Famously as VP Truman and his predecessor were not included in the need to know about the Manhattan project.
However, Truman as a Senator in the early part of the war discovered in his role as a committee Chair about some astronomical expenses on some unknown project (which was in fact the Manhattan project) and launched an inquiry. He then spoke to the Secretary of War, who gave him an answer which satisfied him.
Anyone know what the Secretary told him? And as a result how much did Truman the man know before his succession as opposed to Truman the VP?
The Secretary of War said that the project was the utmost secret of the war and that the White House wanted it to go ahead, but that he couldn’t disclose any information, and so he asked Truman to call off the investigation, which Truman did.
How did they conceal the enormous budget of the Manhattan project? They would up building whole towns (Oak Ridge, Hanford, etc.)-how did Congress vote on all of this without knowing anything?
Have you ever looked at a military budget? Here is a pdf of the request for FY 2016. It’s a mixture of specific programs and generalities like “research.” The CIA’s budget is hidden in there somewhere. Go through it and tell us exactly where it is.
Did you think that in the FY 1943 budget, they had a line item for “build new town to house workers making uranium for atomic bomb?” No, there was a project code-named the Manhattan Engineering District. It could be directly allocated funds and additional money could be allocated from any number of other budget lines without revealing anything at all about what the MED actually did.
most of the people working on the manhattan project did not know what it was for. They only knew it was a military project. They used code words such as tubealloy for uranium. They found out what they worked on only after the 1st bomb was dropped. At that point many of them were no longer needed anyway.
Like so many questions, this one can be answered in isolation but the overall context is critical. I have to wave the flag again for The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes, 1986.
Essential reading for anyone interested in almost any aspect of nuclear weapons, and one of the most lucid and readable technical histories I know of. For good or bad, you’ll never misunderstand how the bomb was developed and first used again.
also read Girls of Atomic City which is about Oak Ridge and the lower level workers there, it just came out a few years ago.
One of the main Oak Ridge plants K-25 was not shutdown until 1987 but they just tore it down in 2013. It used outdated technology, gaseous diffusion. Now they use centrifuges which are more efficient.
Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s vice-president up until 1945, leaked information that reached Hitler. Interception of the Japanese ambassador to German’s radio reports back to Japan found that Hitler knew the exact words used in private conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill.
Not disbelieving, but do you have a cite on that? I’m curious about the exact chain of events, since it seems very unlikely that Wallace would have directly leaked anything. (Blabbed to a secretary to impress her, etc. - that would be my thought.)
I believe that was supposed to be Alger Hiss and Josef Stalin.
Back to the OP, what Truman knew was that there was an expensive project that he didn’t know anything about.
[QUOTE=AK84]
So he knew that there was an extremely expensive project, but not what it was for, except perhaps that it was for a new and powerful weapon.
[/Quote]
Or a bunch of secret battleships. Or a superhighway from California to Hawaii to Tokyo. Or money for every Resistance fighter in Europe. In other words, no idea.
Basically, Henry Wallace’s sister was married to Charles Bruggmann, the Swiss ambassador to the US. In January of 1944, the OSS got hold of a document belonging to the German Foreign Office, which was a report of information the Germans got from the Swiss Foreign Office about a conversation between Wallace and Bruggmann, where Wallace told Bruggman about details of the cooperation agreement between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. Some have suggested that this was one of the reasons Wallace was dropped from the ticket in 1944. That’s discussed briefly in American Dreamer.
Regardless, there’s no evidence that Wallace was responsible for Hitler knowing exact conversation between Hitler and Churchill.
)