The Manhattan Project: A Guest Post by Garrett M. Graff

Blending memories and perspective of scientists, soldiers and ordinary people, this is a powerful narrative about harnessing the atom’s power and the devastating consequences of the tremendous endeavor that contributed to Japan’s surrender in WWII. Read on for an exclusive essay from Garrett M. Graff on writing The Devil Reached Toward the Sky.

August, of course, marks the 80^th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which helped usher in the end of the World War II, the largest and deadliest conflict in human history. This 80^th anniversary I think feels especially poignant because it also serves an unofficial marking of the final passing of that Greatest Generation who won the war and, in Japan, the last Hibakusha—the “bomb-affected people” who survived the atomic bombings.

I wanted to tackle this project—my second oral history of World War II, following last year’s WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE, about D-Day—because we now have effectively every first-person memory we’ll ever have of these major events of World War II; in the years ahead, these events will slip from living memory into permanent history, and when they do, the history we tell about them will be neater, simpler, and seem more preordained than it felt to anyone at the time. To me, a unique power of oral history is that it puts you back in the shoes of the people who lived these events at a moment when they don’t know the outcome. Would the allies prevail in World War II? Would we beat Adolf Hitler to the secrets of the atomic bomb? Would it work … at all?

THE DEVIL REACHED TOWARD THE SKY brings together nearly 500 voices, from scientists and generals to teenage girl factory workers and hardened Depression-era construction workers in secret cities in Tennessee and Washington State to schoolchildren in Hiroshima and shipyard workers in Nagasaki to tell the equally triumphant and tragic story of one of humanity’s greatest technological achievements. To assemble the book, I poured through thousands of oral histories in archives and books from three continents and more than a hundred first-hand memoirs, as well as government reports, Nobel Prize lectures, military reunion reports, and documents like the 1,000-page transcript of the now-infamous Atomic Energy Commission’s security hearing targeting J. Robert Oppenheimer. Crafting oral history is sort of the opposite of normal writing—its subtractive, not additive. As a Vermonter, I compare it to making maple syrup—you’re boiling the sap for hours (or in my case, months!) to get down to just the richest syrup. The first draft of the manuscript stretched to about 1.4 million words—that’s about 3,000 pages!—and then I boiled off about 90 percent of it to get down to the essence you’ll read in the finished book. (Maple syrup, by the way, actually requires even more boiling: It takes about 40 gallons of good sap to make a gallon of syrup.)

Through the book and all those stories, all interwoven together, you’ll come to understand a very different scale and scope than the overly simplified and oft-romanticized story in the popular imagination of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his small group of physicists on a remote mesa at Los Alamos. In fact, the true power of the Manhattan Project comes in the giant industrial might we bring to bear on a problem that only the United States could solve at the time—in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Hanford, Wash., the Army Corps of Engineers builds entire secret cities, each with 100,000 employees and residents, and the US military creates and trains for months an entire special B-29 bomber unit to actually deliver the bomb, all of it done in utmost secrecy. In fact, in August 1945, when the world learns of the Manhattan Project’s existence for the first time, the bus system at Oak Ridge is one of the ten largest public transit systems in the country—and it serves a city that no one knows exists at all and one that doesn’t appear on any map of the United States. As I quote the head of the U.S. science effort, Vannevar Bush, “The merging of efforts of science, engineering, technology, industry, labor, finance, and the military brought about the atomic bomb. In scale relative to the scale of its time, the building of the Pyramids offers a possible comparison.”

There’s a reason that even today, eight decades later, the Manhattan Project is instant shorthand for an all-out, no-holds-barred, no-expense-spared audacity and daring. There’s never been anything like it before—or since.