Ernest Graves
Ernest Graves, Jr.
The career of Ernest Graves reflects the diversity of duties that an engineer officer may be
called upon to perform: troop leader, scientist and engineer, project manager, general staff
officer, senior commander, and director of national programs.
Lieutenant General Ernest Graves' career as an Army officer began in 1944 when he
graduated from West Point and received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Corps
of Engineers. That summer he attended the Engineer Officer Basic Course and commanded a
platoon in the Engineer Replacement Training Center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
In October he flew to Europe for assignment to Headquarters, Communications Zone, in
Paris, where he worked in the Control Section, a group that kept statistics on all logistic
activity. At the end of 1944 he was reassigned to command a platoon in the 1282d Engineer
Combat Battalion, training at the time in England. The battalion deployed to Germany in April
1945, then in June left for the Pacific theater by way of Marseilles and the Panama Canal.
When the 1282d Engineer Battalion arrived in the Philippines at the end of August 1945,
it was sent first to Clark Field, then to San Jose in central Luzon. In October Lieutenant Graves
transferred to the Engineer Construction Command and deployed with the headquarters to
Japan. He ended up in the Construction Division, Engineer Section, of Eighth Army
headquarters in Yokohama, becoming chief of the Buildings, Camps, and Hospitals Section
with responsibility for this type of construction for the army of occupation throughout the
TokyoYokohama area.
Graves left Japan in September 1946 for assignment to the Manhattan Project at Sandia
Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico--one of a group of officers selected by Lieutenant General
Leslie Groves to form a military unit to assemble nuclear weapons. Graves was in Company
B, the assembly company, of the 38th Engineer Battalion (Special) and spent time on a team
that assembled the nuclear cores, first at Los Alamos, then at the Sandstone nuclear test series
at Eniwetok Atoll.
Captain Graves began his graduate schooling in June 1948, first completing a year of
courses in mathematics, physics, and chemistry at the Naval Postgraduate School in Annapolis,
Maryland. From 1949 to 1951 he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, earning a Ph.D. in physics. It was here that he met and married his
wife Nancy.
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