CHAPTER 8: TRINITY - THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING PART 1
TRINITY - THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING: BY "MARK HENDRICKS" as told to Steve Douglass
The shelter was basically three half-buried concrete buildings. One was the observation bunker, the other housed cameras and the third housed generators providing power through cables that snaked out to various instrumentation devices located closer to ground zero.
This was not the duty this nineteen year old Utah native had envisioned when I, like many of my friends, had joined the Army on the morning after the attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy on Pearl Harbor.
I was sure my radio communications skills were much more needed on the Pacific front, close to the action, maybe on some embattled island like Okinawa or in the Philippines, or at a command post relaying combat communications or heck, maybe even from behind enemy lines, at some covert jungle outpost spying on the enemy and radioing coded messages about Japanese troop movements.
Instead I found myself stationed at an Army post in nowhere New Mexico at the constant beck and call of the Eggheads.
They were a weird lot, with their slide rules and starched white shirts – always frantic, always in guarded discussions and always (seemingly) looking down their noses at this lowly private. I felt invisible until they needed me, except for "Bum" - an egghead I worked closely with. He was pretty cool.
Some acted practically bohemian, playing the bongos, and sometimes singing German songs which I found quite distasteful. They drank, lots, partied lots and talked constantly. They didn't believe in the chain of command and most thought they could order us around.
Later many of them would become close friends, but at the time I had a chip on my shoulder, typical for a teen who had joined the army to kill the enemy but because as a civilian I had acquired some technical knowledge on radio technology (taught to me by my dad who was an amateur radio operator) I got sent to New Mexico instead of the war in Europe.
I had missed D-Day playing radio with the longhairs in the desert, who considered me to be inferior. My war stories were going to be boring. It felt like I was missing out on the war to end all wars, most of my time spent replacing tubes in Army radio gear.
I'm just as smart as they are. I felt at the time. Little did I know about the bomb, but I was a wiz at radio propagation predictions. Sure, they can do quadratic equations in their heads, but they cant figure out how to work the radio or calculate the length of a half wave dipole antenna cut for 2.5 megacycles. Heck, half of these scientists here couldn't pour water out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel. That's what I told myself anyways.
Just as I was about to drift off again into a pleasant doze, my radio receiver crackled to life, startling me.
I lightly rolled my index finger on the fine tuning knob and gave it a almost imperceptible nudge. The tube driven radios of the day had the tendency to drift if they weren't properly warmed up.
“Relay to Pyramid Base – weather clearing from the West – we are proceeding with the test – over.”
I glanced at my watch – which we had all synchronized with the base clock early that afternoon. It was precisely 4:45 AM.
“Roger that – will relay on HF.” I replied.
I looked out the open back of the radio truck which I called "SCAR" shorthand for it's official Army Signal Corp designation, SCR299, basically a radio station on wheels, standard issue army equipment but considered quite advanced for the day.
Powered by a towable generator, my special issued unit had additional VHF transmitters installed for point-to-point use between stations at the test site. Highly directional "beam" antennas were aimed at each ground station as a backup to the field telephones.
It had indeed stopped raining. At one point the lightning had been so very close I had to disconnect my radio equipment from fear the antennas would attract a stray bolt.
In hindsight I should have collapsed the antennas but that could have been even more dangerous – imagining myself clutching a metal antenna as it took a jolt nixed that idea. Setting them up again would be a pain.
I figured if the worst happened and they did take a strike, only the equipment would be fried and not me. When the storm was at its worst I retreated to the backseat of the Army staff car parked next to my truck and watched the light show through the rear window.
The strong storm finally lessened in intensity, beating itself out against the side of the mountains. The remaining slow steady precipitation threatened to come down all night but when I was about to think the test would be scrubbed it went from a downpour to a drizzle then to gone. I suddenly realized I could see the lights leading to the tower at the test site.
Los Alamos (Pyramid Base) was located to the north by almost 250 miles so the only way to make the radio hop was on one of the military frequencies below 15 MHz and since I could still hear static crashes on the bands (caused by nearby and distant lightning strikes) the most reliable way was to send it by CW (carrier wave transmission) otherwise known to the layman as Morse Code
I had learned in Radioman School how remarkable the human ear and brain can be at discerning a single tone from amongst the static-filled lower frequency bands – that’s why Morse Code was (and is to this day) still used for long distance emergency communications. When voice won't cut through the noise, CW will.
However, there was a drawback to using shortwave, especially for secret and classified communications. Given the right atmospheric conditions, the communications meant for only for Los Alamos could not only make the hop to Pyramid Base but hop again and again until it had bounced clear around the globe including to intelligence gathering listening posts located in Imperial Japan.
There may not be a Japanese agent hiding in the bushes with a radio set in New Mexico, but there didn’t have to be if your secret communications could be plucked out of the sky as the caromed around the earth.
I consulted the classified code book that never left my possession and would send the message by using what was known as a one-time key. Although the message would be made in the clear and in Morse – only the intended recipient could understand it and then only if he had been in the classified meeting leading up to the test.
In Morse code the message would be a brief and innocuous sounding sentence. I tapped out on my Morse key – .--. -... + - . .- + .. ... + ... . - + - --- + -... --- .. .-.. + --.. . .-. --- + ..-. .. ...- . + - .... .. .-. - -.-- which read on paper as PB tea is set to boil zero five thirty.
Outside was one of the Eggheads – Dr. "Ed" – also known to me as “Bum” because he was always begging for cigarettes. I figured either he was sending all his money home or the Army didn’t pay the scientists very well. Although Ed was from California, I didn't hold that against him. Ed was smart, personable and most of all, interested in radio, something I too was passionate about.
Bum was busy pulling a plastic tarp off a motion picture camera he had hastily covered when the rain began. “How much time we have?” Bum asked as he carefully wiped some moisture that had accumulated off the housing.
Again I glanced down at my Army-issued watch – the radium dial glowing softly in the dark. Little did I know the substance that made the dial glow was a radioactive substance, distantly related to another radioactive substance that was about to light up the entire Tularosa Basin brighter than the sun itself.
“So what are we blowing up tonight? A coyote? Maybe a thousand jack rabbits’ hidie-holes?
"And to think I have a pack of cigars in the truck. I lifted them out of General Grove’s car- just for you.”
I could tell Bum thought about it for a second. What could it hurt? Once the device went off (and I assumed it was another bomb because I wasn't an idiot) none of that would matter. We had been setting off explosions for months now, each one slightly bigger than the last. If I was a right, and if it went off as planned, there would be champagne. There was always champagne after a successful test.
“Tonight we it’s going to be a dud or either blow up the entire basin, or just New Mexico - oh and there’s a minute chance the gadget could ignite the atmosphere and end everything - but hopefully if all goes as predicted - just the war. Either way tonight we make history."
"Now you got me worried Doc. I may need that gin for myself.”
Bum moved closer.
I became of a nervous lump in my throat. Thinking about that gave me chills.
"Quiet!" I shot back. "The jack rabbits will hear you!"
I dashed into the truck and sat down in front of one of the many radio sets. There wasn't much room for anyone else, the interior crammed with radio gear. After donning my headset and plugging it in I whirled in my seat and pulled out a metal box marked US NAVY and flipped it open.
I pulled out a weird looking gizmo – a wire recorder – a predecessor to modern recorders except it didn’t use magnetic tape (there was none in 1945) and instead recorded audio on a magnetized wire with amazing fidelity for its time.
This particular machine I was tasked with operating was manufactured by the Armour Military Recorder Company one of a handful built under special contract for the Navy. How it came into the Army's possession was above my paygrade, but I'm sure Ed may have had something to do with it.
Everything I got was state of the at the time. If I needed it and wanted it to carry out the mission, I just asked Ed, and poof, days later it would appear but the wire recorder was something I didn't know I needed or existed. Ed did though. Ed understood the need to document this moment in human history.
Wire recorders were expensive and rare, they were only issued to high-priority military command posts and special projects units for the purpose of documentation (or as they often were) to record enemy radio transmissions for analysis at intelligence gathering facilities scattered across the world. Some were used in Europe to play prerecorded sounds of tanks moving on giant loudspeakers to make the enemy think a whole infantry battalion was coming their way, when it may have only been a squad of spook troops. This particular wire recorder was more portable, ran on an external battery pack and was way ahead of its time.
In fact, I had never seen one until a few days ago and did not yet feel proficient in its use. It was only the day before that I finally managed to record (quite accidentally) some classical music broadcast from an Albuquerque AM radio station.
Funny thing, our miles of interphone cables strung out from post to post sometimes acted as a long-wave antenna and it wasn't uncommon to hear Mozart or Glenn Miller blaring across the field phones system, driving everyone nuts trying to communicate important instructions over the net, while trying to compete with Sophie Tucker.
Nobody at Los Alamos believed me until I recorded it. Ed helped me figure out a partial solution, by grounding each interphone with a copper rod driven into the earth and using better insulated cables, but the problem never really disappeared. It would come and go with the weather. If the cables got soaked, the music would all but go away, but as they dried out it would return.
Being entrusted with the wire recorder should have been a clue on the importance of the project I had been assigned to. But at the time, I thought of it as a new gizmo, a toy the military was playing with.
I had just minutes to be hooked up and start recording all the VHF transmissions as well as the field telephones connected to each station by miles of cables, some buried, some not. Who knew if they were going to survive the blast.
It was also my job to re-broadcast the VHF (countdown) communications to the two orbiting B-29s that had just lifted off from Albuquerque. The plan was to have them circling and shooting movies of the blast and recording the shock on the airborne instruments they were carrying in their bomb bay.
I was waiting for them to check in on the HF (shortwave) net but they hadn't so far. All I could hear was the Voice of America fading in and out, bleeding on the frequency assigned to the B-29s. On one of my many other receivers I turned up the volume to check the radio beacon steadily transmitting beep, beep beep on 75 MHz, used by the bombers to home in on the test site.
All of the field phone feeds and the radio feeds went into what could only be described as an early version of an audio mixer, with the input from the field phones, transmitters and receivers, outputting to the wire recorder. It looked much like a telephone switchboard of the era, with jumpers and jacks connected to each source controlled by a bank of large audio volume knobs. There was only one of these special trucks in existence, and it was mine to operate.
The reel of thin wire (used then as the recording media) could record up to an hour of communications all dependent on the speed selected by the user. Special care was needed to thread the spool over the recording heads to the take-up spool. The trick was in keeping it taught. The wire had the tendency to unravel like a spool of fishing string and once that happened it was near impossible to untangle. I kept a pair snips handy in case that happened and then just tied the two ends together throwing the tangled wire out.
“Only when I need it – you piece of -” I swore. It was then I realized I hadn't put in a fresh Eveready battery pack to power the gizmo.
“Twenty minutes to charge.” came the voice over the VHF link. “On my mark – now.”
Little did I know that wire recording would change the course of my entire life, even more than the first man-made nuclear explosion would change the course of human destiny.
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