stubborn conviction of the professional officer corps that courage, elan and naked steel must carry the day the machine gun was the ultimate argument. “I go forward,” a British soldier writes of his experience in an attacking line of troops, “… up and down across ground like a huge ruined honeycomb, and my wave melts away, and the second wave comes up, and also melts away, and then the third wave merges into the ruins of the first and second, and after a while the fourth blunders into the remnants of the others.” He was describing the Battle of the Somme, on July 1, 1916, when at least 21,000 men died in the first hour, possibly in the first few minutes, and 60,000 the first day.

Americans invented the machine gun: Hiram Stevens Maxim, a Yankee from Maine; Colonel Isaac Lewis, a West Pointer, director of the U.S. Army coast artillery school; William J. Browning, a gunmaker and businessman; and their predecessor Richard Jordan Gatling, who correctly located the machine gun among automated systems. “It bears the same relation to other firearms,” Gatling noted, “that McCormack's Reaper does to the sickle, or the sewing machine to the common needle.” The military historian John Keegan writes:

For the most important thing about a machine-gun is that it is a machine, and one of quite an advanced type, similar in some respects to a high-precision lathe, in others to an automatic press. Like a lathe, it requires to be set up, so that it will operate within desired and predetermined limits; this was done on the Maxim gun… by adjusting the angle of the barrel relative to its fixed firing platform, and tightening or loosening its traversing screw. Then, like an automatic press, it would, when actuated by a simple trigger, begin and continue to perform its functions with a minimum of human attention, supplying its own power and only requiring a steady supply of raw material and a little routine maintenance to operate efficiently throughout a working shift.

The machine gun mechanized war. Artillery and gas mechanized war. They were the hardware of the war, the tools. But they were only proximately the mechanism of the slaughter. The ultimate mechanism was a method of organization — anachronistically speaking, a software package. “The basic lever,” the writer Gil Elliot comments, “was the conscription law, which made vast numbers of men available for military service. The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence, were military concerns.” Each interlocking system was logical in itself and each system could be rationalized by those who worked it and moved through it. Thus, Elliot demonstrates, “It is reasonable to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to devise guns of high technical capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in protective trenches.”

What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect