Customer Reviews

Historic Photos of the Manhattan Project

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While most of us probably associate only Los Alamos NM with the Manhattan Project, the large majority of photographs in this book are of Oak Ridge TN and Hanford WA, where the extraction of enriched uranium and plutonium took place (respectively).

There are a few photographs of the big names of the project, such as Groves, Fermi, and Oppenheimer, but almost all the photographs of people show some of the thousands of working people and their families that were part of the project. The selection includes crowd scenes, men and women at work, and many photographs of children.

I have always heard that the Manhattan Project was an effort equivalent to building an entirely new auto industry in the United States in three years. The photographs in this book make that clear in a way that just reading about it can't. The physical plant required for the project was enormous, and the infrastructure needed for the workers enormous as well.

The book also is something of a field guide to the America of the 1940s, particularly as regards Oak Ridge. All the women are wearing dresses (as are almost all of the little girls) and most of the men wear hats. The crowd scenes are a sea of white faces.

Oak Ridge was segregated, but there were black workers and it is to the author's credit that he found and included several photographs of them.

In sum, the book is a must-have for anyone interested in the Manhattan Project, and an excellent buy for anyone interested in photographs of mid-century America.

I liked the photos in this book, and the division of them. They weren't all ordered by date, they were ordered by a couple topics: the buildup of the compounds making up part of the project, the "daily life" of people living and working in these compounds, and finally, the results of the bombs. Seemed like a good ordering.

The text was less impressive. I would like to have seen a little more detail regarding what was taking place in the photos. I realize this is primarily a photos book, but there's a huge story behind these photos and to gloss over some of the more striking details and facts takes some of the potential impact out of the photos.

Having said that, if you are interested in this topic, you will like looking at the photos. I had not seen some of them before.

Ohio avoided an atomic conflagration. In spite of that good luck I spent many childhood hours viewing the world from under my desk where I would presumably have been safe from hurtling debris, incinerating heat, and fatal radiation. Perhaps the anxious legacy of those times propelled me to buy one book after another on the Manhattan Project. None can stand up to the magisterial scope of Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". But the picture books- and this is one- offer something else, a chance to look into the nooks and crannies of everyday life in extraordinary times.

The crisp and well-chosen photos appear in chronological order beginning roughly with Fermi's atomic pile in Chicago and ending with the tortured human wreckage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At first glance these leanly captioned scenes offer the raw spectacle of thousands working against a barely visible enemy. Here and there caricatures of Japanese or Germans leer from posters and billboards. The cartoons only hint at a menace lurking somewhere out there,leagues away from the reassuring American landscape.

In part this book reminds me of Capra's Why We Fight. Capra deftly juxtaposed these same American tropes against German films of goose-stepping children armed with rifles and gasmasks. The Japanese do not appear in this collection until the very end. No Pearl Harbor, no Bataan, no Corregidor. This absence suggests a selfish faustian bargain. As much as I liked this book, a hint of why we fought or even entertained the need for an atomic bomb would have added a perspective lacking in these pages. Apart from a brief explanatory prologue, what we see here is a people full of ingenuity, purpose, and civic duty without the contrast of looming destruction.

Yet I think the value of the book transcends these shortcomings. The project's titanic structures, the wrenching aftermath of the bombings, and the bombs themselves have often had their say. A brigade of scientists have written and been written about. Yet the many ordinary men and women, our parents and grandparents, have just begin to talk. These photos reveal the stuff of ordinary life. Chocolate bars, baseball, cigarettes, and segregation. . Jerry-built housing of all sorts, trailers hemmed by picket fences, barracks, and tents. Workers of all sorts: nurses, barbers, cooks and carpenters. And children, children, children. These pictures revive that life, let us taste the many flavors of the past, and help the wizening voices speak.

During the darkest days of World War II, it was none other than Albert Einstein who brought to President Roosevelt's attention that the Nazis were trying to create atomic weapons. That was when America's Manhattan Project was established. This research project resulted in the dawning of the Atomic Age and the destruction of two Japanese cities, ending the Second World War and ushering in the Cold War era threat of mutually assured destruction by nuclear war. Now for the first time the Manhattan Project has been compiled photographically through almost two hundred historic images of the men and women, places and events involved in one of the most expensive and urgent scientific research efforts in military history. Compiled with captions by Timothy Joseph, "Historic Photos Of The Manhattan Project" is a very welcome and highly recommended addition to personal, community, and academic library American History and Photography collections.