Description:

Groves Leslie

 

 

Norman Ramsey Thanks General Groves for Support on Manhattan Project

 

“I can well remember my pleasant surprise in discovering that you had succeeded in extracting from the Air Force one of their very first B-29’s.”

 

NORMAN F. RAMSEY, Typed Letter Signed, to Leslie R. Groves Jr., July 11, 1960, Cambridge, MA. 1 p., 8.5" x 11".  Very good.

 

Excerpts

“I very much enjoyed receiving your letter of July 5th congratulating me on the Lawrence award. I also greatly appreciated your praise of my work at Los Alamos. In this connection I should also like to thank you again for the excellent support which you gave to me in our work at Los Alamos and Tinian. I am afraid that we made a number of difficult requests of you but you always supported them both vigorously and effectively. I can well remember my pleasant surprise in discovering that you had succeeded in extracting from the Air Force one of their very first B-29’s. In fact you may not realize that the first B-29 ever to appear at Wright Field was the one for the Manhattan District project. For a long time we had a high priority with the Air Force solely on the basis of the fact that any project that could extract a B-29 must be of greatest priority.”

 

Historical Background

There were only two Allied aircraft large enough to deliver the atomic weapons being developed at Los Alamos: the British Avro Lancaster and the American Boeing B-29 Superfortress, first introduced in May 1944. The U.S. Army Air Forces wanted to use the B-29, but it required substantial modification. Ramsey supervised the test drop program, which began at Dahlgren, Virginia, in August 1943, before moving to Muroc Dry Lake, California, in March 1944. Non-explosive bombs were dropped and tracked by radar that Ramsey had earlier helped to develop. His team discovered several problems with the bombs and the aircraft, and they made modifications to correct them.

 

U.S. forces captured Tinian in the North Marianas Islands from the Japanese in July and August 1944. U.S. forces immediately began constructing the largest airbase of World War II with six runways and facilities for 40,000 personnel. The island was 1,500 miles from mainland Japan and served as a staging base for heavy bomber attacks on Japan. Both the B-29 Enola Gay that dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the B-29 Bockscar that dropped the Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki took off from Tinian on their historic flights.

 

 

Norman F. Ramsey Jr. (1915-2011) was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up on army posts to which his father was assigned. He studied mathematics and engineering at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1935. He studied physics at Cambridge University and received a Ph.D. in physics in 1940. During World War II, Ramsey was involved in radar research before joining the Manhattan Project in 1943. He led a group tasked with integrating the design and delivery of the nuclear weapons developed in the laboratory. After the war, Ramsey returned to Columbia briefly before joining the physics faculty of Harvard University. He taught there from 1948 until his retirement in 1986. In 1960, he received one of the first Ernest Orlando Lawrence Awards in physics. He received the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention that had important application in the construction of atomic clocks.

 

Leslie R. Groves Jr. (1896-1970) was a United States Army General with the Corps of Engineers who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II. Born in New York to a Protestant pastor who became an army chaplain, Groves graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1918 in a course shortened because of World War I. He entered the Corps of Engineers and gained promotions to major by 1940. In 1941, he was charged with overseeing the construction of the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world, with more than five million square feet. Disappointed that he had not received a combat assignment, Groves instead took charge of the Manhattan Project, designed to develop an atomic bomb. He continued nominally to supervise the Pentagon project to avoid suspicion, gained promotion to brigadier general, and began his work in September 1942. The project headquarters was initially in the War Department building in Washington, but in August 1943, moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer selected the site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for a laboratory, and Groves pushed successfully for Oppenheimer to be placed in charge. Groves was in charge of obtaining critical uranium ores internationally and collecting military intelligence on Axis atomic research. Promoted to major general in March 1944, Groves received the Distinguished Service Medal for his work on the Manhattan Project after the war. In 1947, Groves became chief of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. He received a promotion to lieutenant general in January 1948, just days before meeting with Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower, who reviewed a long list of complaints against Groves. Assured that he would not become Chief of Engineers, Groves retired in February 1948. From 1948 to 1961, he was a vice president of Sperry Rand, an equipment and electronics firm. After retirement, he served as president of the West Point alumni association and wrote a book on the Manhattan Project, published in 1962.

 

 

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