Recordings of people who built Hanford available to public

KENNEWICK — During World War II, Phil Gardner traveled more than 100,000 miles to recruit workers for the secret project at Hanford, having not the slightest idea what was being built there. He and other recruiters scattered across the nation would get Western Union telegrams at the start of the week from Pasco forecasting the new labor requirements at Hanford, a key site in the U.S. effort to produce an atomic bomb before Germany developed one. On one fall week early in the war, that included 600 laborers, 200 carpenters, 35 auto mechanics, 25 experienced crane oilers, 67 typists, three physicians, 142 firemen and 101 surveyors. “It sounds ridiculous,” particularly given the wartime worker shortages, he said in a 1965 interview. But recruiters “had to do whatever you could do to get the job done.” He told his stories to Stephane Groueff, who interviewed dozens of people who worked on the Manhattan Project for the first comprehensive history written for the general public. Now the Atomic Heritage Foundation has made Gardner’s interview and dozens of others available for the public to hear. Two years ago, the nonprofit foundation started a website with the Los Alamos Historical Society to post the oral histories of those who worked on the Manhattan Project or were affected by it. Since then, it has acquired permission to post the interview tapes of three authors whose books are among the best known works on the frantic effort to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. The foundation is working to process the 180 interviews in the collection as creation of a new Manhattan Project National Historical Park at the end of 2014 brings increased interest to the topic. More than a half-million people worked on the Manhattan Project at top-secret sites around the country, including Hanford, which would produce plutonium for the world’s first nuclear explosion in the New Mexico desert and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, helping end the war. The interview tapes being made available to the public range from the memories of top officials who made the key decisions to create an atomic bomb to the recollections of the hard-working laborers who left homes and families to work in the then-barren and dusty Eastern Washington desert. “I knew it was an impossible task to start with but my feeling was that while I very much disliked the assignment that as long as that was my assignment, we were going to make it go,” said Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, in an interview with Groueff. “Every outward appearance was this is going to succeed, it’s got to succeed, and we’re going to make it succeed,” he said. The Atomic Heritage Foundation worked with the Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center and Groueff’s son to make the little-heard recordings collected for Groueff’s book “The Manhattan Project” readily available to the public. The collection being posted online also includes interviews conducted in 1985 by journalist S. L. Sanger. He took a sabbatical from The Seattle Times and traveled 11,000 miles to interview former Hanford workers and their families for his book “Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford.” Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize winning author who spent the late 1980s recording in-depth interviews for his nuclear history works, is the third author represented after giving exclusive permission to include his recordings on the Voices of the Manhattan Project website. The recordings bring the history of the Manhattan Project to life, said Cindy Kelly, president of the foundation. Hearing Leona Marshall Libby, one of the few women scientists on the Manhattan Project, speak emphatically about the fear of Hitler helps people understand the times, Kelly said. “We were terrified,” Libby told Sanger. There was a persistent and ever-present fear that the Germans were ahead of the Allies in the race to build an atomic bomb, fed by the fact that scientific leadership on the Manhattan Project had gone to school with German scientists at leading universities, she said. “They led then the civilized world of physics in every aspect — at the time that the war set in, that Hitler lowered the boom,” she said. “They led, not we. Very frightening time.” Libby, who worked for a time at Hanford’s B Reactor, had no regrets about helping develop the atomic bomb, she told Sanger. Her brother and brother-in-law surely would have perished in battle if plutonium at Hanford had not helped bring the war to an end, she said. “In wartime, it was a desperate time,” she said. “I think we did right and we couldn’t have done differently.” Libby came to Hanford in 1944 with her physicist husband John Marshall and worked at B Reactor, where a separate bathroom was designated for her as the only woman. She made clear, talking with Sanger, that she could not wait to move on from the bleak landscape of Hanford and work elsewhere. Essentially, it was the nation’s plutonium factory, she said. Other interviews in the Voices of the Manhattan Project collection tell of the tough working and living conditions there and the even tougher workers recruited as 50,000 workers were needed to build the complex at Hanford. Gardner described traveling from small town to small town in the South, arranging job interviews in any space available from courthouses to, in one instance, a mortuary. He would scramble to arrange last-minute transportation across states amid gasoline rationing as word came that other projects or companies were laying off workers, making them available as possible recruits for Hanford. He once had a conversation with Col. Franklin Matthias, the officer in charge at Hanford, who asked if it was true that recruiters would hire a man as a carpenter if he could identify a hammer. “Well, no,” Gardner said he answered. “We’re not quite that tough. If he could convince us that his father would have known what the tool was, well, we’d probably just take him.” If a man said that he was a carpenter, there was no time to check, he said. He remembered that the project paid about $1 an hour for common labor, which was good money at the time. “In fact, the man who was head of the War Manpower Commission down in Arkansas said, For Lord’s sake, don’t put out any posters saying that you’re paying $1 per hour up in these little towns in Arkansas or you’ll get the mayor and everyone else.’ “ Gardner might hire 30 or 40 men a day, then go to the railroad station to buy their tickets to Pasco. Once the new hires were ready to board the train, they’d be given some money to buy meals on the trip “because the majority of them didn’t have anything,” Gardner said. Because of the limited housing available, most came without their families. Willie Daniels would tell Sanger that he and his brother together made $19.20 their first day of work at Hanford, Labor Day 1943, which was more than his brother made in a month of work before. Daniels was enterprising and doubled his income some weeks by selling clothing and toiletries after 12-hour work days. “At night when we come in for dinner, I’d get my little bag and go to the mess hall and recreation rooms and get some sales,” he said. By July 1944, the project had almost 1,400 patrolmen as part of a workforce of about 50,000. Bob Bubenezer told Sanger of trying to control the gambling and filling the on-site jail with workers accused of fighting and drinking. The next morning they would be back on the job, each worker too important to the wartime effort to justify keeping them locked up. Hanford workers and William Sweeney, who was a young priest during WWII, told Sanger about two bad accidents at Hanford during the war. In one, two trains collided head-on on a foggy morning. “It was really a morbid scene,” Bubenezer said, according to Sanger’s transcript of his interview. In the second, workers were “chipping on a big tank” and it fell, Sweeney said. “There was almost panic up there, with women from the trailer camp coming into the construction camp hospital to see if their husbands were hurt,” he said. He remembers that five men died. Their bodies “were as black as coal,” he said. The scientists and engineers on the project, who were among the few people who knew what was being built and the goal of the project, worried about what would happen when plutonium began to be produced at B Reactor. “The commitment was made as to the kind of reactor we would do before we had any pilot experience,” said Crawford Greenewalt, a chemical engineer who acted as a liaison between physicists working on the project in Chicago and Wilmington, Del., in an interview with Groueff. One of the first decisions made was whether the world’s first full-scale reactor, Hanford’s B Reactor, would be helium-cooled or water cooled, Greenewalt said. A separations process, to remove plutonium from irradiated uranium fuel pieces, also had to be picked. “What you had to do was to decide on something that you were sure would work and then put all your effort on it … and to hope that you were right,” he said. But leaders of the Manhattan Project had doubts. “At the time we actually started up our operations at Hanford, I suppose that we had 50,000 people there on the property,” said Walter Carpenter in an interview with Groueff. Carpenter was a corporate executive at government contractor DuPont and oversaw the company’s work. DuPont had made arrangements with all the communities within 100 miles to evacuate residents by automobile in case of a chain reaction that could not be controlled, he said. “We didn’t know how fast this calamity might arise,” he said. No evacuation would be needed. B Reactor would irradiate fuel not only during WWII but also the Cold War. It is the centerpiece of the Hanford portion of the newly created Manhattan Project National Historical Park, and looks much the same today as it did when it started up 70 years ago.