Oliphant by Roland Perry Extract

Allen & Unwin
Oct 9
9 min read

Read an extract from Oliphant by Roland Perry.

The Oliphant family was at Rhyl, a holiday resort on the North Wales coast on a bank holiday weekend early in August 1945. The children—Vivian, now seven, and Michael, nine—were enjoying their first vacation since the war began. There was some food rationing, but it was not as severe as before. They were experiencing freedom in a normal way. Victory celebrations were still going on, three months after Hitler had been vanquished. On the gay and vibrant shorefront, there was bunting and special prizes at carnival shops, with throngs of holiday-makers enjoying the atmosphere so long denied them.

Oliphant was introspective as he sat at a beachside tea shop reading, always with a characteristic squint of concentration. Rosa knew that something dark was preoccupying him, but did not ask what it was. She knew it had to have something to do with his secret work for the government. She had to be content that he was at last at home with the family for an extended period, and that they could enjoy a holiday together. Rosa had an inkling of his atomic work. The books, articles, papers and top-secret communiqués were always on his desk. But she never queried him about it.

But she was tempted to do so on the morning of Saturday, 4 August, when he received a telegram from Tube Alloys’ William Akers. He had sent one telegram to the post office at Rhyl and another to the post office at Barnt Green, Birmingham, so Oliphant knew it was urgent or ‘weighty’ or both.

Oliphant caught his breath and swore when he read it. Rosa asked what was wrong. He handed her the telegram with the gentle caveat that they should not discuss what it means. She read it:

It is possible that an official announcement on your project may be issued any time from now on. You are likely to be approached by the press as the names of the members of the technical committee will be given. You should state that you regret that you are not permitted to give any information whatever, and that you are advised that a fuller official statement will be released very shortly to the press.

You must not allow yourself to be drawn into any discussion on the underlying scientific phenomena as the fuller statement will include a most carefully composed historical survey, and it is very important that this be dealt with as a whole. You may of course give biographical details about yourself if asked. I suggest that you should get in touch with me by telephone on Tuesday to discuss further arrangements.

Akers

Oliphant was one of eight British physicists to receive the same communication, and Rosa was entitled now to ask what it was all about. Her husband demurred. He looked stressed and said he would tell her after he had spoken with Akers. His face, she recalled, was a mosaic of mixed emotions, none of them jubilant.

Oliphant reasoned to himself that this was the moment of truth. An atomic bomb was going to be dropped on Japan. He hoped it would be a demonstration, or at the worst delivered on something like an armaments factory. But he could not be sure, from the snippets of discussions he had heard since the Trinity test in New Mexico. He wished for it to end the war in the Pacific, especially with the several hundred thousand Allied POWs still in captivity.

•

Japan—now under siege and enduring massive conventional bombing raids—was still defiant and ready to fight when invaded. This influenced Truman to proceed with the dropping of a bomb on Hiroshima, which had a population of about 300,000. Unlike many other Japanese cities, it had so far been relatively unscathed by conventional bombs. It was an important military and industrial hub, with a booming spinning industry. US military planners had decided its size and layout made it a suitable test site for the atomic bomb’s destructive power. The generals had seen what the plutonium bomb had done in New Mexico. Now they wished to record what a U-235 weapon would do to an average city, full of human beings, animals and buildings.

The date was set for 6 August 1945. At 2.45 a.m. on that date, three American B-29 bombers took off from an airfield on the Pacific island of Tinian, 2400 kilometres south of Japan. Perhaps to lighten the gravity of what the crew were about to do, the bomb was nicknamed ‘Little Boy’, despite it weighing 4500 kilograms. That weight caused the B-29 carrying the bomb to need more than 3 kilometres of runway to become airborne. The bomber was named the Enola Gay after the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets.

At 7.15 a.m., four and a half hours after taking off, the bomb was armed and the B-29 began its descent. An hour later, the plane arrived over its target, Hiroshima. Major Thomas Ferebee located his target, the Aioi Bridge. He opened the bomb bay doors and released ‘Little Boy’ from its restraints. The bomb fell away, causing the plane to jump 10 feet (3 metres) with the sudden loss of weight. Tibbets resumed control of the plane and banked it sharply 155 degrees, knowing he had just 45 seconds to manoeuvre clear of the explosion. He and the crew were never told by the scientists that the B-29 would survive the blast. No one really knew. The crew did not see it as a suicide mission, nor did they know the power of the bomb the plane carried. It was big and looked different from other bombs, but that was the extent of their knowledge, until it went off.

‘Little Boy’ fell almost 10 kilometres in 43 seconds and detonated at around 600 metres’ altitude. It exploded with a force of more than 1500 tons of TNT about 150 metres from the targeted bridge. Less than 2 per cent of the bomb’s U-235 achieved fission, but in a blinding flash of heat and light Hiroshima was engulfed. In one second the ground temperature reached over 3800 degrees Celsius.

At least 80,000 Japanese were killed instantly, some half a mile away from ‘ground zero’. Many were simply vaporised. Bronze statues melted. The skin of people up to 8 kilometres away burned from the intense infrared energy released.

Tibbets and the crew saw a giant purple mushroom cloud that had already risen to nearly 14 kilometres, 5 kilometres above the B-29’s altitude. The cloud boiled upwards and seemed ‘terribly alive’, according to Tibbets, as he fought the controls to get the plane clear. The crew could see fires springing up everywhere: the ground was likened to ‘bubbling hot tar’. The city they had seen in sunlight just a few minutes before was now ‘an ugly smudge’. It had disappeared ‘under the awful blanket of smoke and fire’.

The Enola Gay made it back to Tinian with a few dents from flying debris. Its mission was viewed as a highly successful one, given that no one could predict whether the uranium bomb would work, or whether the plane itself would be vaporised.

•

President Truman was aboard the cruiser USS Augusta on his way back from the Potsdam Conference with Churchill and Stalin when he was told of the U-235 bomb’s detonation. He gleefully shared the news with his advisers and the ship’s crew. The news was soon shooting around the world on wire services. Allied soldiers in the Pacific felt it could be a reprieve from the brutal battles they were anticipating on all the main Japanese islands.

Days after the bombing, Hiroshima survivors were still searching for loved ones and caring for the wounded. Some bore awful burns. Others had no visible scars at all but later died painful deaths from radiation poisoning. Thousands were buried in the debris of their homes. The city was composed mostly of wooden abodes, which were pancaked. Even concrete structures in the city centre had been levelled.

•

Oliphant attempted to call Wallace Akers on Tuesday, 7 August 1945, but he was not available. The Oliphants arrived home by train in time for the nine o’clock news on the BBC. The newsreader spoke with pride as he told the vast UK audience of ‘the tremendous achievement of Allied scientists in the production of the atomic bomb’.

Oliphant recognised the government spin. He braced himself as the newsreader delivered what was essentially a 1500-word public relations statement released by the new Labor prime minister, Clement Attlee, who had defeated Winston Churchill in the recent general election. The news release covered the brief history of the bomb’s genesis with uranium fission, the British involvement in the race to beat the Germans to the bomb, and the combination of brilliant physics and engineering knowhow from both sides of the Atlantic that developed the weapon.

The newsreader pumped up his delivery as he proudly broadcast the names of the key British experts involved. Near the top was Professor Mark Oliphant.

Finally came the most uncomfortable words of all as the newsreader mentioned the force released on a Japanese city. Oliphant’s heart sank. He said nothing to Rosa and the children, but she realised this was not what he wanted to hear.

Oliphant scrambled to telephone people who might know more. But secrecy was now tighter than ever. Not even his close friend Lawrence had any news. They could make educated guesses, given the results of the Trinity test, but no information whatsoever was coming from the US military or government.

He heard one strong rumour, however: that the first bomb would be of the U-235 design.

Oliphant’s mind returned to the day in 1940 when he had read and re-read the Frisch–Peierls Memorandum. The precision of their calculus, physics and chemistry was magical to him. It surpassed all the propositions of countless outstanding physicists who said a chain reaction could not be achieved with uranium. Oliphant, a genius in his own right, had backed their work, judgement and creativity, as he had done so successfully with radar, which had saved the United Kingdom from being pulverised by the Luftwaffe.

With his maverick personality, drive and certitude, he had pushed harder than anyone against barriers in both the United Kingdom and the United States, until the two governments combined to make the atomic weapons. None of this was mentioned on 7 and 8 August when the British government responded to press and radio pleas for information by issuing a bland press release: it outlined the steps that had led to Hiroshima but disclosed no hard facts, mainly because its partner, the United States, was not releasing them.

Following the Trinity test, Oliphant had imagined the Americans would give a demonstration of the U-235 bomb’s power to force Japan’s capitulation; this was his first reaction to Akers’ telegram. But the skimpy news reports were suggesting that Hiroshima was a normal city without a big military presence. And the Japanese government and military had not reacted, at least to the world’s media.

As far as the US military chiefs were concerned, the conventional war was ongoing. There were still plans for 30 divisions of a million US soldiers to attack the main Japanese islands. In fact, there was renewed vigour for the US tactics, since it had been revealed that the Soviet Union was preparing to send troops to take designated Japanese islands. When the Pacific War was over, the Americans did not want to be in a carve-up of Japan with the Russians, as they were in Europe. The United States, with MacArthur in command, would redesign Japan as a democratic state in their own country’s image. The plan was to retain the emperor, despite his complicity in organising and approving various atrocities against Japan’s victims in China and South-East Asia. The last thing the Americans wanted was a dismembered Japan being even partly communist.

Truman had no second thoughts after Hiroshima. If anything, he was inspired to see a second atomic bomb dropped on another city.

•

Meanwhile, in Britain, Oliphant became an overnight superstar—at first by name, and then with a photographic portrait. It was a moment in history when those who devised and designed the war-winning technology, and weapons of mass destruction, were heroes. Their names were up in lights for their role in defeating the Nazis and smashing the Japanese.

Oliphant was far from carried away by this instant fame. He knew the detail of what it had taken to create the weaponry, and what it was capable of. He scoured the next morning’s newspapers for more news. The Times included a report under an unprecedented four-deck headline in capitals:

FIRST ATOMIC BOMB HITS JAPAN

EXPLOSION EQUAL TO 20,000 TONS OF T.N.T.

ANGLO–US WAR SECRET OF FOUR YEARS RESEARCH

‘RAIN OF RUIN’ FROM THE AIR

Oliphant read and re-read this, realising it was the verbatim report from the BBC the night before, except for an additional quote—not from Prime Minister Attlee but from the recently deposed Winston Churchill: ‘By God’s mercy British and American science outpaced all German efforts [to construct an atomic bomb]. These were on a considerable scale, but far behind.’

This gave some measure of relief to Oliphant. He was a national hero on a scale above footballers, cricketers, film stars and even politicians—except for Churchill, whose inspirational words and deeds had held the UK population together at the nation’s most challenging time in centuries.

For Oliphant, the former PM’s words were helpful in clarifying simply that he and his fellow physicists had beaten the Nazis. This was comforting, but a knot remained in his stomach because of the death and destruction his handiwork had caused.

Extracted from Roland Perry's Oliphant - available 30 September in all good bookstores.