August 14, 1945 Los Almos

The atom was split in an explosion in the desert. The tower that supported the bomb was vaporized, a 300 foot diameter crater nearly a hundred feet deep replaced the flat area on which the tower once stood. The sand under the tower had been turned to a green glass-like substance that was more than mildly radioactive. It was named trinitite. The flash was seen a hundred miles away, temporary buildings a mile from the tower were destroyed. The bomb was a success but it was too big to be lifted by any operational plane in any air force. With the success came the need to make the bomb into a deliverable weapon. This dictated making it small enough to be carried by an existing aircraft. With the test came the need to maintain complete secrecy.

Captain Merris was one of the men who witnessed the test. After the raid on the Japanese island air base he was transferred to British Columbia to lead the men fighting the Japanese. He was badly wounded in battle and returned home to recuperate in October of 1944. Just after Christmas he was assigned to Los Almos in logistics support under General Groves. He was found to be a capable officer who would put everything he had into wherever he was assigned. He threw himself into making sure the base had enough of everything from gasoline to toilet paper. Nothing the base needed was too unimportant or trivial. His men were treated well but nothing short of one hundred percent availability was tolerated unless the item just wasn’t available from any source. One of his men mused that he routinely checked with Japanese bases before telling the skipper he couldn’t get something and nobody was really sure this was far from the truth. And that morning he was there in the blockhouse to see the atom split.

Later in the morning General Groves found a stack of forms on his desk. Captain Merris had already prepared the first inch high stack of forms writing off items that had been totally destroyed by the blast including the tower. This stack would grow to over ten inches before the end of the month. General Groves signed them almost without looking at them. Anyone who had seen the blast that morning would not question the devastation.

August 21, 1945 London

The first explosion came at 0103. It was in a residential district, The bomb experts estimated the size of the bomb at 1500 pounds or larger. The people in the area did not hear the plane that dropped it, they claimed to hear it coming after it hit. It took some time for someone to determine why. The device was flying faster than sound. Before the night was over London was hit by 30 more of the bombs. Unlike the German bombing raids these did not stop when the sun rose. They were launched from mobile launchers not from easy to hit stationary air bases. The rockets were moved on trucks that could be hidden each day and driven to the sites at night. They were delivered directly from the factory to the launch site. The launcher and the fuel for the rocket were timed to meet at a site with three rockets and the rockets were fired. The launcher moved to the next meeting place where it met three more rockets and their fuel. Most days a launcher would fire two or three times. There were dozens of the launchers.