Paperclip (1945-1946)
After V-E day , the 8th of May 1945 Britain and Russia launched a vigorous competition to import as many key German scientists and engineers as they could find and persuade or kidnap. General Bissel attempted to get permission to round up the rocket team at Peenemünde, but the state department refused to grant an exception to the prohibition against importing enemy aliens in time of war, and the "duration" had not officially ended. President Roosevelt was dead and Truman had not taken over command and could not be reached to intervene.
One day General Bissel briefed us on his failed attempts. He told us that he considered it his obligation to risk jail if this was in the interest of our country, just as risking his life on the battlefield would have been, and that he had decided to import German engineers illegally. And thus originated "project paperclip", which is described accurately and in great detail in James Michener’s book "Space", even though the book pretends to be a novel.
A detachment of seven of us was assigned to occupy Long Island, strategically located at the entrance to Boston Harbor, which was under military control for the duration, and prepare it as a temporary holding base for several hundred German scientists and engineers. They were offered a per diem consulting fee for volunteering their services. We were to be supported logistically by the First Army command base at Fort Devens, Massachusetts and by the Squantum Navy base, The operation was to be top secret.
A second detachment was sent to prepare a holding base in Germany, where the families of these scientists could be guaranteed complete safety and a comfortable living under American protection. It was an offer too enticing to refuse under the chaotic conditions among the rubble following the German defeat.
Our detachment of seven included my two friends Arno Mayer and Leslie Wilson. We were also given the services of an old mariner familiar around Boston fishermen, Captain Corkum and his motorized whaler the MS Corkum which had been in his family for three or four generations. Corky was based at Rowe’s Wharf on Atlantic Avenue, which was also under military control for the duration. It is now a tourist attraction.
General Bissel’s plan was to bring the German scientists either via returning troop ships to Boston Harbor, or via B-24 cargo flights to Squantum Naval base. No custom or immigration officer was to know of this operation. We were to meet the ships while they were anchored at Nix’s mate awaiting a harbor pilot, and transfer the scientists to Corky’s ship before the harbor pilot got to them.. Nix’s mate is a large rock at the entrance to Boston Harbor which has a light and is mostly submerged at high tide. Legend has it that pirates used to strand their prisoners there to drown before they put into Boston Harbor.
Long Island is now accessible via a causeway connecting it to a hospital, but at the time it was completely isolated and very strategic. It had a lighthouse atop a hill, several coast artillery gun installations dug into the hillside, and two brick barrack buildings dating from the civil war, I believe. It was overgrown with shoulder-high weeds. There was a primitive wood dock badly in need of repairs. There was also a deep well in need of a new pump. A coast guard detachment of three sailors guarded the installation and kept watch over the entrance to Boston Harbor via sonar.
The seven of us explored Long Island for several days and planned our mission. It was obvious that a large work force was required to divide the old barrack into individual rooms, restore the kitchen and mess hall into useable condition, repair the dock, mow the weeds, and tend to several hundred scientists, a few dozen at a time. The only crew we could count on to maintain secrecy was a crew of prisoners. Soldiers would have had to go on shore leave and would certainly have talked. We picked a dozen guards from our home base who were older, reliable and security-cleared intelligence personnel we had worked with for months, and forty or fifty German POWs we selected from among a few hundred at a POW camp. We picked two prisoners who had been professional hotel cooks, two bakers, two tailors, a barber, a few tough construction workers, a few carpenters, a plumber, an electrician, a locksmith, a physician, a few office workers fluent in English, and my own prize discovery: Hans Gass, a professional typist who had been personal adjutant to General Rundstedt. He had also been the European typing champion, and is the only typist I ever met whom I could not out-type. Hans and Leslie Wilson got very friendly.
One hot spring day we arrived at Rowe’s wharf in two chartered Greyhound buses, and Corky took us out in his whaler. We had only a few weeks before the first shipment of scientists arrived, during which we had to make security arrangements with the intelligence officer of the first Army headquarters at Fort Devens. He was the only person who knew of our mission. To their quartermaster we were just a detachment of about twenty soldiers, and yet we had Pentagon orders to obtain rations and other support for several hundred people. We let them believe that we were a hospital operation. We got file cabinets, typewriters, a teletype machine, mimeograph machines, desks, first aid equipment, kitchen equipment, a 16 mm motion picture projector and screen, a barber chair, record player, blankets, sheets, pillows, towels, fatigue uniforms, mess tables, and even a panel truck (kept at Rowe’s wharf). We also had to get tools and building materials from commercial lumber yards to turn the barracks into a hotel, nicknamed "Haus der Deutschen Wissenschaft" by our first guests.
We also arranged for secret medical support. Any of our charges who needed medical or dental services was taken to Fort Devens. twice weekly plus emergency. I remember the dentists being apalled at our POW’s neglected teeth. It seems German army dentists were so prone to pulling teeth that soldiers simply didn’t go to them. They were surprised that they got exactly the same food and medical attention as did American soldiers, in strict compliance Geneva and Helsinki convention rules. I remember that we even took them ashore to go Christmas shopping and arranged to send presents to their families via army mail. Many of them immigrated after the war. There were a couple of die-hard Nazis among this crew, I was told, but their enthusiasm for the Third Reich was very soon beaten out of them by their colleagues.
Our mission was to get scientists to our island either from Squantum via Rowe’s wharf, or from the liberty troop ships at Nix’s mate. Every shipment was accompanied by one of our detachment in Germany who made radio contact before they arrived, and we in turn contacted Corky. Once comfortably installed, each scientist (now an illegal immigrant employed by the Pentagon) was interviewed at great length by Arno, Leslie or myself to determine his areas of expertise and his background, and this information was sent to the Pentagon and to all relevant US installations, such as the signal corps lab at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the radiation lab at MIT (radar headquarters), the underwater sound lab at Harvard (sonar headquarters), the David Taylor Model Basin in Washington, Huntsville Rocket Research in Alabama, Houston Texas, Ordnance Lab at Aberdeen, MD, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Fermilab , Sandia Lab, etc.
Interested installations then requested that scientists be sent to them, or else came to interview them, in which case we provided interpretation services. Secure phone lines didn’t exist yet, but we had encrypting machines and teletype machines.
Wernher von Braun, his younger brother Magnus von Braun, and a dozen key associates, including Axter and Riedel, the first of three hundred Peenemünde people, happened to arrive during a storm that lasted five days. It was a critical situation because we absolutely had to get to the liberty ship ;before the pilot, and we didn’t know when the pilot would risk it. Corky assured us "no problem! The Corkum is more seaworthy than anything the Coast Guard has!" and shortly announced his departure when the storm had barely subsided. It was a memorable operation. First we had to board the Corkum at our wobbly dock, and then we had to transfer a dozen seasick landlubbers and a lot of luggage from the fantail of a liberty ship to the much lower Corkum deck via a bosun’s chair. The rough ride in the fishy-smelling hold of a whaler and the rough debarkation at our dock is not what they had expected for their welcome to America. I remember the tense silence being broken when one of them extracted a piano accordion from his luggage and they all started singing German student songs.
Our detachment in Germany reported several interesting episodes in their collection operation. Peenemünde had been systematically dismantled as the allied armies approached. The staff had scattered and all the crucial documents, drawings and rocket fuel formulas had been removed into hiding by the Waffen-SS. They found Riedel at home, digging his car out of his barn, where he had hidden it in the hay to keep the German army from commandeering it. Riedel was happy to help the Americans, and told them where to find his colleagues. He also took them to an old miner who lived in a shack in the mountains, and who had helped the SS bury documents in an abandoned salt mine. The miner led them to the buried shaft where documents had been welded into one meter cubes of armor plate and lowered down the shaft. They managed to get hold of an engineer battalion and dragged the cubes out of the mine shaft, just in time to depart as the first Russian truck arrived. It is by so narrow a margin that German rocket technology fell into American rather than Russian hands.
Another close call was the acquisition of Schneider, a famous naval architect and co-inventor of the Voigt-Schneider cycloidal ship propeller, an omni-directional thruster now in world-wide use. Professor Schneider had his own research facility complete with a towing tank and technical library, and he was not about to abandon his life work. He refused repeated offers to come to America. One day our detachment visited and told him that they had intelligence to the effect that the Russians were planning to pick him up in the middle of the night, as they had picked up some of his academic colleagues, and that his chance was now or never. Reluctantly he accepted, providing he could bring along much of his technical library, his record collection, and some key equipment. They had an engineer battalion on site within hours, and the Russians found only an empty house. Schneider was happily installed at the David Taylor Model Basin in Washington within weeks. Both he and Voigt spent time at our island, and Schneider confirmed the story of his narrow escape. I remember the old gentleman as an ardent music lover, who was delighted to be able to listen to records of Mendelsohn music, strictly verboten in the third Reich. Schneider was a very creative inventor, and loved to lecture to the other scientists about his revolutionary ideas. He had invented two means for moving cargo over the ocean more efficiently. One was the hydrofoil-vessel, and the other a cargo submarine which eliminated surface waves, the leading cause of drag, and also avoided storm waves. And so it came to pass that our navy had Voigt-Schneider cycloidal propellers. Of course now everybody has them.
Another memorable group was the Mercedes-Benz engineering team. They had designed and built the huge V-12 Diesel engines that powered the assault boat fleet which invaded Norway. All of the engines failed catastrophically during their first attempt to reach Norway. They had used roller bearings for the crankshaft at unprecedented loads, and surface creep had caused steel chips to peel off under the rolling needles. Sabotage was of course suspected, and heads almost rolled. But the engines were rebuilt using journal bearings. The experience was also the subject of very interesting lectures. What the Mercedes engineers contributed to the US Army is a family of three sizes of modular diesel engines using identical parts that could be assembled to produce V-2, V-4, V-6 and larger engines for everything from jeeps to tanks to ships.
An optical engineer named Patin came with a retinue of technicians and chests of optical equipment. His expertise included bomb sights, among other things. He was notorious for having defied the Nazi party on many occasions, and having rescued many Jewish colleagues from concentration camps. One day while showing a 16 mm movie the sound system failed.. Patin took one look at the projector, issued a few instructions, and within an hour his crew had re-ground a chipped prismatic lens to send light through the sound track, and installed a new selenium cell.
Von Braun and his team lectured enthusiastically about rocketry and their dreams of space travel. There was no question in their minds that the technology for a manned moon flight existed. They could hardly wait.
Another interesting character was a young engineer named Werner Stumm. He had worked on radar in England early in the war and knew enough about magnetrons to have given Germany radar. But he failed to get support because his residency in England had made him suspect. Another narrow escape from disaster.
One day around Christmas time we were surprised to see a helicopter land. It turned out to be Edgar Rowe Snow, the well-known historian and "flying Santa" making his annual round to bring presents to lighthouse keepers. He was surprised at hearing of our mission and promised to observe secrecy. He stayed that evening and gave us a fascinating slide lecture about the history of all the islands. We learned that Edgar Allen Poe’s short story "The Cask of Amontillado" is an embellished account of an event that occurred while Poe attended a Christmas party with soldiers in Fort Warren on George’s Island. It seems that a bunch of drunken soldiers walled up one of their comrades in one of the gunpowder cells in the underground arsenal as a practical joke, but released him. Poe’s imagination invented the rest of the plot. Our project added another bit of history to Snow’s repertoire.
Some of the Germans were catholic and requested church services as Christmas approached. I managed to get one of the chaplains from Fort Devens, and had Corky bring him on several Sunday mornings for breakfast and mass. I interpreted his sermons rather freely, to the private amusement of some of our bilingual guests.
The "Haus der Deutschen Wissenschaft" (house of German science) was a comfortable and stimulating place. Our guests were relaxed, happy to know their families were safe, able to buy and send them Christmas presents as Christmas approached. We had 16mm movies almost every evening, and classical music. At one point I was anxious to shown them the Charlie Chaplin film "The Great Dictator" because it is such a stinging satire of Hitler and Mussolini that I thought it would help restore their political sanity. The film was not available in 16 mm format, so I ordered a 35 mm projector through the Fort Devens quartermaster. A twenty man service post doesn’t rate a full-size motion picture theater, and I had to have the Pentagon wire an order. The projector arrived, but by the time I could get the film project paperclip had been legalized and we were ordered to return to Washington.
In January 1946 we had some fifty or sixty scientists plus forty or fifty POWs and some twenty military personnel. We chartered three or four Greyhound buses and departed Rowe’s wharf after breakfast, made a lunch stop in Philadelphia, and arrived at P O Box 1142 for dinner.
We had processed about 600 scientists on the island, and imported another 600 or so through legal channels. I got my honorable discharge in March 1946, and stayed on as a civilian employee until it was time to start my college career at M.I.T. in the fall. At the time, my brother Eric had just finished basic artillery training at Fort Bragg, and I had enough connections to be able to have him assigned to Military Intelligence. I don’t remember details.
(Continue to MIT Undergraduate)
After V-E day , the 8th of May 1945 Britain and Russia launched a vigorous competition to import as many key German scientists and engineers as they could find and persuade or kidnap. General Bissel attempted to get permission to round up the rocket team at Peenemünde, but the state department refused to grant an exception to the prohibition against importing enemy aliens in time of war, and the "duration" had not officially ended. President Roosevelt was dead and Truman had not taken over command and could not be reached to intervene.
One day General Bissel briefed us on his failed attempts. He told us that he considered it his obligation to risk jail if this was in the interest of our country, just as risking his life on the battlefield would have been, and that he had decided to import German engineers illegally. And thus originated "project paperclip", which is described accurately and in great detail in James Michener’s book "Space", even though the book pretends to be a novel.
A detachment of seven of us was assigned to occupy Long Island, strategically located at the entrance to Boston Harbor, which was under military control for the duration, and prepare it as a temporary holding base for several hundred German scientists and engineers. They were offered a per diem consulting fee for volunteering their services. We were to be supported logistically by the First Army command base at Fort Devens, Massachusetts and by the Squantum Navy base, The operation was to be top secret.
A second detachment was sent to prepare a holding base in Germany, where the families of these scientists could be guaranteed complete safety and a comfortable living under American protection. It was an offer too enticing to refuse under the chaotic conditions among the rubble following the German defeat.
Our detachment of seven included my two friends Arno Mayer and Leslie Wilson. We were also given the services of an old mariner familiar around Boston fishermen, Captain Corkum and his motorized whaler the MS Corkum which had been in his family for three or four generations. Corky was based at Rowe’s Wharf on Atlantic Avenue, which was also under military control for the duration. It is now a tourist attraction.
General Bissel’s plan was to bring the German scientists either via returning troop ships to Boston Harbor, or via B-24 cargo flights to Squantum Naval base. No custom or immigration officer was to know of this operation. We were to meet the ships while they were anchored at Nix’s mate awaiting a harbor pilot, and transfer the scientists to Corky’s ship before the harbor pilot got to them.. Nix’s mate is a large rock at the entrance to Boston Harbor which has a light and is mostly submerged at high tide. Legend has it that pirates used to strand their prisoners there to drown before they put into Boston Harbor.
Long Island is now accessible via a causeway connecting it to a hospital, but at the time it was completely isolated and very strategic. It had a lighthouse atop a hill, several coast artillery gun installations dug into the hillside, and two brick barrack buildings dating from the civil war, I believe. It was overgrown with shoulder-high weeds. There was a primitive wood dock badly in need of repairs. There was also a deep well in need of a new pump. A coast guard detachment of three sailors guarded the installation and kept watch over the entrance to Boston Harbor via sonar.
The seven of us explored Long Island for several days and planned our mission. It was obvious that a large work force was required to divide the old barrack into individual rooms, restore the kitchen and mess hall into useable condition, repair the dock, mow the weeds, and tend to several hundred scientists, a few dozen at a time. The only crew we could count on to maintain secrecy was a crew of prisoners. Soldiers would have had to go on shore leave and would certainly have talked. We picked a dozen guards from our home base who were older, reliable and security-cleared intelligence personnel we had worked with for months, and forty or fifty German POWs we selected from among a few hundred at a POW camp. We picked two prisoners who had been professional hotel cooks, two bakers, two tailors, a barber, a few tough construction workers, a few carpenters, a plumber, an electrician, a locksmith, a physician, a few office workers fluent in English, and my own prize discovery: Hans Gass, a professional typist who had been personal adjutant to General Rundstedt. He had also been the European typing champion, and is the only typist I ever met whom I could not out-type. Hans and Leslie Wilson got very friendly.
One hot spring day we arrived at Rowe’s wharf in two chartered Greyhound buses, and Corky took us out in his whaler. We had only a few weeks before the first shipment of scientists arrived, during which we had to make security arrangements with the intelligence officer of the first Army headquarters at Fort Devens. He was the only person who knew of our mission. To their quartermaster we were just a detachment of about twenty soldiers, and yet we had Pentagon orders to obtain rations and other support for several hundred people. We let them believe that we were a hospital operation. We got file cabinets, typewriters, a teletype machine, mimeograph machines, desks, first aid equipment, kitchen equipment, a 16 mm motion picture projector and screen, a barber chair, record player, blankets, sheets, pillows, towels, fatigue uniforms, mess tables, and even a panel truck (kept at Rowe’s wharf). We also had to get tools and building materials from commercial lumber yards to turn the barracks into a hotel, nicknamed "Haus der Deutschen Wissenschaft" by our first guests.
We also arranged for secret medical support. Any of our charges who needed medical or dental services was taken to Fort Devens. twice weekly plus emergency. I remember the dentists being apalled at our POW’s neglected teeth. It seems German army dentists were so prone to pulling teeth that soldiers simply didn’t go to them. They were surprised that they got exactly the same food and medical attention as did American soldiers, in strict compliance Geneva and Helsinki convention rules. I remember that we even took them ashore to go Christmas shopping and arranged to send presents to their families via army mail. Many of them immigrated after the war. There were a couple of die-hard Nazis among this crew, I was told, but their enthusiasm for the Third Reich was very soon beaten out of them by their colleagues.
Our mission was to get scientists to our island either from Squantum via Rowe’s wharf, or from the liberty troop ships at Nix’s mate. Every shipment was accompanied by one of our detachment in Germany who made radio contact before they arrived, and we in turn contacted Corky. Once comfortably installed, each scientist (now an illegal immigrant employed by the Pentagon) was interviewed at great length by Arno, Leslie or myself to determine his areas of expertise and his background, and this information was sent to the Pentagon and to all relevant US installations, such as the signal corps lab at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the radiation lab at MIT (radar headquarters), the underwater sound lab at Harvard (sonar headquarters), the David Taylor Model Basin in Washington, Huntsville Rocket Research in Alabama, Houston Texas, Ordnance Lab at Aberdeen, MD, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Fermilab , Sandia Lab, etc.
Interested installations then requested that scientists be sent to them, or else came to interview them, in which case we provided interpretation services. Secure phone lines didn’t exist yet, but we had encrypting machines and teletype machines.
Wernher von Braun, his younger brother Magnus von Braun, and a dozen key associates, including Axter and Riedel, the first of three hundred Peenemünde people, happened to arrive during a storm that lasted five days. It was a critical situation because we absolutely had to get to the liberty ship ;before the pilot, and we didn’t know when the pilot would risk it. Corky assured us "no problem! The Corkum is more seaworthy than anything the Coast Guard has!" and shortly announced his departure when the storm had barely subsided. It was a memorable operation. First we had to board the Corkum at our wobbly dock, and then we had to transfer a dozen seasick landlubbers and a lot of luggage from the fantail of a liberty ship to the much lower Corkum deck via a bosun’s chair. The rough ride in the fishy-smelling hold of a whaler and the rough debarkation at our dock is not what they had expected for their welcome to America. I remember the tense silence being broken when one of them extracted a piano accordion from his luggage and they all started singing German student songs.
Our detachment in Germany reported several interesting episodes in their collection operation. Peenemünde had been systematically dismantled as the allied armies approached. The staff had scattered and all the crucial documents, drawings and rocket fuel formulas had been removed into hiding by the Waffen-SS. They found Riedel at home, digging his car out of his barn, where he had hidden it in the hay to keep the German army from commandeering it. Riedel was happy to help the Americans, and told them where to find his colleagues. He also took them to an old miner who lived in a shack in the mountains, and who had helped the SS bury documents in an abandoned salt mine. The miner led them to the buried shaft where documents had been welded into one meter cubes of armor plate and lowered down the shaft. They managed to get hold of an engineer battalion and dragged the cubes out of the mine shaft, just in time to depart as the first Russian truck arrived. It is by so narrow a margin that German rocket technology fell into American rather than Russian hands.
Another close call was the acquisition of Schneider, a famous naval architect and co-inventor of the Voigt-Schneider cycloidal ship propeller, an omni-directional thruster now in world-wide use. Professor Schneider had his own research facility complete with a towing tank and technical library, and he was not about to abandon his life work. He refused repeated offers to come to America. One day our detachment visited and told him that they had intelligence to the effect that the Russians were planning to pick him up in the middle of the night, as they had picked up some of his academic colleagues, and that his chance was now or never. Reluctantly he accepted, providing he could bring along much of his technical library, his record collection, and some key equipment. They had an engineer battalion on site within hours, and the Russians found only an empty house. Schneider was happily installed at the David Taylor Model Basin in Washington within weeks. Both he and Voigt spent time at our island, and Schneider confirmed the story of his narrow escape. I remember the old gentleman as an ardent music lover, who was delighted to be able to listen to records of Mendelsohn music, strictly verboten in the third Reich. Schneider was a very creative inventor, and loved to lecture to the other scientists about his revolutionary ideas. He had invented two means for moving cargo over the ocean more efficiently. One was the hydrofoil-vessel, and the other a cargo submarine which eliminated surface waves, the leading cause of drag, and also avoided storm waves. And so it came to pass that our navy had Voigt-Schneider cycloidal propellers. Of course now everybody has them.
Another memorable group was the Mercedes-Benz engineering team. They had designed and built the huge V-12 Diesel engines that powered the assault boat fleet which invaded Norway. All of the engines failed catastrophically during their first attempt to reach Norway. They had used roller bearings for the crankshaft at unprecedented loads, and surface creep had caused steel chips to peel off under the rolling needles. Sabotage was of course suspected, and heads almost rolled. But the engines were rebuilt using journal bearings. The experience was also the subject of very interesting lectures. What the Mercedes engineers contributed to the US Army is a family of three sizes of modular diesel engines using identical parts that could be assembled to produce V-2, V-4, V-6 and larger engines for everything from jeeps to tanks to ships.
An optical engineer named Patin came with a retinue of technicians and chests of optical equipment. His expertise included bomb sights, among other things. He was notorious for having defied the Nazi party on many occasions, and having rescued many Jewish colleagues from concentration camps. One day while showing a 16 mm movie the sound system failed.. Patin took one look at the projector, issued a few instructions, and within an hour his crew had re-ground a chipped prismatic lens to send light through the sound track, and installed a new selenium cell.
Von Braun and his team lectured enthusiastically about rocketry and their dreams of space travel. There was no question in their minds that the technology for a manned moon flight existed. They could hardly wait.
Another interesting character was a young engineer named Werner Stumm. He had worked on radar in England early in the war and knew enough about magnetrons to have given Germany radar. But he failed to get support because his residency in England had made him suspect. Another narrow escape from disaster.
One day around Christmas time we were surprised to see a helicopter land. It turned out to be Edgar Rowe Snow, the well-known historian and "flying Santa" making his annual round to bring presents to lighthouse keepers. He was surprised at hearing of our mission and promised to observe secrecy. He stayed that evening and gave us a fascinating slide lecture about the history of all the islands. We learned that Edgar Allen Poe’s short story "The Cask of Amontillado" is an embellished account of an event that occurred while Poe attended a Christmas party with soldiers in Fort Warren on George’s Island. It seems that a bunch of drunken soldiers walled up one of their comrades in one of the gunpowder cells in the underground arsenal as a practical joke, but released him. Poe’s imagination invented the rest of the plot. Our project added another bit of history to Snow’s repertoire.
Some of the Germans were catholic and requested church services as Christmas approached. I managed to get one of the chaplains from Fort Devens, and had Corky bring him on several Sunday mornings for breakfast and mass. I interpreted his sermons rather freely, to the private amusement of some of our bilingual guests.
The "Haus der Deutschen Wissenschaft" (house of German science) was a comfortable and stimulating place. Our guests were relaxed, happy to know their families were safe, able to buy and send them Christmas presents as Christmas approached. We had 16mm movies almost every evening, and classical music. At one point I was anxious to shown them the Charlie Chaplin film "The Great Dictator" because it is such a stinging satire of Hitler and Mussolini that I thought it would help restore their political sanity. The film was not available in 16 mm format, so I ordered a 35 mm projector through the Fort Devens quartermaster. A twenty man service post doesn’t rate a full-size motion picture theater, and I had to have the Pentagon wire an order. The projector arrived, but by the time I could get the film project paperclip had been legalized and we were ordered to return to Washington.
In January 1946 we had some fifty or sixty scientists plus forty or fifty POWs and some twenty military personnel. We chartered three or four Greyhound buses and departed Rowe’s wharf after breakfast, made a lunch stop in Philadelphia, and arrived at P O Box 1142 for dinner.
We had processed about 600 scientists on the island, and imported another 600 or so through legal channels. I got my honorable discharge in March 1946, and stayed on as a civilian employee until it was time to start my college career at M.I.T. in the fall. At the time, my brother Eric had just finished basic artillery training at Fort Bragg, and I had enough connections to be able to have him assigned to Military Intelligence. I don’t remember details.
(Continue to MIT Undergraduate)