The Second Sun, page 7
Gotta give Groves credit. Once he heard me out, he deflated. A little bit, anyway. “Okay,” he said. “I get it. Jesus, this is the last thing we need: the Japs with a gadget. Good God. We focused on the Germans. Turns out they didn’t even get close. Hindsight. Never thought about the Japs. Okay. Okay. Van Rensselaer, you run this one. Tell me when you have anything of substance.”
Groves and his retinue swept out of the room. I turned to Van Rensselaer. “What’s a gadget?” I asked, innocently.
“That’s the nickname the scientists have given the actual bomb. That way they don’t have to say the word ‘bomb’ or ‘weapon.’ And thank you, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “I’ve met guys like him before. And ‘gadget’? That makes it okay?”
“Something like that,” he replied. “I think most of the scientists are pacifists at heart. Probably because they fully understand the thing they’re creating.”
“They have regrets?”
“I think the only regret they have is that they couldn’t use it against Hitler. Many of them are German Jews. Probably why the German program got nowhere. They exterminated the best scientific minds they had. The ones who were forced to work on a German program probably led the Nazis down some pretty unlikely paths until they went to a camp.”
On that cheery note we left the building and went back to the hotel for lunch.
Van Rensselaer was subdued during lunch. Thinking, I assumed. I’d saved his face when I told Groves about his so-called foresight. “What does Admiral King know about the Manhattan Project?” I asked.
“Theoretically, nothing,” he said. “But…”
“Yeah, but,” I replied. “Permit me to explain something. The CNO’s top priority is to safeguard the Navy’s role in national defense, which is to say to strive for naval budgetary preeminence. The chief of staff of the Army has the same mission. When both of them realize that hundreds of millions of budget money are going elsewhere, they’re going to find out where and why. I’d be very surprised if Ernest ‘Jesus’ King didn’t have a pretty good idea.”
“You work this for him in any regard?”
“Negative. But my point is this: if you want, excuse me, need the Navy’s help to find the Japanese weapons program, you’re going to have to read him in. All the way in.”
“Groves won’t allow that. Not even Truman, when he was the vice president, was read in.”
I sighed. “That was then. This is now. That was FDR. In my opinion, that was pretty dumb. Tell General Groves that he’ll look like a perfect idiot if the Japs drop one before we do, especially if they hit our invasion fleet. I’ll arrange the meeting for you to see the CNO.”
“You’ll go with me, then,” he said.
“Oh. Goody,” I said, knowing Admiral King all too well, but I knew I had convinced Van Rensselaer. The largest naval fleet in history would soon be assembling to invade and destroy Japan. But to do that, it would have to concentrate. The CNO would argue that he could spare no assets at this critical juncture to investigate a hypothetical Japanese atomic program. It would take everything we had to flatten Japan once and for all. Van Rensselaer and I would have to convince him that if the Japs were close to or had a bomb of their own, the only time it would be useful to them was when the entire American fleet concentrated within range of one of their bombers.
But first, Van Rensselaer had to get authorization to let Admiral King in on a whopper of a secret. As our car crawled through some traffic congestion toward Main Navy, I realized I was a long, long way from Johnson County, Kansas.
I entered the naval academy in 1922, having grown up in Olathe, Kansas, which at the time was a typical Midwestern town. My father worked for the telephone company that year; this was long before the large naval air station was built in Olathe. The country was recovering from the First World War and the economy seemed to be once again prospering. My father’s older brother was a congressman, which is how I garnered an appointment to Annapolis. I’d been enthralled as a kid watching war films and news clips of the actions at sea, including grainy black-and-white scenes from the Battle of Jutland. I graduated from a small Catholic high school at a time when only the naval academy was again accepting applicants, following the huge military drawdowns after the Great War. West Point was still restricted to only two hundred new cadets per year.
Graduating in 1926 I’d gone off to sea on an Atlantic Fleet battleship, USS Texas (BB-35). I graduated as an Ensign, USN, and joined six other recent graduates aboard what was then a pretty big battleship. It was a two-year tour of duty, during which time we were not permitted to be married, because having a family was considered to be a handicap for a brand-new naval officer. The miserly pay may have had a bearing on that notion.
Following that “makee-learn” assignment, I went up the line through various ranks and assignments: division officer, department head, executive officer, graduate school, and then, eventually, a destroyer command that came on the heels of Pearl Harbor. My ship and I arrived off Guadalcanal right after the Savo Island disaster, where the Imperial Japanese Navy introduced the Americans to nighttime torpedo warfare. A Japanese cruiser formation sank four heavy cruisers, three American and one Australian, in the space of an hour without suffering a scratch. It was a real wake-up call within the US Navy, and it took the better part of two years before we began to sink consistently some of theirs. During the thirties there wasn’t enough budget money to get out to sea often enough, and that cost us dearly when we went up against Japanese ships that had been training for years, especially in nighttime surface warfare. At the depth of the Depression, the fleet would get to sea once a year in the annual fleet battle problem, and then spend months sitting at the pier on mountains of coffee grounds. Real readiness was nonexistent. Officers’ pay was cut in order to keep numbers sufficient to man the ships, and we were glad to still have a job. Even so, many fleet ships were laid up and their crews paid off.
I was glad at the time that I didn’t have a wife and family. I barely had enough money to own a car and often lived aboard ship so as not to have to pay rent. I would meet attractive women from time to time, but the underlying consensus seemed to be don’t marry a naval officer. They’re always gone to sea and you’ll be forever poor. Hard to argue with that, especially as the country began to prepare for another world war, brought to you by the same people who started the First World War. Realists in the Navy knew that we’d be drawn into it somehow once England was attacked, although no one in the fleet saw Pearl Harbor coming. Bachelorhood in the fleet was common prewar. It was overtaken by widowhood by late 1942. I’d never appreciated the crushing sadness suffered by so many wives whose husbands never came back from the vast Pacific. Every time I thought about it, I recalled that macabre poem by Shakespeare in The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
ELEVEN
COMINCH
When we got to Constitution Avenue, we turned right to get down to the one-third-mile-long Main Navy and Munitions buildings, where reportedly fourteen thousand men and women worked. These “temporary” buildings had been erected in 1918 and showed some definite wear and tear. Supposedly they would all disappear when the armed forces headquarters staffs eventually moved to that concrete monstrosity going up across the Potomac called the Pentagon. The Army had already made the move. The Navy, as usual, was resisting the change.
I took Van Rensselaer to my former office, where now an aviator four-striper resided. I made introductions as his predecessor and told him we needed to set up a half-hour appointment with the CNO today.
He laughed outright. “Your name Harry Truman, did you say?” he snorted. “Get in line, Captain, and the end of that line’s out the building. You worked here; you should know that.”
Van Rensselaer spoke up. “My boss’s name is Truman,” he announced from way up there in the clouds. “I’m from the National Security Council. I prefer to speak to Admiral King in his own offices. But if it’s necessary, I can arrange a summons to the White House. An hour ago I was briefing the president on a topic of some importance. He told me to brief Admiral King. Today, if possible. Can you help me out?”
The captain’s eyes went wide. “Sir, I can’t, but I can call and check with the CNO’s EA. It’s just that—”
“I understand this is somewhat unusual,” Van Rensselaer interrupted, as if the poor captain hadn’t even spoken. “Don’t call,” he said. “Go to the CNO’s office. Mention my name. It’s Van Rensselaer.” He spelled it out. “We’ll wait here.”
As in, discussion over. Do it. The captain blinked, got up, grabbed his uniform jacket, and went down the hall. He was back in three minutes. “The CNO will see you now, sir,” he said, as if he was positively amazed at what he was saying. “If you’ll come with me.”
We went down the hall and entered the first of three anterooms. The first was the waiting room, where there was a rear admiral and his staff officers sitting. Then the secretarial office, where both Navy yeomen and civilian secretaries beavered away on shiny, black Royal typewriters, and then the EA’s office, which led into the CNO’s actual office suite. A captain wearing four gold aiguillettes on his dress khaki uniform shoulder stood up, and welcomed us to the CNO’s office. The sign on the desk said he was H. R. Mayer, the executive assistant to the chief of naval operations. I knew the layout well and was, happily, recognized by several of the clerical staff, but they all stared at Van Rensselaer, who had to bend his head a little to get through the smallish Tempo-building doorways. This was definitely not the Old Executive Office Building. There were, however, Marine guards present in all the corridors outside.
Captain Mayer led us through the final doorway. The temperature dropped ten degrees as we went through that door. The EA backed out discreetly and closed the door. Admiral King was at his desk and he glowered at us both underneath that chrome-dome head of his as we came through. Then he recognized me.
“Wolfe Bowen, what’s this all about, then?” he asked. “I thought you’d been shanghaied by the Army.” Then he turned to Van Rensselaer. “Captain, my EA said I should see you forthwith. Do I know you?”
“No, Admiral,” Van Rensselaer replied, as we sat down. “But you soon will. The president directed me to brief you on an extremely secret national weapons project just an hour ago. It’s called the Manhattan Project. Before I begin, I need your personal assurances that you will not disclose anything I’m about to tell you to anyone on your staff or in your chain of command. Not the vice CNO, not the Secretary of the Navy, not to anyone.”
King’s imperious face bridled. “Captains don’t come barging into my office and say things like that to me, Van Rensselaer, even if they are White House staff. Admiral Leahy said I should see you, but I’ll be the judge of what I tell my staff, as a function of what it is you want. I’m a fleet admiral, the CNO, and also the commander in chief of the entire US Navy, or need I remind you?”
Van Rensselaer closed his eyes for a full half minute, which, I think, made King even angrier. Then he looked over at me, ignoring King. “This was a mistake,” he declared. “We need to seek an alternative modality to find out what we need to know. At a lower level. You know, at the operational level, perhaps. Someone at the sharp end of the spear, without all this gratuitous megalomania. Let’s go.”
King stood up and drew himself to his full height. “How dare you?” he thundered. “I forbid you to approach any of my operational commanders for whatever the fuck it is you’re babbling on about. And, oh, by the way, now I’m going to make it a point to find out what it is you’re all about, and then I’ll decide what to do with that information. And with you, sir.” He picked up the phone and told his secretary to get him the White House operator.
Semper Iratus, I thought. That was the unofficial and circumspect nickname just about the entire Navy staff had given Ernest J. King. Always angry. His own daughter had once rebuked a journalist who’d said that her father had an unstable temperament. “What?” she’d said. “He has the most stable temperament in the entire Navy. He is always furious.”
Van Rensselaer stood up and fixed King with a stony glare. King was a tall man; Van Rensselaer was taller.
“If you so much as pronounce the words Manhattan Project out loud,” he said softly, “you will be arrested by the US Secret Service and placed in solitary confinement at a location suitable to your lofty rank for the duration of the war. If you won’t help, then we will make damn sure you can’t hurt. Believe it or not, Your Highness, what I was going to brief you on supersedes anything you think you have power over. You. Idiot. You.” A half-second pause. “Sir.”
King’s face went white with outrage. Van Rensselaer didn’t give him a chance to say anything. He beckoned to me and we left King’s inner office, got through two of the anterooms, passing the executive assistant, who was trotting anxiously back toward King’s office. We got all the way to the corridor outside the waiting room before an alarmed-looking Marine guard caught up with us.
“Sirs?” he said. “Wait. Please?”
“What now?” Van Rensselaer spat.
“The CNO, sirs?” the frightened kid sputtered. “He wants you to come back. He really wants you to come back.”
Van Rensselaer gave me a cold smile. “Fancy that,” he said, softly. “I believe I detect the long, steely arm of Admiral Leahy.”
We went back in, although Van Rensselaer made slow going of it. Boy, was I impressed. And, once again, fervently wishing I hadn’t had to be there.
TWELVE
THE LADY FROM ONI
The briefing took one and a half hours, not thirty minutes, with Van Rensselaer taking his time to make sure that the CNO truly understood the ramifications of the Manhattan Project. I was a bit surprised at the scope of his technical knowledge. Even with my master’s degree in chemistry from a highly regarded technical university, I learned stuff in that briefing that truly shocked me. At one point, Van Rensselaer again described the “gadget” as basically tapping into the power of the sun. Admiral King, who was no dummy by any means, immediately understood. He had one question. “Does Admiral Leahy know all about this?”
“Yes, sir, he does. He coordinates our interaction with the British program. General Marshall, however, has not been briefed in. Neither has General Eisenhower. Nor had the vice president, now president, until this morning.”
Wow, King mouthed silently. “What do you need from the operational Navy?” he said, finally, with no trace of that unlimited hubris for which he was famous. I was wondering who he’d called at the White House. He’d certainly changed his mind pretty quick. Had to have been Leahy.
“I think we’ll need one submarine,” Van Rensselaer said. “Just one submarine. And someone from ONI.”
“To go where?”
“Korea,” Van Rensselaer said. “We think. Or possibly to far northern Japan. But when we know, I’ll need your immediate approval, no questions asked. And one other thing: I need a directive from you to ONI to cooperate with us, well, me, when I come calling. A blank check, actually. It won’t be about money, but rather signals intelligence, and possibly, the use of any human assets they have in the eventual target area.”
King smiled. “ONI will have a cow with that kind of tasking,” he said. “They’re such nannies. But you’ll have it.”
We got ready to leave. Van Rensselaer turned to King. “So, what do you think now, Admiral?” he asked. “And I apologize for my intemperate language.”
King sat there for a moment. “Apology accepted, Captain Van Rensselaer,” he said. “You’ve got a pair of brass ones, I’ll give you that. But mostly I hope your Manhattan guys know what they’re doing. Sounds to me like you people are about to tread on God’s robes.”
“Exactly so, Admiral,” Van Rensselaer said. “Exactly so. We’re going to test the prototype of this weapon in the not-too-distant future, somewhere out in the Western desert. Three of our most senior scientists still believe there’s a chance the damned thing might ignite the entire earth’s atmosphere. God’s robes indeed.”
King just shook his head, for once not knowing what to say. Who did?
We left Main Navy and got back into our waiting staff car. “The EOB,” he told the driver. I raised my eyebrows. We’d just been there.
“I need to tell Admiral Leahy that we’ve read the CNO into the program. He’ll be the one to see to it that Admiral King follows through. And he gets to tell Groves.”
Admiral William D. Leahy was the essence of an éminence grise in Washington. In a forty-year naval career, beginning as a sailing ship cadet and now as the first five-star flag officer ever in the US Armed Forces, Leahy had been FDR’s chief of staff and now served Truman in that capacity.
He’d been a most-trusted confidant, advisor, and close friend of Roosevelt for many years, on a par with his civilian counterpart, Harry Hopkins. He was discreet to the point of invisibility, and yet heads of governments and military chiefs of staff throughout the Western Alliance answered immediately if he called. He had an office in the White House itself, as well as a suite of offices in the EOB. He’d been the CNO five years before King.
