It had taken just 28 months from the inception of the Manhattan Project to reach this point. It was a remarkable achievement. The 51, known simply as the ‘destination team’ later boarded one of several shiny new B-29 bombers, the first aircraft to have pressurized cabins, and set off for Tinian Island in the Marianas which was to be the launch pad for the nuclear attack on Japan.
Penney, who wore an American air force uniform at Groves’ insistence, was head of the scientific team building a production line of atomic bombs that were being assembled on Tinian. A rare of picture of him at the time shows him smiling broadly as he sits with his team, dressed in their US Army uniforms, near the production shed.
Of course only two of the bombs were ever used: Little Boy, which had a uranium core and was dropped on Hiroshima, and Fat Man, the plutonium device used on Nagasaki. But at least a dozen bombs were assembled on Tinian, just in case the Japanese didn’t surrender immediately. (These ‘spares’ were later abandoned and the remains of hundreds of tons of discarded ordnance material litter the crystal clear waters surrounding the island to this day.)
No British representative was allowed on the first historic flight. On August 6, 1945, at 08.15 am local time, a B-29 Superfortress called the Enola Gay with Colonel Paul Tibbets at the controls dropped the Little Boy uranium bomb on Hiroshima. 100,000 people died. A triumphal announcement was made by President Truman on board the cruiser USS Augusta a short time later.
Penney’s big moment came on August 9 when he climbed aboard a superfortress called Big Stink, which was the observer aircraft for this mission. The lead B29 was Bock’s Car and carried the Fat Man plutonium bomb destined for Nagasaki. At 11.02 am, the bomb was released and although it exploded a mile off course, 80,000 people perished.
Penney witnessed the annihilation of the beautiful Japanese port city (known as the Venice of the Orient) with the only other British observer, Group Captain Geoffrey Cheshire VC. Cheshire was horrified by what he witnessed. Later he became a pacifist and a life-long campaigner against nuclear weapons. Penney found the experience less appalling.
He was not surprised by what he saw, through welder’s goggles in the rear-gunner’s position. He had spent months calculating its probable performance and had given lectures to air crew about what to expect. He knew only too well what would happen to the people of Nagasaki: first there would be the blinding flash with the ‘brightness of a thousand suns.’ Then there would be the huge, roaring sound like an approaching express train accompanied by an immense pressure wave, a howling wind and unbearable heat. He also had a very good idea of what would happen next: the hellish haze of rapidly darkening smoke that would rain lingering death down upon the luckless inhabitants.
Among those who died that momentous day was a young RAF engineer called Ronald Shaw who was on a “slave labour” detail at the Mitsubishi shipyard a couple of hundred yards from ground zero. He is the only known British victim of the Nagasaki bombing. He had been captured in Indonesia and sent by sea to Japan on the troop transports known as “hell ships”. An allied torpedo sunk the ship, but Shaw survived and he was eventually sent to work in Nagasaki. The few known details of Corporal Shaw’s life show he was an engine fitter at the RAF base at Kalidjati on the island of Java and was captured in Batavia, present day Jakarta, in 1942. After the torpedo attack he was rescued and taken to Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese islands and eventually found himself working in the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki. The force of the atomic bomb caused the entire building to collapse killing Corporal Shaw in the crush of falling masonry.
Penney doubtless would have been horrified, but by that time he had embraced the “total war” policy now favoured by the allies to bring the carnage to a swift end. He was a patriot with a deep and abiding love of his country. Later as he examined the smouldering ruins of the once great city he vowed to do everything in his power to avoid a British city suffering a similar fate. As he stared into the ashes of Nagasaki, he hoped it would not only end World War II, but perhaps end war itself. After all, what industrial country, knowing the destructive capacity of the atomic bomb, would deliberately embark upon another war in the face of such utter destruction?
When the Japanese surrendered, Penney was sent to rummage among the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to collect materials which would help to calculate the immense power that had been unleashed. He visited the makeshift hospitals and, with echoes of his grim task during the London blitz, examined the scorched bodies of the dead and barely living. With his task completed Penney returned home to write a detailed report on the blast effects of atomic bombs.
In summing up the British contribution to the Manhattan Project, General Groves singled out Penney for special praise; he was lukewarm about the rest of the British scientific contingent. No doubt his views were coloured by the exposure of Klaus Fuchs as a Russian mole. German-born Fuchs was a Jewish scientist who fled to England when the Nazis rose to power. Groves was furious when only later did he learn that the British had been informed by the Germans prior to the war that Fuchs was a communist. He felt let down by his British allies for not carrying out proper security checks on the scientists chosen to work on the Manhattan Project. Groves vented his spleen in his memoirs: “Since the disclosure of Fuchs’ record, I have never believed that the British made any investigation at all. Certainly, if they had, and had given me the slightest inkling of his background, which they did not, Fuchs would not have been permitted any access to the project.”
Postwar developments saw the US and the UK locked in discussions on cooperation over nuclear collaboration. The Americans were now reluctant to share their nuclear technology, but the British were insisting their ally adhere to promises made that nuclear know-how would be shared after the war. The Brits were suspicious about American insistence that it could not find the document on which the agreement was drawn. This document, referred to as the Hyde Park aide-memoire, supposedly summarized a conversation between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Hyde Park on September 18, 1944. The Americans said they had no record of the document and was not therefore obliged to share its nuclear secrets with Britain. This intransigence persisted even when Churchill sent a Photostat copy of the agreement to the Americans.
General Groves, who was in the thick of the negotiations, commented: “While the mutual confidence which had prevailed throughout the war continued, we were completely mystified by the British references to this document. I am sure that on their part the British must have been annoyed by our insistence that we could find no copy of what they considered to be a valid and binding agreement. Where was it? Why had President Roosevelt never told any of us about this highly important document? This still remains a mystery.”
It was of course convenient for Groves and the rest that Roosevelt wasn’t around anymore to verify the agreement. The confusion was used to renege on the agreement, thus achieving a monopoly on nuclear weapons for the Americans. The Hyde Park aide-memoire eventually turned up in a file of papers pertaining to naval matters. According to Groves: “The misfiling was due, I suppose, to the fact that the paper referred to Tube Alloys, the British code name for the atomic project, and the file clerk must have thought it had something to do with ship boiler tubes.”
While all this was going on, Penney slipped quietly away to resume his career in academia. But like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Goethe’s poem, he found it impossible to escape the elemental forces he had helped to unleash.