Merle Tuve imagined horrors and fantasies.
By the summer of 1944, Section T’s chairman was a member of a new, high-ranking committee formed to consider the future of science and warfare. How should scientists be used in national defense work after the war?
Tuve studied a column in the Times-Herald that lamented the Nazis’ “robot bombs,” warned that “war seems to inspire the fiendish side of scientific minds,” and predicted that the next battle could employ “terrible robot armies.”
Mortal man, the writer cautioned, as Nazi drones continued to devastate London, “certainly is turning the world God gave him into a nightmare.”
Could science become, instead, as another of Tuve’s clippings argued, a “world-unifying force” that could be “systematically and rationally applied”? How could America avoid the lapses in preparedness seen after World War I? Would a postwar “scientific high command” be run by “big business labs”? Could science ensure a lasting peace?
Meanwhile, Rome was liberated. The Russians had ended the siege of Leningrad and were now pushing west. The Allies were making strong inroads into France. It finally felt possible to imagine a new world order, to dream of a postwar life occupied by normal pleasures. In one cartoon in Merle’s files, passed along by a green Section T technician, a naughty drawing depicted a young woman sitting in a filing-cabinet drawer, as a matron scolded a very embarrassed gentleman: “Can you explain what this girl is doing in Confidential . . . Post War Plans?”
The Army and Navy would want the top scientific minds for military science, but as Tuve knew, most researchers wanted to resume their academic careers. “Can’t be full time, [they’re] not interested,” he scribbled, in his notebook. “Scientist does not like destruction.”
Merle solicited opinions on the postwar picture from military leaders he trusted, like Deak Parsons, and from business leaders at General Electric and Crosley. He even reached out to his childhood friend Ernest Lawrence, who was busy at Los Alamos and whom he addressed as “Dear Dr. Lawrence.” For reasons that weren’t clear, Ernest replied that while he “had better be on the side lines in the discussion,” he “certainly would say that a bold program should prevail.”
At Section T, at least, a bold program was prevailing. Merle’s upstart group had transformed into the nation’s third-largest research group, after MIT’s radar team and the Manhattan Project. Section T employees now numbered more than a thousand men and three hundred and forty-four women, including key contractors. The Applied Physics Laboratory in Silver Spring hosted over six hundred and fifty people, with an additional sixty-seven military personnel attached for liaison and field training. Any hints of the used-car dealership had completely vanished, and with all the additions—a third story and extensions in nearly every direction—the once modest garage now spanned an entire city block. The old Wolfe building, new Navy buildings, and yet another edifice under construction would soon join to form a complete quadrangle surrounding a central courtyard.
The telephone switchboard was so overloaded in early 1944 that larger equipment, requiring an entirely new setup and room, needed to be purchased. In the meantime, employees were urged to reduce their call volume. A public address system was installed throughout the lab to broadcast news.
Tuve was mayor of a small city, boss to hundreds of physicists and engineers, fifty watchmen, seventy-five stenographers, clerks, and typists, and dozens of janitors, laborers, and field observers. Section T had five drivers, four carpenters, and two photographers on payroll. Thirty staff assistants, and thirty-seven technicians were women, and several departments were either half or majority women.
Starting in July, “Section Tuve” had its own fledgling newsletter, nicknamed “Apple Juice” for the combined initials of the Applied Physics Laboratory and its nominal parent, Johns Hopkins University: APL-JHU-S. Run by editor in chief Dotty Dietz, its staff included associate, art, and sports editors. The inaugural issue included a section for “Gripes,” like the lack of an elevator operator. Next to a for-sale notice for a girl’s bicycle, it carried a request for employees not to tear up confidential, discarded papers, because that made them harder to burn.
The lab had a library filled with hundreds of scientific magazines, mathematical tables, and textbooks. Topics ranged from aviation, to radio circuitry, alloys, statistics, chemical explosives, materials science, vacuum tubes, and antiaircraft gunnery. Its catalog included three copies of Alan Hynd’s Passport to Treason, about Bill Sebold and the Nazi spy ring that sought the fuse.
The building at 8621 Georgia Avenue was such a hive of activity that the guards needed a night registrar to track the constant comings and goings. Some four hundred cases of Coca-Cola were being consumed at the lab every month. Section T staff held picnics with beer and music. For morale, movies were screened: of the Chesapeake drone tests, of the experiments at Parris Island in South Carolina, and of the shoots at the New Mexico ranch. The athletically inclined joined a Johns Hopkins league softball team, the Silver Spring Giants. Plans were in place for an astronomy club.
Section T’s work had also expanded and changed. The smart gadget for antiaircraft shells was in service. But research continued on dozens of new models and improvements. Between April 1 and June 30, 1944, Tuve’s lab produced and released nine separate versions of a single fuse. While those efforts proceeded, Section T took on other projects, like a gun-aiming “predictor” for the Navy.
Tuve did not take his eye off Hitler’s drones. On June 17, he arranged for his British liaison, Ed Salant, to visit England in case the fuse was called on.
Against Japan, it was already proving its worth.
“Great rearing clouds,” a young lieutenant observed, from the bridge of the battleship USS Washington, “marched along the borders of the sea, presenting all sorts of grotesque shapes like a giant parade of animal crackers.”
The misty cloud formations, illuminated in a “beautiful peach color,” stretched endlessly into the distance. Above the sunset, sailors saw a lone Japanese bomber, fatally wounded by an American B-24, nose-dive into the glowing ocean.
Within hours, a climactic battle would fill the skies.
The U.S. Navy was preparing for a bold assault on the Mariana Islands, at the edge of the Philippine Sea. If the daring incursion was successful, the Navy would secure a precious foothold deep in the Pacific. Only fifteen hundred miles from Tokyo, the islands would afford the Allies with submarine ports and, most critically, with air bases for long-range bombers that could reach Japan.
Japanese high command had been waiting for just such a decisive engagement, a final chance to destroy the American fleet. Days earlier, on June 15, Admiral Toyoda proclaimed that “The fate of the Empire rests on this one battle.” The Japanese massed nearly all their serviceable boats: nine carriers, five battleships, thirteen cruisers, and twenty-eight destroyers. The Navy summoned no less than fifteen aircraft carriers, seven battleships, twenty-one cruisers, and sixty-nine destroyers.
Both sides expected that naval airpower would decide the fight. The American battleships formed a protective shield in front of their carriers.
The Washington was the flagship of the battle fleet.
James Van Allen was on it. The Section T physicist was now an assistant staff gunnery officer (and also a junior officer of the deck) for Admiral Willis Lee, the gunnery expert who had first vouched for the fuse in early 1943.
Van Allen did not need to be there. The fuse had already developed a well-deserved reputation. Over the course of 1943, 75 percent of rounds fired by Navy five-inch guns used standard ammunition, while 25 percent used Section T fuses. Yet the proximity fuse was credited for 51 percent of downed airplanes, a rounds-per-bird advantage of three to one. Twelve antiaircraft guns armed with smart fuses in effect became thirty-six guns. The gadget took on Japanese Mitsubishis at the battle for Guadalcanal, defended the Seventh Fleet off Makin Island, and helped save a convoy off the Russell Islands. The smart weapon was finally gaining widespread acceptance.
But in early 1944, a devilish problem had emerged. The dry batteries were running out of power. With Navy vessels patrolling the tropics, the scorching cargo holds could reach 120 degrees. The heat had a devastating effect on the batteries’ useful lifetime. The liquid, glass-jar energizers were nearly ready, but in the meantime, dying batteries were turning smart fuses into duds.
Van Allen personally devised a technique for replacing them. He asked to return to the Pacific to set up “re-fusing” depots. Then he hopped between New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, Australia, Eniwetok, the Caroline Islands, Manus, and Espíritu Santo, training soldiers on the battery replacement technique. He removed thousands of old “energizers” himself, disassembling the guts of the devices in a delicate surgical operation. The procedure covered his hands with sticky, fine explosive dust and turned his and the sailors’ skin bright yellow.
Now he would get his first taste of battle.
On June 19, Admiral Ozawa, the commander of the Japanese fleet, launched an initial salvo of sixty-nine planes—including forty-five vicious Zero fighter bombers—toward the American carriers. From the bridge of the Washington, Van Allen eyed the first wave of Japanese fighters and bombers approaching, and saw three planes escape the net of U.S. Hellcats and begin flying toward the bridge.
Were the pilots steering into the ship? Kamikaze tactics hadn’t yet been used. As Van Allen watched, Lee’s gunners fired the smart weapon he’d helped invent. Two of the planes were shot down and fell flaming into the sea. The third veered past at such close range that Van Allen could see the fear on the pilot’s face.
Forty-four planes slipped through to Lee’s ships. The Japanese fighters swarming around the Washington, one lieutenant said, “seemed to come in ones and twos from every direction. . . . The attacks seemed to go on and on without end.” The Japanese fighters charged over and over. Again and again they were downed by Admiral Lee’s gunners. The Hellcat pilots were just as ruthless, shooting down twenty-five planes in a manner reminiscent of “a big Ferris wheel at a country fair.” Japanese planes entered at the top, pursued by Hellcats, and exited smoking and burning from the bottom while American pilots climbed the wheel again to the apex.
It was hard to keep track of how many planes were gunned down. The “whole thing became a blur,” a sailor said. The blue sky was peppered with exploding shells and lit with burning planes struck by the fuse. For one pilot looking down, the view of the USS Indiana in the middle of Lee’s formation—a six-mile circle of twenty-four warships rattling off a twenty-thousand-foot umbrella of antiaircraft fire—was his “most memorable scene of World War Two.”
Another pilot compared it to “an old-time turkey shoot.”
Not one of the forty-four planes made it past Lee’s gunners to the carriers. A Navy translator monitoring Japanese communiqués overheard an enemy broadcast advising the next wave of planes to avoid Lee’s battleships entirely.
After the fight, Van Allen and the sailors went down to the wardroom. On a table covered with nice linen, they dined on roast beef and strawberries. The reserved physicist never forgot the contrast between the violent battle and the face of the Japanese pilot and the strangely refined banquet hours later.
The Japanese lost 92 percent, or 395, of the attack planes they flew into battle. Their air force never recovered. Hellcats claimed most of the credit, and radar developed by Van Bush’s scientists played an outsize role, but the fuse also contributed. Soon enough, Van Allen and the Washington were circling the Marianas, living once again, a sailor on deck complained, “a very boring existence.”
The Washington anchored on Saipan on July 7, 1944.
Even the staunchest critics of the fuse were now convinced. And with the new liquid battery and other fixes, its performance would only improve further.
Soon, the island of Tinian was also taken and occupied by American Marines. Construction began on two airfields suitable for the long-range B-29 bombers that could reach Tokyo. Japanese attack planes, stationed over seven hundred miles away at Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima, were initially kept at bay by Navy carriers, but eventually American planes on Tinian and Saipan had to fend for themselves. During the day, American pilots defended the Marines and controlled the skies, but they did not have the fighters they needed to protect the soldiers at night.
Thousands of American troops, with no caves for protection, camped out in the open, exposed to Japanese raiders who came in the dark. Antiaircraft artillery battalions, equipped with 90-millimeter guns, could do very little to ward off the bombers. U.S. casualties were mounting at a frightening rate. “Almost every night,” an American gunner on Tinian recalled, “would see three to four thousand shells fired with only a hit or two in several nights.”
Section T smart fuses, designed for Army guns, changed that picture immediately and dramatically. “On the very first night they were used,” the gunner reported, “17 [Japanese] planes were shot down, 12 the next night, and 11 the third night.” Within days, the enemy bombers were “reduced to a few nuisance raids.”
All the Japanese pilots could manage to do was to harass the Marines as they slept, and the vital airfields that could finally reach Japan were completed.