Chapter One: Professor Berg

Berg took school pretty seriously even in his youth. One day at home, he and his father got into one of their interminable arguments about sports, which culminated in Berg challenging Bernard to a race. Bernard accepted. They agreed that the old man would sprint from the front door to the back door through the home’s interior; Berg would run around the outside of the house. But on the way, Berg tripped on a coal chute and cut his leg pretty badly. He nevertheless insisted on going to school the next day, getting hauled there in a wheelbarrow.

Berg’s letters to his family are oddly distant. There are flashes of wit (he addresses them as “the House of Berg”) but he mostly rambles on about etymology and time zones and how much it costs to dry-clean different articles of clothing. There’s almost zero emotion. (They actually remind me of people with memory disorders who can recall facts about their lives with ease, but who don’t remember what it felt like to live through those moments.) At one point while visiting Hawaii Berg writes, “I’m having a truly marvelous time—linguistically, sociologically, ethnologically, legally.” What a gas!
……….One exception stands out. After his first year of Major League Baseball, Berg visited France for the first time, and as his ship approached the shore, he couldn’t help but think of his parents’ emigration a few decades earlier. They’d been abandoning Europe, glad to see the shores of the Old World recede. Berg, meanwhile, was eagerly watching the shores grow bigger, since to him Europe represented something deeper and richer. He wasn’t exactly gushing, but it was at least a personal moment.

As noted, Berg’s hitting went into decline after his knee injury. But teammates of his were certain they knew what the real problem was—that the Professor read too much. It’s an old baseball superstition, that poring over books will make you squinty and near-sighted and wreck your “hitter’s eye.”

Chapter Two: Near Misses and Big Hits

The field stations and mobile van units that Marie Curie developed provided roughly a million x-rays for injured soldiers over the course of World War I.

The story of the radium gift is an inspiring one. In the late 1910s, Marie Curie was struggling to raise money to buy more radium. So an American magazine editor named Marie Meloney led a fundraising drive in 1920, modeled after a similar drive in the late 1800s to raise money for the Statue of Liberty. American women had just earned the right to vote and were feeling empowered, and they responded to Meloney’s campaign in droves. Housewives tramped door to door to collect dollar bills; tenement girls scrounged for nickels and dimes. Overall, the women of the United States raised $156,413, enabling them to purchase $100,000 worth of radium and also set up a trust fund for Marie and her daughters. (Irène and her children in fact lived off this fund when they fled to Switzerland during the battle for France in 1944.)
……….Meloney did make Marie work for the gift, though, forcing the scientist to endure an exhausting speaking tour of the United States. Marie eventually took possession of the gram at a ceremony at the White House with President Warren Harding. Or really, she took possession of the 130-pound, lead-lined case there. For security reasons, the radium itself was under lock and key at a nearby government lab, and joined her only when she sailed for France a few weeks later.

During this chapter, I mentioned some experiments where beryllium was supposedly releasing superfast “gamma rays” and knocking protons loose from a block of paraffin. For technical reasons, scientists knew that this interpretation would have violated the law of conservation of energy. That might seem a fatal objection, but quantum mechanics was forcing scientists to abandon so many cherished ideas at the time that Niels Bohr himself had suggested that energy conservation might not be universal. As a result, a violation here wasn’t necessarily a red flag.

A technical note on the discovery of artificial radioactivity: Again, the Joliot-Curies were bombarding a thin sheet of aluminum with alpha particles. After absorbing an alpha, a swollen aluminum atom turned into phosphorus-30 and released a neutron: Al-27 + α -> P-30 + n. The phosphorus-30 then emitted a positron and became silicon: P-30 -> Si-30 + β+.
……….The first step there, aluminum turning into phosphorus and releasing a neutron, happened almost instantly, and that activity would have died out the moment Frédéric Joliot pulled the alpha source away. But the second step, phosphorus decaying into silicon and releasing a positron, took some time (the half-life of phosphorus-30 is 2.5 minutes). So when Joliot removed the alpha source and noticed—to his bafflement—that the detector kept recording hits for a few minutes, it was the second reaction that he was noticing.

Fittingly, given that they blew several major discoveries, the Joliot-Curies succeeded in discovering artificial radioactivity only because a rival lab bungled things. The famed Rad Lab at the University of California at Berkeley had the most powerful cyclotrons (particle accelerators) in the world, and they’d been preparing samples of radioactive aluminum just like the Joliot-Curies. But for some reason the Berkeley crew had wired both the cyclotron and their Geiger counters (the detectors) to the same power supply—meaning they could run the counters only while the cyclotron was churning. It never occurred to them to keep the counters running afterward.
……….When the Joliot-Curies announced artificial radioactivity, the Rad Lab’s director immediately ordered things to be rewired, using two power supplies. The crew then prepared a sample and let the Geiger counters run afterward for once. Sure enough, the detectors kept chattering—pounding in the reality of their failure with every click. Said one Berkeley physicist, “It was a sound that none who were there would ever forget.”

Characteristically, Irène Curie put no effort into making a good impression with the King of Sweden at the Nobel Prize ceremony. At one point the king asked Frédéric Joliot—who was thrilled to chat with a head of state—where on earth his wife was. Joliot didn’t know, and they formed a search party. They eventually found her in a remote corner with her nose buried in a technical book.

Chapter Four: Crimea to Hollywood

Beyond shortening his original last name, Pashkovsky, Boris Pash also tried going by “Bob” for a while when he immigrated to the United States, but apparently it didn’t stick.

In addition to all the famous students who attended school there, Hollywood High also managed to attract some impressive speakers for school assemblies, including Mary Pickford, Will Rogers, and John Philips Sousa. Charlie Chaplin declined an invitation, though, claiming that he was no good at speaking.

Chapter Five: Division

Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn’s partnership stretched back to the early 1910s, and they continued to collaborate during the chaos of World War One. Hahn worked in Germany’s notorious gas-warfare unit and Meitner (much like Marie and Irène Curie) worked as a nurse in a mobile x-ray ward, but whenever their furloughs coincided, they scrambled to their lab in Berlin to study radioactivity. They even discovered a new element during the war, which they codenamed “abrakadabra” in letters; it’s now known as protactinium. They took a break from each other after the war—Meitner tended to boss Hahn around, and he wanted some space—but they resumed their collaboration in 1933.

The Germans did eventually deliver Meitner’s things to Stockholm, but they made sure none of it arrived intact: they broke the spines on her books, splintered her furniture, smashed her china, and more or less ruined everything she owned.

Enrico Fermi had been planning his escape to the United States for years. He was a regular guest at the summer physics camps in Michigan, and whenever he visited, he would deposit a few hundred dollars in Samuel Goudsmit’s bank account, so that he wouldn’t end up destitute when he had to flee.
……….On those trips to Michigan, Fermi also learned how to speak English. He of course mispronounced certain words at first (“fiunctions”, “infynite”), but two friends volunteered to listen to his lectures and take note of anything he got wrong. He proved a quick study, his wife Laura later said: “Once aware of his errors, Enrico did not repeat them. By the end of the summer he was making only the one or two blatant mistakes that friends purposely had not corrected—or, they said, his classes would be no fun.”

At the end of the chapter, I mentioned that Hitler had inadvertently acquired the richest uranium mine in Europe when he invaded Czechoslovakia. The name of the mine was Joachimstal, and it was the same mine that had once supplied Marie Curie with radioactive ores to study, back in the innocent days of 1900.

Chapter Six: Spinning out of Control

The story of how Samuel Goudsmit came to study hieroglyphics is an amusing one—a very Goudsmitian tale. He belonged to a student speaking club in college, where the members took turns delivering talks. Most students varied their topics week to week, but Goudsmit always spoke about the structure and light spectra of atoms, since that’s only topic he knew anything about. Finally, after the fifth or sixth go-round, the president of the club suggested that Goudsmit should maybe mix things up a bit. Fine, Goudsmit snapped. My next talk will be on—and here he said the first thing that came into his head—the mathematics of ancient Egypt. That sounds great, the president said. We’d love that. The only problem was, Goudsmit knew nothing about ancient Egypt.
……….Panicked, he threw himself on the mercy of a creaky old professor of Egyptology at his university. He explained his predicament, and the professor let him borrow some books. The talk apparently went okay—Goudsmit bluffed his way through—and afterward he returned the books to the professor. As he did so, the professor suggested that Goudsmit might want to stop by and hear his lecture on hieroglyphics. He named a place and time. Out of a sense of gratitude, Goudsmit said sure, why not.
……….When Goudsmit arrived, he was in for a surprise. The “lecture” turned out to be just the two of them. Goudsmit could hardly sneak out halfway through, as he’d intended, and had to endure the whole thing. And at the end, the professor requested that Goudsmit come back the next week, for lecture number two. Feeling guilty, Goudsmit agreed. The same thing happened at the end of the second lecture, and the third. This kept going on for over a year, until Goudsmit realized that he actually loved studying hieroglyphics, and was pretty good at it.
……….A few years later Goudsmit got to show off his skills in front of none other than Niels Bohr. Goudsmit was doing a sabbatical in Copenhagen, and one afternoon they took a trip to the local Egyptian museum. Some pieces had phrases written on them in hieroglyphics, and the museum had placards with translations—but only in Danish. So Bohr began to explain to Goudsmit what the placards said. Goudsmit told him not to bother—he could read the originals.

About those hand-crafted wooden toilet seats: they actually played a big role in Goudsmit’s career. One day in the early 1920s, when he was studying under physicist Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden, Goudsmit’s father made him take two weeks off in the middle of the semester to visit a toilet-seat factory in Germany. Ehrenfest was annoyed, and asked where the town was. Goudsmit told him, at which point Ehrenfest brightened. “That’s right near Tübingen,” he said, “and in Tübingen there is a great spectroscopist. Why don’t you visit him?”
……….Goudsmit did, and immediately hit it off with the spectroscopist. They also did some “beautiful experiments,” Goudsmit remembered, on different spectral lines of helium. Some of them even turned out to be important in confirming and refuting different models of the atom—most of which Goudsmit admitted was over his head, but which he found intoxicating anyway. Here was real science!
……….As a result of all this, his career got a boost: “After that visit to Tübingen, because of my father’s factory interest, I went back [to the spectroscopist] several times and learned personally the tricks of spectroscopy, and it was really marvelous. So you see, the toilet seats had something to do with it. But you can’t put that in a history essay.” Well, here you go Samuel—that absolutely deserves to go in a history essay.

There are two main reasons Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck never won a Nobel Prize for discovering spin, despite dozens of nominations.
……….First, their original paper was haphazard. They’d come up with a mathematical formula for spin, and it explained the results of experiments quite well. But the formula looked funny to quantum physicists. In particular, it was missing a factor of two. It also predicted that, in some cases, electrons would orbit atoms faster than the speed of light, which violated Einstein’s theory of relativity.
……….All wasn’t lost—the formula clearly worked, so it had to be right in some sense. But when theorists asked Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck why their formula worked, the pair had no idea. They didn’t really follow the mathematics involved and couldn’t resolve certain anomalies. For instance, why wouldn’t a charged object like an electron, if it started spinning, eventually radiate all its energy away through electromagnetic waves, as classical physics predicted? And moreover, how could such a tiny object produce the relatively huge magnetic field that Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck’s theory suggested it would?
……….Eventually a few other physicists squared everything away. They noticed subtleties that everyone had overlooked before, which reconciled the contradictions with relativity theory, made the factor of two disappear, and shored up other problems. But the whole mess cast a cloud on Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck, making people wonder if they really understood their work or had just stumbled into something.
The second reason was even more important. A few years before they discovered spin, a physics student in Germany had privately proposed the same thing. But the student’s advisor—Wolfgang Pauli, who was notoriously judgmental—told the student it sounded like nonsense and forbade him from pursuing it. As a result the student missed out completely, and was heartbroken when Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck published their work.
……….Now, no one ever suggested that Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck didn’t deserve credit for spin—they’d done their work independently and had never heard of the student. But this put the Nobel Committee in a bind. It couldn’t really reward the student with a Prize, since he hadn’t published anything. But it couldn’t cut him out, either. So the committee decided to make (in my opinion) the worst possible decision and not reward anyone.

The suicide of Goudsmit’s mentor, Paul Ehrenfest, was a sordid affair. Ehrenfest had been depressed for years, and talked about suicide so often that most people started ignoring him. When he did finally kill himself, they were shocked. Even more shocking, he also took the life of his fifteen-year-old son Wassik at the same time, shooting the boy in the head with a pistol in the waiting room of the institute where Wassik lived. The son was mentally retarded, with Down’s syndrome, and Ehrenfest feared that he’d become a burden to his other children. However noble Ehrenfest’s intentions, though, he still murdered the boy.

To be scrupulous, Goudsmit did receive a few job offers in Europe while he was working at Michigan during the early 1930s—and turned every last one down. Why he did so remains a mystery, although I can offer a few theories.
……….The jobs weren’t in Holland, which is where he really coveted a position. His wife seems to have enjoyed America more than him, and especially after the birth of their daughter, she wanted to stay put. Goudsmit’s confidence was battered by then, too, and perhaps he didn’t want to return to Europe and risk being exposed as second-rate. Goudsmit was also a wishy-washy person by nature, constantly changing his mind, so perhaps he genuinely wanted to leave Michigan sometimes and at other times wanted to stay. Regardless, he remained in Ann Arbor despite the crummy circumstances, and when he did finally receive the job offer in Holland in 1938, he agonized over whether to take it.

Part of the reason Goudsmit never quite found his footing as a professional physicist is the somewhat arbitrary split between theory and experiment. He wasn’t a brilliant enough mathematician to succeed in pure theory, but he wasn’t enough of a grease-monkey to succeed on the experimental side, so he ended up stranded between the two. His real talent, as he realized too late, was taking data from experiments and interpreting them—that is, figuring out what the data meant theoretically. He also had a real knack for guessing formula to fit data. But he couldn’t really work independently as a result—most of his papers were derivative, dependent on other people’s labor—and colleagues didn’t quite know what to make of him.

Chapter Seven: Banzai Berg

Speaking and studying Japanese apparently inspired Berg to experiment with new ways of writing in English. At one point on his trip east, Berg dispatched a letter home to Newark whose lines, while written in English, ran up-and-down and right-to-left, in the Japanese manner.

The closest game the Major League all-stars played on their trip to Japan was a 1-0 squeaker against an 18-year-old Japanese pitcher named Eiji Sawamura. Sawamura struck out Babe Ruth three times and surrendered only five hits that afternoon. Unfortunately, one of the five was a solo home run to Lou Gehrig in the seventh. A few days later an unscrupulous American talent scout traveling with the team tricked Sawamura into signing a contract by pretending to ask for his autograph.
……….When Sawamura found out about the ruse, he laughed. “I will not go to the U.S. even if I get a million dollars,” he boasted. His love for Japan was too great. He later died during World War II fighting in the Taiwan Strait.

Chapter Eight: The Brink

In addition to a princely allowance, Joseph and Rose Kennedy also promised each of their children a $1,000 reward if they abstained from drinking until age 21. They got another grand for not smoking. Some of the nine Kennedy children didn’t make it; the girls in particular, Rose said, “smoked to keep from eating sweets…and losing their figures.” But Joe did make it without drinking or smoking (or at least didn’t get caught), and claimed the $2,000 bounty, worth $36,000 today.

A grandson of Irish immigrants on both sides, the hardworking and conniving Kennedy Sr. had become the youngest bank president in America in 1913, at age 25. After expanding his fortune by investing in a chain of movie theaters (which had the side benefit of allowing him to seduce Hollywood starlets), Kennedy then vaulted himself into the stratosphere of the megarich by using (then-legal) insider trading to short the stock market just before the 1929 crash. It was only after this that he joined the Securities and Exchange Commission—a move that today would look scandalous.

The U.S. embassy wasn’t the only embassy in Madrid that was in chaos. Several thousand local residents claimed asylum in South American embassies and lived out the balance of the war on embassy grounds. As Joe noted in his letters, this brought up some interesting legal issues, since people got married and died and gave birth in the embassies, and it wasn’t clear whose national laws took precedence for things like assigning citizenship.

Chapter Nine: The Uranium Club

The German atomic bomb project was actually more complicated than what the chapter portrays, with several different teams doing research. I focused on the Uranium Club because that’s what the Americans did, given their obsession with Werner Heisenberg.
……….Oddly enough, one agency heavily involved in nuclear research was the Reich Post Office. That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. The Post Office already ran all radio and television in Germany; they considered telecommunications a natural extension of their role in sending messages via mail. As a result, the agency had a large research budget and several ambitious scientists on staff. And when the director heard about this atomic fission stuff, he decided to get in on the action.

Flatteringly, the physicist Paul Ehrenfest once compared Werner Heisenberg to Isaac Newton, because Heisenberg not only invented a new branch of physics (based on his Uncertainty Principle), but had to invent a whole new type of mathematics (based on matrices) to support this new physics.
……….It turned out that the math wasn’t completely new—the famous French mathematician David Hilbert had invented it decades earlier. (Colleagues in fact teased Heisenberg for laboring so hard to reinvent it; you must have been asleep that day in class, they laughed.) But Heisenberg didn’t know about Hilbert’s work, so the comparison to Newton still stands.

Although he worked as a physicist, Carl von Weizsäcker was equally interested in philosophy. He even became a disciple of the notorious Martin Heidegger, the Nazi philosopher par excellence. Weizsäcker also worked under Lise Meitner for a few months in 1936, as the “house theoretician” in her lab.

Samuel Goudsmit once came up with a taxonomy of wartime scientists in Germany. Different species included the genuine Nazis (Lenard, Stark), who truly believed in Hitler; the opportunists (Heisenberg), who didn’t believe but shrugged and went along with things; and a small number of heroes (von Laue), who genuinely resisted Nazi rule. He classified Weizsäcker among the diplomats, those who always saw the political angles and always took advantage. Goudsmit of course didn’t like the actual Nazi, and was disappointed in Heisenberg’s opportunism. But he seemed to reserve the most scorn for Weizsäcker and his ilk.

The consulate in San Francisco where Ingeborg Moerschner worked was a rat’s nest of spies, informants, and provocateurs in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The top official there was a diplomat named Fritz Wiedemann, a handsome if portly bon vivant whose name regularly appeared in the society section of local newspapers. One reason Wiedemann rose to his post was his war record: he’d served with distinction during World War One. In fact, he’d commanded a certain soldier in the trenches who went on become rather well-known—Corporal Adolf Hitler.

In an uncomfortably close shave, one of the first papers that Enrico Fermi withheld from publication laid out the scientific case for using graphite as a moderator to slow down neutrons; had the Germans seen this, the war might have turned out quite differently.
……….Scientists have later estimated that the graphite Bothe used during his experiments probably contained around one-tenth of a gram of impurities per kilo. That might seem pretty darn pure, but the Allies discovered that anything above about one-thousandth of a gram per kilo will cause chain reactions to fizzle.

Also, because I’m incorrigible, here’s a Werner Heisenberg joke:
……….A cop sees Heisenberg go screaming by in his car and turns on his lights. After a high-speed chase, he finally gets him to pull over. After which he stomps up to the window and snaps, “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”
……….Always cheery, Heisenberg says, “Nope. But I know exactly where I am!”

Chapter Eleven: Heavy Water

France actually had its own, short-lived atomic bomb program in 1939. In addition to cornering the world supply of heavy water, Frédéric Joliot begged a Belgium company for roughly 11,000 pounds of uranium, which he planned to detonate in the Sahara desert, presumably in one of France’s colonies. He seems to have vastly underestimated the difficulty of building a nuke, and the outbreak of World War Two in September 1939 submarined the plan anyway.

Jacques Allier ended up needing twenty-six canisters to hold all the heavy water he was smuggling out of Norsk. Roughly half of them did accompany him on the plane, as described in the book. But the other half went via some other route—a route that I’ve never been able to find information on. If anyone reading this has any leads, please let me know!
……….A year or two after the heavy-water heist, a German general heard about the rogue French officer who’d traitorously seized all the D2O and smuggled it out of Norway. The general even appointed someone to investigate the matter. Unfortunately, not knowing Allier’s role, he appointed Allier himself to head up the investigation into his own crimes. And darn his luck, Allier simply couldn’t track anyone down.

Chapter Twelve: Mad Jack

After being torpedoed twice during the war, the Broompark finally sank in July 1942 off the coast of Canada.
……….The Earl himself had an even shorter war. Unable to return to Nazi-occupied Paris, he volunteered to aid the war effort by defusing bombs. (You won’t be surprised to learn that this was a hobby of his.) Most of the bombs were unexploded shells that had landed in London or surrounding suburbs and were still dangerous. So they’d call in Mad Jack, who’d check them over with a stethoscope, light a cigarette, and get to work. He finally pressed his luck once too often, and in May 1941 a cleverly booby-trapped bomb exploded on him, killing him and thirteen others, including a secretary. His earldom passed to his only son, Michael John James George Robert Howard, who remains alive today.

Chapter Thirteen: Compromise

……….Carl von Weizsäcker once remarked that, although Erich Schumann was a bad physicist, he was useful to have around for his political savvy. For instance, Schumann warned the Uranium Club not to mention atomic bombs to anyone who might mention them to Hitler. Hitler wasn’t exactly known for his patience, and if he got excited about nuclear bombs, he might set an impossibly tight deadline for producing them—and then imprison or even execute the scientists if they didn’t deliver.

Chapter Fifteen: Maud Ray Kent

Ironically enough, the two physicists who wrote the memorandum on how scarily plausible atomic bombs were—and thereby spurred their development—were initially banned from the MAUD committee, since each was technically an enemy alien (one from Austria, one from Germany). Only a severe labor shortage convinced the Brits to relent and let them join. Most native British physicists had already been swept into work on radar and other pressing projects, and the refugees were the only competent people left. Some officials also privately doubted that atomic bombs would amount to much, and therefore didn’t see the harm in letting enemy aliens waste their time on them.

Chapter Seventeen: The Fire Heard ‘Round the World

As a publisher and scientific bon vivant, Paul Rosbaud was friendly with pretty much every member of the Uranium Club, but his relationship with Werner Heisenberg grew strained in 1940. In his muddled way, Heisenberg was arguing with Rosbaud one day that the Nazis weren’t all bad. For one thing, they provided lots of money for scientific research, and built grand institutes to work in. Sure, Rosbaud shot back, and then they put ghastly Nazis hacks in charge of them, and force you to do their bidding. He proceeded to chew Heisenberg out for being too complacent, too willing to bury himself in research and pretend that life under the Third Reich was normal. Heisenberg didn’t take the tongue-lashing well, and after that night they limited themselves to scientific topics whenever they met.
……….Heisenberg finally broke with Rosbaud for good after a dinner party in the summer of 1942. Rosbaud was seated next to Heisenberg’s wife, Elisabeth, who found him quite the charmer. But throughout the meal, whenever Heisenberg could catch his wife’s eye, he would signal her to stay mum. Puzzled, Elisabeth asked him afterward why he’d been so paranoid. Heisenberg explained that he didn’t trust Rosbaud; he seemed like a spy, although Heisenberg couldn’t tell for which side. If Rosbaud were an SS informant, he’d obviously be dangerous, but even being an Allied spy would be bad, since he’d probably run afoul of the Nazis sooner or later. Better to steer clear altogether, Heisenberg figured. Ironically, then, the muddle-headed and politically naïve Heisenberg was just about the only person in the war to peg Rosbaud for what he was.
……….Rosbaud did slip up occasionally. One night after a meeting of the German Physical Society in Berlin, he attended dinner at a Chinese restaurant with a dozen nuclear scientists. They began chatting about fission research, as if it were just another innocent physics problem. Rosbaud, already brooding, proceeded to get stinking drunk. He finally began screaming at them: “If any one of you knew how to make the bomb, he would not hesitate a minute to tell your Führer how to destroy the rest of the world.” The dinner no doubt broke up pretty quickly after that. Rosbaud later said, “They were decent enough not to denounce me.”

Chapter Eighteen: Off to War

The British started adding incendiaries to bombs in March 1942, which signaled a shift of tactics in destroying cities. Normal bombs simply knocked buildings flat. Incendiary bombs caused fires, which did far more damage overall. After the Germans realized what was happening—several cities in a row burned down—Adolf Hitler was incensed, and in one of his inimitable rants, he vowed to destroy every British city with three or more stars in Baedeker’s. It was an odd threat, using a tourist guide as a military manual, but it proved effective as propaganda: the British shuddered.

Chapter Nineteen: Brazil and Beyond

In arguing that the military could lure soldiers away from booze and sex with books and other highbrow diversions, Moe Berg resorted to quoting Ovid: “Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor.” It means, “I see the better way, yet still follow the worse”—a sentiment that seemingly undermines Berg’s point. But perhaps he thought the average American GI had more backbone than old Ovid.

While in Brazil, Moe Berg also investigated a supposed plot to assassinate President Franklin Roosevelt, who visited in January 1943. A few weeks before this, a plane carrying several FBI and State Department officials had crashed off the coast of South America, and rumors were swirling that the plane had been shot down by Nazi agents, who mistakenly thought Roosevelt was aboard. Berg turned up nothing to confirm this.

When it came time to study Moe Berg’s homemade movies and select targets to bomb, the military called in employees of Standard Oil who’d worked in Tokyo during the 1930s and knew the city well. Presumably, they were contacts of Nelson Rockefeller, who was the grandson of Standard founder John Rockefeller and who headed the agency Berg worked for, the OIAA.

Always reckless in battle, Wild Bill Donovan could be equal reckless in civilian life. At one point during the war, OSS developed a new pistol that was silent and that produced no flash. He wanted to show it off to President Franklin Roosevelt. So he scheduled an appointment one day, and showed up carrying a sandbag, with the pistol in his pocket. While FDR wrapped up some paperwork, Donovan laid the sandbag in the corner, took a seat, and proceeded to fire the gun into the sand several times. FDR had no clue he was doing this—until Donovan interrupted and handed him the smoking-hot barrel. As Donovan later put it, despite being bound to a wheelchair, FDR was so startled that he damn near leapt to his feet.

Chapter Twenty: Baja Days

In addition to Pearl Harbor and the oil refinery near San Diego, Japan did attack one more stretch of American territory during the war, one of the Aleutian islands way out on the tip of Alaska. This attack occurred at the same time as the Battle of Midway, however, which overshadowed it.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Operation Freshman

The British actually gave heavy water several codenames during the war. At first, they used the international Morse code symbol for a question mark, IMI. That got confusing, so they tried “XY” and then “Soup” before settling on “Juice.”

If anyone got injured during the retreat from the heavy-water plant, the Operation Freshman commandoes—rather than jeopardize everyone—had orders to pump the poor guy full of morphine and dump him by the side of the road, probably to die.

On the night of Operation Freshman, a Norwegian meteorologist in London named Sverre Petterssen warned British officials to call off the drop. They overruled him, to their later regret. Perhaps with this mistake in mind, Dwight Eisenhower heeded Petterssen’s forecast a few years later and, on the Norwegian’s advice, pushed the D-Day operations back from June 5th to June 6th.

Nazi troops in Norway sometimes blew up the corpses of enemy combatants with explosives before dumping them in the sea, to make identification impossible. It’s not clear whether the Freshman soldiers tossed into the sea suffered this fate, but it seemed like a common practice.

As punishment after the war, Vidkun Quisling—the Norwegian Nazi whose last name became a byword for treachery—was ordered to help dig up the bodies of the Freshman commandos to return them to England. Newspapers accounts call him “visibly shaken” during the task.

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Italian Navigator

If the scientists setting up the first nuclear pile at the University of Chicago sweated like crazy those weeks, the security guards outside the squash court nearly froze. They shivered through their shifts wearing raccoon-fur coats leftover from the university’s defunct football team.

Although the progression seems inevitable nowadays, it was not a quick, easy path from Enrico Fermi’s pile to an atom bomb. The Chicago pile would have required seventy thousand years to produce enough plutonium for one nuke, and one scientist compared the gap between that pile and the Trinity/Nagasaki bombs to the gap “between the discovery of fire and the manufacture of a steam locomotive.”

Chapter Twenty-Five: Secret Messages

No one knows who tipped off the Pope about the danger of nuclear weapons in 1943, but the best guess is the grand old man of German physics, Max Planck, who served on the Pontifical Academy of Sciences during the war.
……….The relevant lines of the Pope’s talk are: “Since atoms are extremely small, it was not thought seriously that they might also acquire practical importance. Today instead such a question has taken unexpected form following the results of artificial radioactivity. It was, in fact, established that in the disintegration which the atom of uranium undergoes when bombarded by neutrons, two or three neutrons are freed, each launching itself—one being able to meet and smash another uranium atom … Above all, therefore, it should be of utmost importance that the energy originated by such a machine should not be let loose to explode … Otherwise there could result not only in a single place but also for our entire planet a dangerous catastrophe.”

Chapter Twenty-Six: Operation Gunnerside

As harsh as the Nazis were on the Norwegians, Norwegian freedom fighters exacted even harsher revenge on their own people—especially on quislings who ratted them out and collaborated with the Axis. In a few cases, they lopped these people’s tongues off. I think being executed would be a far better fate than running around making grunting noises your whole life, and having everyone you meet know that you betrayed your country.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Consolations of Philosophy

Kurt Diebner took security seriously at his lab. He posted soldiers to guard the entrances, and had grass planted on the roofs to camouflage it from above, so that bombers couldn’t spot it. His lab also had its own personal fire department, power supply, and hospital.

Here’s another example of Kurt Diebner’s cleverness. In the original reaction vessels, the uranium cubes had to dangle from wires attached to the lid. Problem was, the wires absorbed neutrons and slowed chain reactions down. Diebner responded by freezing the heavy water into heavy ice, which could support the cubes without the need for wires or other apparatus.

On the night of the raid in Berlin, Werner Heisenberg ran into the burning houses himself, rather than call the fire department, in part because German firefighting forces were useless. Most were volunteer brigades who ended up spraying bystanders more than the actual fire. And they at least made a sincere effort. Professional firefighters, when they bothered showing up, often spent more energy liberating liquor and other valuables than actually battling the flames.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: “The Fun Will Start”

Given how much the British public hated the Nazis, there was some controversy over the cushy treatment extended to Gen. Wilhelm von Thoma. Rather than arrest him and throw him in a dark hole, the British general Bernard Montgomery welcomed his German counterpart, and actually sat down to supper with him the evening of his capture. Characteristically, Winston Churchill defused the tension with a quip. When asked about this treatment, he assured everyone that the German general had not escaped punishment, not at all. “Poor von Thoma,” he said. “I too have dined with Montgomery.”

Although celebrated for conquering Belgrade, Ludwig Crüwell’s reputation did take a hit during the invasion, after his men looted huge quantities of wine from private homes and businesses. Crüwell thought this unfair. After all, he had 18,000 troops, and surely each one of them needed his own bottle to celebrate.

After reading transcripts of just how much the German generals blabbed during their stay at Trent Park, some historians have argued that they must have known they were being taped, and talked not out of ignorance, but to hasten the end of the war. There’s just no other explanation, they claim, for such stupidity. This makes sense in a way, but no positive proof has ever turned up.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Seeing Red

FBI wiretaps usually involved rewiring someone’s telephone to bypass the disconnect circuit. A telephone can’t transmit sound when the receiver is resting in its cradle because the receiver is pushing down on a button that turns certain circuits off. But if you rewire the phone, and bypass the button, the receiver stays on at all times, transmitting sound constantly. Essentially, you’ve converted the telephone into a microphone. This worked better than a regular phone tap because agents could listen in at all times, day or night, even when people weren’t making calls.
……….These methods were quasi-legal at best, and outright illegal at worst. So whenever agents gleaned information from wiretaps, they had to list their source in indictments or warrants as “an informant of known reliability who is not available to testify.” The courts never would have admitted this information otherwise.

Chapter Thirty: Beautiful Peenemünde

Duncan Sandys’s crew estimated that each V-1 rocket strike would kill or injure up to four thousand people. The estimate ran so high in part because British buildings were flimsier than German ones, more liable to collapse. The Germans also had more powerful explosives, because they often sprinkled aluminum into the mix, which raised the temperature of explosions and lengthened their burn.

Pascual Jordan had Spanish roots: his great-grandfather had fought in Napoleon’s army and settled down in Germany after the wars. Jordan was considered a child prodigy and quite witty, though some people looked askance at his dabbling in the occult. He was intellectually honest enough to support Heisenberg in the “Jew physics” debacle, but in every other particular he toed the Nazi party line.

Paul Rosbaud, the Griffin, had sent his wife and daughter to London during the war to keep them safe, but this wasn’t quite the selfless act that it seemed. Rosbaud was quite the ladies’ man, and he took advantage of their absence to live openly with his mistress, Ruth Lange, a former world shot-put champion. It was Lange who made eyes at Pascual Jordan that night in the restaurant and loosened him up.

Despite being surprised, Peenemünde’s anti-aircraft artillery took a heavy toll on the British bombing squadrons that attacked it. Of the five hundred planes that went in, forty never returned, representing a loss of 215 Royal Air Force cadets.

Chapter Thirty-Two: Blabbermouth

Regarding the Bohr-Heisenberg row, it’s not even clear where the two held the conversation. Bohr remembered speaking in his study, where no one could watch them. But Heisenberg feared (probably correctly) that the Gestapo had planted bugs in Bohr’s rooms, so he insisted they walk along the wharf, away from listening devices. Perhaps they spoke in both places over the course of the night.

When Bohr arrived in New York in early December, he learned about another crisis brewing back in Denmark. After he’d fled Copenhagen, the Germans had taken over his institute and everything inside, including the cyclotron. Giving the Nazis access to a cyclotron seemed dangerous, so members of the Danish underground decided to destroy the institute by sneaking into the sewers beneath it and lining the foundation with explosives. But before they detonated them, someone decided to check with Bohr—did he think this was a good idea? God no!, he answered. The underground abandoned the plan.
……….Incidentally, after the Germans took over, they tried to install Carl von Weizsäcker as the head of Bohr’s institute. Always attuned to the political undertones, Weizsäcker refused to even consider it.

Chapter Thirty-Three: Heavy Water Under Fire

As a baseball fan, OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan had heard of Moe Berg before he joined OSS. In fact, he distinctly remembered Berg as the “slowest runner in the American league.”

In March 1943, British intelligence officers began hearing rumors (never quite confirmed) that the Americans were offering a $1-million bounty for anyone who could give them—and only them—hard intelligence about Vemork. This torqued the British off, but given how stingy they’d been with intel up to that point, the Americans apparently felt they had no choice.

Leslie Groves did approach OSS about securing Moe Berg’s services as an atomic spy, but the general told Wild Bill Donovan as little as possible about the work otherwise, and in fact didn’t even reveal the existence of the Manhattan Project to him. Groves was a maniac for secrecy, and Donovan had a reputation as a Bohr-level blabbermouth—someone utterly incapable of keeping secrets. It was part of the reason OSS was such a mess.

American and British bombing squadrons employed different tactics during the war. The United States was richer and had more people. It could therefore afford to lose more planes and pilots. The British had to be more cautious. So while the Americans regularly did bombing runs during the day, the British usually bombed at night under cover of darkness. And the key to nighttime bombing runs was none other than the element radium. Radium glows in the dark (it’s phosphorescent), and by painting their dials with radium, British pilots could still read their instrument panels at night.

Chapter Thirty-Four: Alsos

An officer working in the Chicago branch of the Manhattan Project, James Schoke, had done amateur magic shows in high school. Someone noticed this prestidigitation experience in his personnel record, and asked him to put on a show at the army Christmas party that year. He did, and it was a hit—the audience left buzzing.
……….So when the next year rolled around, Schoke decided to put on another show. He no doubt worked and worked, polishing up a whole new set of tricks—only to have a meager handful of people show up. He couldn’t understand why. What had gone wrong? Only later did he find out that this was the Christmas and New Year’s when Manhattan Project officials were convinced that Hitler was going to rain atomic thunder on America. Anyone who could left town, and those who remained behind sure as hell weren’t going to gather in one place and give the Krauts an easy target.

Chapter Thirty-Five: Busy Lizzie

Based on the specs that spies had given them, the British put together guesses about the capabilities and ranges of V-rockets. When Winston Churchill asked an advisor where rockets launched from, say, Calais, might fall, the advisor answered: “About Westerham, sir,” a suburb of London. “Dammit!,” Churchill said, “That’s where I live.”

After the Peenemünde raid, the manufacturing of V-weapons shifted to subterranean factories, vast caves where workers were denied sunlight, fresh air, fresh water, and even bathrooms. The main V-factory was dug out beneath a mountain in central Germany. The complex was shaped like a kinked ladder, with two mile-long tunnels running in parallel and several dozen six-hundred-foot-long shafts connecting them like rungs. It was the largest underground factory in the world, and the Nazis imported sixty-thousand slaves from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp to run it; twenty thousand were eventually worked to death. Occasionally the workers sabotaged the production lines, but anyone caught doing so was hanged on a crane and left swinging for days as a warning to others.
……….Word about these subterranean manufacturing centers leaked out to the Allies through various means. French agents sometimes arranged to smuggle a drug called atropine into factories and prison labor camps; when injected into the bloodstream, it caused the prisoners’ hearts to race. The prisoners would also chew on soap, which made them foam at the mouth, then fall to the ground in a sham seizure, bucking their arms and legs. Camp commanders, thinking they had an epileptic on their hands, would banish them to a hospital outside the camp, which had better medical facilities. The hospital also had laxer security, and undercover agents could approach and interview the prisoners about V-weapons and other projects.

Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Ferry

After the air strike on the Vemork heavy-water plant, one of company’s directors refused to keep the heavy-water cells running, saying they just made the plant a target for Allied raids. He got sent to a concentration camp, naturally, but the Nazis eventually saw the wisdom of his argument and shut them off on their own.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Sharks

Boris Pash’s crew had a mostly uneventful trip hopping across the Atlantic and North Africa to Italy, but they did almost crash one afternoon while taking off in the Sahara. Their departure was delayed as a result, and they had to kill a night in a local village. Sometime after sunset, Pash noticed his flashlight was missing, and found that his own men had swiped it to provide footlights for an erotic belly-dancing show nearby. Sitting down to watch, he managed to find it in his heart to forgive them.

In addition to being grueling, military flights across the Atlantic often creeped soldiers out. Those unlucky enough to catch rides on medical-supply planes had to endure ice-cold fuselages that were sometimes packed ceiling to floor with thousands of pints of frozen blood.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Biscay Blues

The Anvil and Aphrodite teams initially selected napalm as the explosive because, beyond being powerful, it would also gobble up all the oxygen in the huge concrete bunkers as it burned, suffocating everyone inside within an estimated ten minutes.

Chapter Forty-One: Augers & Peppermint

Regarding the composition of soils, one village in France actually benefited from an airstrike. An unexploded bomb broke through the soft ground there one day and burrowed deep enough to send water gurgling up, forming a new source of water for the town. People took to calling it “Hitler’s well.”

While knowledge of geology did help Allied leaders plan D-Day, the field was actually more vital during World War One. There, generals employed whole teams of geologists for advice on where to dig trenches with picks and shovels, hoping to avoid rock formations hidden just underground. Equally important, generals needed to know how easily the underlying soil at different sites would drain. Many a commander standing in a foot of trench water learned his geology the hard way. Geologists also helped dig tunnels beneath the other side’s trenches to lay explosives—literally undermining the enemy. The use of tanks and planes during World War Two made battles far more mobile, eliminating the need for trenches.

With regard to radioactivity, you might be wondering why soldiers couldn’t just strap on gas masks and still occupy contaminated areas. Gas masks would help some, but because radioactivity is odorless, tasteless, and colorless (unlike, say, chlorine or mustard gas), troops might not know when to “mask up” until it was too late. Radioactive particles—which, as single atoms, are often smaller than chemical-warfare molecules—often slip through the filters of masks anyway. Finally, the long half-life of some isotopes ensures that the grounds will be contaminated for years, and the long-term use of gas masks by an occupying army just isn’t practical.

Chapter Forty-Two: Remus

There’s some discrepancy about when exactly Moe Berg entered Rome. Sometimes, especially later in life, he claimed that he didn’t arrive there until three or four days after its liberation. But most accounts point to him arriving there quickly. It’s possible that Berg forgot the exact timeline as the years passed. Or perhaps (more likely, I think) he was embarrassed about the dressing-down from Boris Pash and wanted to obscure what happened.

Chapter Forty-Three: Aphrodite vs. Anvil

Adolf Hitler was counting on V-rockets to reverse the tide of the war, but one errant missile very nearly wiped out Hitler himself in 1944. Four days after the first V-1 attacks, a gyroscope inside a hastily built rocket got flipped around 180 degrees during its launch. So instead of zooming 100 miles northwest to London, it zoomed 100 miles southeast into Germany—toward a city where Hitler happened to be staying at the time. He’d in fact just finished raving about how the V-weapons would bring those English dogs to their knees when the delinquent one slammed down and exploded. Unfortunately for the world, he was giving this speech inside a bunker, and he emerged without a scratch.

The Anvil/Aphrodite teams got relocated several times, but not every case involved a skittish British general. One night a German plane mysteriously appeared above the base where the crews were staying and circled several times before landing. Odds were good that the pilot simply got lost or decided to defect, but no one knew for sure, and mission leaders couldn’t shake the thought that he’d gotten a glimpse of the flying bombs and radioed their coordinates back to Germany in an effort to destroy them. So they immediately picked up and moved to a new base.

For the Anvil/Aphrodite crews, there was one silver lining to having missions scrubbed at the last second: extra chocolate. Before each mission, the pilot and engineer were issued emergency rations that include chocolate bars, a high-calorie food that could get them through some lean days if they got shot down. So the instant the flight got scrubbed, they’d tear the bars open right there in the cockpit and scarf them down. Later, when the quartermaster demanded to know where the bars had gone, they’d feign ignorance.

In addition to Churchill, another celebrity graced the Aphrodite/Anvil boys with a visit—James Doolittle, the already-legendary pilot who’d led the famous attack on Tokyo in 1942 a few months after Pearl Harbor. Doolittle arrived at their base in his personal plane, had a few drinks with the men in the bar, then buzzed the officers club after taking off.

After the disastrous Aphrodite sorties, the army officer in charge of the mission, James Rand, got dismissed from his post and reassigned to a base in Suffolk, England. Upon arriving, his plane crash-landed and skidded into a nearby gasoline truck. Rand got free, but crawled back into the wreckage to pull another soldier out before the whole thing exploded. After that, he had a complete mental breakdown and ended the war in a psychiatric hospital.

Chapter Forty-Five: Escape and Resistance

Irène Curie knew she was risking a lot by delaying her family’s departure from France until after her daughter Hélène took her baccalaureate exams. To mitigate the danger, she scouted several villages near the border until she located another, unrelated family named Curie in one of them. Hélène took the exams in that town, so that if anyone noticed her last name it wouldn’t provoke suspicion.
……….As noted above, during the several months they spent in Switzerland, Irène, Hélène, and Pierre lived on the proceeds from the Marie Curie Trust Fund, which had been set up by the women of America with the $56,413 left over from the purchase of the gram of radium in 1920.

In this chapter I mentioned how “Irène and the children, like scientific von Trapps, simply waltzed to freedom” by crossing the border into Switzerland. To be scrupulous, however, their famous mountain crossing was the Broadway-Hollywood version of their escape. In reality, the family was traveling around Europe singing at the time, and were crossing borders on a regular basis. So on one trip from Austria to Italy, they simply skipped the train back and immigrated to the United States. Rodgers and Hammerstein sexed the story up for The Sound of Music.

Chapter Forty-Six: Lightning-A

At different times, Boris Pash gave somewhat different accounts of how the mission in L’Arcouest went down. In reports filed immediately after the visit, he mentions going to the cottage of another local physicist first, possibly because they arrived late in the day and that physicist’s house was easier to reach. Pash then went after Frédéric Joliot the next morning. But in a memoir about Alsos written a few decades later, Pash implies that they rushed to Joliot’s place first thing, immediately upon arriving. Regardless, the story of the actual visit to the Joliot-Curie cottage is consistent in both accounts, which is the important thing.

As Lightning-A rolled through Paris, they would have passed Rue Pierre Curie on the way to Frédéric Joliot’s lab. It’s now named Rue Pierre et Marie Curie.

Lightning-A enjoyed several days of revelry after capturing Frédéric Joliot, but at least one member of the crew had a harrowing time—the man Boris Pash assigned to watch the Molotov cocktail ingredients in the police station basement. The poor bastard even had to sleep there, guarding this huge stock of incendiaries while gunfire continued in the streets and shells rained down from above. After a few days he practically had a nervous breakdown.

Incredibly, on the day after Alsos captured Frédéric Joliot, another OSS captain showed up with strict orders to take the physicist into custody—a virtual replay of the Moe Berg incident in Rome. Boris Pash dismissed this fellow less harshly, however, since he recognized him as a former student of his at Hollywood High.

Things weren’t all sunny weather and girls riding bicycles in post-liberation Paris. Vigilantes began hunting down women who’d slept with German troops over the previous few years; upon finding them, they held them down and shaved their heads to shame them. Mobs also executed many collaborators without trial. After a two-year hiatus, when Le Figaro newspaper began printing again on August 23rd, 1944, one of its top features was the daily list of “les exécutions capitales” and “les exécutions summaires.”

Samuel Goudsmit had lectured at the Sorbonne right after discovering electron spin, when his career was peaking. Being Goudsmit, though, he did manage to make a memorable blunder. He spoke execrable French, and spent much of the lecture explaining his investigations into the l’electron retournant—which meant not the “turning” or “spinning” but the “flatulent” electron.

Chapter Forty-Seven: Zootsuit Black

Roy Forrest was a descendent of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a famous Confederate general and one of the earliest members of the Ku Klux Klan. Although head of the Aphrodite program, Forrest was better known around the army for his ingenious jury-rigged latrines. One he built had hot running water and a bidet, and best of all was located right next to the barracks. “No more riding a bicycle half a mile to take a crap,” he announced to his men, with no little satisfaction.
……….Forrest was also notorious for his love of craps and other dice games. Whenever officers flew on a mission, they were issued $50 or so in cash, in case they crash-landed and need to bribe someone or buy something in an emergency. Forrest, however, regularly took to the skies with $6,000. “I want to have a bankroll,” he explained, “to begin the new game in the P.O.W. camp.”
……….Incidentally, the Aphrodite program was named not after the Greek goddess but a species of butterfly, possibly Speyeria aphrodite. I have not been able to determine why. If any reader knows, please contact me!

Few people had ever heard of televisions in 1944, much less thought of rigging one up to an airplane like Bud Willy did. Joe Kennedy, however, was among the elites who’d seen one, a two- or three-inch model at the World’s Fair in Queens a few years earlier. Compared to that, the one mounted on the plane was gigantic—spanning a full eight inches across.

Chapter Forty-Eight: Catching Pretty Well

Bizarrely, Berg’s driver that summer in Rome, one Aldo Icardi, eventually got tangled up in a murder case involving his (Icardi’s) commanding officer, who was shot in the back during a sketchy OSS raid in northern Italy. No one has ever quite sorted out what happened, although Icardi was tried in absentia in Italy and convicted. Berg had left Italy by then, and there’s no indication he was tied to the incident.

After investigating the optical plant in Florence, Berg allegedly hearkened back to his OSS training and reprised his final exam by infiltrating a nearby munitions plant. In preparation he reportedly bought some German books at a local store and read them aloud in his room to sharpen his accent. He then supposedly chopped his hair into a crewcut and donned a Nazi military uniform—a sure way to get yourself shot. At the plant, he claimed to be an inspector from Berlin, and plant managers instinctively saluted him and led him on a tour. He made himself walk deliberately slowly, as an arrogant Nazi would. When he informed them that Berlin was disappointed in their production levels, their faces fell. Berg then asked about potential new weapons, the real object of his mission. Hoping to get on his good side, they answered every query in detail, and he learned about several new developments without arousing any suspicions.
……….More than a few historians have questioned whether something like this actually happened—it would have been insanely risky. But if it did, Berg certainly earned a belated A+.

Chapter Forty-Nine: “I’ll Be Seeing You”

Joe Kennedy wasn’t the only presidential relation involved with Project Anvil. Elliott Roosevelt, FDR’s son, was taking photographs in one of the reconnaissance planes that accompanied Zootsuit Black on August 12th. Roosevelt’s plane, in fact, nearly got wiped out by shrapnel from the explosion.

To be frank, the debate over which component in the arming circuits failed and caused the plane to explode is pretty convoluted. You practically need a Ph.D. in electrical engineering to follow the details, and the problem is compounded by the fact that different sources contradict each other about how the circuits were configured.
……….To further confuse matters, a few experiments threw doubt on the theory that the solenoid overheated. In particular, technicians placed a solenoid near some fuses and ran the same amount of current through it that the solenoid on the plane would have had, and no matter how long the current ran, the fuses never blew. However, they did acknowledge that that configuration of the circuit they tested was somewhat different from the circuit in the plane, so the test was inconclusive. And other, similar tests by different technicians indicated that the solenoid might still have been to blame.
……….Overall, given the fact that the other components of the circuit appeared sound, the arming panel still seems like the obvious culprit.

After the explosion of Zootsuit Black, pretty much everyone involved got blotto at a bar on base. The engineer to whom Joe Kennedy had promised his eggs was feeling especially morose; he eventually stumbled outside and began firing his pistol into the air. When everyone else ran out to see who was “attacking” them, he quickly organized a search party to hunt down the culprit. He never could bring himself to eat Kennedy’s eggs.

During his time in England, Joe Kennedy grew especially close with his sister Kathleen, a.k.a. Kick. Joe was in fact the only Kennedy to attend Kick’s wedding, when she defied her parents’ wishes and married a non-Catholic, the English peer William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington. A few weeks after Joe died, Cavendish himself got picked off by a sniper in Normandy.
……….A few years later, thieves broke into Kick’s house in London and stole $25,000 worth of goods. Kick told the press that she didn’t care about most of it. But she begged for the return of her husband’s keepsake cufflinks, and a pair of golden navy wings from Joe, which were inscribed on the back “To K from J.” She never got either back.

Throwing all morality aside, and considering them from a strictly military perspective, the Allies misused the Anvil/Aphrodite plane-bombs. Given their low accuracy but incredible punch, they would have been amazing weapons of terror—something to crash into Berlin or other cities at night. That’s exactly how the Germans used V-1s and V-2s. But the British discouraged the Americans from using the plane-bombs this way, fearing that the Germans would retaliate in kind against London.

Chapter Fifty: Quisling Zoo

The soldier sent out to gather bottles of “radioactive” wine for Washington ended up having some adventures of his own. Despite his protests to the contrary, every French merchant he approached assumed that he was really a rogue businessman trying to get a leg up on the French-American wine trade before the war ended. Hoping to get a leg up themselves, the merchants forced bottle after bottle of their best stuff on him, and it finally just became easier to say yes and have a few glasses with them. It was a little bit of harmless debauchery in the midst of the war.

Chapter Fifty-One: Health Rays, Healthy Teeth

For reasons that remain obscure—especially given how secretive Alsos was—a few celebrities dropped by the Alsos office in Paris to swap stories and chat with the scientists there. Most notable were Charles Lindbergh, who advised the U.S. army air force, and Noel Coward, who did undercover work for British intelligence during the war.

Chapter Fifty-Two: The Deadliest Hombre

Some more Carl Eifler tidbits:
……….After taking shrapnel during training exercises once, he performed surgery on his own leg with a penknife.
A precociously muscular lad, he’d joined the army at age fifteen, but got booted out when someone realized his true age.
After his army exit, he worked as a customs agent along the Rio Grande, where smugglers like to swim across with goods. His favorite trick to discourage them was to shoot a perfect circle of splashing bullets around their head; they almost always turned back.
……….Eifler’s son attended the Palo Alto Military Academy, and one day Eifler got a call from the headmaster. He’d overheard the twelve-year-old lad telling “fabulous stories” about his supposed sexual conquests—detailing acts so raunchy that he (the schoolmaster) had never even dreamed of them, much less tried them out. Eifler almost burst out laughing. He’d been stationed in Pearl Harbor for a spell during the war, where the boy had spent time hanging out with soldiers. They loved telling ribald tales, and the boy had obviously absorbed every detail. So as “punishment,” Eifler demanded that his son be put on the phone. The boy was, and meekly answered yes when Eifler asked if he’d been telling people such things. Eifler then told him he was quite angry about his behavior. “Always remember,” he said, “A gentleman never tells.”
……….After his OSS career stalled, Eifler decided to get a doctorate degree in, of all things, divinity. He eventually opened a psychology clinic in California.

Chapter Fifty-Three: Nazi U

Samuel Goudsmit found more than just physics papers in Carl von Weizsäcker’s office. He also found copies of letters that Weizsäcker had sent to Nazi security agencies, detailing how ideologically sound certain colleagues were. Although not a party member himself, Weizsäcker was dutifully spying on others for the Nazis.

It was Samuel Goudsmit’s second wife, Irene, who reported that he visited a psychiatrist on his rest leave in the States after his breakdown in late 1944. But she implies that he didn’t get much out of the visits, because most of what he wanted to discuss was classified and he therefore couldn’t unburden himself.

Chapter Fifty-Four: Uncertainty, Principles

Again, Werner Heisenberg hoped that S-matrix theory would reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Obviously he failed, since physicists are still struggling to reconcile them today. Enthusiasm for S-matrix theory died right after the war, though it enjoyed a brief revival in the early 1960s.

As a recognition signal during their first meeting, Moe Berg told Flute that “Doctor Suits sends his regards from Schenectady.” “Doctor Suits” sounds like a James Bond villain, but it was actually a real person, Guy Suits, a physicist at the GE labs in upstate New York.

Since 1945, several nations have faced the same basic dilemma Moe Berg did. If our enemies seem likely to acquire nuclear weapons soon, should we kill them pre-emptively? How sure do we need to be before striking?
……….In the early 2000s, several nuclear scientists in Iran were assassinated after the country announced a program to build nuclear power plants; many observers thought this project was a sham, and that the real goal was an atom bomb. Many analysts believe Israeli agents were responsible for the deaths, partly because Israel had the technical skills to pull them off, and partly because Israel would view a nuclear Iran as an existential threat.

Chapter Fifty-Five: Operation Big

During their headlong dashes through Germany, Alsos ended up capturing the parents of Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of wartime production. They didn’t get much out of the Speers, although Boris Pash did secure a sample of Albert’s handwriting, presumably to help authenticate documents or identify him in case of capture. Among the Alsos mission records, there’s also a picture of a grinning Pash at the gates of Speer’s mansion.

In his memoir about Alsos, Samuel Goudsmit recalled a practical joke that his men used to play in Germany. They were billeting in a gloomy old country mansion full of hunting trophies. It also lacked electricity, making it hard to see at night. So the men would take, say, a stuffed goose and shove it deep down into someone’s sleeping bag as a joke. The victim would come home bone-tired after a long day of work, slip under the covers, and yelp to find a cold dead bird tickling his feet.

Chapter Fifty-Six: The Lonely Organist

In addition to his other innovative work, near the end of the war Kurt Diebner tried imploding samples of heavy hydrogen with powerful explosives, to recreate conditions inside the center of the sun for a fraction of a second. In other words, he pioneered nuclear fusion. Given how difficult hydrogen bombs proved to make, he probably wasn’t anywhere close to succeeding, but it’s an interesting footnote to the German bomb program.

Chapter Fifty-Seven: Triumph and Loss

The Nazis “werewolves” not only wanted to defend Hitler’s Third Reich, they had plans to erect a Fourth Reich in the case of their Führer’s downfall. According to a British MI5 document declassified in 2011, the werewolves developed several diabolical ways to kill Allied officers after the war. For instance, as a fake gesture of goodwill, they would offer a cigarette laced with chemicals that cause headaches. When it took hold, they’d offer the officers an “aspirin” laced with poison to finish them off. Similar schemes involved “sausages, chocolate, Nescafé coffee, [and] schnapps.” Having learned of these plans, Allied armies apparently forbid officers from accepting treats from German citizens.

As noted, the Alsos crew let a doppelgänger of Adolf Hitler go free after stripping the man down and deciding that the real Hitler would never wear such ratty underwear. History has since vindicated them in their reasoning: a pair of Hitler’s skivvies were recently sold at auction for $6,737, and they were pristine.
……….The catalogue entry for the Führer’s drawers read: “A monogrammed pair of Adolf Hitler’s striped white linen under shorts. The shorts are surprisingly large—19 inches long, with a waist of about 39 inches. There is a single button fly with another button closing the drawers at top, and two tabs adjust the size at the rear of the waistband. There are also two pairs of loops sewn on either side of the front of the waist band, whose purpose must have been to support the drawers in some fashion, probably fastening to the pants. It is no secret, of course, that Hitler was in general an atrocious dresser and preferred the loosest clothing, according to his valet, Karl Wilhelm Krause. The shorts bear his monogram ‘A. H.’ just to the right of the top of the fly. In as-new condition. They are accompanied by a notarized letter of provenance directly from our consignor. In the letter, he explains that he is the grandson of the previous owners of the Parkhotel Graz, Austria, where Hitler stayed April 3-4, 1938 while traveling through the country, and that these items were left behind in his suite.”
……….The owner of the auction house said, “People tend to either buy fearsome Hitler memorabilia, or things that make him look like a buffoon, such as this. To minimize a monster, you make people laugh at him.” The story added that he “ruled out selling the shorts to any member of the political far right before the auction.”

Not all of Samuel Goudsmit’s scientific interrogations went as poorly as the Frédéric Joliot one or were as wrenching as the Werner Heisenberg one. A few he actually took pleasure in.
……….Just before the war, Goudsmit had run into an old German friend named Walther Gerlach in England, and was hurt when Gerlach acted evasive—refusing to talk politics or to commit to visiting Goudsmit in Holland. After Gerlach’s capture in 1945, Goudsmit interviewed him again, and while Gerlach looked tired and haggard, he was much more friendly than before. As they talked, Goudsmit realized that Gerlach had been under immense strain before the war, and that he hadn’t appreciated how much danger Gerlach would have been in if someone had seen them together. They ended up reconciling.
……….Another interrogation gave Goudsmit the chance to put an uppity Nazi official in his place. Physicist Paul Harteck started telling Goudsmit about separating uranium-235, then stopped. It’s all very complicated, he said, far above the knowledge you have. Try me, Goudsmit said. Harteck deigned to, and glanced at Goudsmit’s desk for a prop. Reaching for a paperweight, he picked it up and said, “Now, let us assume that this represents uranium.” But the heft of the paperweight surprised him. And after a long moment, he realized the truth: “But this is uranium,” he cried. Yes, Goudsmit answered. In fact, we’ve confiscated every last bit from your so-called Uranium Machine. He took great pleasure in watching Harteck’s face fall.

To be fair to Werner Heisenberg, over the course of the war he did try to save the lives of roughly a dozen people who’d run afoul of the Nazis, and in one case he appealed directly to Himmler for help.
……….Perhaps not coincidentally, that appeal came in March 1943, just after the incident with Goudsmit’s parents. Did he appeal to Himmler then because he felt guilty for not helping them? Or did he finally feel secure enough within the Nazi power structure to risk it? Perhaps he realized the Goudsmits were goners no matter what and was saving his political capital for a more likely case? Or most horrifying of all, did he possibly not care about Goudsmit parents? We simply don’t know.

Chapter Fifty-Eight: Goimany

In lounging around the cafés of Zurich, Moe Berg and Flute were in good historical company: these were the same cafés that Henri Matisse and James Joyce and Albert Einstein had all once frequented.

The plan to send Moe Berg into Germany was always shrouded in secrecy, but the basic idea was for him to penetrate the Black Forest region, scope out Werner Heisenberg’s atom cellar there, and report back to Gen. Leslie Groves on what he saw.
……….Eager to get another crack at the physicist, Berg brushed up on his German accent and even began buying suits tailored to the fashion of the region. The more Groves considered the matter, though, the warier he got. Germany was still a warzone then, and there was a decent chance Berg would be killed. But what really made Groves sweat wasn’t the thought of Berg dead, it was the thought of Berg alive and in Nazi custody. If the catcher got caught and broke down under torture, he might spill something about the Manhattan Project—an intelligence disaster. With Boris Pash and Alsos planning to infiltrate the region soon anyway, Groves nixed the mission in early 1945.

Security officers in Gen. Leslie Groves’s office likely didn’t know about Moe Berg’s little scam to bilk OSS out of meal money and hotel bills, and they might not have cared if they did. (The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion, after all, roughly $30 billion in today’s money.) But that didn’t meant they trusted Berg. They were in fact horrified about his peripatetic habits and lackadaisical attitude about checking in. They realized that if the Germans—or god forbid, the Russians—ever laid hands on Berg, no one would know he was missing for weeks—plenty of time to pry open his skull and extract secrets. Short of locking Berg up, however, there was nothing they could do, given that he was technically employed by OSS.

Moe Berg was reading a newspaper in Paris in mid-April when he first heard that Franklin Roosevelt had died. The news crushed him—he’d known FDR for years and adored him. Berg happened to be having breakfast with Wild Bill Donovan that morning, and Donovan consoled him by assuring Berg that Roosevelt had followed his exploits closely. Donovan was probably blowing smoke up Berg’s ass, but the catcher was touched.
……….It’s characteristic of OSS that while Gen. Leslie Groves’s office—and several of Donovan’s own subordinates—spent much of the spring of 1945 scouring Europe for Berg, the catcher could nevertheless have breakfast with the head of OSS and yet slip away without any consequences.

Lise Meitner had the chance to escape Stockholm during the war and join Niels Bohr at the weapons design lab at Los Alamos. She turned the offer down: she abhorred the idea of nuclear weapons, which seemed to her like a perversion of nuclear science.

Lise Meitner was furious with Moe Berg for swiping the letter she’d written to Otto Hahn. The situation pissed Berg off as well, because OSS handled the whole thing so clumsily. “It’s fun to be double-crossed like this,” he wrote in a letter to his boss. And he had a point. As Berg pointed out, given that Hahn was in custody in England, his incoming and outgoing letters should have been monitored by censors. Someone should therefore have removed Meitner’s reference to the original letter in her follow-up message, or at the very least cut out Hahn’s remarks to her about never receiving it.

Chapter Fifty-Nine: The Bomb Drops

Just like the Soviet Union, the United States imported scads of German scientists after the war, including several, like Wernher von Braun, who made vital contributions to NASA. (We never would have reached the moon first without the Third Reich.) The U.S. called the plan Operation Paperclip. The big difference between the American and Soviet programs was that the Soviets took the vast majority of these scientists against their will—effectively kidnapping them and their families. That’s not to say the U.S. didn’t pull similar shenanigans in individual cases, but the scale was far different.

When Samuel Goudsmit arrived in Berlin, he learned that the Soviets had already ransacked the former Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the top scientific organization in Germany. Afterward a U.S. military intelligence unit moved in, and when Goudsmit knocked on the door and asked if he could look around, the soldiers there told him not to bother—everything left behind was “junk.” Goudsmit insisted on seeing it all anyway, as well as the odd “swimming pool” in the basement that one officer mentioned. The junk of course turned out to be lab equipment for running nuclear experiments—there was even uranium lying around—while the swimming pool was a pit for running chain reactions. Goudsmit also found a fancy remote-control system for moving uranium around behind protective barriers, with portholes for viewing the material.

During the discussions at Farm Hall on the night of August 6th, Otto Hahn marveled at how well the Allies had concealed the building of a nuclear bomb, given what a massive undertaking it must have been. “If [the Americans] have really got it,” he said, “they have been very clever in keeping it secret.” Gen. Leslie Groves was tickled pink by this inadvertent compliment.

Boris Pash did have one more adventure after capturing Werner Heisenberg. On June 30th, 1945, he received an emergency pink radiogram from Samuel Goudsmit directing him to the tiny German town of Weida near the Czech border. Soviet forces would be rolling through soon, and Goudsmit feared that a valuable prize there—an international radium standard—would fall into their hands.
……….Scientists at the time used radium standards—basically, a small mass of radium that emitted particles at a known, steady rate—in all sorts of different applications, like calibrating cyclotrons and testing how well different materials (metal, air, heavy water) absorbed radioactivity. So while radium itself wasn’t much good for making bombs (it’s fairly unstable and decays too quickly) it was useful for scientific work that could lead to bombs. That’s why it couldn’t fall into Soviet hands.
……….Pash took off within hours of receiving the radiogram, commanding a force of twenty-one men in seven jeeps, all of them mounted with machine guns. They had three hundred miles of bombed-out roads to cover, and given the urgency of the mission, they kept right on going when the sun set. This wasn’t the safest idea. The autobahn they chose had only one lane open, and sometime around midnight, a truck without headlights suddenly appeared in front of Pash’s jeep, the lead car. Pash smashed into it headfirst, and the entire top frame was shorn off. Pash himself took a blow to the head and cut his hand, and he would suffer backaches for decades as a result. At the time, he just cursed the truck driver and kept going.
……….The convoy arrived at Weida at 3am. Perhaps feeling it wouldn’t be a true Alsos mission without a ruse de guerre, Pash sent one of his men to stage a car accident east of town, along the road the Soviets would have to enter by. They made the pile-up as big as possible, knocking over two army trucks and adding an extra car to block the whole road.
……….Meanwhile, Pash barged into the institute where the radium was. He learned that it was stored in a wall safe, which he bullied the German manager into opening. Inside Pash found a small cardboard carton containing fourteen vials, each one containing a separate radium standard. He had instructions to only take the French standard—one prepared by Marie Curie herself—but he decided to swipe them all for good measure. When the German manager protested this theft, Pash agreed to give him a receipt to help facilitate their return. He then signed it with a fake name, Col. Robert Smith, and dashed off.
……….Pash was feeling mighty pleased with himself on the eight-hour ride home. And to keep the radium standards safe, he tucked the carton into his hip pocket, blissfully unaware that the decaying atoms were cooking his skin.
……….Back at Allied headquarters, he presented the carton to scientists. They opened it—and immediately dashed out of the room. Baffled, Pash followed them into the hallway and asked what the matter was. That radium’s unshielded!, they cried. Pash shrugged. I’ve been carrying it in my pocket for the past eight hours, he said, and I feel fine. This horrified them even more, and they finally sent someone into the room to cover the carton in what looked like a small lead coffin.
……….All in all, Pash treated the incident like a schoolboy caper. In his memoir he boasted, “The exposure [I endured on the trip back], many times the normal tolerance, was not strong enough to kill an Alsos man!” In later years it didn’t seem so funny. His medical records indicate that his white blood cell count plummeted afterward, a sign of radioactivity poisoning. He also developed a nasty “ruby red” wound on his hip with enflamed blood vessels, like a horrific sunburn. Worst of all, he had to have cataract surgery years later, since the lenses in the eyes are quite prone to radioactivity damage. And as late as 1993, the burn on his right leg was still bothering him.

Chapter Sixty: Epilogues

A few notes to wrap up the Vemork heavy-water story:
……….Incredibly, Joachim Rønneberg, leader of the Gunnerside raid, lived until age 99, dying in October 2018. After the war he became a broadcaster in Norway.
……….Vemork began producing heavy water again right after the war, and given the sudden interest in everything nuclear, they made a quite a bundle of money: by the mid-1950s, they were churning out 8.2 tons of heavy water each year, with 4.3 more coming from nearby plants. Eventually, though, the heavy-water market dried up (so to speak), and they stopped production in December 1988. The plant itself was demolished not long afterward and the debris was dumped into the gorge. But a Resistance Museum in the nearby village of Rjukan still exists, with an exhibit on D2O. The gift shop also sells ampules of it.
……….Cadets from the Norwegian War College reenacted the dramatic climb up and down the gorge on the 50th anniversary of the Gunnerside raid in 1993. Ten of the eleven saboteurs were still alive then, and they all attended. But as one witness joked, “this time the saboteurs took the easy route, across the suspension bridge over the gorge.”

The French Academy of Science—in charge of nominating scientists for the Nobel Prize back then—at first declined to suggest Marie in 1903. Only when her husband Pierre insisted on her nomination did they included her. The first woman to gain admission to the Academy, in 1962, was Marguerite Perry, one of Marie Curie’s old research assistants.

A few notes to wrap up the Carl von Weizsäcker story:
……….After his release from Farm Hall, Weizsäcker got drawn into the tumultuous Nuremberg war trials. He attended in support of his father, the ambassador, who was accused of deporting Jews in France and abetting the rape of Czechoslovakia. The ambassador eventually got convicted on both accounts. For what it’s worth, Winston Churchill called the verdict a “deadly error,” and a panel of judges later reversed it.
……….Afterward, Weizsäcker fils resumed his efforts to rehabilitate the image of German physicists. By this point he’d hit upon a new tactic: casting moral aspersions on Manhattan Project scientists. It was them, after all, who’d built these reprehensible bombs, then killed tens of thousands of people with them. German scientists, he proclaimed, had no such blood no their hands. (The best defense is a good offensive, apparently.) Most American scientists of course found this equivalence disgusting. “The difference,” fumed one, “which it will never be possible to forgive, is that they worked for the cause of Himmler and Auschwitz, for the burners of books and the takers of hostages.”
……….Samuel Goudsmit in particular tore into Weizsäcker whenever possible. Weizsäcker finally got fed up with the attacks and declared that Goudsmit couldn’t be trusted to render a fair verdict on him, since his (Goudsmit’s) parents had died in the Holocaust. A furious Goudsmit responded that, by that rationale, Weizsäcker couldn’t be objective either, since the Allies had convicted his father of war crimes. “At least my parents were guiltless,” he added.
……….In his dotage Weizsäcker ran a “peace institute” in Bavaria. His brother Richard carried on his father’s legacy in politics, becoming president of West Germany in 1984 and overseeing the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Although he bungled the graphite experiments, the lovelorn Walther Bothe won a Nobel Prize in 1954, the third member of the Uranium Club (along with Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn) so honored. The Nobel committee rewarded his development of the “coincidence method,” a way to eliminate false positives in radioactivity detectors by accounting for cosmic rays and other spurious signals.

In addition to linking Boris Pash to the Kennedy assassination, people on the Internet have tied him to some pretty outlandish groups, including “Bavarian Thule/Vril/Illuminati/Skull & Bones/Rosicrucian/OTO/ Babylon Mystery Society serpent cults.” Obviously.
……….Pash didn’t respond to such nonsense, but when a play about the Robert Oppenheimer loyalty hearings began touring the United States in the 1960s, he bullied the producer into removing the “Colonel Pash” character, saying he refused to allow U.S. security officers to be ridiculed onstage. (For what it’s worth, Oppenheimer hated the play, too. “They wanted to make that affair into a tragedy,” he once said, but it was actually a farce.”)

During one of his postwar trips to Europe—he was traveling on the CIA’s dime—Moe Berg crashed a party for the daughter of the former American ambassador to Japan, and told her all about the time he’d used the birth of her little girl as a ruse to climb to the hospital’s roof and film Tokyo. It’s not clear whether she found the story amusing or simply bizarre.

Part of Moe Berg’s financial troubles stemmed from a clash with the IRS, which came down hard on him in the 1950s for back taxes. During his baseball days, Berg had invested in a stationery company that enjoyed some fat years during the war, snapping up several government contracts. Berg didn’t really pay attention to his profits, and agreed to have them plowed back into the company as an investment. Unfortunately, officials at the company never paid taxes on those profits. And when the company went belly-up after the war—they’d extended themselves too far, and couldn’t find enough customers to stave off bankruptcy when the government contracts were cancelled—the IRS went after Berg, claiming he owed the agency up to $80,000. This seemed monstrously unfair, and Berg fought them tooth and nail. After years of bickering and resentment, the two sides settled for $5,000.

Dr. Samuel Berg, Moe’s brother, played his own small part in the World War Two nuclear saga, becoming one of the first doctors to visit Nagasaki after the plutonium bomb fell on August 9th.
……….Incidentally, Sam and his sister Ethel hated each other, a dispute that dated back to some unresolved family quarrel that no one would talk about. They lived just blocks apart in Newark but refused to have anything to do with each other. Moe’s move from Sam’s house to Ethel’s house was therefore probably intended to wound Sam. Sam later collaborated with some journalists in writing a book about Moe, and Ethel threatened to sue the heck out of them if they so much as mentioned her name in it. Wisely, they didn’t.
……….When Berg died, Sam pilloried his doctors for negligence, claiming that anyone who even glanced at his charts should have realized that he was losing blood internally.
……….In 1974, two years after Berg’s death, Ethel dug up his ashes and took the urn to Israel. Sam didn’t find out about this until after she died in 1986. He tried to hunt the ashes down and return them to Newark, but never located them. Moe Berg had managed to disappear one last time.

After the war, as he revived his interest in Egyptology, Samuel Goudsmit played around with the idea of using cosmic rays to hunt for hidden chambers inside the pyramids at Giza. The idea was that cosmic rays are absorbed at a certain rate when they pass through matter, like the bricks that make up the pyramids. So if there were hidden spaces, fewer rays than expected would be absorbed when scientists looked.
……….Nothing ever came of the scheme in Goudsmit’s lifetime, but in 2017, scientists used this exact method to determine that, yes, there are secret chambers in the pyramid. As of now, we have no idea what’s in them.

I’d like to finish with some examples of Samuel Goudsmit’s sense of humor. Although he griped endlessly, and suffered his share of sorrows, he could be wickedly funny as well.
……….(I) Late in his career, long after he should have been, Goudsmit finally got elected to a certain professional society, a nice honor. He decided to attend an induction ceremony with a friend of his who got elected at the same time. At the ceremony’s start, the emcee asked everyone to rise and bow their heads in memory of all those members who’d died over the previous year. He then proceeded to read the names. The list went on and on, far longer than Goudsmit expected, for over a minute. When it finally wrapped up, Goudsmit leaned toward his friend and whispered, “Well, Bob, this is the most dangerous mission we’ve taken on yet.”
……….(II) At one point in the late 1930s Goudsmit went to hear a lecture by the famous British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington. Eddington was a towering figure, having provided the first strong experimental proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity. But later in life he began to indulge in mysticism and numerology, and the lecture Goudsmit caught was little more than drivel. On the drive back, Goudsmit turned to a friend and said, “That’s terrible. Does this happen to all of us as we get older? Do we go off our rockers and talk nonsense?” His friend glanced at him and said, “A genius like Eddington may go nuts. A fellow like you just gets dumber and dumber and dumber.” Goudsmit loved telling this story in later years, always having a good laugh at his own expense.
……….(III) Goudsmit’s sister was marooned in unoccupied France in 1942, and wanted to emigrate to the United States. He agreed to sponsor her, but to do so he needed a letter of recommendation attesting to his own character. He wrote to a fellow physicist asking for one, and in explaining what he wanted, he told the man: “I would appreciate if you were willing to write such a letter for me soon. You may not know enough about me, but I assure you that I have never been to jail (too clever for the cops), that I have no debts (nobody loans me anything), that I am not habitually drunk (I can stand an awful lot), and that I don’t own a harem (ask my wife why).” Despite the wisecracking, his sister did eventually secure her visa.
……….(IV) In later years, Goudsmit founded and edited Physical Review Letters, an immensely popular journal that specialized in publishing hot new results at a brisk pace. (While there, he also invented the press embargo, the practice of giving journalists a head’s up about papers before publication, so they could time their articles to the release of the paper.) Eventually, Letters grew so popular, with so many submissions coming in, that Goudsmit got overwhelmed. Given its current rate of growth, he once griped, the shelf space that the journal takes up in libraries would eventually, by the mid-2000s, be growing faster than the speed of light. Still, he reassured everyone that this state of affairs would not violate the laws of relativity, since the actual rate of information transfer by that point would have shrunk to zero.
……….(V) In 1975, Goudsmit learned that the American Physical Society was holding a symposium on the history of electron spin—without acknowledging him or George Uhlenbeck, the men who’d discovered it. Rather than rant, Goudsmit used his rapier wit to make his point:
……….“From time to time,” he wrote the committee in charge, “I read in the newspapers an interview with a very old veteran who knew Abe Lincoln, or about another one who remembers the Maine and was there when it blew up, or a handyman who assisted the Wright brothers. I am always skeptical about their stories. They remember too much and too many details. I often suspect that their parents told them these stories and that they read a lot, and in their old age they are unable to distinguish that from actual experiences. Some time after having seen a movie it sometimes is not possible to be sure whether one has also read the book or not. That happened to me with The Ten Commandments.
……….“I write you all this because I see in the APS Bulletin that you are planning a symposium in recognition of the 50th anniversary of electron spin. Now I have a strange obsession thinking that I was there, together with another fellow whose name was George something-or-other, I think. As with those veterans, I cannot be quite sure; perhaps my mother told me about it in too vivid terms. I am sorry that I cannot be there. It would have been nice to have been interviewed by a reporter from the campus newspaper, or even taped by a local radio station for use after midnight to help insomniacs fall asleep. In any case, if it is not too much trouble, I would like to hear later about the results of your symposium. Perhaps we’ll meet at the 100th anniversary.”
……….Goudsmit won’t make the 100th anniversary, sadly. He died of a heart attack in a parking lot at the University of Nevada at Reno on December 4th, 1978, slumped over the steering wheel of his car. I myself was born on November 4th, 1978, meaning us two Samuels shared the earth for exactly one month. And I have to say, that fact pleases me no end: out of all the characters in The Bastard Brigade—the mischievous, the wicked, the enigmatic—he somehow emerged as my favorite. R.I.P., Sam…

P.S. If you got through all the notes, congratulations! Why not drop me a line and brag a little…

Shh! … a secret riddle:

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Poe wrote on both!