2723 Gallivan Loop
Park City, Utah
July 17, 2000
Ms. Cynthia Kelley, President and Founder
Atomic Heritage Foundation
910 17th Street, NW
Suite 408
Washington, DC 20006
Good Morning Cindy!
I received the tape, "A Handful of Soldiers" a few days ago and wanted you to know how much I appreciate what you and your organization are doing.
I was an SED who worked at S-site until the war ended and then switched over to DP site until my discharge in July 1946. Fran Kennedy and I live in Park City, Utah now. A few years back I took her down to Los Alamos and went out to S-Site with her thinking I might be able to show her around a bit. Explaining as much as I could, there was no way I could get beyond the main building at the area. We did have lunch there but it was certainly not the same place where we soldiers sat with Oppenheimer for lunch on occasion.
Seeing the pictures of the train stopping at Lamy brought back so many similar feelings that I had, not having the slightest idea of where and for what reason we were going to such a deserted place. I probably should have gotten a lot of this down in writing in years past, so excuse me if I take advantage of you via this e-mail to put in writing what I have recounted verbally for years--even to my grandchilden!
I graduated from high school in 1941 at the tender age of 16 and immediately enrolled in the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt in my home town of Nashville. Because of the war we took no vacations and by the time I was l8, I was already in the 3rd year of Engineering School. I love to tell kids these days how eager we were to join up and that I went to my draft board forthwith to sign up. To my dismay (but to my mother's great joy) they told me to go back to engineering school and they would call me when they wanted me. This was in 1943 and the draft board had been told, apparently, to hold back on some engineering students who were making good grades. It has always been my supposition that at about the time Roosevelt had given a final go ahead to the project, it was realized that there would soon be a need for working personnel with at least some technical background. When they looked around to see where such personnel might come from, it became apparent that most all graduate engineers were already in the Service somewhere and only reachable with some difficulty. The draft board didn't know why they were told to hold up.
Then in the summer of 1944, I finally got that call from the draft board and was inducted into the Army. I went into basic "Infantry Replacement Training" and being 19 years old, enjoyed every minute of it as if it were Boy Scout Camp. It was then, during the Christmas season that the Battle of the Bulge began and our training was cut short by a couple of weeks as replacements were needed in a hurry. We were in final bivouac in northern Alabama (Ft. McCLellan) in a fresh snow storm, four of us trying to sleep in a tent put together from four shelter halves, when our sergeant awakened me at 4 AM. I can remember his words perfectly, "Gates, get your stuff together, you are going back in". I thought my grandfather had died as he had been ill for some time. He was regarded as "loco parentis" and his death would have qualified me for a short furlough. My father who had served in the trenches in France in WW 1 with a chemical warfare unit, had died shortly after Pearl Harbor.
I was directed to go to the mess tent for a cup of coffee before starting the 20 mile hike back. At the mess tent I was a little surprised to find five other GI's similarly called back in. But then it wouldn't have been too surprising for that many emergency furloughs out of several thousand troops on bivouac. We hiked back in with actually a little bit of concern for our buddies left behind, knowing that we were all supposed to be heading for Europe immediately. As a side note, one of our platoon, our guide-on, had played basketball with me back in high school (He was 6'6" tall and had made All State) was killed about 10 days later in Europe, after being in combat for all of twenty minutes.
Back at base, we were issued new uniforms and told to sit tight until called--but we were given a 24 hour pass to spend New Year's Eve in Anniston, Alabama. It was a great evening at the USO there but when I got back to my barracks, the rest of our unit was coming in from the bivouc-wet muddy and tired. They as well as I wondered where I was going next.
The next day about a dozen of us were put on a train for New York City. I was given the travel orders for all of us with instructions to keep them sealed and to hand them over to the officer who would meet us at Penn Station. In New York we were driven up to the University Heights campus of New York University (I believe it is now the Bronx Community College) and billeted in Gould Hall, six to a room. We were entered into Electrical Engineering courses as part of an ASTP program--approximately 50 soldiers. I had been a chemical engineer at Vanderbilt but electrical engineering was fascinating also. As an aside this may be why I went to S-Site At Los Alamos instead of somewhere more electrically oriented, although my chemical
engineering had nothing in particular to do with high explosives.
It was now Spring, 1945, and we certainly enjoyed all the wondrous things that New York did for soldiers. We were in Times Square or thereabouts several nights per week with free meals at fashionable restaurants and free tickets to all the big band shows and the Music Hall. I think I saw at least a dozen broadway shows that Spring. We were there when the President died and were still wondering why all this was happening to us. One of my roommates was so concerned that he was going to miss out on the fighting that he applied for and was accepted in Parachute School.
Sometime in April we were all interviewed by a couple of civilians. Truthfully we didn't care much for civilians--not in uniform, wow! It turns out that after the interviews we were divided into two groups and late in May half of us was sent to Presque Isle, Maine to become chief engineers on the new and supposedly secret B-29. The other half including myself was sent to Oak Ridge. I had a week's furlough at home in Nashville on the way and none of my friends or family there could figure out why I was to report to Knoxville, of all places. As close as Nashville was to the Oak Ridge area, the latter was still totally secret.
I was at Oak Ridge for just over 24 hours before being shipped out again to what turned out to be Los Alamos. But the one night at Oak Ridge I was walking over a narrow bridge to the mess hall when I confronted a friend, Hugh Richardson, from Nashville who had been a year ahead of me at Vanderbilt, and had graduated. He was a soldier also but when I asked him what in the world was going on here, he replied, "dogged if I know". He was an operator in one of the big units (gaseous diffusion, presumably) and knew what he was supposed to do but apparently not for what. (After the war and when I had graduated from Vanderbilt, he and I were room mates at MIT in graduate school.)
The next day about forty soldiers (including me) were put in a Pullman car and shipped out, without the slightest idea of where we were going. I remember the train going to either Louisville or Cincinnati where we were coupled on to another train. This train wound up in St. Louis where we were connected up to the Santa Fe Line, heading west.
We were not allowed out of our car on the train at any point and meals were brought in to us. Sleeping accommodations were slim and it helped if you were slim as there were two assigned to lower berths and one to an upper. A couple of days later our Pullman car was detached and left on a siding while the Santa Fe went on west. I have always been impressed with the fact that the Santa Fe Railroad didn't go through Santa Fe. Lamy was close though. I had never been in the desert before and here we were in the middle of nowhere at a siding called, "Lamy". That proverbial school bus did eventually show up with the cowboy driver and we boarded for places unknown. I was a little excited when we entered Santa Fe proper as I had at least heard of it. We drove past the elegant La Fonda Hotel (at least it was then), around the square in front of the Palace of Governors (with all the Indians quietly sleeping along side of their miscellaneous things for sale) and out the north side into more country that seemed like desolation. We wondered if our driver had gotten mixed up but I soon realized that he was the only one who knew where we were going.
The trip up along the Rio Grande, crossing at Espanola, and then down the other side was bewildering but beautiful. And then we finally turned off onto that little side road winding its way up the mountains. At last we came to the first of two gates and were checked out thoroughly but it was not until the second gate that we caught our first glimpse of Los Alamos. It was military, of that we were sure, but what in the world was going on way up here in the stratosphere? We were temporarily put into some square
buildings for the night near the school playing fields where we had a great
game of softball that evening.
First thing the next morning we were told what was going on! And for a young twenty year old it was close to not believable. We had been used to hearing of our air force dropping two ton "block busters" and could hardly imagine the destruction caused by those bombs . To learn that we were here for the duration with no outside contact to produce bombs equivalent to more than 10,000 tons of TNT was impressive to say the least, and probably doubtful to me in all honesty. I faced the fact a couple of days later when Trinity was successful. The night of Trinity, several of my new SED buddies invited me to hike up to a mountain peak near the Via Grande where they were expecting (and rightly so) to see light from the explosion. Unfortunately I declined and was sound asleep when it happened but as reported in a newspaper (perhaps in Albuquerque), a blind girl asked her parents, “What was that”.
I was assigned to S-Site, and began casting lenses at once. Dr. George Kistiakowsky was head of the implosion development and I remember being totally fascinated by his explanation of mixing ingredients, like barium nitrate and TNT, to get the burning rate necessary to make the lenses work properly. As I recall, the tubs in which we melted the ingredients were heated with tightly controlled high pressure steam so a temperature of about 110 degrees C could be reached--but no higher as auto ignition would likely occur at 120 degrees. The milkshake mixers with reversed pitch blades helped do the trick in getting rid of cavitation and bubbles so that solid castings were realized.
It seems to me that the professional explosives people who were there when I arrived were mostly from the Holston Ordinance Works in Tennessee.
They were great to work with and had a lot of fun early on with me the first time I stepped on a small bit of explosive that we had not completely washed off with high pressure steam at the end of the shift. It exploded rather loudly and made a quick believer out of me.
Early in the summer, after Trinity, when we began to put out good lenses quite regularly, I was given a job by Mr. Popham who as a civilian was in charge of S-Site at the time, I believe. He had been a professor at Ohio University and had befriended a bounty hunter (mountain lions) up in the mountains whom we visited one time. Mr. Popham gave me a small metal box holding 3x5 cards on which we entered the lens items for each completed bomb. As I recall, we stopped casting lenses almost the day after Japan surrendered. My little card box showed a grand total of six completed bombs. One had been exploded at Trinity and one over Nagasaki. That left four in inventory and I have speculated they were eventually used at Bikini.
I was now out of a job at S-Site but still in the Army so I asked to be transferred to DP-Site where I spent the rest of my Los Alamos career filtering the raffinate from Plutonium recovery. I became adept at working in dry boxes, putting the plutonium-residue filter papers in lead containers and running the liquid out to 55 gallon drums on the outside of the building. Needless to say, it was rather hot out there, radiation speaking. I don't know what finally happened to all those drums but when I left in June 1946, they were still there. That probably at least partially explains why when I took Frances back to Los Alamos, we couldn't get anywhere near the old DP-Site, a truly hazardous location now.
I must mention at this point how frustrated I get when people find fault with the way hazardous materials were handled back then. We were subjected to most intense checks every day. When I arrived at DP-Site each morning nose swabs were taken before we went into a change room, stripped, and frequently urine samples were required. Then we passed through closed doors into another room where we put on our coveralls for the morning's work, and then passed on into the facility that had been designed and built by Myron Kratzer. The reverse procedure was followed at noon and then again at the end of the shift with more nose swabs. Of course, we had dosimeters on as well.
As a further precaution, every six weeks or so I had to leave the Hill entirely on a three day pass, returning immediately to the hospital where I was held for twenty-four hours while they measured every thing that went in and everything that came out of me checking for any residual radiation. I know that Plutonium is highly radioactive and I hear now that it is regarded at just about the most poisonous substance known to man. Perhaps that is so but the precautions taken with our contact were surely exemplary.
I returned to Los Alamos for the 50th reunion of the SED several years back and was pleased to find so many of the SED still alive and kicking. Most of the famous theoretical physicists are no longer with us. They seemed to me to be old timers back then but most were in their late 20's and 30's. I have to realize that at age 20, I was about as young as one could have been to have been in the Army and even be able to say today to my grandchildren (also three great grandchildren) that I was at Los Alamos and helped work on the Atom Bomb.
Cindy, I hope soon to work on a book that will include the above but also the letters and diaries of my father from the First World War--the one that was supposed to “end all wars”. Please keep me informed of your continuing wonderful program.
Sincerely, Ralph Gates (proudly remembering my dog tag #44 020 574)
