"They Were Heroes Too"

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by: Arnold Kramish

"They Were Heroes Too"

     At Pearl Harbor on December 7, it became difficult for President Bush to suppress tears for those who had died there fifty years ago.  The occasion reminded me that no official tears were ever shed for two men who made the supreme sacrifice a few years after Pearl Harbor in a secret incident that was important in helping George Bush and hundreds of thousands of other Americans to survive World War II.

     On September 2, 1944, the same day that Lt (j.g.) Bush was downed during a bombing run over the Pacific island of Chichi Jima, two men were killed in Philadelphia in an effort to make the atomic bomb.  The two civilian engineers were Peter Newport Bragg Jr. of Fayetteville, Ark. and Douglas Paul Meigs of Owings Mills, Md.

     A week earlier, ten enlisted men (SED's) had been assembled to meet at Oak Ridge, Tenn. with Lt. Col. Mark C. Fox and James Conant, president of Harvard.  Conant was a personal adviser to Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt had assigned to lead the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.  Conant told the soldiers very little about what he was asking them to do, and he cautioned them that the job would be very dangerous, testing a new and untried process.  "But," he said, "you will be winning the war."  Any soldier who did not wish to participate could leave the room without prejudice.  All 10 volunteered and were dispatched to the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

     The Navy Yard pilot plant was under the direction of Philip Abelson, a co-discoverer of a precursor isotope in plutonium production, important for the second bomb (the Nagasaki weapon).  The Philadelphia plant was testing a uranium isotope separation process for a much larger plant under construction by Col. Fox at Oak Ridge.  The purpose of the plant, coded "S-50", was to supply slightly enriched uranium feed to the calutrons (See Y-12 Plant)  (of recent notoriety in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program) to speed delivery of weapon-grade uranium for what became the Hiroshima bomb.

     At 1:20 PM on September 2, 1944, a cylinder of uranium hexafluoride process gas exploded in the pilot plant, fracturing pipes containing live steam.  The steam reacted with the uranium compound to produce hydrofluoric acid, one of the most corrosive of chemicals.  Immersed in the steam and acid bath, Bragg, Meigs, and the third man in the transfer room, one of the soldiers, suffered severe chemical and steam burns over their entire bodies and inhaled substantial amounts of chemical forms of uranium.

     One of the soldiers outside the transfer room, Pvt. John Hoffman (SED), rushed into the blinding cloud to help bring the three men and others outside the transfer room to showers, cutting off their clothes.  The vital signs of the three men from the transfer room were ebbing as their bodies lay on the concrete floor of the nearby power plant.  Meigs died first, followed by Bragg.  I was the third man.

     Blinded, because my corneas had been etched by the acid, I heard a doctor say to the Navy chaplain, "Attend to the third man; he's next."  The chaplain proceeded to administer last rites as he had done for the others, but I heard myself reject the rites, saying, "I'm not going to die.  I refuse to die." (My sight returned in about a week.)

     Washington was perplexed by the event.  Perhaps a nuclear explosion had occurred, even though the physics of the situation had predicted one would not.  In fact, a nuclear explosion had not occurred; what happened was perhaps then the largest release in history of radioactive materials.

     Groves dispatched a security officer to Philadelphia to stem information to the press.  The general's concern was not only that the atomic bomb project might be compromised but that if project workers learned of the true hazards of working with uranium, they might balk.  Groves directed a board of inquiry "that there should be only one question to settle" and that involved making it clear to all that "the injuries were sustained while the men were in the line of duty and were not under the influence of alcohol or narcotics."