Engineer Memoirs
A:
Los Alamos was very informal. We did a lot of skiing. It is beautiful country up there
in the mountains. It was a young crowd--a lot of young men and women who had a lot
of fun together. It was stimulating. They were very bright and interesting.
Q:
There is frequent mention of tension between the soldiers and the scientists who
worked there.
A:
That's interesting. I had forgotten about that. I used to have to listen by the hour to all
the complaints of my civilian colleagues. Most of the Army officers fitted in very well.
There were about a dozen of us at Los Alamos. We had been sent up from Sandia Base
in Albuquerque, where most of the assembly work was done. About a dozen were sent
up to do the nuclear assembly work.
As I said, most of us fitted in very well--as long as we were willing to listen. After all,
we were not in a position of any kind of authority. We were just workers like them.
Most of us, if we were willing to listen to these complaints and were sympathetic with
the worst of them, got along well. We were young guys. We were at the bottom of the
military heap. We thought that there were some problems up the line. So we could be
sympathetic. But we certainly had to hear a lot of complaints. Yes, that was a feature
of life.
Q:
The military wants too many reports. The military has too many restrictions--
A:
Yes. All kinds of stories--how ridiculous the whole regimentation was of the Army.
Q:
Did you know General Groves from before the project?
A:
Yes, I did. He and my father were great friends, and he was stationed in Washington
as a lieutenant when I was a boy. His son and I rode horseback together at Fort Myer
[Virginia]. There was a riding program, Army and Navy juniors, at Fort Myer. General
Groves, who was a lieutenant then, normally drove his son Dick and me over there. We
went three days a week. We would go after school and ride in the riding hall at Fort
Myer. An artilleryman named [Major General George B.] Barth--a captain--conducted
the classes. We were members of a Cub Scout troop, a mounted Cub Scout troop,
probably the only one that's ever existed.
Q:
That's extraordinary.
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