VICE ADMIRAL RANDALL JACOBS HAD COME UP WITH THE SOLUTION to a colossal problem.
The war was taking its toll on America. Many of the nation’s doctors and engineers had been sent to the front line, where their numbers had been depleted. A shortage of skills was starting to hinder the war effort.
Worse than that, the production line for replacement doctors and engineers was grinding to a halt. The conscription age had been dropped from twenty-one to eighteen immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, marking America’s entry into the war. The young men who would ordinarily have gone on to a college education were being drafted into service before they had a chance to enroll, and those who had started their education before the war had been whisked off soon afterward, before completing their studies. The only skilled graduates now emerging from America’s educational establishments were those who had already been excused from active service, mainly for medical reasons.
The shortage of students in the system created another worrying problem, with potentially lasting impact. The drop in enrollment at US colleges had been so steep that many institutions faced bankruptcy. A large part of the whole academic system was on the cusp of closing down, creating a secondary headache for the American government.
The US Navy came up with a neat solution, which it called the V-12 program. As the chief of naval personnel, it fell to Vice Admiral Jacobs to reveal the project at a specially arranged conference of 131 colleges and navy top brass held at Columbia University on May 14–15, 1943.
It was a fast-track officer-training scheme that would mix undergraduate study in a few chosen disciplines with the rigors of naval training. Empty college dormitories would be turned into improvised barracks to house this new elite force, and college quadrangles would be transformed into parade grounds.
Under the program, the US Navy would filter the best of the best of America’s high-school students through a nationwide testing system. These students would then be mixed with battle-hardened marines and seasoned sailors who had been singled out for promotion to officer class but needed to improve their education.
Those accepted to the course were to be offered tuition at top academic institutions paid for by the navy, along with a salary of fifty dollars a month and a trainee officer’s posting upon completion. They would study medicine, dentistry, engineering, mathematics, or more specialized subjects such as electrical engineering. There were even courses in theology, designed to increase the dwindling ranks of navy chaplains.
Unlike other students, the V-12 classes would be in uniform at all times, wake up at 6:00 a.m., and be confined to their quarters at 7:00 p.m. They would also study for twelve months of the year, rather than nine, in order to push through their degree course in record time.
All of America’s academic giants, including Ivy League colleges like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, signed up to take part. High school teachers across America pushed their brightest pupils to take the test, not least because it offered the chance to delay being sent to Germany or the Pacific.
“Gentlemen, we are about to embark on an education program that will have important effects on American colleges, on the navy and most important of all, on the lives of thousands of this nation’s finest young men,” Vice Admiral Jacobs told the assembled crowd at the start of the conference. “We must educate and train these men well so that they may serve their country with distinction, both in war and in peace.”
The V-12 program lived up to that lofty billing. More than a hundred thousand young men were pushed through the course—allowing colleges to rebuild their finances and the navy to build up its skills base.
The scheme’s output was prolific. Its graduates included everyone from future senator Robert F. Kennedy to Johnny Carson, who would go on to become America’s most famous TV star. The actor Jack Lemmon and the film director Sam Peckinpah both passed through V-12, along with Warren Christopher, who would become US secretary of state. Paul Newman passed the V-12 tests but had to drop out after the navy doctors found him to be color-blind.
The V-12 project was not without its controversies. There were suspicions about whether everyone who caught on to it as a draft-dodging ploy had passed the test, or if there was a possibility that some families had used influence to keep their offspring from the front line. Its proponents argued that it was a thoroughly meritocratic affair. Whatever the truth of the situation, it unquestionably provided a route to a future for many youngsters from less affluent backgrounds who were blessed with sufficient brainpower.
Dudley Buck took the V-12 test in January 1944 and passed it easily. Five months later, right after graduating from high school, he was put on a train from Santa Barbara to Seattle. He had been assigned to study electrical engineering at the University of Washington.
Buck left charge of the Santa Barbara Sound Laboratories to Lee Meadows, who would run the business for one more year before he too signed up for a navy training course, followed by a lengthy career with defense contractor Raytheon.
By the time the train got to San Francisco, Buck had already made his first new friend. Ed Barneich had qualified for a separate training program, to become a navy pilot. After a long overnight ride on the hard train seats they arrived in Seattle to discover that they were to be roommates: the navy arranged its men alphabetically so Barneich and Buck were thrown in together.
They were posted to what had been the university’s women’s dormitory before the war. They were lucky; most of the other teenagers were also forced to share rooms with battle-hardened sailors.
“The navy had a sense of humor,” explains Lynn Huff, one of Buck’s classmates in the V-12 program. “The group there was made up half of guys coming out of high school like Dudley, myself, and the other half made of guys in from the fleet. They paired us up as roommates, the green seventeen-year-olds with the old salts. I refer to that as the education of the innocent. It was an interesting time; we grew up in a hurry.”
Although the navy kept a steady eye on the curriculum for the V-12 students, the whole point of the program was that it should represent a full college education—the participating institutions were under orders that they were “expected to keep academic standards high.”
Buck soon got bored of classes, however. Thanks to his extracurricular dabbling with radio back home in Santa Barbara, he already knew most of what he was being taught. He spent a lot of time helping out others, such as Barneich, who were struggling with the workload. With his spare time he soon renewed his love of practical jokes.
As part of its efforts to groom future leaders, the navy required its V-12 candidates to take courses in public speaking. Often their speeches would be recorded on 78 rpm records using a machine that cut the groove in the record right as the young students spoke. The cutting process left a long thin trail of vinyl strips. Buck realized the strips were flammable, and stored up a bagful of them. Once he had gathered a few handfuls he stuffed them into a floor lamp belonging to one of the students down the corridor. Not long after study hours began, the lamp started smoking. Buck was lucky to escape unscathed—not from the fire, but from the angry classmate who had been his victim.
That was by no means a one-off incident. Buck was forced to do five hours of drill after being caught making fudge in his room on an improvised hot plate made with some electrical wire. Undeterred, he then created a strange goopy compound that would create a small explosion when someone sat in it.
“He’d place a tiny drop of it on the chair of an unsuspecting person, who would then sit on it,” explains Ken Lowthian, another V-12 student. “After a few minutes of body heat it would go off like a cap gun. It didn’t cause any damage, but it sounded like a cap gun. Buck never gave up his secret. He was always a source of amusement to the rest of us.”
While other students were working eighteen or nineteen hours a day, Buck could concentrate on trying to wind up one Lieutenant Durando, the officer tasked with prowling the halls to make sure everyone was studying.
Don Balmer, one of Buck’s closest student friends, claims that one particular practical joke became the talk of campus:
We were not supposed to have any sound during study hours. Dudley thought it would be fun to take his room apart and conceal wires behind the molding. He put a radio way back in the overhead of the closet and he had it rigged so if you turned the doorknob the radio turned off.
The students standing watch were in on the gag. Dudley had his radio loud enough to wake the dead. Lieutenant Durando was prowling the halls one evening. He stopped the student officer of the watch and asked, “How come you haven’t gone after that radio?”
“What radio, sir? I hear nothing, sir.” Durando grabbed him and they went down and stood in the hall outside of Dudley’s room. Other students had their doors cracked, waiting to see what would happen as the radio was blaring away. Durando asked the officer of the watch, “You don’t hear that sound?” “No sir, I hear no sound, sir.”
Durando grabbed the doorknob and turned it; the radio instantly was quiet. Dudley was sitting at the desk doing his homework. He lumbered to his feet and said, “Yes sir, Lieutenant Durando. Is there anything I can do for you sir?” It drove Durando nuts. Later on he asked Dudley, “Just tell me how you did that.”
“Did what, sir?” That was typical of Dudley; he was always doing something special.
The war that they were being trained for raged on, but the V-12 students were reasonably isolated from it. In between their long days of study, there was sufficient leave to allow time for hiking trips up some of the biggest mountains in Washington, including many glacier-capped peaks over ten thousand feet high. They also went on sailing trips around the inlets of Puget Sound.
In their first few months at college, in the summer of 1944, the Soviet Union had yet to declare war on Japan. Buck and some of the other young navy cadets would canoe out to the fleet of Soviet icebreakers docked in the bay, where they would try to strike up conversations before the sailors headed back to Vladivostok.
When the V-12 students signed out of their dorms in the evening to go to the university library, it was often just to chat up girls. The life led by this elite group was a relatively charmed one—certainly when compared to that of their high-school friends, who were now mostly in active service. The brutality of what was going on farther west in the Pacific was only evidenced by the occasional return to port of a battered aircraft carrier or destroyer, sent to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in nearby Bremerton for repair.
Thanks to the work of a group of pioneering scientists more than fourteen hundred miles away in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Buck and most of his classmates never experienced the horrors of World War II. The Manhattan Project scientists were nearing their first test detonation of an atomic bomb. On July 16, 1945, in the middle of the New Mexico desert, the first nuclear explosion was secretly initiated. Ten days later, Britain, China, and the United States warned Japan that it faced imminent destruction unless it surrendered soon.
For Dudley Buck, official confirmation of the nuclear technology meant just one thing: he had to try to make a bomb for himself. In between planning his practical jokes, Buck had been staying up late into the night reading what little there was to read on nuclear physics; there was only one book on the topic in the university library.
He had been telling his classmates for some time that with even a small amount of uranium it would be possible to “blow up the state of Nebraska.” With hydrogen he reckoned he could make “a bigger boom.” Somehow he persuaded his classmate Don Balmer to break into the university lab with him to test the theory. As Balmer remembers,
We were in chemistry class; we had made acetylene gas and we made hydrogen gas as part of our lab courses, so Dudley figured out if we could get the hydrogen gas hot enough it would blow itself apart.
So we thought that we could do this over at the university chemistry lab. We broke into the chemistry lab on a weekend, took the Bunsen burner. Dudley figured out if we had a series of concentric tubes, he could inject gas, just the gas out of the Bunsen burner, and put some acetylene gas and then shoot into that a jet of hydrogen gas—and if that worked, we might have a big bang. So we got into the lab one weekend and we got close to the end and Dudley said, “Here we go, and if this works, we might blow up the university,” and we agreed we would go ahead and do it—and of course it didn’t work.
The real bomb, which had been in development since 1942, worked with devastating efficiency. On the morning of August 6, 1945, a small atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, wiping out two-thirds of its buildings and most of its population. Three days later a bigger bomb wiped out Nagasaki. Five days after that, Japan finally surrendered.
The end of the war brought big changes to Seattle. For starters, the university was entitled under the terms of its deal with the US Navy to reclaim its dormitories for the use of regular students, whom it expected would be returning to college. The navy students were moved to a large accommodation barge tied up close to the university, along the waterfront on Boat Street. It was 261 feet long and forty-nine feet wide at its broadest point, built to house up to six officers and 680 enlisted men. Twice a day the V-12 students would have to march back and forth from the barge to class.
Buck still found time to put his brain to work on extracurricular projects. By the end of 1945 he had designed a gas-powered internal combustion engine. Although he sent documents to patent lawyers—who were so impressed that they offered to cut their fees for the register of the design—Buck never got around to filing the paperwork.
Soon after he completed his sophomore year at the university in 1946, Buck’s mother passed away. His father grew even more distant. Frank, his younger brother, asked to move to Seattle to be with Buck.
Buck, now nineteen years old, sneaked Frank onto the barge, where the teenager became a permanent fixture. Frank would have breakfast with the navy men, then head off for the day to Roosevelt High School. If the officers ever knew he was there, they turned a blind eye to his existence.
Aside from watching over his little brother, Buck had a new hobby: salvaging electronics parts. In their spare time, the navy cadets would look across the bay at the navy ships limping back to the Bremerton shipyards from the Pacific theater. Many of the vessels had been partly destroyed by kamikaze attacks, and were mostly being stripped down for parts.
As a navy cadet, Buck had full access to the Bremerton yards. He would regularly commandeer a navy truck, drive over to the yards, and clear out as many unwanted parts as he could get his hands on: radios, cables, any scrap of electric components. Don Balmer, his accomplice in the homemade H-bomb plot, would often be dragged along for the ride.
The two cadets would strike up conversations with the young sailors who had come into port. Buck’s main interest was in the radar operators. As Balmer explains,
Radar was very new in those days, and the radar men would work and Dudley would watch them work and chat with the boys who had been in some of these big battles. Dudley was very interested in radar. When it came time to leave, Dudley nudged me and said, “Put these in your pocket,” and he had me put in my pocket some radio tubes which were called lighthouse tubes that were used in this radar set. I said, “Dudley, what are these?” and Dudley said, “These are radar tubes, and I am going to make myself a radar set back at the university.” I said, “But Dudley, we can’t steal these things; if we get caught we’ll be shot, for God’s sake.” And Dudley said, “Oh no, they have lots of them, and I just need a few of them.” So we snuck back, and Dudley ultimately did build a radar set.
The university’s radio club had its own building, and so Buck had sawed a hole in the floor and stashed his stolen parts under the floorboards. Using the equipment scrounged from the ships he built a complete, fully operational S-band radar system. There was already an antenna on the roof of the building. Along with the radar tubes he procured from the crew of one of the battered ships in Bremerton, Buck also got his hands on the official navy radar guide—which detailed how to operate and repair a radar set. From that he was able to work out how to cobble one together from scratch.
Buck started spending a lot of his time at the radio club workshop; he slung a hammock across the room and would sleep there from time to time. If the night watchmen came to check up on him, Buck would just make them coffee. After he eventually finished his project, he unveiled it to the members of the radio club, who were so impressed they wanted to brag about it.
The local newspaper was invited to see the homemade radar set, calling it a “device made of spare parts.” The article said that Buck, then president of the club, had engineered and built a radar set that was “strictly from Rube Goldberg”—the famous cartoon illustrator of the day who drew pictures of ludicrous gadgets and inventions. The article went on to claim that Buck’s improvised device “operates as efficiently as a standard navy radar.”
The five hams in the club were also planning a project to build a television system that projected the picture onto a wall, the report added.
That was not the only gadget Buck was building. On some of their sailing trips around the bay, he had fallen in love with Vashon Island, a sparsely populated hunk of land covered with trees and berry bushes. With five hundred dollars of cash he had saved up from his radio business and navy stipend, Buck bought a heavily wooded twelve-acre plot from a Seattle attorney. He told his friends that he had a plan to build an automated berry-harvesting machine that would be able to tell ripe berries apart from green ones based on their color alone.
While that gadget did not come to fruition, his time on the island inspired a different invention: a diesel-powered machine used to rip up tree stumps. Some of the local berry farmers were struggling to clear the land, which was starting to be sold off for development. Buck sold the stump puller to local farmer James Jennings for the princely sum of sixty-five dollars.
In spite of all his entrepreneurial dealings, Buck was running short of cash by the time he entered his final year. His student days dragged on a little longer than some of his peers through no fault of his own. On the way back from one of their many student hiking trips Buck’s jeep slid off the road and fell down the side of the mountain. Buck broke his cheekbone and fractured a vertebra. The thirty-pound body cast he had to wear forced him to withdraw from college for a semester.
To help make ends meet, Buck and his buddy Tom Comick found the perfect job. After spotting a notice on a bulletin board, they applied to become houseboys at the Phi Mu sorority house. Not only would the two young students have a steady income, but they’d be surrounded by girls. They also got off the navy accommodation barge: the positions came with a basement apartment in the sorority.
From their subterranean lair the two college boys could see the telephone wires running up to the dormitories. Buck knew he could just connect a phone to any particular pair of wires and listen in on any conversation he wanted. However, an arrangement as simple as that would cause disturbances on the line, and would probably be detected.
Buck delved back into his toolkit of spare radio parts and built an interface that allowed him and Comick to listen in on the girls’ conversations undetected—offering them an unprecedented cache of information on the young women they were trying to seduce. And it went entirely undetected by the girls of the sorority, or the university—unlike Buck’s last big prank at high school (he got in a good deal of trouble after he electrified a urinal).
Yet the time for pranks and practical jokes was coming to an end. Graduation from the V-12 program loomed, and with it came a mandatory two years of navy service. Buck had to decide how he wanted to pay back his education. Comick—who was older, having joined the college program from active service—pushed Buck to consider codebreaking, where his remarkable talents with electronics, argued Comick, would be best put to use. Very soon thereafter, Buck was thrust into the front lines of the intelligence wars.