The Atomic Heritage Foundation's 2014 annual report is now online. The report includes information on the new Manhattan Project National Historical Park; updates on our oral history project and historic preservation efforts; and more. To download the report, click here.

If you would like a hard copy, please email us at info@atomicheritage.org with your address and we will be glad to mail you one. 

Grace and Gwen Groves reading about the bombing of Hiroshima

Most days from September 1942 until August 1945, Manhattan Project Director

General Leslie Groves would leave his modest brick home located on 36th St., NW in Washington, DC's historic Cleveland Park neighborhood at 6:15 AM. He would climb into his green 1942 Dodge four-door sedan, and make the fifteen minute drive to his office at the New War Building at 21st and C St., NW. There he oversaw the secret project to build the world's first atomic bomb.

Groves and his wife, Grace, had moved to the neighborhood in August 1939 to be near the National Cathedral School for Girls where their daughter, Gwen, attended school. Their son, Richard, was at West Point Academy during the War and stayed in the fourth bedroom during visits home.

Now you can hear interviews with each member of the Groves family on the "Voices of the Manhattan Project" website. Stephane Groueff recorded more than twelve hours of conversation with the General in 1965 for his book, The Manhattan Project. Groueff also recorded an interview with the General's wife, Grace, who admired her husband's determination and ability to make tough decisions. "I think that he's quite unusual. I've always thought so. I admire him more than anyone I've ever known."

Richard Groves at West Point

Groves' commitment to his family meant keeping some things secret, namely his work on the atomic bomb. Grace, Richard, and Gwen were shocked to learn about their father's involvement on the project when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. "It was on the radio--that is where we first heard about it," recalls Gwen. "It was a big bomb, and there was my father--he had done all this work. My mother was truly astonished."

Groves, who passed away in 1970, had no regrets about his role in building the atomic bomb. "He was intensely proud of the Manhattan Project and proud of the people that worked on it," said Richard. "All 200,000 of them, not just the 'fancy dans' that wrote books, but the people that were out there doing the mucking around in the mud."

We are sad to report that two prominent Manhattan Project veterans passed away in February, Val Fitch and Ralph Nobles.

Val Fitch was drafted into the Special Engineer Detachment in 1943. He was sent to Los Alamos, where he worked with Ernest Titterton on signals for the detonation of the "Gadget" in the Trinity test. He was also sent to Wendover to observe the dummy bomb tests. Fitch won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 "for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons." He was a professor at Princeton for many years.

 In a 2008 interview with AHF President Cindy Kelly, Fitch remembered witnessing the Trinity test: "It's hard to overstate the impact on the senses of something like that. First the flash of light, that enormous fireball, the mushroom cloud rising thousands of feet in the sky, and then, a long time afterwards, the sound. The rumble, thunder in the mountains. Word's haven't been invented to describe it in any accurate way." 

Ralph Nobles. Photo courtesy Dan Honda/Bay Area News Group

Thanks to hard work by our interns, Caitlyn Borghi, Anna Frenzilli, and Emma Schaff, we are making great progress in uploading more interviews from the AHF, Groueff, Sanger, and Rhodes Collections to the Voices of the Manhattan Project website. Here is a selection of the 20+ interviews we added in February. For more, visit Voices.

Nancy Bartlit is the former president of the Los Alamos Historical Society and co-author of Silent Voices of World War II: When Sons of the Land of Enchantment Met Sons of the Land of the Rising Sun. Her father worked on the Manhattan Project in New York City, Oak Ridge, and Canada. Bartlit talks about how her experiences teaching in Japan and living in Los Alamos influenced her work as a historian. She discusses Japan's surrender, the internment of Japanese Americans, Navajo Code Talkers, and how Japan remembers the bombings today. 

Freeman Dyson is an esteemed mathematician and theoretical physicist at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Dyson discusses his work at England's Bomber Command in World War II. He explains the importance of scientific innovation in wartime, the effectiveness of strategic bombing campaigns, and why civil defense worked better in Germany than in Britain. Dyson later worked with Manhattan Project veterans Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, and Robert R. Wilson, and recalls how they felt about the project. He discusses what methods he thinks would work best to further nonproliferation efforts today. Dyson remembers visiting Oak Ridge, and explains Oak Ridge's important role in building innovative nuclear reactors and conducting biological experiments.

Tom Gary headed the design division in the engineering department at the DuPont Company and served on the committee which decided among the proposed fissionable material production and purification processes. He discusses his time on the review committee, including Ernest Lawrence's effective salesmanship, and what it was like to work with a young Crawford Greenwalt.

Martin Skinner worked in the Beta 3 Building in the Y-12 Plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In this interview, Skinner elaborates on his role as a troubleshooter for the Calutrons in the Beta 3 Building. He also highlights the degree of the secrecy involved in working on the Manhattan Project. After the war, Skinner returned to Oak Ridge to continue working on a project researching the stable separation of isotopes. He concludes by stressing the need to preserve the memory and importance of atomic history.

Adrienne Lowry arrived at Los Alamos in 1942 after her husband, radiochemist and co-discoverer of plutonium, Joseph W. Kennedy, was selected by J. Robert Oppenheimer to lead the chemistry division at Los Alamos. Lowry recalls the early days of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, when construction was just beginning and housing remained scarce for many of the workers who had just arrived. Prior to the birth of her first child, Lowry carried mail between Los Alamos and Santa Fe. 

Julius Tabin was a physicist and a member of Enrico Fermi's team at Los Alamos. Tabin, working alongside fellow physicists Herbert Anderson and Darragh Nagle, carried out experiments under Fermi. In July 1945, Tabin witnessed the Trinity Test and afterwards went into into the crater left by the blast, riding in a specially modified lead-lined tank to collect surface samples at ground zero. In this interview, Tabin describes in great detail the personalities of Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He further elaborates on how the scientists at Los Alamos got along and the problem-solving strategies they used. Tabin finishes with a reflection on technological progress since WWII and his family.