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Manhattan, the Army and the Atomic Bomb (United States Army in World War II)

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The drama of building the first atomic bomb has been told several times, and well, elsewhere. 1984's "Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb" is about the organization of the massive engineering and industrial effort that, in the midst of the Second World War, took the bomb from its scientific underpinnings to a deployable weapon in just three years. This book is one of many volumes in the series put out by the Center of Military History on the U.S. Army in World War II.

Early in the Second World War, It became apparent that an atomic bomb was technically feasible, for the U.S. and its allies, and more problematically, perhaps also for Germany and Japan. The decision to build the bomb included the imperative to build it faster than the Axis. That meant marshaling, in wartime, the resources to explore all reasonable methods to produce a uranium or plutonium-based bomb simultaneously rather than sequentially.

The Army Corps of Engineers was given the mission of organizing that industrial effort. Under the direction of General Leslie Groves and the cover of the fictional Manhattan Engineering District, what became known as the Manhattan Project created the necessary industrial and testing complexes in Tennessee, Washington State, and New Mexico from scratch in record time. The Manhattan Project, a government-civilian partnership that involved as many as 600,000 workers spread across the country, acquired land, hired skilled labor, built the facilities, provided the necessary support infrastructure, and somehow kept it all reasonably secret.

Author Vincent Jones documents the security effort, the acquisition of scarce raw materials, land, manpower, electricity, and living infrastructure. The scope of the industrial processes is also described. A concluding section on the development and testing of the actual atomic weapon and its employment against Japan in 1945 rounds out the narrative.

This is an official history. As such, it makes for dry reading in places. On the other hand, there are significant lessons learned in such a massive military-civilian industrial effort. The expression "a Manhattan Project" is still used to describe time-critical national priority efforts. This book documents just how that was done and is highly recommended to students of the atomic bomb story.