As the decades passed, Section T’s contributions gradually faded from collective memory. Overshadowed by the atomic bomb, and then muddled by a messy patent suit, the story of the fuse receded. Based on the early British work on rocket fuses, which were not effective, a fiction took hold that the British had “invented” the smart fuse and merely passed it along to Merle Tuve to manufacture.
Historians implied the hard work was done in England.
Johns Hopkins University hired a reporter to assemble a complete account of that work. But, Larry Hafstad recalled, it was too “embarrassing to publish . . . all complimentary with no historical detail or technical facts.” Several later attempts were begun and “somehow or other they all died.” Hafstad said he had “long been disappointed” that the full story never saw daylight. Van Bush, too, regretted that Section T’s triumphs had never been properly told. (An insider’s history published in 1980 did not draw on available archives and was not widely read.)
The characters of the V-1 drama withdrew to their normal lives.
Ed Hatch and the other survivors from the 130th Chemical Processing Company received Purple Hearts. He returned home to Massachusetts, where he lived out the rest of his years. He found a career in broadcasting, hosting a children’s TV show called Uncle Ed’s Fun Club. On the twenty-first anniversary of the July 3, 1944, tragedy at Sloane Court, he became father to a newborn son, David.
Colonel Max Wachtel was found in hiding in 1946, and was not charged with war crimes. He went on to become manager of the Hamburg airport.
Amniarix survived the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Rousseau was close to death when she was rescued by the Swedish Red Cross, and met her future husband while being treated for tuberculosis. He was a survivor of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. She died in 2017, after a long, full life, at the age of ninety-eight.
R. V. Jones became a professor at Aberdeen University.
Dick Roberts, as a biophysicist, named the ribosome. Larry Hafstad ran research and development for General Motors. Ray Mindlin explored how crystals generated electric charges under stress. Ralph Baldwin studied lunar craters.
Ed Salant went on to a fine research career at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Long Island. He divorced his wife in 1946. She remained, until the 1970s, a psychiatric patient at a hospital in Vermont—apathetic, indifferent, and practically mute. He remarried and moved to East Eighty-Seventh Street, in Manhattan.
James Van Allen and Abigail Halsey were married over fifty years, and had five children and six grandchildren in their “squadron.” He would recall his Navy service as “far and away, the most broadening experience of my lifetime.”
Van Allen remained at the Applied Physics Laboratory exploring “Altitude Research.” He was involved with testing the American versions of the V-1 drone and the V-2 rocket developed at Peenemünde. He devised measuring instruments for the first U.S. satellites, became known as the “father of space science,” and discovered the belts of radiation encircling the Earth: “Van Allen belts.” Working with Wernher von Braun, Peenemünde’s rocket expert, he helped birth the space age.
Van Bush stayed on as president of the Carnegie Institution. Not long after the end of the war, he imagined briefly that he had a brain tumor—a “psychosomatic difficulty.” He spruced up his basement machine shop on Hillbrook Lane and fiddled with engines, solar power, an original sailboat design, and even a new technique for applying paint. Retiring in 1955, he settled down in his farmhouse in New Hampshire. There, the “super-gadgeteer,” as Newsweek dubbed him, invented a novel car engine, a military boat powered by hydrofoil, and tiny medical valves for repairing heart ailments. He also raised turkeys and fashioned pipes.
Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development was dissolved, as planned, in 1947. The military-industrial complex rose directly from its ashes.
Defense work would not be relaxed. The war proved that nightmares were real. In 1946, during the Nuremberg trials for Nazi war criminals, Hitler’s minister of armaments Albert Speer warned that within a decade, “ten men, invisible, without previous warning” would be able to “destroy one million people in the center of New York City in a matter of seconds.” There was little reason to doubt him.
The Applied Physics Laboratory today employs over six thousand people. With clients ranging from the Department of Defense to NASA, it is America’s largest university-affiliated research center. APL scientists, engineers, and technicians contribute to missile defense, naval warfare, computer security, and space exploration.
Scientific intelligence became a major focus of espionage. Soon after its founding, the CIA opened its own department in the field. In 1993, the agency honored Amniarix and Jones personally at a ceremony in Langley, and endowed an award in his name for “scientific acumen applied with art in the cause of freedom.”
A number of Section T “graduates” went on to engage in scientific intelligence work. Ed Salant scouted for Russia’s nuclear secrets, and Van Allen advised the CIA during the Cold War. Bush was consulted, throughout his career, on secret government projects. Both he and Merle Tuve would have their names publicly linked to Roswell, New Mexico, Area 51, and the discovery of UFOs.
In 1946, Tuve became director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. With Bush’s backing, he returned to the pure science research that was his life’s true calling. He scrounged surplus explosives off the Navy and set off mammoth terrestrial detonations to study seismic waves. His researchers fitted out Air Force B-29s to fly through thunderstorms and measure atmospheric electricity. They devised a new telescopic instrument to peer vastly deeper into space.
Merle finally bought a house in the countryside, in rural Maryland. With his wife, Winnie, he planted a large vegetable garden. He loaded bales on the tractor and gave the children hay rides. Weekends, he delved “into the dirt” and trimmed the trees in the pasture. The Tuves kept guinea hens, cattle, and even a pig named Phoebe whom Merle “took a shine to” and who was raised as a pet on bread and jam. When the pig was finally butchered, Merle could not bear to eat any of the pork.
He gave up cursing entirely after the war.
He did not reminisce much about the fuse.
When he was interviewed in 1967 about his wartime work, he found it difficult to recall the precise details of those “five or six years of real stress.”
“I’ve lived another life since then,” he said.
In the intervening years, the clear-eyed patriotism of the national emergency had retreated somewhat in Tuve’s mind. The urgency of the era was dimmed, sheared of context, and a slight sadness had taken root in its place. Merle blamed himself for pushing Section T staff so hard. He spoke to the interviewer, Al Christman, of remorse. Bush, he said, had nightmares over the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo with napalm. Deak Parsons grieved over his role in dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. For his part, Tuve regretted the brutality of the fuse.
“Our job was antiaircraft,” he told Christman. Using the fuse against German troops in the Ardennes was never the intention. “I’ve never visited Germany,” Merle said. “There are too many—too many orphans over there on my account.”
Christman held a different opinion about the Battle of the Bulge. He was a veteran of it. The interviewer fought amidst the insane Nazi shelling, foxholes, frostbite, amputations, crimson snow, and frozen GIs whose dead bodies lifted like wooden slabs. He knew exactly how the fuse saved thousands of American lives.
“We killed—” Tuve said.
“Well,” Christman replied, “let me tell you this—”
He switched off the tape recorder, and told Merle what he’d seen.