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1. Apollo employed nearly half a million people.

Apollo's moon mission was one of the most expansive government initiatives in American history. During its peak years, some 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 outside contractors took part in the program. Budget estimates vary, but in 2008, the Congressional Research Service put Apollo's inflation-adjusted costs at $98 billion-several times more expensive than the Manhattan Project and the equivalent of almost $500 for every man, woman and child living in the United States in 1969.

2. JFK floated the idea of a joint U.S.-Soviet moon mission.

Apollo unfolded during the famous "space race" between the United States and the Soviet Union, but in September 1963, President Kennedy shocked the world by suggesting that the two Cold War foes might join forces for a tandem lunar mission. "In a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity-in the field of space-there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space," he said in a United Nations speech. "I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon." The President's proposal was most likely driven by the soaring costs of the Apollo program and a desire to ease tensions with the Russians. While there is evidence that the Soviets considered the idea, it was abandoned following Kennedy's November 1963 assassination.

3. Apollo suffered its worst tragedy before it ever left the ground.

On January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee climbed inside their Apollo 1 spacecraft for a routine prelaunch test. As they sat on the launch pad, a spark from some faulty wiring triggered a massive fire that tore through the cabin's pure oxygen atmosphere. A complicated latch system on the hatch made it all but impossible for the astronauts to escape, and by the time ground crews finally opened it several minutes later, all three men had died from asphyxiation. The fire marked the first time that American astronauts were killed inside a spacecraft. It grounded Apollo for 18 months, but it also led NASA to make crucial design improvements that increased safety and performance during the lunar missions.

4. The crew of Apollo 7 won an Emmy Award.

Apollo's first manned mission began in October 1968, when Apollo 7 entered low-Earth orbit to conduct a shakedown of the command and service module. During the 11-day flight, astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham made the first live television transmissions from inside a manned spacecraft. Billed as coming "from the lovely Apollo room, high atop everything," the broadcasts treated viewers to tours of the spacecraft, demonstrations of how meals were prepared in zero gravity, and plenty of wisecracks from the crew. The "Wally, Walt and Donn Show" proved to be a massive hit. After returning home, the astronauts were even given a special Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

5. Neil Armstrong wasn't handpicked to command Apollo 11.

NASA's Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton adhered to an impartial rotation system for the Apollo missions. Each three-man team of astronauts served as the backup crew on a flight, and then became prime crew of their own mission three flights later. For the first moon landing, however, Slayton considered handpicking a commander. Gus Grissom was the leading candidate before his death in the Apollo 1 fire, and Slayton later informally offered the job to Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, who turned it down in favor of retiring. In the end, the historic Apollo 11 mission fell to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins-the next crew in the rotation line. "I wasn't chosen to be first," Armstrong later said. "I was just chosen to command that flight, which turned out to be the first landing. Circumstances put me in that particular role."

6. A bra company designed the Apollo spacesuits.

When Neil Armstrong took his "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" in July 1969, he was wearing a spacesuit crafted by Playtex, a company better known for making ladies' bras and girdles. The International Latex Corporation-the industrial division of Playtex-won a contract to build Apollo spacesuits in 1962, and later sealed the deal after besting two other companies in a design competition. It went on to create the A7L and A7LB, a pair of hand-sewn spacesuits that protected the Apollo astronauts from the elements while also giving them the freedom of movement required to collect moon rocks, conduct scientific experiments and drive the lunar rover. Playtex's spacesuit division split off from the main company in 1967, and it continues to serve as a NASA contractor under the name ILC Dover.

7. Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice during takeoff.

Apollo's second lunar landing mission took off on November 14, 1969, during a brief lull in a thunderstorm. All went according to plan at first, but just 36 seconds after liftoff, the spacecraft and its roaring Saturn V rocket suffered a lightning strike. Moments later, a second bolt of lightning tore through the ship and wiped out many of its electrical systems. Inside the cockpit, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon heard the master alarm and saw their instrument panel glow with warning lights. NASA considered aborting the mission, but a young flight controller remembered a method for switching the spacecraft's Signal Conditioning Equipment to an auxiliary setting, which allowed the crew to reconnect the ship's fuel cells and bring its navigation platform back online once in orbit. Despite beginning its mission with a near-disaster, Apollo 12 went on to make a successful moon landing.

8. An Apollo astronaut conducted a secret ESP experiment.

During his voyage to the moon and back with Apollo 14, astronaut Edgar Mitchell secretly carried out the space program's only experiment in extrasensory perception, or ESP. Mitchell had a deep interest in psychological phenomena, and before leaving for the moon, he concocted a test to see if it was possible to transmit his thoughts through space. While his fellow crewmembers Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa slept, Mitchell took out a collection of cards and spent a few minutes concentrating on a random series of symbols. Back on Earth, a team of psychics tried to read his thoughts and write down the order of the sequence. The group reportedly guessed the right numbers 51 times out of 200, which Mitchell described as "results far exceeding anything expected." A few years after returning from his moon mission, Mitchell continued his psychic research by founding the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a nonprofit group devoted to studying human consciousness.

9. NASA quarantined astronauts after the first few moon missions.

NASA knew very little about the moon before the Apollo missions-including whether it harbored hazardous microbes or "space germs." With this in mind, the crews of Apollo 11, 12 and 14 were quarantined after they returned home from their lunar landings. The astronauts were required to slip into anti-contamination suits as soon as they were plucked out of the sea, and they were then sealed off for three weeks inside a converted Airstream trailer called the Mobile Quarantine Facility, or MQF. In the case of Apollo 12, the astronauts were even forced to spend Thanksgiving inside the MQF, so a special turkey dinner was prepared for them. Luckily for the crews of Apollo 15, 16 and 17, NASA later concluded there was no risk of moon diseases and scrapped its quarantine measures in 1971.

10. Apollo 15's crew left a work of art on the moon.

By the time Apollo 17 ended in 1972, six different lunar expeditions had left the moon's surface littered with everything from discarded spacecraft parts to scientific experiments and even a photo of astronaut Charlie Duke's family. Still, the most unusual relic might be "Fallen Astronaut," an aluminum sculpture designed by Belgian artist Paul van Hoeydonck and secretly left on the moon in August 1971 by Apollo 15 commander David Scott. Scott believed that the minimalist artwork should serve as a memorial to those that had died in the pursuit of space exploration, so he placed it alongside a plaque inscribed with the names of 14 lost American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts.

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10 Things You May Not Know About the Apollo Program

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Apollo's moon mission was one of the most expansive government initiatives in American history. During its peak years, some 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 outside contractors took part in the program.

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Apollo, project conducted by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1960s and '70s that landed the first humans on the Moon. All told, 24 Apollo astronauts visited the Moon and 12 of them walked on its surface. Additional NASA astronauts are scheduled to return to the Moon by 2025 as part of the Artemis space program.

In May 1961 Pres. John F. Kennedy committed America to landing astronauts on the Moon by 1970. The choice among competing techniques for achieving a Moon landing and return was not resolved until considerable further study. Three methods were considered. In direct ascent, one vehicle would lift off from Earth, land on the Moon, and return. However, the proposed Nova rocket would not be ready by 1970. In Earth orbit rendezvous, a spacecraft carrying the crew would dock in Earth orbit with the propulsion unit that would carry enough fuel to go to the Moon. However, this method required two separate launches.

In the method ultimately employed, lunar orbit rendezvous, a powerful launch vehicle ( Saturn V rocket) placed a 50-ton spacecraft in a lunar trajectory. The spacecraft had three parts. The conical command module (CM) carried three astronauts. The service module (SM) was attached to the back of the CM and carried its fuel and power to form the command/service module (CSM). Docked to the front of the CSM was the lunar module (LM). One astronaut stayed in the CSM while the other two landed on the Moon in the LM. The LM had a descent stage and an ascent stage. The descent stage was left on the Moon, and the astronauts returned to the CSM in the ascent stage, which was discarded in lunar orbit. The LM was flown only in the vacuum of space, so aerodynamic considerations did not affect its design. (Thus, the LM has been called the first "true" spacecraft.) Before reentering Earth's atmosphere, the SM was jettisoned to burn up. The CM splashed down in the ocean. The lunar orbit rendezvous had the advantages of requiring only one rocket and of saving fuel and mass since the LM did not need to return to Earth.

Uncrewed missions testing Apollo and the Saturn rocket began in February 1966. The first crewed Apollo flight was delayed by a tragic accident, a fire that broke out in the Apollo 1 spacecraft during a ground rehearsal on January 27, 1967, killing astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. NASA responded by delaying the program to make changes such as not using a pure oxygen atmosphere at launch and replacing the CM hatch with one that could be opened quickly.

In October 1968, following several uncrewed Earth-orbit flights, Apollo 7 made a 163-orbit flight carrying a full crew of three astronauts. Apollo 8 carried out the first step of crewed lunar exploration: from Earth orbit it was injected into a lunar trajectory, completed lunar orbit, and returned safely to Earth. Apollo 9 carried out a prolonged mission in Earth orbit to check out the LM. Apollo 10 journeyed to lunar orbit and tested the LM to within 15.2 km (9.4 miles) of the Moon's surface. Apollo 11, in July 1969, climaxed the step-by-step procedure with a lunar landing; on July 20 astronaut Neil Armstrong and then Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the Moon's surface.

Apollo 13, launched in April 1970, suffered an accident caused by an explosion in an oxygen tank but returned safely to Earth. Remaining Apollo missions carried out extensive exploration of the lunar surface, collecting 382 kg (842 pounds) of Moon rocks and installing many instruments for scientific research, such as the solar wind experiment and the seismographic measurements of the lunar surface. Beginning with Apollo 15, astronauts drove a lunar rover on the Moon. Apollo 17, the final flight of the program, took place in December 1972. In total, 12 American astronauts walked on the Moon during the six successful lunar landing missions of the Apollo program.

Apollo CSMs were used in 1973 and 1974 in the Skylab program to take astronauts to an orbiting space station. In July 1975 an Apollo CSM docked with a Soviet Soyuz in the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft.

A chronology of spaceflights in the Apollo program is shown in the table.

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Apollo | History, Missions, Significance, & Facts

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Apollo, Moon-landing project conducted by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1960s and '70s. The project reached its goal with the July 1969 landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon. Learn more about the history of the Apollo program in this article.

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NASA.gov brings you the latest images, videos and news from America's space agency. Get the latest updates on NASA missions, watch NASA TV live, and learn about our quest to reveal the unknown and benefit all humankind.

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The historic event captivated the world—and helped people look to the future.

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More than a decade before the first Harvard-Yale football game, another sport that's still in play started the rivalry: rowing. The first Harvard-Yale Regatta was held in 1852 and the race became an annual event in 1864. The few breaks in the series have mostly been a result of major events like world wars.

This standing record makes the Harvard-Yale Regatta the oldest active college sporting event in the United States, according to historical experts on rowing.

"The Harvard-Yale race is not only the oldest intercollegiate competition in the U.S., but it's also the oldest collegiate rivalry," Daniella K. Garran, former coxswain and author of "A History of Collegiate Rowing in America," told ABC News.

"The race took hold in collegiate athletic culture just as colleges were being established all over the nation and collegiate sports were beginning to evolve," Garran continued. "Football and basketball hadn't even been invented when the first race was held in 1852."

Garran said the race is "an old-fashioned grudge match" steeped in tradition.

"Yale and Harvard are the oldest universities and had established rowing clubs in the 1840s," Bill Miller, Director of Friends of Rowing History told ABC News. "It didn't take long for someone to suggest that the two agree to a race."

Rowers are dedicated student athletes

The regatta has been held on the Thames River in New London, Connecticut, since 1878, according to Miller. The schools attract some of the best rowers in the country, including athletes who competed in the Olympics. These athletes do not take their sport lightly.

Garran said she considers collegiate rowers to be the most dedicated athletes, mostly due to the "grueling training regimen." The teammates must be up before sunrise, on the water as the sun peeks over the horizon and finish practicing as their fellow students stumble back to their dorms after pulling all-nighters, Garran noted.

"To balance the demands of being a collegiate oarsman with the academic demands, particularly at elite educational institutions like Harvard and Yale, one must be a particularly driven and almost sadistic individual," Garran told ABC News.

Garran said Yale and Harvard are the only colleges that have training camps focused solely on the single event: The Harvard-Yale Regatta.

"The Yale-Harvard race was a staple of the northeast summer social circuit from [about] the Civil War until the 1960s," Yale rowing historian Thomas Weil told ABC News.

The contest has been relatively well matched throughout the years.

"The streaks can somewhat be attributed to the effectiveness of the coaching," Miller told ABC News. "One college would obtain the services of a great coach and would go on to a winning streak. Coaches changed and the streak would shift."

"When Harry Parker became coach of Harvard in 1963, Harvard accumulated long strings of victories and the split between the two [schools] became lopsided," Miller continued. "His tenure ended upon his death in 2013 [as did] the lopsided victories for Harvard."

A storied event becomes surrounded by controversy

Yale won in 2015 and, in 2016, the team thought it had won its first back-to-back victory since 1984, according to collegiate rowing records. However, the 2016 competition was surrounded by controversy.

Yale was ahead by a boat length, about one-half mile into the annual four-mile rivalry race, when a wave sent a large amount of water into the Harvard boat causing it to sink. Harvard coach Charlie Butt suggested a re-row, but conditions on the river made that impossible.

"The controversy occurred when the referee discontinued the race although Yale was capable of reaching the finish line thus should have been allowed to finish and claim victory," Miller told ABC News. "The only time a race should be abandoned is when there is a safety issue: lightening to name one."

Yale finished the race and celebrated victory over its arch-rival, but was informed two hours later that no winner would be declared because a referee put up a red flag when the incident occurred.

Yale coach Steve Gladstone appealed the result.

"The race was poorly officiated," Gladstone told ABC News in 2016. "There is some precedent. In the other big four-mile race, the Oxford-Cambridge race, the crew that crosses the finish line is the winner. If the other boat sinks, they sink."

A committee investigated the disputed regatta and determined that nobody won the race and responded by codifying the first official rules for the regatta.

The regatta committee decided the trophy for the event in 2016 would be engraved with the words "no official result."

Stephen H. Brooks, chairman of the Harvard-Yale Regatta Committee, called the decision regrettable in a memo to the coaches on Jan. 24, 2016. But, Brooks said it was made after "much deliberation, research, and consultation with both of you, as well as with respected rules officials, historians, and others."

Miller told ABC News that after the 2016 incident, referees were reminded they must not cancel a race because one crew runs into difficulty.

"Since [the 2016] regatta when Harvard's varsity eight was swamped and nearly sunk resulting in a decision of 'no official result,' a committee has codified a set of official rules to serve as a guide should similar circumstances occur again in the future," Garran told ABC News. "These rules are based on commonly accepted rules used in national and international competition."

Rowing teams are for life

But, the rivalry does not die after the graduation caps are thrown into the air, Garran claims.

"Rowers are a special breed; they tend to keep to themselves and remain fiercely loyal to their teams long after graduation," Garran told ABC News. "Perhaps this is because of the intimate bonds formed on crew teams or perhaps it is due to the fact that rowing is a lifelong sport and many continue their involvement with the sport long after graduation."

Many alumni have reflected fondly on their time with either the Harvard or Yale rowing teams, Garran said. As they should, since Garran claims the Harvard-Yale Regatta -- to rowing enthusiasts -- is as anticipated as the Super Bowl is to football fans.

"Both sites are wrought with history and tradition and having the experience of staying there and being part of 'The Race' is akin to a pilgrimage for many," Garran told ABC News. "In a world that is characterized by athlete scandals, contract negotiations and the like, it is comforting to know that very little, indeed, has changed with regard to the Harvard-Yale race since its inception and likely very little will."

Harvard won the 2017 Harvard-Yale Regatta combination race on Friday.

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The history behind America's oldest ongoing collegiate sporting event

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More than a decade before the first Harvard-Yale football game, another sport that's still in play started the rivalry: rowing. The first Harvard-Yale Regatta was held in 1852 and the race became an annual event in 1864. The few breaks in the series have mostly been a result of major events like world wars.

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The United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing 210,000 people-children, women, and men.

President Truman authorized the use of the atom bombs in an effort to bring about Japan's surrender in the Second World War. In the days following the bombings Japan surrendered.

The Manhattan Project was the US government program during World War II that developed and built these first atomic bombs.

Detonation of these first nuclear bombs signaled arrival of a frightening new Atomic Age.

The Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project was the codename for the secret US government research and engineering project during the Second World War that developed the world's first nuclear weapons. President Franklin Roosevelt created a committee to look into the possibility of developing a nuclear weapon after he received a letter from Nobel Prize laureate Albert Einstein in October 1939. In his letter, Einstein warned the president that Nazi Germany was likely already at work on developing a nuclear weapon. By August 1942, the Manhattan Project was underway.

By 1944, six thousand scientists and engineers from leading universities and industrial research labs were at work on the development of the world's first-ever nuclear weapon. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist, headed the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Manhattan Project's principal research and development facility. For security reasons, the facility was located in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Major General Leslie Groves oversaw the Manhattan Project for the US government. Private corporations, foremost among them DuPont, helped prepare weapons-grade uranium and other components needed to make the bombs. Nuclear materials were processed in reactors located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. At its peak, the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 Americans at thirty-seven facilities across the country.

On July 16, 1945 the first nuclear bomb was detonated in the early morning darkness at a military test-facility at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The intense brightness of the explosion's flash was followed by the rise of a large mushroom cloud from the desert floor. House windows more than fifty miles away shattered.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

In May 1945, the Allies defeated Germany, two months before the atomic bomb was complete. War with Japan continued, however, and In August 1945 it seemed that an invasion of Japan itself might be necessary to force the Japanese to surrender. Military advisers to President Harry S. Truman warned that such a ground war would result in the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of young men in the US Armed Forces, as well as the deaths of many Japanese military personnel and civilians. After receiving no reply to his threat that "prompt and utter destruction" would follow if the Japanese did not surrender unconditionally, Truman authorized the use of the bomb on Japan.

On August 6, 1945 an American B-29 bomber named the " Enola Gay" dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The device exploded over the city with a force of 12,500 tons of TNT. "[The city] had been there just a few minutes before . . . but it was absolutely gone," said one witness. About 140,000 people were killed instantly or died due to injury or radiation poisoning within months of the blast at Hiroshima.

Truman called for surrender the day after the bombing at Hiroshima once more, but once more the Japanese government refused. On August 9, about 80,000 people died after the United States dropped a second bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. A total of 210,000 civilians died in the two atomic blasts. (In comparison, the United States had killed 120,000 Japanese civilians with conventional bombs during air raids on Tokyo in March 1945.)

Six days later, after the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, the Japanese government signed an unconditional surrender. World War II was over.

The development of the atomic bomb had repercussions that would continue to resonate throughout the twentieth century, particularly in the Cold War. Spies within the research and development facility at Los Alamos-most notably the scientist Klaus Fuchs -gave the Soviet Union information about the nuclear program that helped the Soviets develop their own atomic weapon by 1949.

Was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?

Truman's decision was framed by his belief that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would shorten the war and thereby save the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of American soldiers as well as untold numbers of Japanese soldiers and citizens.

However, in the years following the war-and to this day-the United States' use of nuclear bombs against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has had both proponents and detractors. Many questions remain about the necessity of using the bomb and its moral implications: Would the United States have acted so quickly to use nuclear weapons against Europeans? Was racism against the Japanese an element in the decision? Might the United States have exploded a nuclear bomb on an uninhabited island to demonstrate the bomb's terrible power instead of destroying two cities? Might the United States have been able to gain Japan's unconditional surrender by other means?

But there was no question that the development and use of the atomic bomb changed the nature of world warfare forever. Though the bombings of Japan remain the only wartime use of nuclear weapons, since 1945 the threat of nuclear war has loomed over international conflicts, promising a level of "prompt and utter destruction" never before seen in the world.

What do you think?

What might have happened if Nazi Germany had developed a nuclear weapon before the United States?

In what ways did scientists, engineers, corporate leaders, American workers, and the military come together in shaping the successes of the Manhattan Project?

Was the decision to drop the atom bombs on civilians morally justifiable?

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The atomic bomb & The Manhattan Project (article) | Khan Academy

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The United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing 210,000 people-children, women, and men. President Truman authorized the use of the atom bombs in an effort to bring about Japan's surrender in the Second World War. In the days following the bombings Japan surrendered.

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Newsela | Birth of the Civil Rights Movement, 1941-1954

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Newsela | "Betty Before X" tells the story of civil rights leader Betty Shabazz

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Daughter of civil rights leader Malcolm X writes about the childhood of her mother, Betty Shabazz, a social justice leader in her own right.

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Manhattan Project | Definition, Scientists, Timeline, Locations, Facts, & Significance

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Manhattan Project, U.S. government research project (1942–45) that produced the first atomic bombs. The project’s name was derived from its initial location at Columbia University, where much of the early research was done. The first bomb was exploded in a test at Alamogordo air base in southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

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America Declares War

The agencies leading up to the Manhattan Project were first formed in 1939 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after U.S. intelligence operatives reported that scientists working for Adolf Hitler were already working on a nuclear weapon.

At first, Roosevelt set up the Advisory Committee on Uranium, a team of scientists and military officials tasked with researching uranium's potential role as a weapon. Based on the committee's findings, the U.S. government started funding research by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard at Columbia University, which was focused on radioactive isotope separation (also known as uranium enrichment) and nuclear chain reactions.

The Advisory Committee on Uranium's name was changed in 1940 to the National Defense Research Committee, before finally being renamed the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 1941 and adding Fermi to its list of members.

That same year, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt declared that the U.S. would enter World War II and align with Great Britain, France and Russia to fight against the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific theater.

The Army Corps of Engineers joined the OSRD in 1942 with President Roosevelt's approval, and the project officially morphed into a military initiative, with scientists serving in a supporting role.

The Manhattan Project Begins

The OSRD formed the Manhattan Engineer District in 1942 and based it in the New York City borough of the same name. U.S. Army Colonel Leslie R. Groves was appointed to lead the project.

Fermi and Szilard were still engaged in research on nuclear chain reactions, the process by which atoms separate and interact, now at the University of Chicago, and successfully enriching uranium to produce uranium-235.

Meanwhile, scientists like Glenn Seaborg were producing microscopic samples of pure plutonium, and Canadian government and military officials were working on nuclear research at several sites in Canada.

On December 28, 1942, President Roosevelt authorized the formation of the Manhattan Project to combine these various research efforts with the goal of weaponizing nuclear energy. Facilities were set up in remote locations in New Mexico, Tennessee and Washington, as well as sites in Canada, for this research and related atomic tests to be performed.

Robert Oppenheimer and Project Y

Theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was already working on the concept of nuclear fission (along with Edward Teller and others) when he was named director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in northern New Mexico in 1943.

Los Alamos Laboratory-the creation of which was known as Project Y-was formally established on January 1, 1943. The complex is where the first Manhattan Project bombs were built and tested.

On July 16, 1945, in a remote desert location near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated-the Trinity Test -creating an enormous mushroom cloud some 40,000 feet high and ushering in the Atomic Age.

Scientists working under Oppenheimer had developed two distinct types of bombs: a uranium-based design called "the Little Boy" and a plutonium-based weapon called "the Fat Man." With both designs in the works at Los Alamos, they became an important part of U.S. strategy aimed at bringing an end to World War II.

The Potsdam Conference

With the Germans sustaining heavy losses in Europe and nearing surrender, the consensus among U.S. military leaders in 1945 was that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end and force a full-scale invasion of the island nation, resulting in significant casualties on both sides.

On July 26, 1945, at the Potsdam Conference in the Allied-occupied city of Potsdam, Germany, the U.S. delivered an ultimatum to Japan-surrender under the terms outlined in the Potsdam Declaration (which, among other provisions, called for the Japanese to form a new, democratic and peaceful government) or face "prompt and utter destruction."

As the Potsdam Declaration provided no role for the emperor in Japan's future, the ruler of the island nation was unwilling to accept its terms.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Meanwhile, the military leaders of the Manhattan Project had identified Hiroshima, Japan, as an ideal target for an atomic bomb, given its size and the fact that there were no known American prisoners of war in the area. A forceful demonstration of the technology developed in New Mexico was deemed necessary to encourage the Japanese to surrender.

With no surrender agreement in place, on August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay bomber plane dropped the as-yet untested "Little Boy" bomb some 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, causing unprecedented destruction and death over an area of five square miles. Three days later, with still no surrender declared, on August 9th, the "Fat Man" bomb was dropped over Nagasaki, the site of a torpedo-building plant, destroying more than three square miles of the city.

The two bombs combined killed more than 100,000 people and leveled the two Japanese cities to the ground.

The Japanese informed Washington, which following Roosevelt's death was under the new leadership of President Harry Truman, of their intention to surrender on August 10th, and formally surrendered on August 14, 1945.

Legacy of the Manhattan Project

With the development of weapons designed to bring about the end of World War II as its stated mission, it's easy to think that the story of the Manhattan Project ends in August 1945. However, that's far from the case.

Following the end of the war, the United States formed the Atomic Energy Commission to oversee research efforts designed to apply the technologies developed under the Manhattan Project to other fields.

Ultimately, in 1964, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson put an end to the U.S. government's effective monopoly over nuclear energy by allowing for private ownership of nuclear materials.

The nuclear fission technology perfected by the Manhattan Project engineers has since become the basis for the development of nuclear reactors, power generators, as well as other innovations, including medical imaging systems and radiation therapies for various forms of cancer.

Sources

Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb. U.S. Army Center of Military History.
The Manhattan Project-Its Story. U.S. Department of Energy: Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
Leo Szilárd, a traffic light and a slice of nuclear history. Scientific American.
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967). Atomic Archive.

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The agencies leading up to the Manhattan Project were first formed in 1939 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after U.S. intelligence operatives reported that scientists working for Adolf Hitler were already working on a nuclear weapon. At first, Roosevelt set up the Advisory Committee on Uranium, a team of scientists and military officials tasked with researching uranium's potential role as a weapon.

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What Inspired the Manhattan Project?

Nothing has inspired such fear and awe as the atomic bomb, an extremely destructive bomb that causes miles of damage to buildings and people. The fact that it ended World War II, when it hadn't even been invented when that war started, is incredible. During World War II, Germany, Italy, and Japan were united against the Soviet Union, United States, France, and Britain. It was a defining time in world history, and the atomic bomb was a key player.

The Manhattan Project is the name of the U.S. government program in which scientists were responsible for researching and building an atomic bomb during World War II. Why would the United States want to create such a harmful device? Well, at the beginning of the war in 1939, scientists around the world found out that Germany was beginning its own experiments to develop an atomic bomb.

German scientist Albert Einstein and Italian scientist Enrico Fermi had already fled to the United States. They worked to warn the U.S. government of the dangers of Germany having atomic bomb capabilities and convince President Franklin Roosevelt to create a research team to develop a similar weapon. The idea was that if each side had equal fighting power, they would be less likely to use it.

A Breakthrough in Research

In 1941, Roosevelt agreed to start a research program, which became the Manhattan Project. The program was kept top secret so that enemy spies would not learn about what the United States was doing. Most of the employees had no idea what they were working on. It was so secret, that even Vice President Harry Truman didn't know about it until he became president toward the end of the war.

Funding and progress was slow at first, but a year after the program began, Fermi and a group of physicists made a breakthrough in research of the atomic bomb. After the government realized progress was being made, they supplied more money and staff. By the end of the program, about $2 billion had been spent, and more than 100,000 people had worked to research and develop the atomic bomb.

Three new research facilities were built in Tennessee, Washington, and New Mexico. Leading the New Mexico team was General L. Groves and scientist Robert Oppenheimer, who would later become known as the father of the atomic bomb.

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manhattan project lesson for kids: history & facts | study.com

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Manhattan Project Lesson for Kids: History & Facts | Study.com

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Nothing has inspired such fear and awe as the atomic bomb, an extremely destructive bomb that causes miles of damage to buildings and people. The fact that it ended World War II, when it hadn't even been invented when that war started, is incredible.

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Manhattan Project Facts: Fast Fact Sheet for kids
Fast, fun facts and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) about the Manhattan Project.

What was the Purpose of the Manhattan Project? The purpose of the Manhattan Project was to develop an Atomic Bomb. The Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the "Fat Man" atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki

Why was it called the Manhattan Project? It was called the Manhattan Project because the program began under the Manhattan Engineering District of the War Department and its scientists worked in Columbia University in Manhattan, NY

When did the Manhattan Project start? The Manhattan Project started on May 12, 1942 when President Roosevelt signed an order creating a top secret project to develop the nuclear weapon.

Why was the Manhattan Project kept top secret? The Manhattan Project was kept top secret for fear that the nuclear technology would be stolen by enemy spies belonging to Germany or Japan or fall into the hands of the Russians. Info about the Manhattan Project could be used to accelerate their own nuclear projects or to mount covert operations against the project.

Who were the Manhattan Project scientists?
The famous scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project included Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, David Bohm, Leo Szilard, Vannevar Bush, Walter Zinn , David Bohm, Herbert L. Anderson, Eugene Wigner, Otto Frisch, Rudolf Peierls, Felix Bloch, John R. Dunning, Niels Bohr, Emilio Segre, James Franck, Ernest O. Lawrence, Klaus Fuchs, Arthur Wahl and Edward Teller.

Was Albert Einstein involved in the Manhattan Project?
Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard was a friend and colleague of Albert Einstein and well known for his pioneering work in nuclear physics. Leo Szilard was the first to realize that nuclear power could be used to build a bomb of terrifying proportions. The only involvement Albert Einstein had in the Manhattan project were letters sent to President Roosevelt. Albert Einstein first put his name to a letter, dated August 2, 1939, written by Leo Szilard that was sent via Alexander Sachs to FDR. Alexander Sachs, a trusted advisor, had access to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The letter informed the President that "a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium" was undoubtedly possible, and could lead to the construction of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type". The letter, signed by Einstein, also warned that Germany might be developing a nuclear weapon. In response to the letter FDR set up the Advisory Committee on Uranium to investigate the issue. The committee were not convinced by the scientists and remained skeptical about the warning. Einstein sent two more letters to President Roosevelt, on March 7, 1940, and April 25, 1940, calling for action on nuclear research. In 1941 the committee were finally convinced when they met with British scientists, who were already working on an atomic bomb, and read the MAUD (Military Application of Uranium Detonation) report on the British atomic bomb project. President Roosevelt signed an order creating a secret project, called the Manhattan Project, to develop the nuclear weapon. The reason Albert Einstein was not included in the Manhattan Project was because in July 1940 the U.S. Army Intelligence office had denied Albert Einstein the security clearance required to work on the top secret Manhattan Project.

Manhattan Project Facts for kids The following fact sheet contains interesting information, history and facts on Manhattan Project for kids.

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Manhattan Project Facts for kids

Facts about the Manhattan Project Facts for kids The following fact sheet continues with interesting information, history and facts on Manhattan Project for kids.

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Manhattan Project Facts for kids - President Franklin Roosevelt Video
The article on the Manhattan Project Facts provides detailed facts and a summary of one of the important events during his presidential term in office. The following Franklin Roosevelt video will give you additional important facts and dates about the political events experienced by the 32nd American President whose presidency spanned from March 4, 1933 to April 12, 1945.

Manhattan Project Facts

● Interesting Facts about Manhattan Project for kids and schools
● Manhattan Project Facts for kids
● Manhattan Project Facts with important dates and key events
● Franklin Roosevelt Presidency from March 4, 1933 to April 12, 1945
● Fast, fun, Manhattan Project Facts for kids
● Foreign & Domestic policies of President Franklin Roosevelt
● Franklin Roosevelt Presidency and Manhattan Project Facts for schools, homework, kids and children

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Manhattan Project Facts: Fast Fact Sheet for kids Fast, fun facts and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) about the Manhattan Project. What was the Purpose of the Manhattan Project? The purpose of the Manhattan Project was to develop an Atomic Bomb.

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New to Rowing?

If you are new to the sport of rowing, this Guide will give you the basics.

The Events

Events are divided into two disciplines: sweep rowing and sculling, and two categories within those: lightweight and open. Rowers can also be categorized by age: Juniors, Under-23, Open and Masters.

Sculling and Sweep Rowing

Athletes with two oars - one in each hand - are scullers. There are three main sculling events: the single - 1x (one person), the double - 2x (two) and the quad - 4x (four). Occasionally a regatta will have an 8x (octuple). Athletes with only one oar are sweep rowers. Sweep boats may or may not carry a coxswain (pronounced cox-n) to steer and be the on-the-water coach. In boats without coxswains, one of the rowers steers by moving the rudder with his or her foot. Sweep rowers come in pairs with a coxswain (2+) and pairs without (2-), fours with a coxswain (4+) and fours without (4-) and the eight (8+), which always carries a coxswain. The eight is the fastest boat on the water. A world-level men's eight is capable of moving almost 14 miles per hour.

The pairs and fours with coxswain are sometimes the hardest to recognize because of where the coxswain is sitting. Although the coxswain is almost always facing the rowers in an eight, in pairs and fours the coxswain may be facing the rowers in the stern or looking down the course, lying down in the bow, where he or she is difficult to see.

Athletes are identified by their seat in the boat. The athlete in bow is seat No. 1. That's the person who crosses the finish line first (which makes it easy to remember - first across the line is No. 1 seat). The person in front of the bow is No. 2, then No. 3, No. 4, No. 5, No. 6, No. 7 and No. 8, a.k.a. the stroke. The stroke of the boat must be a strong rower with excellent technique, since the stroke sets the rhythm and number of strokes per minute and the rest of the crew must follow.

Lightweight and Open Weight

An athlete of any weight can enter the open categories, although the average woman in an open race will approach 6′ in height and an average open weight man 6'6″. Lightweight Men cannot weigh more than 160 pounds and the average weight in the entire boat cannot exceed 155 pounds. Lightweight Women cannot weigh more than 130 pounds. There is no averaging weight for women's boats in the United States.

Age Categories

An athlete who does not turn 19 in the current calendar year or is still enrolled in a secondary school is classified as a Junior. Under-23 is as the name applies, a rower who has not reached 23 years of age. In rowing, an athlete officially becomes a Master the year they turn 27, however many regattas offer a newer Masters category that requires a person to be 21. The Masters events are frequently broken down into age subcategories which are assigned letter designations with current top age category J composed of rowers who are 80 years old and older. Athletes of any age can row in an open event.

The Race

International and most United States races are 2,000 meters in length, or approximately 1.25 miles. There are still some Juniors races that are run on a 1,500 meter course. The racecourse is divided into six lanes and each 500-meter section is marked with buoys.

The race begins with all boats aligned at the start in the lanes they've been assigned. Individuals in each lane hold the stern of each boat steady while an official, known as the aligner, ensures that each boat is even with the others and squarely facing the course.

Each crew is allowed one false start; two means disqualification. If within the first 100 meters there is legitimate equipment breakage (e.g., an oar snaps in two), the race will be stopped and restarted with repaired equipment.The stroke rate (the number of rowing strokes per minute that a crew is taking) is high at the start - maybe 45 to even 50 for an eight; 38 to 42 for a single scull. Then, the crew will "settle" into the body of the race and drop the rating back - 38 to 40 for an eight; 32-36 for a single. The coach and the way the race is going determine when the crew will sprint but finishing stroke rates of 46+ in the last 200 meters aren't unheard of. However, higher stroke rates are not always indicative of speed. A strong, technically talented crew may be able to cover more water faster than a less-capable crew rowing a high stroke rate.

Unlike canoe/kayak competitions, rowers are allowed to leave their lanes without penalty, so long as they do not interfere with anyone else's opportunity to win. An official follows the crews to ensure safety and fairness.

Despite the exhaustion of the race, the crew will row for five to 10 minutes afterwards in order to cool down. In rowing, the medals ceremonies include the shells. The three medal-winning crews row to the awards dock, climb out of their shells and receive their medals before rowing away.

The Stroke

The whole body is involved in moving a shell through the water. Although rowing tends to look like an upper body sport, the strength of the rowing stroke comes from the legs.

The stroke is made up of four parts: Catch, Drive, Finish and Recovery. As the stroke begins, the rower is coiled forward on the sliding seat, with knees bent and arms outstretched. At the catch, the athlete drops the oarblade vertically into the water. At the beginning of the drive, the body position doesn't change - all the work is done by the legs. As the upper body begins to uncoil, the arms begin their work, drawing the oarblades through the water. Continuing the drive, the rowers move their hands quickly into the body, which by this time is in a slight "layback" position, requiring strong abdominal muscles.

During the finish, the oar handle is moved down, drawing the oarblade out of the water. At the same time, the rower "feathers" the oar - turning the oar handle - so that the oarblade changes from a vertical position to a horizontal one. The oar remains out of the water as the rower begins the recovery, moving the hands away from the body and past the knees. The body follows the hands and the sliding seat moves forward, until, knees bent, the rower is ready for the next catch.

In the fall, crews race a different type of race called a Head Race. Head Races can be of various lengths and involve the crews starting individually at set time intervals. The crews try to catch up to the crew starting in front of them while avoiding being passed crews starting behind them. Time penalties can be given if one crew interferes with another crew. The crew with the quickest time is declared the winner. Head races frequently involve courses with turns making the coxswain's job much more difficult.

The Equipment

Oars
Oars move the boat through the water and act as balancers. Sweep oars are longer than sculler's oars. The shaft of the oar is made of extremely lightweight carbon fiber instead of the heavier wood used years ago. The popular "hatchet" blade - named because of its cleaver-like shape - is about 20 percent larger than previous blades. Its larger surface area has made it the almost-universal choice among world-level rowers.

The Boats - Sculls and Shells
All rowing boats can be called shells. Rowing boats with scullers in them (each person having two oars) are called sculls, e.g., single scull, double scull, quadruple scull. So, all sculls are shells but not vice versa! Originally made of wood (and many beautifully crafted wooden boats are made today), newer boats - especially those used in competition - are made of honeycombed carbon fiber. They are light and appear fragile but are crafted to be strong and stiff in the water. The smallest boat - the single scull - is approximately 27 feet long and as narrow as 10 inches across. At 60 feet, the eight is the longest boat on the water.

The oars are attached to the boat with riggers, which provide a fulcrum for the levering action of rowing. Generally, sweep rowers sit in configurations that have the oars alternating from side to side along the boat. But sometimes, most typically in the 4- or 4+, the coach will rig the boat so that two consecutive rowers have their oars on the same side in order to equalize individual athlete power.

Race Watching

The crew that's making it look easy is most likely the one doing the best job. While you're watching, look for - continuous, fluid motion of the rowers. The rowing motion shouldn't have a discernible end or beginning.

Synchronization. Rowers strive for perfect synchronization in the boat.

Clean catches of the oarblade. If you see a lot of splash, the oarblades aren't entering the water correctly. The catch should happen at the end of the recovery, when the hands are as far ahead of the rower as possible. Rowers who uncoil before they drop the oarblades are sacrificing speed and not getting a complete drive.

Even oarblade feathering. When the blades are brought out of the water, they should all move horizontally close to the water and at the same height. It's not easy, especially if the water is rough.

The most consistent speed. Shells don't move like a car - they're slowest at the catch, quickest at the release. The good crews time the catch at just the right moment to maintain the speed of the shell.

Rowing looks graceful, elegant and sometimes effortless when it's done well. Don't be fooled. Rowers haven't been called the world's most physically-fit athletes for nothing. A 2,000-meter rowing race demands virtually everything a human being can physically bring to an athletic competition - aerobic ability, technical talent, exceptional mental discipline, ability to utilize oxygen efficiently and in huge amounts, balance, pain tolerance, and the ability to continue to work when the body is demanding that you stop.

More Race-Watching Tips

Race times can vary considerably depending upon the course and weather conditions. Tailwinds will improve times, while headwinds and crosswinds will hamper them.

If a crew "catches a crab," it means the oarblade has entered the water at an angle instead of perpendicularly. The oarblade gets caught under the surface and will slow or even stop a shell.

A "Power 10" is a call by the coxswain for 10 of the crew's best, most powerful strokes. Good coxswains read the course to know how many strokes remain for their crew to count down to the finish.

Crews are identified by their oarblade design.

It doesn't matter whether you win an Olympic medal or don't make the finals - each crew still carries their boat back to the rack.

Coxswains from first-place boats worldwide are thrown into the water by their crews.

Coxswains don't now and probably never did yell "stroke! stroke!" Similar to a jockey, their job is to implement the coach's strategy during the race, in addition to steering and letting the rowers know where they stand in the race and what they need to do to win.

Rowing is one of the original sports in the modern Olympic Games.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, was a rower.

Rowers were the third largest U.S. delegation (48 athletes) to the Olympic Games in 2000.

Eight-oared shells are about 60-feet long - that's 20 yards on a football field.

Rowing was the first organized team sport contested in the United States. The longest running U.S. athletic competition, the rowing race between Harvard and Yale, was first contested in 1852.

Physiologically, rowers are superb examples of physical conditioning. Cross-country skiers and long distance speed skaters are comparable in terms of the physical demands the sport places on the athletes.

An eight, which carries more than three-quarters of a ton (1,750 pounds), may weigh as little as 200 pounds. The boats are made of fiberglass composite material.

Singles may be as narrow as 10 inches across, weigh only 23 pounds, and stretch nearly 27-feet long.

The first rowing club in the U.S. was the Detroit Boat Club, founded in 1839.

The first amateur sport organization was a rowing club - Philadelphia's Schuylkill Navy, founded in 1858.

From 1920 until 1956, the USA won the gold medal in the men's eight at every Olympic Games.

The first national governing body for a sport in the United States was for rowing. Founded as the National Association for Amateur Oarsmen in 1872, it was changed in 1982 to the United States Rowing Association.

Yale College founded the first collegiate boat club in the U.S. in 1843.

FISA, the first international sports federation, was founded in 1892.

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor, was an Olympic rower in 1924 and won a gold medal in the eight. Gregory Peck rowed at the University of California in 1937. From the television show House, Actor Hugh Laurie was a world class rower.

Physiologists claim that rowing a 2,000-meter race - equivalent to 1.25 miles - is equal to playing back-to-back basketball games.

Information Source: USRowing

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If you are new to the sport of rowing, this Guide will give you the basics. The Events Events are divided into two disciplines: sweep rowing and sculling, and two categories within those: lightweight and open. Rowers can also be categorized by age: Juniors, Under-23, Open and Masters.

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Rowing is a sport that uses all of the body's major muscle groups: arms, legs, back, abs and buttocks. The power comes from the legs, while it takes core and upper body strength to transfer that power into the stroke. Rowing also requires balance, flexibility and coordination - plus mental focus to keep a crew in sync. It's a great aerobic workout often compared to cross-country skiing, and because it's low impact, can be an alternative to running for those with knee injuries.

Olympic-style Rowing
Rowers sit facing the rear of the boat and wield an oar that pivots in an oarlock. Boats are called shells. Rowers either scull (row with two oars) or sweep row (one oar). The rowing team is called a "crew."

Men and women of all ages row both competitively and for pleasure. Rowers who are sculling (rowing with two oars) compete in single, double and quad events. In sweep rowing (one oar) there are racing events for pairs, fours or eights. The "eight" is the most impressive of the boats and is approximately 60 feet long. It accommodates eight rowers perched on sliding seats.

The Crew
Athletes are identified by their position in the boat. The athlete sitting in the bow, the part of the boat that crosses the finish line first, is the bow seat or No. 1 seat. The person in front of the bow is No. 2, then No. 3 and so on. The rower closest to the stern that crosses the finish line last is known as the stroke. The stroke of the boat must be a strong rower with excellent technique, as the stroke is the person who sets the rhythm of the boat for the rest of the rowers.

Coxswain
Some boats are equipped to accommodate a coxswain (pronounced cox'n) who doesn't row but uses a rudder to steer. The "cox" also coaches the rowers throughout the race. The coxswain is tucked into a seat at the stern of the boat and uses a "cox box" to amplify his/her voice throughout the boat.

Race Types
Olympic style races are held on a 2,000 meter course; longer races are called "head" races and cover 5,000 meters. The shortest races are either 500 or 1,000 meters and are called sprints.

Rowing Divisions
Rowers are categorized by age, sex and weight. Age categories for racing including junior (under 18); collegiate; adult (18-24); and masters (over age 24). Masters races are usually subdivided into age categories. There are two weight categories: lightweight and open weight.

Strokes Per Minute
Rowers speak in terms of strokes per minute (SPM). The stroke rate at the start is high, approximately 38 to 45, even into the 50s for an eight - and then "settles" to a race cadence typically in the 30s. Crews sprint to the finish, taking the rate up once again. Crews may call for a "Power 10" during the race - a demand for the crew's most intense 10 strokes.

The Athletes
Rowing is a total body workout. Although upper body strength is important, the strength of the rowing stroke comes from the legs. Rowing is one of the few athletic activities that involves all of the body's major muscle groups. It is a great aerobic workout, in the same vein as cross-country skiing, and is low-impact on the joints.

The Equipment
Rowing boats are called shells, and are made of lightweight carbon fiber. The smallest boat on the water is the single which is only 27 to 30 feet long, a foot wide and approximately 30 pounds. Eights are the largest boats at 60 feet and a little over 200 pounds. Oars are each about 9.5 ft long. Sweep oars are longer than sculling oars, typically with carbon fiber handles and rubber grips.

The Ultimate Team Sport
Rowing isn't a great sport for athletes looking for MVP status. It is, however, teamwork's best teacher. The athlete trying to stand out in an eight will only make the boat slower. The crew made up of individuals willing to sacrifice their personal goals for the team will be on the medal stand together.

Adapted from www.usrowing.com

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Rowing is a sport that uses all of the body's major muscle groups: arms, legs, back, abs and buttocks. The power comes from the legs, while it takes core and upper body strength to transfer that power into the stroke. Rowing also requires balance, flexibility and coordination - plus mental focus to keep a crew...

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This account of Bob Moch, the coxswain on the University of Washington's 8-man crew that won gold in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was written by Stephen Sadis. It appears in Distant Replay! Washington's Jewish Sports Heroes, a book curated, designed, and edited by Sadis and published in 2014 by the Washington State Jewish Historical Society. Distant Replay! contains brief biographies, authored by several writers, of more than 150 Jewish athletes, sports executives, writers, and others who have contributed to Washington's rich athletic heritage. The publisher has graciously allowed HistoryLink.org to present a number of these biographical sketches as People's Histories, and they appear here as they do in the book.
Bob Moch
Reflecting on the athletic triumphs over the past 100 years, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer deemed it Washington state's greatest sports achievement of the century. In front of 75,000 German fans chanting, "Deutsch-land! Deutsch-land!" the University of Washington's 8-man crew came from behind to win gold in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. At the helm, was coxswain Bob Moch, who found out shortly before embarking on the trip to Europe that he was Jewish -- a fact hidden by his father since immigrating to the United States.

Though the story has faded and resurfaced over the decades, the 2013 publishing of The Boys in the Boat has brought national focus to the Olympic feat, with a chance for even more attention with a movie on the horizon.

Born in 1914 in the town of Montesano, 30 miles inland from Grays Harbor and the Washington coast, Robert was the son of Gaston and Fleeta Moch. His father had emigrated from Switzerland and within years of arriving, married and opened a jewelry store in the small town of 2,500. Enrolled at the UW in 1932, Robert took up fencing and rowing, landing a spot on the 8-man crew coached by Al Ulbrickson. "I knew for years I was going to turn out to see if I could be a coxswain for the University of Washington crew ... . I was always interested in athletics and there was only one place I could go," remembered Moch in a 2002 interview.

At the start of the season, Ulbrickson had selected a different team as the varsity crew. Moch and his teammates were disappointed, knowing they were the faster team, but none of them had ever rowed before stepping onto campus and lacked the experience of the others. The eight oarsmen and the coxswain bonded over the slight and came up with a mantra, "L-G-B," that they would repeat quietly amongst themselves. If anyone asked, they explained it stood for, "Let's get better," when it really meant, "Let's go to Berlin." Inter-squad time trials eventually turned the tide, prompting Ulbrickson to name Moch's crew as the varsity team.

Since its earliest days, rowing had always been an elite sport with the nation's top teams crewed by the sons of the affluent from Ivy League schools. The Husky team, in contrast, was comprised of kids from working and middle class families -- farm boys, fishermen, and loggers struggling to survive the Great Depression. Many of the oarsmen earned their tuition washing windows, scrubbing floors and selling tickets at football games. In addition to Moch, the team included, Don Hume, Joe Rantz, George "Shorty" Hunt, Jim McMillin, John White, Gordy Adams, George Day and Roger Morris. Moch was the only senior.

In June of 1936, after the Huskies beat UC Berkeley on Lake Washington, they traveled to Poughkeepsie, NY to compete in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association's Championship Regatta. Held on the Hudson River, the competition was viewed as rowing's national title event. Trailing by as much as five lengths at the midway point, they raised their stroke from 28 to 34 and their shell, dubbed, the " Husky Clipper," seemed to lift out of the water. "We took off ... we just flew by them," said Moch. The wins by the UW freshman, JV and varsity crews combined for the first ever sweep of the rowing championship by a west coast crew. The victory also gave Coach Ulbrickson and the varsity eight the UW's first undefeated season.

Ulbrickson's strategy of keeping the stroke count low in the beginning of the race and "mow 'em down in the finishing sprints," would be tested when the men traveled to Princeton in July for the Olympic trials. The crew trailed by as much as five lengths at the midway point, but in the final 400 meters, Moch called upon Don Hume -- who set the pace for the seven oarsmen behind him -- to turn the stroke up to 40. Again, the shell surged to the finish line, winning by a length.

Following the Huskies victory, the U.S. Olympic Committee contacted the UW to inform the team that they needed to come up with $5,000 for the trip to Berlin. Sports editors for both Seattle papers penned their outrage in editorials and enlisted newsboys to ask for donations while selling papers on street corners. Funds came in from all across the state and in three days enough had been raised.

Before taking up rowing, most of these young men had never traveled beyond Washington's borders. Now they stood on the deck of the S.S. Manhattan as it set sail for Europe. Also making the voyage was the designer and builder of the Husky Clipper, George Pocock. Pocock crafted his first shell for the UW in 1912 and while slowly growing his boat-building business, William Boeing walked into his shop and asked him to build pontoons for seaplanes during World War I. The Husky Clipper was specially designed for the 1936 Olympics, and after winning gold, Pocock's reputation soared. At one point, 80% of all college crews were racing in Pocock boats, while US rowers returned to the Olympics in the Seattle-made shells, winning gold in 1948, 1952, 1956, 1960 and 1964. With Pocock's constant attention to its security, the Husky Clipper arrived in Hamburg undamaged; Hume and teammate John White however, became ill, while many of the others suffered seasickness.

Donned in uniforms now representing the United States, the boys from the UW would first face Great Britain, a team Ulbrickson and Pocock felt were their toughest competitors. The intense competition pushed both teams to their limits with the US taking the heat as well as setting a new Olympic and world record. Italy, Germany, Hungary and Switzerland also advanced to the finals. The brutal qualifying race exacerbated Hume's illness, who passed out at the finish line and was revived by Moch splashing cold water on his face.

The regatta's final event and the final event of the 1936 Olympics was set for August 14th and would be broadcast live around the world. Seattle retailer Weisfield and Goldberg ran an Olympic special on Philco radios, offering home installation up to 8 o'clock the night before the 9 am broadcast. With so many families having made donations to finance the crew's trip to Berlin, excitement for the race was pervasive throughout the Northwest. "People in the city felt that they were stockholders in the operation," recalled Gordon Adam, who rowed in the three-seat.

Up until the final race, Americans were focused on the brilliance of African American athlete, Jesse Owens, who took four gold medals in track and field events. The victories were made that much sweeter as the US had earlier threatened to boycott the games after Hitler declared that Blacks and Jews would not be allowed to compete. While Owens and the American track team reigned on the field with 20 gold, 10 silver and 4 bronze medals, the Germans dominated on the water, winning five gold medals and one silver. Cesar Saerchinger, who, along with Bill Henry covered the rowing events for CBS, recalled later that with every German victory they had to, "stand up for the German anthem and 'Horst Wessel' [the Nazi party anthem] after every event, until we were nauseated."

On the morning of the race, Hume was shivering uncontrollably. He had lost 14 pounds. During warm ups that afternoon he could barely pull his oars. Ulbrickson considered an alternate oarsman, but "Johnny White went to [the coach] and told him Don had to be in the boat," recalled Moch. "He said, 'Tie him in, and we'll get him across the finish line.'"

By 6 pm, over 75,000 people gathered along the banks of Lake Grunau. Hitler, Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels and a host of other Nazi officials watched from the grandstand. At the starting line, Moch looked over at Hume whose eyes were closed and his body listless. The Germans were in lane one, the Italians in two and the US at the end in lane six. Positioned farthest from the race official, the Husky crew didn't hear the starting commands, but managed a decent start nevertheless. Germany bolted for the lead, followed by Italy, Great Britain and the US. Millions listening by radio smiled apprehensively at Henry's broadcast; "We all know the Washington crew is probably the slowest-starting crew in the world. It gives everybody heart failure."

At the halfway mark of the 2000-meter race, Hume had kept the stroke down to 36, while the Germans and the Italians opened a boat-and-a-half lead. With 800 meters to go, Moch saw Hume's eyes pop open, his jaw clamp shut and he began to increase the stroke. Seattle listeners moved closer to their radios and clung to Henry's call:

"It looks as though the United States [is] beginning to pour it on now! The Washington crew is driving hard on the outside of the course. They are coming very close now to getting into the lead! They have about 500 meters to go, perhaps a little less than 500 meters, and there is no question in the world that Washington has made up a tremendous amount of distance ... . They have moved up definitely into third place. Italy is still leading, Germany is second, and Washington -- the United States -- has come up very rapidly on the outside. They are crowding up to the finish now with less than a quarter of a mile to go!"

In the final 200 meters, the crowd noise was so loud that Moch's megaphone was useless and the coxswain instead had to bang on the side of the shell to signal the desired cadence. Hume pushed the stroke to a near impossible rate of 44. Nearing the finish line, Moch called for "a 20" (20 powerful strokes) and the rowers thought those would be the last of the race.

"We hit 17 and 18, and then he said 20 more on top of that," recalled Jim McMillin, who sat in the five-seat. The US passed the Germans in the final 10 strokes and were drawing even with the Italians as they crossed the finish line together. The crowd's roar was deafening, but still none of the oarsmen knew who had won. McMillin said, "I can still remember Bob saying in kind of a half-whisper, 'I think we won,' but no one was sure."

With the crowd now quieted in anticipation, the speakers above the grandstand announced that the US had won, followed by Italy and Germany. After racing for a mile and a quarter across the lake, the finishing times of the three nations were separated by just one second. Exhausted, the crew managed to row to the dock in front of the grandstand, where laurel wreaths were draped around the victors.

The next day, the nine men from the University of Washington gathered in the Olympic stadium to receive their gold medals. In front of the massive German crowd numbering 100,000, Bob Moch, the Jewish coxswain and his eight oarsmen stood proudly while the "Star-Spangled Banner" played and the American flag was raised.

Moch was credited with being the mind of the team, for pulling his teammates together and for getting them to respond to an unfathomable stroke count. "Bob got some things out of the crew that I didn't think were there," recalled Roger Morris, who rowed in the eight-seat. "We owe him a ton for helping win that race in Berlin," McMillin said. "We were in deep trouble, and he was able to pull us out of it."

Moch went on to help coach the Washington freshman and lightweight crews from 1937-1939, then spent five years at M.I.T. as the head rowing coach. Moch graduated from the UW business school and partnered with the Seattle law firm, Roberts, Shefelman, Lawrence, Gay and Moch.

Starting in 1969, the nine crew members agreed to meet once a year -- and did so nearly every year until they began passing away. In 2005, Moch died at his home in Issaquah. Roger Morris, who sat in the bow of the shell, had the distinction of being the first to cross the finish line, and after passing in 2009, was the last surviving member of the UW's legendary crew.

In a 2002 interview, Moch reflected on what he gained from the sport, "Crew has been a great influence on my life. It's one of the two greatest influences outside of my family that dictated what I did and how I did it. And this group of men I was associated with, they've been my best friends all my life -- we were all like brothers ... and I miss them."

Sources:

Distant Replay! Washington's Jewish Sports Heroes ed. by Stephen Sadis (Seattle: Washington State Jewish Historical Society, 2014).

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This account of Bob Moch, the coxswain on the University of Washington's 8-man crew that won gold in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was written by Stephen Sadis. It appears in Distant Replay! Washington's Jewish Sports Heroes, a book curated, designed, and edited by Sadis and published in 2014 by the Washington State Jewish Historical Society.

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Rowing: Rowing, propulsion of a boat by means of oars. As a sport, it involves watercraft known as shells (usually propelled by eight oars) and sculls (two or four oars), which are raced mainly on inland rivers and lakes. Learn more about the history, equipment, and styles of rowing in this article.

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There must be something in the water at Eton, where rowing rules as the sport of choice

The Thames has been synonymous with rowing for almost three centuries. In August 1715, half a dozen "watermen"-oarsmen who ferried passengers on the river-convened beneath London Bridge for Britain's first rowing race. Nearly 200 years later, at the London Summer Olympic Games in 1908, spectators thronged the banks of Henley-on-Thames, site of the annual Royal Regatta, as British scullers competed against crews from seven countries, including Canada, Hungary and the Netherlands. England's team captured gold medals in all four matches, and won three silvers and a bronze as well. "The result of the racing," reported the Times of London, "was a triumph for English oarsmanship."

The Thames will take pride of place July 27 during the Olympics opening ceremony, when the torch will be carried on a stage floating down the storied waterway. Since the International Olympic Committee decided that varying currents in the river would give certain rowing lanes an unfair advantage, the rowing competition will take place alongside the river, in a man-made waterway, Dorney Lake. (Most Olympic boating events, from those in Stockholm in 1912 to Beijing in 2008, have been held in natural lakes or constructed courses for the same reason.) Dorney Lake is located a stone's throw from the river, down the road from its owner, Eton College.

Eton, the nearly 600-year-old prep school whose graduates include novelist Ian Fleming, Prime Minister David Cameron and Prince William, is famed for its fanatic devotion to rowing. More than half the school's 1,300 students row recreationally; 140 belong to what Dorney Lake's managing director, Ivor Lloyd, characterizes as a "high-performance, competitive group." Dozens of Etonians have gone on to row in the Olympics, including four-time gold medalist Sir Matthew Pinsent, now 42. For generations, Eton's crews practiced and competed on the Thames, but by the 1990s, recreational boat traffic made rowing there dangerous. Dorney Lake, otherwise known as the Eton College Rowing Center, was completed in 2006; the 2,200-meter lake has a depth of 3.5 meters-the minimum required to prevent drag on the sculls. Dorney was the venue for the 2006 World Rowing Championships, which Lloyd calls "a trial run for the Olympics."

New grandstands at Dorney will hold 20,000 spectators. Olympic rowing events, commencing July 28, will continue for seven consecutive days. The program has expanded over the decades to include four categories of rowers-lightweight men, all-weight men, women and lightweight women-and multiple categories of 2,000-meter races: for pairs, eights, and single, double and quadruple sculls. Six days of canoe and kayak races will follow, including a 200-meter canoe sprint-an event making its Olympic debut.

For Lloyd, who holds a world record for rowing across the English Channel (3 hours 35 minutes) and nurtures Olympic champions at Dorney and the Leander Club at Henley-on-Thames, the prospect that the competition will take place in his own backyard is immensely gratifying. "We've been waiting seven years for this," he says, referring to the 2005 announcement that London would host the Games. He then adds, with typical British understatement, "We're quietly calm and confident."

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The Thames has been synonymous with rowing for almost three centuries. In August 1715, half a dozen "watermen"-oarsmen who ferried passengers on the river-convened beneath London Bridge for Britain's first rowing race.

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Rowing is the propelling of a boat using a fixed oar as a lever. In modern sports, rowers race against each other either as individuals or in crews of two, four or eight.

The boat race

Rowing was first used as a means of transport in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. As a sport, it probably began in England in the 17th and early 18th centuries, with the Oxford-Cambridge university boat race, which was inaugurated in 1828. By the 19th century, rowing was popular in Europe and had been exported to America.

Sculling vs sweep

The races are divided into sculling and sweep oar. Sculling events use two oars, whilst in sweep the rower holds one. The eight-person crews have a coxswain, who steers the boat and directs the crew, but in all other boats one rower steers by controlling a small rudder with a foot pedal.

Athlete of the century

Sir Steve Redgrave of Great Britain is widely hailed as the greatest rower ever. A six-time World Champion, he won gold medals at five Olympic Games and has been loosely crowned Athlete of the Century because of the extreme physical demands of rowing. His female counterpart on the gold medal count is Elisabeta Lipa of Romania, who also won five Olympic gold medals between 1984 and 2004.

Olympic history

Rowing has been staged at all the editions of the Olympic Games, except in 1896 in Athens. It was, however, on the programme, but a stormy sea compelled the organisers to cancel the events.
Women made their debut at the Games in 1976 in Montreal. They competed in a smaller programme. The Olympic Games in 1996 in Atlanta marked the introduction of the lightweight events.
Up to the 1960s, the USA dominated Olympic rowing. Then it was the turn of the Soviet Union, which in turn gave up its place in the 1970s-80s to the all powerful GDR (East Germany). These days, the reunified German team is among the best in the world.

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Rowing Equipment and History - Olympic Sport History

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Rowing is the propelling of a boat using a fixed oar as a lever. In modern sports, rowers race against each other either as individuals or in crews of two, four or eight. The boat race Rowing was first used as a means of transport in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome.

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The sport of rowing has been in existence as long as humans have traveled the water by boat. The first reference to rowing as a sport, and not simply as a means of transportation, comes from a fifteenthcentury BC Egyptian funerary carving. The writer Virgil mentioned rowing as part of the funeral games for Aeneas. During the Middle Ages, Italian Carnevale often featured regatta races that pitted the nation's best rowers against one another. Boatmen who offered taxi service across London's Thames River give us the first glimpse of a modern rowing competition as the taxi operators competed with one another for monetary prizes put up by London's guilds. Although there is no official record of when rowing was first brought to America, the first recorded race took place in New York Harbor in 1756. Once rowing was brought to America, it found its way into the sports programs of several of the country's most prestigious colleges. Since the early 1800s, rowing has been a mainstay on U.S. college campuses and is easily the oldest intercollegiate sport in America.

The first rowed vessels made their appearance more than 4,000 years ago as a faster method of transporting people and goods over short distances. The first evidence we have of competitive rowing for leisure comes from 1430 BC Egypt. A funerary carving for Pharaoh Amenhotep II heralded the king for his prowess as a rower and details some of the competitions he won against rival Egyptian nobles. Upon the death of the mythic Greek hero Aeneas, the Greek story teller Virgil describes the funeral of Aeneas which included rowing as one of the funerary games. Rowing continued to be practiced for its economic and trade benefits throughout the Roman period and European Dark Ages, but rowing as a sport saw a major revival during the Middle Ages. Because the city is built directly on top of the Mediterranean Sea, Venice has long been at the epicenter of watercraft development. During the fourteenth century, the ancient sport of rowing saw a revival in the Carnevale regattas in which rowing teams and individual rowers raced the narrow canals and waterways of Venice. The first modern rowing competitions can be traced to renaissance England, where guilds sponsored boats to compete in the "Lord Mayor's Water Procession" beginning in 1454. The "Doggett's Coat and Badge" race is the oldest continuously held boat race in the world, the race between London Bridge and Chelsea Harbor has been held annually since 1715. The sport of rowing made it to the Americas in the 1700s, where the first recorded race was held in New York in 1756. For as long as rowing has been a widely practiced sport, it has been closely associated with college athletics. One of the oldest college teams in existence is the Oxford men's rowing team, which began competing in 1815. This close relationship with colleges carried over to America where prestigious universities such as Harvard, Yale, and the U.S. service academies immediately took to the spot, giving rowing a permanent foothold in America.

When Yale challenged Harvard to the first intercollegiate boat race in 1852, the sport rocketed to prevalence and, for several decades, outpaced football in terms of popularity. The year 1903 brought the formation of the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (later joined the NCAA) as the world's first scholastic organization devoted to the oversight of rowing. With the advent of rowing as an Olympic sport in 1900, the United States was finally able to showcase its rowing talents to the world, winning gold in the first two competitions in 1900 and 1904. After consecutive wins by the English team in 1908 and 1912, the U.S. team ceased using professional rowing teams to compete at the Olympic level, instead calling on the best college team to represent the U.S. at the Olympics in 1920. The change paid off as the team from the U.S. Naval Academy beat the English team and recaptured the gold medal for the U.S. This success led to gold medal victories in rowing for the top U.S. college team in every Olympic Games from 1920 to 1948. But the immense early success of US college rowing programs could not protect them from being overshadowed under the growing popularity of college sports such as basketball and especially football.

Rowing was the most popular college sport in America 80 years ago. But the last century has brought a significant decline in the number of programs and scholarships offered at the NCAA level. Today, 91 college programs officially recognize the sport of rowing, and the NCAA allows 20 scholarships per school to be devoted to rowing. Despite the decline in popularity over the last several decades, rowing coaches are constantly on the lookout for high school talent to bolster their rosters. Getting into contact with these coaches is the key to receiving a rowing scholarship. Athleticscholarships.net has worked with hundreds of rowers over the past decade, and we have been successful in finding scholarships for the vast majority of them. We know exactly what coaches want to see when scouting a high school rower, and our database of coaches allows us to put you in direct contact with every NCAA rowing coach.
Olympic rowers at risk in Rio because of extreme water pollution. Atlanta Sports Academy Recruiting.

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The History of the Sport of Rowing The sport of rowing has been in existence as long as humans have traveled the water by boat. The first reference to rowing as a sport, and not simply as a means of transportation, comes from a fifteenth century BC Egyptian funerary carving. The writer Virgil menti…

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The Germans invaded Denmark on 9 April 1940, in a combined attack against Norway, a few hours later the Danish Government accepted the German ultimatum and surrendered.

At the beginning of 1942 Himmler and Heydrich enlisted the zealous aid of the Foreign Office to get the Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws applied to all Western countries under military occupation.

In Holland, a totally occupied country this pressure could not be resisted, in France a half-occupied country, it was half-resisted. In the case of Denmark a nation which retained its neutrality under German occupation, with a monarchy and constitution both unimpaired.

Here the pressure of Ribbentrop and Himmler was resisted with ninety-five per cent success - almost the only bright spark in a truly dark and depressing tale of murder and misery.

In January 1942 it was reported in the American press that the King of Denmark had threatened to abdicate if the German demand for Nuremberg legislation was pressed.

As a consequence, Rademacher the SS watch-dog over the Diplomatic Corps, advised Cecil von Renthe- Fink, the Reich plenipotentiary in Copenhagen, "to find occasions to point out that it would be prudent for Denmark to prepare in good time for the Final Solution."

But Denmark was not prudent, and in June 1942, when the Germans were pressing for a Danish "Jewish badge" decree, similar to which had been in force in the Reich since September 1941, King Christian was reported to have said that he would be the first Danish citizen to wear the badge.

Himmler now tried to proceed against the Jews in Denmark in the guise of security measures. On 24 September 1942 he ordered Heinrich Muller, the head of the Gestapo, to insert the names of Jews in a list of Danish Communist and resistance leaders whom he proposed to arrest.

No doubt Himmler believed he could rely on the co-operation of Renthe-Fink successor, Karl Werner Best, since Best had once been legal advisor to the Gestapo - but Best who had left the Gestapo to escape the clutches of Heydrich, was now relieved of the worst anxieties of a successful careerist by the death of his enemy.

Moreover, as a Reich plenipotentiary in a quasi-neutral country, Best desired a quiet life above all things, so his report to Ribbentrop on 28 January 1943, was quite daring. Best suggested that, since the proposed measures would certainly create a constitutional crisis in Denmark, the Danes should be asked only to dismiss their Jews from the civil service.

Under Himmler's prodding Ribbentrop returned to the charge, and on 24 April, Best replied that out of 6,500 Jews in Denmark only 31 were civil servants. Of course, there were the 1,351 refugees from the Reich whom the Danish Government had hitherto protected, but Best suggested that the Danes would not be able to do this any longer if the refugees were given back their German nationality.

Such a step was, however, impossible under the 11th decree supplementing the Reich Law of Citizenship, which could not be retracted in the case of refugees in Denmark without upsetting the whole legal fabric of the deportations from Germany.

Himmler still insisted on the full application of the Final Solution in Denmark and Ribbentrop as usual, gave way. On 22 May he informed Best that while he could not take instructions from Himmler, the next steps might be discussed with Himmler in the precincts of the Foreign Office, if necessary in Ribbentrop's presence.

Nothing however was done till August when a disturbance in Denmark gave Himmler the pretext he required. On 5 August 1943, Sweden renounced the 1940 agreement by which German troops stationed in Norway were permitted to use her railway system.

This action inspired the Danish dock workers at Odense to refuse to repair German ships. There were riots and arrests and on 9 August, the Danish Premier Scavenius, threatened to resign if the Danish courts were required to try the arrested men.

As a consequence, the Germans introduced martial law at Odense, and on the 24 August 1943 - the day that Himmler was made Minister of Interior - the Danish resistance movement blew up the German - occupied Forum Hall in Copenhagen, and on the following day all the Danish shipyards were on strike.

On the 28th the Scavenius Government resigned, on the 29th General von Hannecken, the German military commander, proclaimed martial law throughout Denmark. The Danish defence forces were interned, while the small Danish fleet either scuttled itself or sought internment in Swedish ports.

But even now Best and von Hannecken could not take over the government of Denmark, since they had to rely on a Committee of Ministerial Directors to act for the absent Danish Cabinet.

It appeared to Best, nevertheless, that this provided the opportunity for deportations, and on 8 September 1943 he asked for police reinforcements and help from the German Army, "so that the Jewish problem can be handled during the present siege conditions and not later."

But as a witness at the War Crimes trial in Nuremberg on 31 July 1946, Best tried to put the cart before the horse, he claimed that he had only approved of martial law for Denmark after Himmler had fixed the date for the deportations, which, he feared would cause riots.

At the same time he warned certain Danish politicians of Himmler's plans, yet according to his report to von Ribbenentrop, Best had made it clear to the Danish Foreign Office that the arrest of Jewish notables "had nothing to do with the Jewish question."

The truth would seem to be that Best, in company with von Hannecken and even the Security Police chiefs in Denmark was seized at the last moment with a fear of the world publicity which the action ordered by Himmler would inevitably follow.

On 18 September Rolf Gunther arrived in Copenhagen from Berlin, with a special commando of members of Eichmann's office. The station commander of the Security Police in Copenhagen, Standartenfuhrer Rudolf Mildner, at once perceived what matters would be charged to his responsibility and flew to Berlin to get Kaltenbrunner to withdraw the commando, but without success.

Best in the meantime, continued to cover himself either way. Thus on the night of the round-up, he promised Ministerial Director Svennigsen of the Danish Foreign Office to forward the King's petition that the Jews should be interned in Denmark.

But Best had already tried to interest Ribbentrop in a far less honorable proposal, proceeding from Helmer Rostig , a former League of Nations Commissioner in Danzig, now head of the Danish Red Cross.

This was that the Jews should be interned in place of the Danish soldiers, "to show that Germany was at war not with the Danes, but with the Jews," and that fifty to hundred Jews should thereafter be deported for each Danish act of sabotage.

Furthermore, on 28 September Best assured von Ribbentrop that the deportations would start as soon as the steamer Wartheland berthed in Copenhagen, and he complained that through the non-co-operation of von Hannecken, the Security Police were unable to proceed with the round-up in Jutland and Fuenen.

Von Hannecken had in fact been engaged in an intrigue to shift the responsibility on to Best's shoulders. He had asked Keitel on the 23rd to suspend the round-up during the period in which the German Army was responsible for maintaining order, if indeed, it was not possible to cancel altogether such unpopular measures, which would mean "the loss of Danish meat and fats."

Keitel replied that Gottlob Berger, Himmler's chief of personnel would be in charge of the "aktion." Von Hannecken thereupon refused to lend the Security Police the use of his Feldgendarmarie and Secret Field Police - a direct challenge to Keitel and the High Command.

On 29 September Ribbentrop telegraphed Best that he had read his complaint to Hitler in the presence of Keitel, who denied that he had banned the use of Wehrmacht police, and swore that he would demand an explanation from Hannecken. But the latter told the Danish Commission in 1945 that, even after the rocket he got from Keitel, he only provided fifty men of a guard battalion to cordon the embarkation on board the Wartheland.

At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, Colonel - General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations section of the High Command, insisted that these fifty men must have been policemen. He had telephoned von Hannecken to have nothing to do with the deportation order, which was Himmler's affair.

This got back to Best via Colonel von Engelmann of the Abwehr which was the German equivalent of MI 5. Best then telegraphed Ribbentrop on the eve of the deportation action "that Keitel's order for co-operation had been revoked, and that Keitel had misinformed the Fuhrer."

One is to gather from al this that, except for those who were conveniently dead like Himmler, no German carried out the Fuhrer's order in Denmark. In reality, the misgivings of Germans in office played less part in saving the Jews than the unique geographical position of Denmark, separated by a bare ten miles of sea from the neutral Government of Sweden, the only Government to offer unconditional asylum to an entire Jewish population which was threatened by the Final Solution.

But in October 1943, the Ministers of neutral countries had less reason to be susceptible to the German mailed fist than, for instance, the Swiss Ministry of Justice and Police, which had refused to admit Jewish refugees from the terror in France precisely a year earlier.

Geography and the changed way of neutrality did not however explain everything. No rescue would have been possible if the bulk of the Danish nation had not been sympathetic and a very large number of ordinary people disposed to risk their lives out of common charity.

The figures are eloquent, only 284 Jews were arrested on the night of 1 October, of whom 50 were released and only 202 embarked in the Wartheland. They were mostly people who were too old to hide from the police. Casual arrests in the next few days brought the number to 477, but more than 6,000 full Jews and 1,376 half-Jews were smuggled into Sweden in fishing boats between 26 September and 12 October 1943.

On the morning after the round-up, Best suggested that the interned Danish soldiers should be released at once to show that the "Danish peasant boys" were not being treated like Jews. Von Hannecken at the same time demanded the abandonment of martial law.

It suited Himmler to believe that Denmark was now "Jew -Free" and both requests were soon granted. Best was less successful in trying to get some of the Danish Jews out of the clutches of Eichmann's office. He believed that it might appease Danish public opinion if a Jewess, aged 102, could be brought back from Theresienstadt together with a few other very old people.

On this project von Thadden, the successor to Luther and Rademacher , reported back to his chief Wagner, on 25 October that the RSHA thoroughly disapproved, because it would create an impression of weakness among the Jews, if any were brought back to Copenhagen.

In the meantime, the Foreign Office maintained unreal negotiations with the Swedish Government. Unofficially, the Danish Jewish refugees were in Sweden enjoying complete liberty.

Officially they were still in hiding in Denmark and the Swedish Government offered to intern them if the Germans would hand them over. On 4 October the Swedish Minister in Berlin begged that Sweden might at least be allowed to take the children.

Weizsacker was no longer von Ribbentrop's First Secretary of State - since his transfer to the Vatican, his place had been taken by Adolf Steengracht von Moyland , who formally refused the offer, upbraiding the Swedish Minister in Berlin in terms which he recalled as follows:

"In very severe words I criticized today's Swedish morning press and told him that I was unable to imagine what further reactions might be possible in Sweden after the newspapers had voiced such incredible language.

If the occasion arose, this attitude would force us to answer in a manner not to be misunderstood. It was not appreciated here why Sweden was unequivocally taking the side of Bolshevism, while our blood and the blood of our allies was being expended to keep the Communist danger from Europe and thus also from the Nordic countries."

It had been decided early in September that the Danish Jews should go to Theresienstadt not Auschwitz. About 360 were sent via the port of Swinemunde, and of these twenty died on the journey and fifty in the camp.

Werner Best was sentenced to death by a Copenhagen court in August 1946, soon after his appearance as a witness at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial.

His appeal was not heard by the High Court till 20 July 1949, when in the light of new evidence, his sentence was reduced to five years imprisonment. He was released on 29 August 1951.

Sources:

The Final Solution by G. Reitlinger - Vallentine Mitchell &Co Ltd 1953 .
Beretning fra Centralkontoret for s rlige Anliggender for Stork benhavn, 1946

Copyright 2007 Chris Webb H.E.A.R.T

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The fate of the Danish Jews http://www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

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The Germans invaded Denmark on 9 April 1940, in a combined attack against Norway, a few hours later the Danish Government accepted the German ultimatum and surrendered. At the beginning of 1942 Himmler and Heydrich enlisted the zealous aid of the Foreign Office to get the Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws applied to all Western countries under military occupation.

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It has all the information about how the atomic bomb works, how it's changed, and where they tested it out (plus the final results of the bomb being dropped).

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Atomic bomb | History, Properties, Proliferation, & Facts

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atomic bomb, also called atom bomb, weapon with great explosive power that results from the sudden release of energy upon the splitting, or fission, of the nuclei of a heavy element such as plutonium or uranium. When a neutron strikes the nucleus of an atom of the isotopes uranium-235 or pl…

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At the beginning of World War II, the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden and Norway declared their neutrality. That means they would not take sides in the conflict. With memories of the devastation of World War I still fresh in the memories of many Danes, the governments thought that by being neutral their citizens would be spared the horrors of this new crisis.

This however was not to be the case.

The morning of 9 April 1940, German forces crossed the border into neutral Denmark, in direct violation of a German-Danish treaty of non-aggression signed the previous year. In a coordinated operation, German ships began disembarking troops at the docks in Copenhagen. Although outnumbered and poorly equipped, soldiers in several parts of the country offered resistance; most notably the Royal Guard in Copenhagen and units in South Jutland.

At the same time as the border crossing, German planes dropped the notorious Oprop leaflets over Copenhagen calling for Danes to accept the German occupation peacefully, and claiming that Germany had occupied Denmark in order to protect it against Great Britain and France. Colonel Lunding from the Danish army's intelligence office later confirmed that Danish intelligence knew the attack would be coming on either April 8th or 9th and had warned the government accordingly. The Danish ambassador to Germany, Herluf Zahle, issued a similar warning which was also ignored.

As a result of the rapid turn of events, the Danish government did not have enough time to officially declare war on Germany. Sixteen Danish soldiers died in the invasion, but after two hours the Danish government surrendered, believing that resistance was useless and hoping to work out an advantageous agreement with Germany

Within the first years of the German occupation, the Germans had often raised the question of the status of the Danish Jews. However the Danish government had consistently refused to engage in any debate on the "Jewish question" as they insisted there existed no "Jewish question" in Denmark.

It became increasingly clear to Berlin that if they wished to maintain a peaceful occupation and secure the collaboration of the Danish government, it would be opportune not to put pressure on the government. It was abundantly clear that a compromise was out of the question, and as long as the Danish government adhered to collaboration the "problem" was put aside.

During the first years of the occupation, active resistance activities were few in number and consisted mostly of the production of underground newspapers. This lack of active fighting prompted Winston Churchill to refer to Denmark as "Hitler's Pet Canary". Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, many Danish Communists formed resistance cells.
Resistance Groups

BOPA (Borgelige Partisaner, Bourgeois Partisans) was a group of the Danish resistance movement operating at the time of the occupation of Denmark by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

In 1942, the illegal Communist Party of Denmark had begun organizing small sabotage cells across the country, mainly formed by veterans who had been part of the volunteer anti-Franco brigades of the Spanish Civil War. However, as arms were scarce, the weapon of choice was often petrol and matches, and only small scale operations were carried out.

On January 25, 1943 a group of students - who had previously been refused membership of the communist resistance group due to the mistrust held by its members toward any elitism - set fire to a stock of German listening devices at Dansk Industrisyndikat in Hellerup using a bottle of spirit. The students were hereafter accepted into the group, and this caused a change of name from the original KOPA (Kommunistiske Partisaner, Communist Partisans) to BOPA. The new name was at first used jokingly by old members, but it soon became the most widely used name.

Operations grew in magnitude as individuals with inside knowledge of possible targets joined the group. Especially young apprentices from large factories proved useful in identifying targets which were supplying the German military, and this resulted in attacks on factories such as Burmeister & Wain and Riffelsyndikatet in 1943, Riffelsyndikatet (again) and Global in 1944 and Always in 1945.

Holger Danske (Resistance group)

The group was formed in Copenhagen in 1942 by five men who had all fought on the Finnish side during the Winter War. By this time of the occupation resistance work carried a great deal of risk because the general public was still largely opposed to sabotage and the government was following its "co-operation" policy with the Nazis to avoid as much German intervention in Danish affairs as possible.

Holger Danske, as well as the rest of the Danish resistance, was very opposed to this collaboration and continued to believe that the Danish should have resisted the invasion much more fiercely. Gunnar Dyrberg recalls in his book how he had seen Danes engage in friendly conversation with the Germans immediately after the invasion and cites this as one of the reasons he later decided to enter Holger Danske.

The group was infiltrated by the Gestapo twice but because of its loose structure (unlike BOPA the organization was very loose) they were unable to identify all the members. A total of 64 members were excecuted by the Gestapo during the occupation.

Among their largest sabotage actions were the blowing up of the Forum Arena in 1943 and the attack on Burmeister & Wain in 1944.

In 1942-43, resistance operations gradually shifted to more violent action, most notably acts of sabotage. Various groups succeeded in making contacts with the SOE which began making airdrops of supplies. The number of drops were slow until August 1944, but increased in the last part of the war.

As the war dragged on, the Danish population became increasingly hostile to the Germans. Soldiers stationed in Denmark had found most of the population cold and distant from the beginning of the occupation, but their willingness to cooperate had made the relationship workable.

The government had attempted to discourage sabotage and violent resistance to the occupation, but by the autumn of 1942 the numbers of violent acts of resistance were increasing steadily to the point that Germany declared Denmark "enemy territory" for the first time. After the battles of Stalingrad and El-Alamein the incidents of resistance, violent and symbolic, increased rapidly.

On August 29, 1943, SS-General Werner Best declared martial law and demanded the introduction of capital punishment. The Danish government, after cooperating for three years, defiantly stopped functioning but refused to resign formally to prevent Germans from taking over, without violating the Danish constitution. The Danish administration however continued to function.

In a move to save face, Best decided to crack down and launched plans to arrest Jews. On September 8, he sent a telegram to Berlin: "The time has come to turn our attention to the solution of the Jewish question." When final orders for the raid arrived from Berlin on September 28, Best informed his confidant, Georg Duckwitz, that Jews would be rounded up within two days, on the night between October 1 and 2.

German maritime attaché Georg F. Duckwitz leaked the information to Danish politicians and the news spread like wildfire through friends, business acquaintances, and strangers wanting to help. Ordinary citizens all over the country offered refuge in churches, attics, and country homes, and residences. Complete strangers walked up to Jews on the street to offer keys to their apartment. Medical staff hid more than 1, 000 Jews in Copenhagen hospitals.

On the night of the raid, Germans only found 284 Jews out of almost 8,000 in the population.

Read more about the fate of the Danish Jews HERE

The Jews were smuggled out of Denmark by transporting them by sea over the Øresund from Zealand to Sweden, a passage of approximately 10 miles. Some were transported in large fishing boats of up to 20 tons, but others were carried to freedom in rowboats or kayaks. Some refugees were smuggled inside freight cars on the regular ferries between Denmark and Sweden, this route being suited for the very young or old who were too weak to endure a rough sea passage. The underground had broken into empty freight cars sealed by the Germans after inspection, helped refugees onto the cars, and then resealed the cars with forged or stolen German seals to forestall further inspection.

Some of the fishermen assisting in the rescue charged money to transport Jews to Sweden, while others took payments only from those who could afford passage. Some profiteers took advantage of the confusion and fear during the early days of the escape, but as time passed, the Danish underground movement ousted them and took an active role in organizing the rescue and providing financing, mostly from wealthy Danes who donated large sums of money for the rescue.

During the first days of the rescue action, Jews swarmed into the many fishing harbors on the Danish coast for rescue, but the Gestapo became suspicious of activity around harbors (and on the night of October 1-2, eighty Jews were caught hiding in the loft of the church at Gilleleje, their hiding place betrayed by a Danish girl in love with a German soldier). Subsequent rescues had to take place from isolated points along the coast. While waiting their turn, the Jews took refuge in the woods and in cottages away from the coast, out of sight of the Gestapo.

In September 1943, the 'Danish Freedom Council' was created. This attempted to unify the many different groups that made up the Danish resistance movement. The council was made up of seven resistance representatives and one member of SOE. The resistance movement grew to over 20,000 and in the lead-up to D-Day acts of sabotage markedly increased. Though the D-Day landings were to be in Normandy, SOE believed that the more German soldiers tied up elsewhere in Europe, the less that could be present in northern France. Therefore, the more acts of sabotage in Denmark, the more German troops would be tied down there.

In 1944, the 'Danish Freedom Council' stepped up its efforts and more than 11 million copies of underground newspapers are published. That June, following a declared state of emergency, the entire city of Copenhagen goes on strike. Infuriated, Germany floods the city with troops, cuts off water and electricity, and establishes a blockade. By July 2, 23 Danes have been killed and more than 203 are wounded. But the dauntless Danes persevere. Exasperated, the Germans abandon these punitive measures by July.

Later that fall, when the Germans try to deport Danish police officials whom they believe are turning a blind eye to sabotage and disorder, Copenhagen goes on strike again, joined this time by 58 other cities and towns. Unafraid of Gestapo arrests, civilians flock to the resistance movement; enrollment exceeds 45,000 at its highest point. In May 1945, war-ravaged Berlin succumbs to advancing Allied forces, prompting Germany to abandon Denmark altogether.

After the war, 40,000 people were arrested on suspicion of collaboration. Of these, 13,500 were punished in some way. 78 received death sentences, although only 46 were carried out. Most received prison sentences of under four years.

Many people criticized the process for victimizing "small" people disproportionately, while many politicians and businesses were left untouched. Another difficult issues was what to do with collaborators who were essentially "following orders" that their own government had given them, such as business executives who had been encouraged to work with the Germans.

Sources:
The Museum of Danish Resistance

Holocaust Historical Society

Danish Peace History

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Access official Olympic Rowing sport and athlete records, events, results, photos, videos, news and more.

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Kids learn the history of the Space Race during the Cold War. A race between the United States and the Soviet Union to put a man on the Moon.

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Who Were The Boys of '36? | American Experience | PBS

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In 1936, nine young rowers from the University of Washington electrified the nation when they won gold at the Berlin Olympics. Meet the boys who took home the medals.

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The Space Race! Includes information about Russians and Americans, compare and contrast.

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The Space Race! Includes information about Russians and Americans, compare and contrast.

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In 1957, the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite shocks Americans and fuels their desire to catch up on technology.

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Joe Rantz, a member of the 1936 University of Washington eight-oared crew that won the Olympic gold medal, died Monday night. Rantz, 93, died of...

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Joe Rantz, a member of the 1936 University of Washington eight-oared crew that won the Olympic gold medal, died Monday night.

Rantz, 93, died of age-related causes at the home of his daughter, Judy Willman of Redmond.

"He was about as good a teammate as you could get," said Roger Morris of Maple Valley, who is the sole remaining member of the revered crew.

The victory in the 1936 Olympics in Germany was one of the major sports stories in Seattle in the first half of the 20th century.

"At that time, rowing was a major-league sport in this town," said Bob Ernst, who heads the current UW rowing program. "It's still important, but the fact they were able to be national champions and then take on the world overseas in Germany amidst all the turmoil is something that made a lot of people identify with them."

Rantz, who never lost a race as a Husky, rowed the No. 7 seat in the Olympic boat. The Huskies were in Lane 6 and didn't hear the start command.

Accounts say that Rantz yelled, "The race has started. Let's get out of here!"

The Huskies were in last place at the 1,000-meter halfway mark and coxswain Bob Moch called for a higher stroke rate but stroke Don Hume was ill - his eyes were closed and his mouth open. Moch was about ready ask Rantz, the closest man to him in the boat, to set the stroke, but Hume suddenly responded.

The Huskies started passing other shells, reaching an estimated stroke rate of 44 strokes a minute, and won.

Rantz was born in Spokane and his mother died when he was 3. He lived with relatives and at times with his father.

He was living with his brother, Fred, and attending Roosevelt High School when UW rowing coach Al Ulbrickson Sr. saw him practicing on the high bar for the gymnastics team and was impressed.

"When he comes to the university, you have him look me up and talk about crew," Ulbrickson told Fred.

Rantz studied chemical engineering at UW and worked 35 years for Boeing. After retirement, he went into business for himself making posts and shakes, and other products from cedar. His wife, Joyce, died in 2002. They had raised their family of five in Lake Forest Park.

A memorial service will be held at the Lake Forest Park Presbyterian Church, 17440 Brookside Blvd. N.E., at 1 p.m. Sept. 29. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the UW Crew, P.O. Box 354070, Seattle, WA 98195. The family plans to donate Rantz's rowing memorabilia to UW.

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Joe Rantz, a member of the 1936 University of Washington eight-oared crew that won the Olympic gold medal, died Monday night. Rantz, 93, died of... Share story Joe Rantz, a member of the 1936 University of Washington eight-oared crew that won the Olympic gold medal, died Monday night.

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Despite being an ally during World War II, the Soviet Union launched an all-out espionage effort to uncover the military and defense secrets of the United States and Britain in the 1940s. Within days of Britain's highly classified decision in 1941 to begin research on building an atomic bomb, an informant in the British civil service notified the Soviets. As the top-secret plan to build the bomb, called the Manhattan Project, took shape in the United States, the Soviet spy ring got wind of it before the FBI knew of the secret program's existence. Barely four years after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, the Soviet Union detonated its own in August 1949, much sooner that expected.

The Soviets did not lack for available recruits for spying, says John Earl Haynes, espionage historian and author of Early Cold War Spies. What drove these college-educated Americans and Britons to sell their nations' atomic secrets? Some were ideologically motivated, enamored of communist beliefs, explains Haynes. Others were motivated by the notion of nuclear parity; one way to prevent a nuclear war, they reasoned, was to make sure that no nation had a monopoly on that awesome power.

For many years, the depth of Soviet spying was unknown. The big breakthrough began in 1946 when the United States, working with Britain, deciphered the code Moscow used to send its telegraph cables. Venona, as the decoding project was named, remained an official secret until it was declassified in 1995. Because government authorities did not want to reveal that they had cracked the Russian code, Venona evidence could not be used in court, but it could trigger investigations and surveillance hoping to nail suspects in the act of spying or extract a confession from them. As Venona decryption improved in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it blew the cover of several spies.

Investigations resulted in the execution or imprisonment of a dozen or more people who had passed atomic secrets to the Soviets, but no one knows how many spies got away. Here are some of the ones we know about:

John Cairncross
Considered the first atomic spy, John Cairncross was eventually identified as one of the Cambridge Five, a group of upper-middle class young men who had met at Cambridge University in the 1930s, became passionate communists and eventually Soviet spies during World War II and into the 1950s. In his position as secretary to the chairman of Britain's scientific advisory committee, Cairncross gained access to a high-level report in the fall of 1941 that confirmed the feasibility of a uranium bomb. He promptly leaked the information to Moscow agents. In 1951 when British agents closed in on other members of the Cambridge spy ring, Cairncross was interrogated after documents in his handwriting were discovered in a suspect's apartment.

Ultimately he was not charged, and according to some reports, asked by British officials to resign and keep quiet. He moved to the United States where he taught French literature at Northwestern University. In 1964, questioned again, he admitted to spying for Russia against Germany in WWII, but denied giving any information harmful to Britain. He went to work for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome and later lived in France. Cairncross returned to England a few months before his death in 1995, and went to his grave insisting that the information he gave Moscow was "relatively innocuous." In the late 1990s when Russia under its new democracy made public its KGB files from the last 70 years, the documents revealed that Cairncross was indeed the agent who provided "highly secret documentation [of] the British Government to organise and develop the work on atomic energy."

Klaus Fuchs
Dubbed the most important atomic spy in history, Klaus Fuchs was a primary physicist on the Manhattan Project and a lead scientist at Britain's nuclear facility by 1949. Just weeks after the Soviets exploded their atomic bomb in August 1949, a Venona decryption of a 1944 message revealed that information describing important scientific processes related to construction of the A-bomb had been sent from the United Sates to Moscow. FBI agents identified Klaus Fuchs as the author.

Born in Germany in 1911, Fuchs joined the Communist Party as student, and fled to England during the rise of Nazism in 1933. Attending Bristol and Edinburgh universities, he excelled in physics. Because he was a German national he was interned for several months in Canada but returned and cleared to work on atomic research in England. By the time he became a British citizen in 1942, he had already contacted the Soviet Embassy in London and volunteered his services as a spy. He was transferred to the Los Alamos lab and began handing over detailed information about the bomb construction, including sketches and dimensions. When he returned to England in 1946, he went to work at Britain's nuclear research facility, and passed information on creating a hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Union. In December 1949, authorities, alerted by the Venona cable, questioned him. In a matter of few weeks, Fuchs confessed all. He was tried and sentenced to 14 years in prison. After serving nine years he was released to East Germany, where he resumed work as a scientist. He died in 1988.

Theodore Hall
For nearly half a century Fuchs was thought to have been the most significant spy at Los Alamos, but the secrets Ted Hall divulged to the Soviets preceded Fuchs and were also very critical. A Harvard graduate at age 18, Hall, at 19, was the youngest scientist on the Manhattan project in 1944. Unlike Fuchs and the Rosenbergs, he got away with his misdeeds. Hall worked on experiments for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, the same type that the Soviet detonated in 1949. As a boy, Hall witnessed his family suffer during the Great Depression and his brother advised him to drop the family name Holtzberg to escape anti-Semitism. Such harsh realities of the American system affected young Hall, who joined the Marxist John Reed Club upon arrival at Harvard. When he was recruited to work at Los Alamos, he was haunted, he explained decades later, by thoughts of how to spare humanity the devastation of nuclear power. Finally, on leave in New York in October 1944, he decided to equalize the playing field, contacted the Soviets and volunteered to keep them apprised of the bomb research.

With the help of his courier and Harvard colleague, Saville Sax (a fervent communist and aspiring writer), Hall used coded references to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to set up meeting times. In December 1944 Hall delivered what was probably the first atomic secret from Los Alamos, an update on the creation of the plutonium bomb. In the fall of 1946 he enrolled in University of Chicago, and was working on his PhD in 1950 when the FBI turned its spotlight on him. His real name had surfaced in a decrypted message. But Fuch's courier, Harry Gold who was already in prison, could not identify him as the man, other than Fuchs, that he had collected secrets from. Hall never went to trial. After a career in radiobiology, he moved to Great Britain and worked as a biophysicist until his retirement. When the 1995 Venona declassifications confirmed his spying from five decades earlier, he explained his motivations in a written statement: "It seemed to me that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented. I was not the only scientist to take that view." He died in 1999 at age 74.

Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
When Klaus Fuchs confessed in January 1950, his revelations would lead to the arrest of the man to whom he had passed the atomic secrets in New Mexico, even though the courier had used an alias. Harry Gold, a 39-year-old Philadelphia chemist had been ferrying stolen information, mainly from American industries, to the Soviets since 1935. When the FBI found a map of Santa Fe in Gold's home, he panicked and told all. Convicted in 1951 and sentenced to 30 years, his confession put authorities on the trail to other spies, most famously Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Ethel's brother David Greenglass. After being drafted into the Army, David Greenglass was transferred to Los Alamos in 1944, where he worked as a machinist. Encouraged by his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, a New York engineer and devoted communist who actively recruited his friends to spy, Greenglass soon began supplying information from Los Alamos.

In addition to Fuchs and Hall, Greenglass was the third mole at the Manhattan Project, although they did not know of each other's covert work. In 1950 as the atomic spy network unraveled, Gold, who had picked up material from Greenglass in New Mexico, positively identified Greenglass as his contact. That identification turned the investigation away from Ted Hall, who initially was a suspect. Greenglass confessed, implicating his wife, his sister and his brother-in law. To lessen their punishment, his wife came forward, providing details of her husband and her in-laws' involvement. She and Greenglass had given Julius Rosenberg handwritten documents and drawings of the bomb, and Rosenberg had devised a cut-up Jell-O box as a signal. The Venona decryptions also corroborated the extent of Julius Rosenberg's spy ring, though they were not made public. The Rosenbergs, however, denied everything and adamantly refused to name names or answer many questions. They were found guilty, sentenced to death in 1951 and despite pleas for clemency, executed on June 19, 1953 in the electric chair at Sing-Sing prison in New York. Because they chose to cooperate, Greenglass received 15 years and his wife was never formally charged.

Lona Cohen
Lona Cohen and her husband Morris were American communists who made a career of industrial espionage for the Soviets. But in August 1945, she picked up some Manhattan Project secrets from Ted Hall and smuggled them past security in a tissue box. Soon after the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, authorities ramped up security for the scientists in the Los Alamos region. After rendezvousing with Hall in Albuquerque and stuffing Hall's sketch and documents under the tissues, Lona discovered that agents were searching and questioning train passengers. Posing as a hapless woman who had misplaced her ticket, she successfully distracted police, who handed her the "forgotten" box of tissues, whose secret papers she spirited to her Soviet handlers.

When the investigations and trials of the early 1950s got scorchingly close, the Cohens fled to Moscow. In 1961 the couple, under aliases, resurfaced in a London suburb, living as Canadian antiquarian booksellers, a cover for their continued spying. Their spy paraphernalia included a radio transmitter stashed under the refrigerator, fake passports, and antique books concealing stolen information. At their trial the Cohens refused to spill their secrets, once again thwarting any lead to Ted Hall's spying. They received 20 years, but in 1969 were released in exchange for Britons incarcerated in the Soviet Union. Both received that country's highest hero award before their deaths in the 1990s.

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Despite being an ally during World War II, the Soviet Union launched an all-out espionage effort to uncover the military and defense secrets of the United States and Britain in the 1940s. Within days of Britain's highly classified decision in 1941 to begin research on building an atomic bomb, an informant in the British civil service notified the Soviets.

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Integration came to the nation's space agency in the mid-1960s.

On May 13, 1961, in its first issue after Alan Shepard's historic Mercury mission, the nation's leading black newspaper, the New York Amsterdam News, ran a front-page column that asked a question on the minds of millions of Americans. "If you are like me," wrote executive editor James Hicks, "as soon as you finished thrilling to the flight of the United States's first man into outer space, your next thought was, 'I wonder if there were any Negroes who had anything to do with Commander Shepard's flight?' " History forced President John F. Kennedy to commit the country to explore space at exactly the same time it forced him to confront the movement for civil rights. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's Earth orbit, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Alan Shepard's flight, the Freedom Rides with their attendant violence and imposition of martial law, and Kennedy's man-on-the-moon-by-the-end-of-the-decade speech all happened within weeks of one another in 1961.

More than 50 years later, few people know about the first African-Americans in the space program. They performed mathematical and engineering work at a time when laws would not allow them to use the same bathroom as their white co-workers.

Among them was a small group of young African-American men who left Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in January 1964 to work at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. These men did not lead protests or stage sit-ins (even when given the opportunity), but what they accomplished as NASA's first black engineers was part of the civil rights revolution.

Kennedy chose federal employment as one of the tools to force integration at precisely the time that NASA and its contractors were creating 200,000 jobs in Alabama, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It is possible that Kennedy took this route because he doubted Congress would give him the power to do anything greater through legislation. But Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who believed the root of racial injustice was southern poverty, believed that one way to achieve racial integration was to create jobs. He thought an activist federal government could pour money into the region and bring it into the nation's social and economic mainstream. After Kennedy placed Johnson at the head of both his National Aeronautics and Space Council and the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, the vice president was well positioned to implement his plan. For many African-Americans who went to work for NASA, the new space program created employment opportunities that had never before been available to them.

There is a short list of steps NASA took to promote equal employment in the year before the 1964 Civil Rights Act became law: The agency created a contractors' group in Alabama that used its money and influence to make sure African-Americans got space jobs. NASA hired Charlie Smoot, called the "first Negro recruiter" in official agency histories, to travel the nation persuading black scientists and engineers to come south. The Marshall Space Flight Center invited representatives of the historically black colleges to Huntsville in 1963, and a year later opened the agency's college cooperative education program-in which students alternated semesters at school with semesters at Marshall-to blacks.

As a result, Walter Applewhite, Wesley Carter, George Bourda, Tommy Dubone, William Winfield, Frank C. Williams Jr., and Morgan Watson arrived at Marshall to become the embodiment of Johnson's plan for jobs in the South.

NASA's Cooperative Education Program
When he was young, Morgan Watson says, he didn't have a green thumb, but had what he calls "a greasy thumb": He liked taking things apart and putting them back together. "I worked in a hardware store," he says, "and the white store owner saw my report card one day and saw that I had good grades in math and science, chemistry, and so forth, and he said, 'You know, you would probably make a good engineer.' " Watson didn't know what an engineer did, "so I went to the library and started reading about [them]."

Watson eventually entered the new engineering school at the all-black Southern University-Baton Rouge. By the time Charlie Smoot arrived, the university faculty considered Watson and six other young men the most promising engineering students at the school.

The seven were given exams, though Smoot reports that none of the white students who found jobs at NASA through the Co-Op program were required to take them. Once the agency was convinced the students were eligible, they were hired.

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How NASA Joined the Civil Rights Revolution

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On May 13, 1961, in its first issue after Alan Shepard's historic Mercury mission, the nation's leading black newspaper, the New York Amsterdam News, ran a front-page column that asked a question on the minds of millions of Americans.

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Jesse Owens got no congratulations from FDR after taking home 4 olympic gold medals!

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Jesse Owens got no congratulations from FDR after taking home 4 olympic gold medals!

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After the Berlin Olympics, there was no invitation for Jesse Owens to the White House. To celebrate the release of Race in UK cinemas on 3 June, here's a look at how the athlete was treated at home and abroad
After his Olympic triumph, Jesse Owens burnished his own legend. He was well aware of its symbolic power and marketability. The defeat of Nazi designs for an athletic exhibition of Aryan supremacy came to seem almost a personal battle between the black athlete and the Führer.

Owens later wrote: "My whole life was wrapped up, summed up - and stopped up - by a single incident: my confrontation with the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, in the 1936 Olympics. The lines were drawn then as they had never been drawn before or since. The Germans were [...] coming to represent everything that free people have always feared."

It is not clear whether Hitler snubbed Owens by refusing to acknowledge his victories. The record suggests this reading is wrong, or at best doubtful. There are reports of a Nazi salute, a wave or a handshake. Yet there is no doubt at all about the hurt inflicted on Owens by the neglect of US President Franklin D Roosevelt.

Owens received no telegram of congratulations for his record-breaking haul of medals. On his return, there was no invitation to the White House to shake hands with the President. That honour was reserved for white Olympians. Owens even had to attend a non-presidential reception in his honour with his mother at the Waldorf Astoria using the goods lift.

Was Roosevelt, architect of the New Deal, a closet racist? According to one account, FDR segregated black and white servants at the White House at mealtimes to stop them talking. He appointed Hugo Black to the Supreme Court in the knowledge that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He neither enacted nor supported legislation to outlaw lynching.

The US civil rights movement was still at least two decades from building up a head of steam under Martin Luther King. In 1936, more than 70 years after Abraham Lincoln had declared emancipation of the slaves who had fought for freedom on the Union side in the Civil War, American society was still rife with racial discrimination.

Owens had experienced this reality all his life, from his impoverished Alabama childhood to his growing success as an athlete at university. Though he was the first black captain of the Ohio State University athletics team, he had to live off campus, shower separately, eat at designated black-only restaurants and stay in black-only hotels while travelling.

After confounding Nazi racial theories at the Berlin Olympic stadium, it was hurtful to return to his homeland and find clear signs of similar attitudes. Yet he did not seem surprised.

He said of the experience: "I'd spent my whole life watching my father and mother and older brothers and sisters trying to escape their own kind of Hitler, first in Alabama and then in Cleveland, and all I wanted now was my chance to run as fast and jump as far as I could so I'd never have to look back.

Credit: Getty

"If I could just win those gold medals, I said to myself, the Hitlers of the world would have no more meaning for me. For anyone, maybe."

He maintained a kind of detachment: "I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn't in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I'd learned long ago from Charles Riley [Owens's coach], the only victory that counts is the one over yourself."

As America began to change post-war, Owens was happy to capitalise on his achievements by working as a sporting ambassador for the government. He accepted well-paid corporate jobs and made a good living as a motivational speaker. He had complained soon after losing his amateur status post Berlin: "A fellow desires something for himself."

He believed in the ethos of sport, its power to transcend politics. And yet, by 1972, he could also write in his book I Have Changed: "I realised now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man concerned, that any black man who wasn't militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward."
* New movie Race tells the incredible true story of Jesse Owens. Race is released in UK cinemas on 3 June 2016. For tickets, go to racemovietickets.com

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After the Berlin Olympics, there was no invitation for Jesse Owens to the White House. To celebrate the release of Race in UK cinemas on 3 June, here's a look at how the athlete was treated at home and abroad After his Olympic triumph, Jesse Owens burnished his own legend.

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Washington Huskies Rowing 1930's History

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The Greatest Underdog, Nazi-Defeating American Olympic Victory You've Never Heard Of

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Sportswriter Grantland Rice called it the "high spot" of the 1936 Olympics. Bill Henry, who called the race for CBS, said it was "the outstanding victo ...

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World War II Part 1: Crash Course US History #35

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This has all of the ideas you will need.

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Kids learn about the history of the Cold War. Educational articles for teachers, students, and schools including the leaders of the Cold War, battles and proxy wars, communism, major events, Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Berlin Wall, and countries involved in this nuclear stalemate.

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Thomas Bolles, a rowing coach and former athletic director at Harvard University, died yesterday of a heart attack in Raleigh, N.C. He was 76 years old and maintained homes in Raleigh and in Clearwater, Fla.

Mr. Bolles began his career as rowing coach at Harvard in 1937, after serving as freshman rowing coach at the University of Washington, where he was an outstanding oarsman. His new appointment was considered something of a gamble at the time since the Harvard varsity of 1937 was the first varsity crew he had ever coached. He remained the rowing coach until 1951 when he became athletic director. He retired eight years ago.

He received his B.A. degree from Washington in 1926 and his M.A. degree in 1936, majoring in history. He did graduate work at Harvard and was the first nongraduate to be appointed athletic director at Harvard.

Except for the three years he served in the Navy during World War II as a lieutenent commander, Mr. Bolles turned out exceptional crews. In his years at Cambridge, Harvard lost only once to Yale, in 1949, and its only defeat by Princeton in the Compton Cup Regatta came in 1951.

Twice the Crimson won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley and in 1947, 1943 and 1949 Harvard captured the Eastern sprint championship. The 1947 varsity won the Lake Washington Regatta 2,000meter sprint, setting a world record of minutes 49 seconds.

He is survived by his wife, the former Doris Ferguson of Raleigh; a son, Lemuel H. of Hamilton, Mass.; a daughter, Mrs. Theodore Bartlett of Darien, Conn., and four grandchildren. His first wife, the former Catherine Hope, died in 1968.

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Thomas Bolles, Rowing Coach And Athletic Head at Harvard

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Thomas Bolles, a rowing coach and former athletic director at Harvard University, died yesterday of a heart attack in Raleigh, N.C. He was 76 years old and maintained homes in Raleigh and in Clearwater, Fla. Mr. Bolles began his career as rowing coach at Harvard in 1937, after serving as freshman rowing coach at the University of Washington, where he was an outstanding oarsman.

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NACA engineers tested, developed, and recommended one of the most vital technologies that the U.S. needed to successfully launch the Saturn rocket.

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By Rachel Ayres, Montesano High School intern to GraysHarborTalk

Recently, the story of Montesano High School (MHS) graduate Robert (Bobby) Moch has gone from the plaque of the high school's Hall of Fame to the pages of a New York Times Best Seller, The Boys in the Boat.

Moch's story begins June 20, 1914, in Montesano. His father, Gaston Moch, was a jeweler in town. His shop was "where mother and everyone else went for wedding presents, graduation presents, and wristwatches," said Pat Clemons, a Montesano resident, who is also in MHS's Hall of Fame.

"I believe he and his family lived a relatively comfortable town life," The Boys of the Boat author, Daniel James Brown, said. "Though I'm sure the Depression affected them as it affected pretty much everyone."

As a high school student, Moch was not very tall for his age. "Even though he was only 5'7″ he went out for basketball at Montesano High, and lettered in the sport. He also liked to join in sand lot football games, even though he was always the smallest kid on the team," Brown stated. It was also well known that Moch was quick witted, intelligent, and a go getter.

After graduating from Montesano High School in 1932, Moch continued his education at the University of Washington. There, he was first introduced to crew, a sport where athletes row a shell boat. Though he was not the typical large size for rowing, he was a perfect fit for coxswaining, which requires those with small stature, a quick mind, and a loud voice.

As Brown puts it, "The coxswain is central to the success of any boat. It's something like the role a quarterback has to play in football. There is always a game plan going into each race, but once the boat is on the water, circumstances change quickly and the coxswain has to be the one to change the plan and communicate the change to the rest of the crew. He or she often has to make split second decisions that will determine the outcome of the race."

"He was good at taking charge of men, even men much larger than he was," said Brown. "He was very smart, so he quickly rose in the ranks of potential coxswains for the 1936 Olympic boat.". Together the UW Huskies won the final Olympic trials and boarded the SS Manhattan. Bound for Berlin, Germany, the nine man team along with their racing shell, the Husky Clipper, crossed the North Atlantic.

Even though it was five years before the United States would declare war on Nazi Germany, tensions were growing. In fact, the United States debated whether to boycott the Olympics. In his book, Brown describes in detail how Berlin had "put on a fake front" for tourists. Meanwhile in other parts Germany, concentration camps were being assembled. The discrimination of Jews, along with other targeted groups, grew increasingly worse.

Just before leaving for Berlin, Moch found out some life changing news. In a letter, his father told him that he was Jewish. "His father kept that from him, in hopes of protecting him or maybe having an easier upbringing," said Teri Zillyett, English teacher at MHS, as well as a member of the Hall of Fame committee. "This was a very emotional part of the book to me."

Spoiler Alert: The team went on to win gold in the event, beating the others despite unthinkable obstacles including a very sick teammate and a late start to the race.

"Moch was the one who had to figure out a way to get the boat back into contention after they had a terrible start," said Brown. The race of their lives became a desperate situation.

"It was up to Moch to get his crew to rally. As they came into the final few hundred meters the German fans in the grandstands were chanting 'Deutschland, Deutschland, Deutschland' so loudly that the crew couldn't hear Moch's commands. He had to grab a wooden dowel and pound it on the side of the boat to get the boys to take the rhythm up to the extraordinary 44-strokes-per-minute that they needed in order to win," Brown said. And with a flying finish, they indeed won.

After college, Moch signed on as assistant crew coach at the UW, under his old coach. Moch later went on to become the head crew coach at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and earned his law degree from Harvard Law School. Moch became a very successful lawyer in Seattle, even winning a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

"He also spent a good deal of energy later in life trying to get more recognition for his crew - for what they had pulled off in Berlin," remarked Brown of Moch. So, that is how it came to be that Moch is in the MHS Hall of Fame.

"I first learned of Robert Moch [being] in the 1936 Berlin Olympics when we inducted him into the Hall of Fame for Montesano High School," said Zillyett.

Even though Moch's legacy is decades old, the story of the determined young man still resonates today. A movie is even in the making about the 1936 win for the UW crew team. "Bob Moch managed to master his circumstances and emerge as a truly dynamic leader. He was just a great guy," said Brown.

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Robert Moch Brings Home Olympic Gold for Monte

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By Rachel Ayres, Montesano High School intern to GraysHarborTalk Recently, the story of Montesano High School (MHS) graduate Robert (Bobby) Moch has gone from the plaque of the high school's Hall of Fame to the pages of a New York Times Best Seller, The Boys in the Boat.

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Joe Rantz was born in 1914 in Spokane, Washington, and rowed in the 1936 Olympics.

Rantz's mother died when he was three. At the start of the Great Depression, when Rantz was 15, his father and stepmother abandoned Joe. Without telling him where they were going they drove away in the family car while he watched the tail lights disappear in disbelief. In Rantz's words, "The whole thing was over in five minutes."

Cast aside, Rantz spent three years living alone in a half-finished home in the Oregon backwoods, fending for himself. To eat, he foraged for edible mushrooms and blackberries. He fished with a make-shift pole in local streams. He sold fish he caught at the back doors of markets, sometimes bartering them for what he needed. He did every odd-job a 15 year old could find. He dug out stumps in pastures, split fence rails, loaded barns and worked part-time as a logger. It was backbreaking work.

Despite the lack of parents or guardians, he still attended the nearest high school. But at the end of every day he was stoically alone, eating on and rewashing the same plate each night.

After three years of surviving like this, an uncle found him, took him in and brought him to a real home and a new high school. But there was no news about Joe's father and stepmother.

At the new high school, Joe competed for the gymnastics team his senior year. Rantz's athleticism on the bars attracted the University of Washington's crew coach, who by chance happened to be visiting the high school one day for other reasons. The coach encouraged Rantz to attend the University of Washington and try out for the crew team.

Rantz was admitted to the University of Washington, and he made the crew team. But he had to pay his own way with money scraped together from summer construction jobs and part-time jobs during the school year.

His living quarters for his four years at the University of Washington was a closet-sized room in the basement of the local YMCA. Unlike well-dressed classmates, Rantz wore the same faded sweater almost every day, and it became fodder for campus conversation. But Rantz silenced his fashion critics when he was the last man selected for the prestigious varsity-eight boat in 1936.

The 1936 varsity boat was perhaps the best varsity boat in University of Washington history. It was made up of the sons of loggers, shipyard laborers and farmers. They beat archrival Berkeley, ending Berkeley's streak of three consecutive national championships. Washington then beat the best of the Ivy League. They ultimately beat everyone in the country to become the United States' rowing team for the eight-man race in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

At the start of the 2,000 meter (1.25 mile) gold-medal race, the University of Washington crew, in a boat named Husky Clipper, was in the farthest lane from the starter, and they did not hear the starting signal over the noise of the 70,000 fans in attendance that included Adolf Hitler and his top Nazi aides.

Washington was still dead last halfway through the race. But then the crew drew on a mysterious reservoir of power and cranked its pace up to an inconceivable 44 stokes per minute for the remaining half-mile. Their hearts were now pumping at over two-hundred beats per minute. They passed Great Britain, Hungary, Switzerland and Germany. With blades swinging in perfect synchronicity, they then passed the stunned Italians in the race's final 10 strokes.

Washington went from a gummed up start to a gold medal photo-finish and setting the world and Olympic records. It won the race by a mere six tenths of a second, or by about three feet.

Rantz's father, and the rest of the world, had listened to it all on the radio.

The book The Boys in the Boat is about Rantz and his improbable, circuitous journey from crushing early struggles to Gold Medalist in the greatest race in Olympic rowing history.

Rantz graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Chemical Engineering. He passed in 2007.

The finish of the eight-man, 2,000 meter gold medal race, 1936 Olympics

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Joe Rantz was born in 1914 in Spokane, Washington, and rowed in the 1936 Olympics. Rantz's mother died when he was three. At the start of the Great Depression, when Rantz was 15, his father and stepmother abandoned Joe.

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ESPIONAGE AND THE MANHATTAN PROJECT(1940-1945)
Events >Bringing It All Together, 1942-1945

Security was a way of life for the Manhattan Project. The goal was to keep the entire atomic bomb program secret from Germany and Japan. In this, Manhattan Project security officials succeeded. They also sought, however, to keep word of the atomic bomb from reaching the Soviet Union. Although an ally of Britain and the United States in the war against Germany, the Soviet Union remained a repressive dictatorship and a potential future enemy. Here, security officials were less successful. Soviet spies penetrated the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and several other locations, sending back to Russia critical information that helped speed the development of the Soviet bomb.

The theoretical possibility of developing an atomic bomb was not a secret. Fission had been discovered in Berlin, and word of the breakthrough had spread quickly around the world. The scientific basis for a sustained, or even explosive, chain reaction was now clear to any well-versed research physicist. Most physicists initially may have thought an explosive chain reaction unlikely, but the possibility could not be entirely discounted.

With an atomic bomb program of its own, Germany attempted to build a large spy network within the United States. Most German spies were quickly caught, however, and none penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project. German physicists heard rumors and suspected an atomic bomb project was underway in Britain, the United States, or both, but that was all. Japan also had a modest atomic research program. Rumors of the Manhattan Project reached Japan as well, but, as with Germany, no Japanese spies penetrated the Manhattan Project.

The Soviet Union proved more adept at espionage, primarily because it was able to play on the ideological sympathies of a significant number of Americans and British as well as foreign émigrés. Soviet intelligence services devoted a tremendous amount of resources into spying on the United States and Britain. In the United States alone, hundreds of Americans provided secret information to the Soviet Union, and the quality of Soviet sources in Britain was even better. (In contrast, during the war neither the American nor the British secret services had a single agent in Moscow.) The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) had thousands of members, a disproportionate number of whom were highly educated and likely to work in sensitive wartime industries. Many physicists were members of the CPUSA before the war. This does not mean that every member of the CPUSA was willing to supply secret information to the Soviet Union, but some were and some did.

Soviet intelligence first learned of Anglo-American talk of an atomic bomb program in September 1941, almost a year before the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) was created. The information likely came from John Cairncross, a member of the infamous "Cambridge Five" spies in Britain. (Cairncross served as a private secretary for a British government official, Lord Hankey, who was privy to some British discussions of the MAUD Report.) Another of the "Cambridge Five," Donald Maclean (left), also sent word of the potential for an atomic bomb to his Soviet handlers around the same time. (Maclean was a key Soviet agent. In 1947 and 1948, he served as a British liaison with the MED's successor, the Atomic Energy Commission.) At the same time, the sudden drop in fission-related publications emerging from Britain and the United States caught the attention of Georgii Flerov, a young Soviet physicist, who in April 1942 wrote directly to Josef Stalin to warn him of the danger.

Soviet intelligence soon recognized the importance of the subject and gave it the appropriate codename: ENORMOZ ("enormous"). Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow pressured their various American residencies to develop sources within the Manhattan Project. Many of these early attempts at recruiting spies were detected and foiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Manhattan Project counterintelligence officials. In February 1943, they learned of Soviet attempts to contact physicists conducting related work at the "Rad Lab" at the University of California, Berkeley. The scientists in question were placed under surveillance and, when possible, drafted into the military so that they could be assigned away from sensitive subjects. Another scientist at the Rad Lab caught passing information to the Soviet Union in 1944 was immediately discharged. In early 1944, the FBI also learned of several " Met Lab" employees suspected of divulging secret information to their Soviet handlers. The employees were immediately dismissed. While these Soviet attempts at espionage were discovered and thwarted, other Soviet spies went undetected.

Of the Soviet spies not caught during the war, one of the most valuable was the British physicist handlers detailed information regarding atomic weapons design. Returning home to begin work on the British atomic program in 1946, he continued to pass secret information to the Soviet Union intermittently until he was finally caught (largely due to Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs first offered his services to Soviet intelligence in late 1941. Soon thereafter, he began passing information regarding British atomic research. Soviet intelligence lost contact with him in early 1944 but eventually found out that Fuchs had been reassigned to the bomb research and development laboratory at Los Alamos as part of the newly-arrived contingent of British scientists. Fuchs worked in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, and from there he passed to his SovietVENONA), and in January 1950 he confessed everything.

For over four decades, Klaus Fuchs was thought to be the only spy who was a physicist at Los Alamos. In the mid-1990s, release of the VENONA intercepts revealed an alleged second scientist-spy: Theodore Hall. Like Fuchs, a long-time communist who volunteered his services, Hall made contact with Soviet intelligence in November 1944 while at Los Alamos. Although not as detailed or voluminous as that provided by Fuchs, the data supplied by Hall on implosion and other aspects of atomic weapons design served as an important supplement and confirmation of Fuchs's material. The FBI learned of Hall's espionage in the early 1950s. Unlike Fuchs, however, under questioning Hall refused to admit anything. The American government was unwilling to expose the VENONA secret in open court. Hall's espionage activities had apparently ended by then, so the matter was quietly dropped.

The most famous "atomic spies," Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (right), never worked for the Manhattan Project. Julius Rosenberg was an American engineer who by the end of the war had been heavily involved in industrial espionage for years, both as a source himself and as the "ringleader" of a network of like-minded engineers dispersed throughout the country. Julius's wife, the former Ethel Greenglass, was also a devoted communist, as was her brother David. David Greenglass was an Army machinist, and in the summer of 1944 he was briefly assigned to Oak Ridge. After a few weeks, he was transferred to Los Alamos, where he worked on implosion as a member of the Special Engineering Detachment. Using his wife Ruth as the conduit, Greenglass soon began funneling information regarding the atomic bomb to his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, who then turned it over to Soviet intelligence. As Greenglass later explained, "I was young, stupid, and immature, but I was a good Communist."

In March 1946, Greenglass left the Army. Soviet intelligence maintained contact with him, urging him to enroll at the University of Chicago in order to re-enter atomic research. The NKGB (the People's Commissary for State Security and the predecessor to the KGB) offered to pay his tuition, but Greenglass's application to Chicago was rejected. In 1950, the confession of Klaus Fuchs led the FBI to his handler, Harry Gold, who in turn led the FBI to David Greenglass. When confronted, Greenglass confessed, implicating his wife Ruth and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg. This was soon confirmed through VENONA intercepts (Rosenberg was codenamed ANTENNA and LIBERAL, Ethel was WASP, Greenglass was BUMBLEBEE and CALIBER, and his wife Ruth was OSA). The "rolling up" of the espionage ring stopped, however, with the Rosenbergs. Julius and Ethel (who knew of her husband's activities and at times assisted him) both maintained their innocence and refused to cooperate with authorities in order to lessen their sentences. Because of his cooperation, Greenglass received only 15 years, and his wife, Ruth, was never formally charged. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. Authorities apparently hoped to use the death sentences as leverage to get them to name names, but the Rosenbergs maintained their silence. Despite a worldwide campaign for clemency, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on June 19, 1953.

At least two other scientists associated with the Manhattan Project also served as spies for Soviet Union: Allan Nunn May and Bruno Pontecorvo. Another British physicist who came over with James Chadwick in 1943, May, unlike his colleague Klaus Fuchs, was not assigned to Los Alamos. Instead, he was chosen to assist in the Canadian effort to construct a heavy water-moderated reactor at Chalk River, Ontario. During 1944, May visited the Met Lab several times. Once during these visits, he even met Leslie Groves. In February 1945, May passed what he had learned to Soviet intelligence. His colleague at Chalk River, Bruno Pontecorvo, also served as a spy. Pontecorvo was a former protégé of Enrico Fermi. In 1936, Pontecorvo, who was Jewish, fled fascist Italy for France. When France fell to the invading Nazi armies in 1940, Pontecorvo was again forced to flee fascism. He was invited to join British atomic research, and by 1943 he found himself assigned to the Chalk River facility. Pontecorvo established contact with Soviet intelligence and began passing them information about the atomic activities there. He continued his dual life as a physicist and a spy in Canada until 1949 when he was promoted and moved back to Britain to join the atomic research being conducted there. Following the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, Pontecorvo's Soviet handlers became worried that he would be exposed, and in 1950 Pontecorvo defected with his family to the Soviet Union. Pontecorvo continued his work as a physicist in the Soviet Union, eventually receiving two Orders of Lenin for his efforts, all the while continuing to deny that he had been a spy during his years in Canada and Britain.

A number of spies within the Manhattan Project have never been positively identified. Most are only known by their codenames, as revealed in the VENONA decrypts. One source, an engineer or scientist who was given the codename FOGEL (later changed to PERSEUS), apparently worked on the fringes of the Manhattan Project for several years, passing along what information he could. Soviet documents state that he was offered employment at Los Alamos, but, to the regret of his handlers, he turned it down for family reasons. Another source, a physicist codenamed MAR, first began supplying information to the Soviet Union in 1943. In October of that year, he was transferred to the Hanford Engineer Works. In another case, a stranger one day in the summer of 1944 showed up unannounced at the Soviet Consulate in New York, dropped off a package, and quickly left. The package was later found to contain numerous secret documents relating to the Manhattan Project. Soviet intelligence attempted to find out who the deliverer of the package was so that they could recruit him. They never could, however, determine his identity. An Englishman codenamed ERIC also provided details of atomic research in 1943, as did an American source codenamed QUANTUM, who provided secret information relating to gaseous diffusion in the summer of 1943. Who QUANTUM was or what became of him after the summer of 1943 remains a mystery.

Few aspects of the Manhattan Project remained secret from the Soviet Union for long. Given the size of the pre-existing Soviet espionage network within the United States and the number of Americans who were sympathetic to communism or even members of the CPUSA themselves, it seems highly unlikely in retrospect that penetrations of the Manhattan Project could have been prevented. In most cases, the individuals who chose to provide information to the Soviet Union did so for ideological reasons, not for money. They were usually volunteers who approached Soviet intelligence themselves. Further, in most cases, they were not aware that anyone else had chosen to do the same thing. (Fuchs, Greenglass, and Hall were all at Los Alamos at the same time, yet none of them knew of the espionage activities of the other two.)

Soviet espionage directed at the Manhattan Project probably hastened by at least 12-18 months the Soviet acquisition of an atomic bomb. When the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test on August 29, 1949 (left), the device they used was virtually identical in design to the one that had been tested at Trinity four years previously.

To view the next "event" of the Manhattan Project, proceed to"1945: Dawn of the Atomic Era."
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Sources and notes for this page.

The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources. The main sources for this entry were:

Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999);

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999);

David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994);

Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and

Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999).

For a summary of the failure of German espionage in the United States (and in Britain), see Richelson, Century of Spies, 139-144.

On the scope of Soviet espionage in the United States in general, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield; Haynes and Klehr, Venona; and Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood.

On Cairncross as the source of the first word on atomic energy to reach Moscow, see Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 82-83; Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield, 114; and Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, 172. Cairncross may have passed word as early as October 1940; see Richelson, Century of Spies, 136. In 1993, Cairncross denied to the Schecters ever having passed this information (Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History (Washington: Brassey's, 2002), 348 (note 5)). On Maclean passing word of the atomic bomb program in the fall of 1941, see Richelson, Century of Spies, 137. On Maclean in general, including his work with the AEC, see Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 52-55. On the Flerov letter, see Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 76-79.

On the name "ENORMOZ," see Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield, 118. For those Soviet intelligence operations that were detected and stopped, see Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb, United States Army in World War II (Washington: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1988), 263-266, and Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 325-326.

For the sources consulted regarding Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, see the notes for their separate entries ( Fuchs' notes; Hall's notes).

The information on the Rosenbergs and David Greenglass is from Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield, 128; Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 295-303, 307-311; and Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, 198-202, 205-216, 221-222, 327-334.

The information on May is from Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 105. On Pontecorvo, see Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 317-318, 379.

On FOGEL/PERSEUS, see Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, 190-195, and Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 16, 313-314. Before Theodore Hall was identified, FOGEL/PERSEUS was sometimes mistakenly thought to be the source that turned out to be Hall. On MAR, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield, 117. On the strange "walk-in" in New York, see Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, 193. On ERIC, see ibid., 181-182, and on QUANTUM, see Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 311-313.

For estimates of how many years Soviet espionage sped up their atomic weapons program, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield, 132, and Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 222.

The Los Alamos ID Badge photograph of Fuchs was taken in 1944; it is courtesy the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and is reprinted in Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra, Picturing the Bomb: Photographs from the Secret World of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1995), 106. The photograph of Werner Heisenberg is courtesy the National Archives (NARA); it is reprinted in Jeremy Bernstein, ed., Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Woodbury, NY: American Institute of Physics, 1996). The photograph of Hall and the photograph of Donald Maclean are courtesy the National Security Agency. The photographs of David and Ruth Greenglass, Julius Rosenberg, and Ethel Rosenberg, are all courtesy the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (via NARA). Clickhere for more information on the photograph of Kasparov, Kamen, and Kheifits. The "Silence Means Security" propaganda poster is courtesy the Office of Government Reports, United States Information Service, Division of Public Inquiry, Bureau of Special Services, Office of War Information (via NARA). The photograph of the first Soviet atomic test is courtesy the Federation of American Scientists.

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Manhattan Project: Espionage and the Manhattan Project, 1940-1945

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ESPIONAGE AND THE MANHATTAN PROJECT (1940-1945) Events >Bringing It All Together, 1942-1945 Security was a way of life for the Manhattan Project. The goal was to keep the entire atomic bomb program secret from Germany and Japan. In this, Manhattan Project security officials succeeded.

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The Spy Who Saved The Soviets

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ichard Sorge had just returned to Tokyo on June 22, 1941, when he heard the report, being shouted by newsboys in the street, that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. Sorge, a prominent German journalist, notorious womanizer, and heavy drinker, had earlier been driving through the countryside with his latest paramour, a beautiful German pianist. Now, sitting at the bar at the Imperial Hotel, he sank into a black mood and became belligerently drunk.

"Hitler's a f - - -ing criminal," he shouted in English. "A murderer. But Stalin will teach the bastard a lesson. You just wait and see!" Neither the Japanese barman nor Sorge's drinking companion could calm him. From a public telephone in the lobby he dialed the German embassy. "This war is lost!" he shouted to the startled ambassador Eugen Ott, a longtime friend.

Sorge's rage was fueled in part by hatred of war (he had served in the German army in the First World War and was grievously wounded) and by his belief that Hitler's attack would lead to disaster. But there was another, more potent, reason for his anger. For Richard Sorge-the German journalist, Nazi Party member, and part-time press officer in the German embassy-was in fact an officer in the Soviet foreign military intelligence service, the GRU, and the most important Soviet spy in Asia. And just weeks earlier, his warnings to Moscow of the imminent German attack had been ignored.

On a dispatch he sent the GRU on June 1, which read, "Expected start of German-Soviet war around June 15 is based on information Lt. Colonel Scholl brought with him from Berlin...for Ambassador Ott," Sorge's superiors in Moscow had written, "Suspicious. To be listed with telegrams intended as provocations." An earlier warning from Sorge was contemptuously dismissed by Stalin as coming from "a shit who has set himself up with some little factories and brothels in Japan."

Sorge nonetheless continued his espionage work-and after the shock of the German attack proved him right, Moscow began heeding his reports. Within a few months, the activities of this man, who many regard as the most important spy of World War II, would provide information that enabled the Soviets to halt the Nazi blitzkrieg at the gates of Moscow, and altered the course of the war.

e seemed custom-made for the role. Richard Sorge was born in 1895 in southern Russia. His mother was Russian, his father a German engineer. The family moved to Germany a few years later, where the boy was raised in an upper-middle-class home. But his Russian origins exerted a lifelong influence. In 1914, Sorge enlisted in the German army. While recuperating from shrapnel wounds that shattered his legs and left him with a lifelong limp, he seduced-and was seduced by-a nurse. She and her father, a physician and a Marxist, introduced Sorge to radical ideas. He spent the next few years studying economics and political science, and Marxist ideology.

At the end of the war, radicalism of all stripes was rampant in Germany, and Sorge veered leftward. He earned a PhD in 1919 and in the same year joined the German Communist Party. Sorge plunged into leftist propaganda work among some German coal miners with whom he had taken a job. He also plunged into an affair with the wife of one of his former professors.

Sorge was both handsome and charismatic, irresistible to women and admired by men. Such was the case with the Gerlach household. Years later Christiane Gerlach described her first sight of Sorge: "It was as if a stroke of lightning ran through me. In this one second something awoke in me that had slumbered until now, something dangerous, dark, inescapable...." Sorge also charmed the professor, Christiane's husband, who agreed to an amicable divorce, and Sorge and Christiane married in 1922. It lasted only a few years.

Sorge's leftist agitation got him in trouble with the police, and in 1924 he fled Germany for the new Promised Land-Soviet Russia. There he joined the Soviets' new international arm, the Comintern (short for Communist International), working as a liaison with foreign communist parties. In 1929, he began work as a military intelligence officer, and the GRU assigned him to work in China. He was instructed in the political and military aspects of his new position as well as the fundamentals of clandestine trade craft. Ever a magnet for women, he took as a lover an attractive drama student, Katya Maximova. After three productive years of espionage work in China, Sorge returned to Moscow in 1933, where he married Maximova, a decision that would bring her grief.

After Japan's conquest of Manchuria in 1931-32, Moscow feared that Japanese aggression might turn toward the Soviet Far East. Sorge's assignment was to set up a network in Japan and reveal Japan's intent toward the Soviet Union. To establish his cover as a journalist, he traveled there via Germany, where a newspaper editor who agreed to accept his articles gave him a letter of introduction to a German army officer, Col. Eugen Ott, the new military attaché in Tokyo.

Sorge arrived in Tokyo in September 1933. His newspaper articles helped establish his credentials as an expert on Japan. He also joined the Nazi Party. In this way, he gained access to the German embassy, where diplomats-including the ambassador to Japan at the time, Herbert von Dirksen-came to value his opinions and analysis.

Sorge did not pretend to be an ardent Nazi. He often voiced scorn for Nazi excesses and the stupidity of some party leaders. Curiously, this enhanced, rather than undermined, his credibility. Surely someone who dared speak his mind so freely could be only what he appeared to be-a serious scholar and patriot whose blunt words and war wounds attested to his authenticity. Another aspect of Sorge's "cover" was equally genuine: his penchant for heavy drinking and chasing women. An American journalist and bar-hopping companion wrote later that Sorge "created the impression of being a playboy, almost a wastrel, the very antithesis of a keen and dangerous spy."

In October 1934, Colonel Ott invited Sorge to accompany him on a tour of Manchuria. Sorge wrote a trip report, which Ott forwarded to the high command in Berlin, where it won praise. Sorge became Ott's most trusted adviser on Japanese politics and was welcomed in Ott's home-and before long, into the bed of Helma Ott, the colonel's wife. That Sorge would choose to jeopardize his relationship with the military attaché was surpassed in improbability only by the fact that when Ott learned of the affair, he chose to overlook it, believing, correctly, that it would soon blow over. Ott valued Sorge's insights into Japan too highly to allow this indiscretion to ruin their relationship. One of Ott's favorite epithets for Sorge was "der Unwiderstehliche"-the Irresistible. The colonel, too, had fallen under Sorge's spell.

orge's Tokyo network included two other agents sent by Moscow. Branko Vukelic, a Yugoslav communist, worked as a journalist for a French news agency and handled microfilm work for Sorge. Max Clausen, a German communist, was the ring's radio operator. Clausen sent dispatches in a numerical code using a one-time pad, a cumbersome but virtually unbreakable code system that relied on a secret, random key. Japanese authorities discovered the unauthorized radio transmissions, but were unable to pinpoint the source or decipher the code.

The ring's most important member, after Sorge himself, was Hotsumi Ozaki, a left-leaning Japanese journalist. Ozaki was a highly respected expert on China, with influential political contacts. One of his friends was the chief cabinet secretary to the prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye; Konoye later hired Ozaki as a cabinet consultant. Ozaki moved into an office in the prime minister's official residence, where he had access to classified documents and worked on foreign policy reports and recommendations for the government. Ozaki's information and assessments became key elements of Sorge's reports to Moscow. In Sorge's discussions with German embassy officials, he presented Ozaki's opinions as his own, which further enhanced his stature as a trusted expert.

Sorge lived in a small rented house in a quiet residential neighborhood, within sight of the local police station. This may have been part of Sorge's unorthodox method, to "hide in plain sight." He certainly did not give the appearance of hiding. He raced through Tokyo's crowded streets on a motorcycle at breakneck speed, sober or drunk. In the summer of 1936, he wooed a pretty 26-year-old named Hanako Iishi, a waitress at one of his regular haunts. Before long, Iishi moved into Sorge's house. It would be the most enduring relationship of his life.

n the spring of 1936, Sorge's three years of groundwork in Tokyo began to pay off. Eugen Ott learned from Japanese army contacts of secret negotiations between Germany and Japan for what would be known as the Anti-Comintern Pact, a de facto anti-Soviet treaty. The negotiations were conducted in Berlin, and the German embassy in Tokyo was kept in the dark. Ott shared this intelligence only with Ambassador Dirksen, and with Sorge. As a result, Sorge-and the GRU-were kept abreast of the negotiations, which heightened Moscow's concern that the alliance could threaten the Soviet Union with a two-front war.

In 1938, Ott, who had been promoted to major general, became Germany's ambassador to Japan. This further enhanced Sorge's standing in the German embassy. Ott showed him drafts of his cables and reports and asked his opinion before transmitting them to Berlin. The embassy staff took their cue from Ott. As Sorge himself wrote, "They would come to me and say, 'we have found out such and such a thing, have you heard about it and what do you think?'" The embassy's police attaché, Gestapo Col. Joseph Meisinger, confirmed that the relationship between Ott and Sorge "was now so close that all normal reports from attachés to Berlin became mere appendages to the overall report written by Sorge and signed by the Ambassador."

One of Ott's favorite epithets for Sorge was "der Unwiderstehliche"-the Irresistible. The colonel, too, had fallen under Sorge's spell.

That June, Gen. Genrikh Lyushkov, head of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) in the Soviet Far East, crossed the border into Manchuria and sought political asylum in Japan to avoid Stalin's bloody purge of the Red Army's leadership. Moscow was desperate to know what he was telling the Japanese. Berlin had sent an intelligence officer to Tokyo to help debrief Lyushkov; Sorge got the embassy's copy of the top-secret report. It said that according to Lyushkov, there was strong dissatisfaction and opposition to Stalin in the Soviet Union, and that if Japan struck, the Red Army "may collapse in a day." Lyushkov had also apparently disclosed Soviet military deployments and codes. Naturally, Moscow changed the codes.

Six weeks later, a Soviet-Japanese border clash erupted at the site of Lyushkov's defection, sparked by over-aggressive Soviet efforts to seal the border there. Intelligence from the Sorge ring shaped the Soviets' tough response. Hotsumi Ozaki had learned that Japan's leaders, preoccupied with their war in China, were determined to prevent this from becoming a large-scale conflict. So Moscow threw thousands of men, with armor and air support, into the battle. After two weeks of fighting, the Battle of Lake Khasan ended with Japan accepting Moscow's terms.

The same dynamic played out one year later during an undeclared war on the Mongolia-Manchuria frontier. The stakes and the scope of the fighting were far greater this time, but the result was similar. Again, Sorge was able to report authoritatively that the Japanese government was determined that the conflict not grow into a general war. That emboldened Stalin to deal a crushing blow to the Japanese in August 1939 at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol.

At the same time, Sorge kept Moscow informed about Japan's attempts to draw Germany into an anti-Soviet military alliance. That information contributed to Stalin's decision to counter the threat by himself aligning late that August with Hitler in the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact-triggering the outbreak of the Second World War one week later. In one stroke, Stalin helped instigate war between Germany, Britain, and France, leaving the Soviet Union safely on the sidelines, and cut Japan off from its Anti-Comintern ally, Germany, allowing him to deal with the Japanese military threat in isolation. Sorge's reports to Moscow helped shape this strategy. But his greatest service to the USSR was yet to come.

B y late 1940, Sorge began to pick up indications of a large-scale German military buildup near the Soviet borders. On December 28, he sent his first serious warning to Moscow about a possible German attack. More would follow.

By early May 1941, Sorge became convinced that war was imminent. He summed up his concerns in a dispatch transmitted on May 6: "Possibility of outbreak of war at any moment is very high.... German generals estimate the Red Army's fighting capacity is so low...[it] will be destroyed in the course of a few weeks."

A May 30 dispatch to the GRU began: "Berlin informed Ott that German attack will commence in the latter part of June. Ott 95 percent certain war will commence."

Then, on May 31, Lt. Col. Edwin Scholl confided to Sorge that 170 to 190 German divisions were massed on the Soviet border and the invasion would begin June 15. On June 1, Sorge sent this momentous news to Moscow. It should have been the most important dispatch of his career. It was this message that was marked "suspicious" and a "provocation" by his bosses.

Aware that his warnings were being disregarded, Sorge tried once more to rouse Stalin from his complacency. On June 20, he drafted this warning: "Ott told me that war between Germany and the USSR is inevitable.... Invest [the code name for Ozaki] told me that the Japanese General Staff is already discussing what position to take in the event of war." Max Clausen transmitted the dispatch on June 21; the German invasion began the next day, and took the Red Army totally by surprise. The next five months were catastrophic for Russia.

Immediately after the attack, Moscow called on Sorge for urgent help. A curt radio message ordered him to report on the Japanese government's policy regarding the German-Soviet war. The point was this: if Japan decided to attack the Soviet Far East, a grave situation would become vastly-perhaps fatally-worse. At that moment, Berlin was directing Ambassador Ott to use all possible means to persuade Japan to attack the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union might not survive a two-front war.

Meanwhile, a policy debate arose in Tokyo. Japan was deeply engaged in war in China; but China had vast strategic depth and there was no end in sight. Now, the situation in Europe presented new possibilities. Germany's victories in Western Europe opened the door for Japan to advance into the resource-rich French, Dutch, and British colonies in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, Hitler's invasion of Russia invited Japan to strike north into Siberia and the Soviet Far East. Each course entailed risk. Japan, bogged down in China, could not strike south and north. It would have to choose.

Less than a week after the German attack, Sorge accurately summed up the situation for Moscow. He reported that Japan had decided to send troops into French Indochina; that Ozaki believed Japan would wait to see how the German-Soviet war developed; that it would attack north if the Red Army were quickly defeated; but that Ott believed Japan would not attack north for the time being. Stalin's signature at the bottom of this document indicates that the supreme leader read Sorge's dispatch, not just a summary of it.

The relationship between Ott and Sorge "was now so close that all normal reports from attachés to Berlin became mere appendages to the overall report written by Sorge and signed by the Ambassador."

On July 2, an Imperial Conference-a meeting of Japan's top military and political leaders in the Emperor's presence-set Japan's policy. As Sorge informed Moscow, Japan would send its troops into French Indochina, but would also build up its strength in northern Japan and Manchuria to prepare to strike north if the Red Army were defeated.

At the bottom of this document, the Deputy Head of Soviet Army General Staff Intelligence wrote, "In consideration of the high reliability and accuracy of previous information and the competence of the information sources, this information can be trusted." After Sorge's warnings of the German attack had proved correct, Moscow, belatedly, believed him.

Later that July, Tokyo's situation became more complicated when the United States and Britain imposed an oil embargo on Japan. Almost all the oil Japan imported was controlled by the Anglo-American powers and their allies. The oil-rich Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia), however, lay within Japan's reach. That strengthened the arguments of those in Tokyo advocating southward expansion. But the astounding magnitude of Germany's early victories against the Red Army encouraged those who favored the northward course.

In July, Japanese troops occupied French Indochina. At the same time, Japan sent hundreds of thousands of additional troops into Manchuria, near the Soviet borders. Sorge was unsure in which direction Japan would move, but in the next few weeks he and Ozaki solved the puzzle. On August 25-26, Sorge drafted this message to Moscow: "Invest [Ozaki] was able to learn from circles closest to [Japanese Prime Minister] Konoye...that the High Command...discussed whether they should go to war with the USSR. They decided not to launch the war within this year, repeat, not to launch the war this year."

On September 6, another Imperial Conference confirmed the decision to expand southward-and prepare for war with the United States and Britain. Ozaki got word of this, and Ott confided to Sorge the total failure of his efforts to persuade the Japanese to attack Russia. On September 14, Sorge reported even more emphatically to Moscow that, "In the careful judgment of all of us here...the possibility of [Japan] launching an attack, which existed until recently, has disappeared...."

Now Stalin finally felt free to make the critical decision to move a large part of his Far Eastern reserves westward. In the next two months, 15 infantry divisions, 3 cavalry divisions, 1,700 tanks, and 1,500 aircraft moved from the Soviet Far East to the European front. It was these powerful reinforcements that turned the tide in the Battle of Moscow in the first week of December 1941, at the same time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

he Sorge ring alone, of course, was not solely responsible for this turn of events. But Sorge played an important part. He had scant opportunity to savor his success, however. His spy network had begun to unravel.

In October, Japanese police brought in for questioning a dressmaker who had been recruited by a sub-agent of Ozaki's named Yotoku Miyagi. The dressmaker gave up Miyagi's name. When they hauled in Miyagi, he tried to save his colleagues by leaping to his death through an unguarded window. But the fall was not fatal. Dragged back to the interrogation room with broken bones, he named Ozaki and Sorge as communist agents. On October 18, Sorge was arrested.

After resisting for a week, Sorge agreed to give a full account of his activities in Japan, provided that the authorities took no action against his Japanese lover, Hanako Iishi, and the wives of several of his colleagues, whom he insisted were innocent.

Sorge spent the next three years in Tokyo's Sugamo Prison. Following months of interrogation, he was tried and convicted of being a communist agent whose espionage activities were aimed at overthrowing the emperor system and private property. In September 1943, he was sentenced to death. Sorge was confident, however, that he would not face the gallows; Tokyo would trade him to Moscow in exchange for a Japanese prisoner. His captors had the same idea. The Japanese tried on three separate occasions to arrange a prisoner exchange. Each time, Moscow's reply was the same: "The man called Richard Sorge is unknown to us."

Many countries do not acknowledge their spies. But Sorge was probably doomed for a different reason: he was an embarrassing reminder that Stalin had ignored warnings of the impending German attack. Such a reminder, and witness, would be most unwelcome to Stalin and his regime.

Moscow's apparent indifference to Sorge's fate persuaded the Japanese that there was no point in further attempts to trade, or for mercy. On November 7, 1944, Richard Sorge was hanged in Sugamo Prison. He had no way of knowing that his wife, Katya Maximova, had died more than a year earlier. After waiting forlornly for him for years in Russia, she was arrested by the NKVD in September 1942 on charges, surely false, of spying for Germany. She died in a Siberian labor camp a year later. Her real crime probably was being the wife of Richard Sorge.

Sorge's beloved Iishi fared better. Japanese authorities honored their pledge not to prosecute her, and she was allowed to spend the rest of her life quietly in Tokyo. At her expense, Sorge's remains were moved in 1949 from the prison graveyard to a grassy cemetery in the Tokyo suburbs.

In 1961, a French movie entitled Who Are You, Mr. Sorge? became popular in the Soviet Union. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev saw the film and reportedly asked the KGB whether the story was true. When it was confirmed, Khrushchev awarded Sorge the title Hero of the Soviet Union, its highest honor; Iishi, who died in 2000 at age 89, received a Soviet pension. Today the title is carved into Sorge's large black marble tombstone, a street in Moscow bears his name, and commemorative stamps were issued in his honor.

In the movie, as in real life, Sorge was no James Bond. Still, he was the person whom Ian Fleming, Bond's creator and himself a World War II British intelligence officer, judged "the most formidable spy in history." The intelligence that Sorge provided of Japan's decision to strike south may literally have saved the Soviet Union from defeat. But ironically, Stalin's refusal to believe Sorge's earlier warnings, a decision that so endangered the Soviet Union, doomed its savior to a lonely death.
Stuart D. Goldman is the Scholar in Residence at the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Goldman spent a year in Tokyo as a Japan Foundation Fellow researching Soviet-Japanese conflict in the 1930s. His book on the subject will be published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press in 2011. The Russian spy Richard Sorge plays an important part in that story.

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ichard Sorge had just returned to Tokyo on June 22, 1941, when he heard the report, being shouted by newsboys in the street, that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. Sorge, a prominent German journalist, notorious womanizer, and heavy drinker, had earlier been driving through the countryside with his latest paramour, a beautiful German pianist.

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John Glenn

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Newsela | Former astronaut and Ohio senator John Glenn has died at age 95

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Hidden Figures Trailer

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Hidden Figures | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX

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On this day in 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project comes to an explosive end as the first atom bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Plans for the creation of a uranium bomb by the Allies were established as early as 1939, when Italian emigre physicist Enrico Fermi met with U.S. Navy department officials at Columbia University to discuss the use of fissionable materials for military purposes. That same year, Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt supporting the theory that an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction had great potential as a basis for a weapon of mass destruction. In February 1940, the federal government granted a total of $6,000 for research. But in early 1942, with the United States now at war with the Axis powers, and fear mounting that Germany was working on its own uranium bomb, the War Department took a more active interest, and limits on resources for the project were removed.

Brigadier-General Leslie R. Groves, himself an engineer, was now in complete charge of a project to assemble the greatest minds in science and discover how to harness the power of the atom as a means of bringing the war to a decisive end. The Manhattan Project (so-called because of where the research began) would wind its way through many locations during the early period of theoretical exploration, most importantly, the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi successfully set off the first fission chain reaction. But the Project took final form in the desert of New Mexico, where, in 1943, Robert J. Oppenheimer began directing Project Y at a laboratory at Los Alamos, along with such minds as Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Fermi. Here theory and practice came together, as the problems of achieving critical mass-a nuclear explosion-and the construction of a deliverable bomb were worked out.

Finally, on the morning of July 16,in the New Mexico desert120 miles south of Santa Fe, the first atomic bomb was detonated. The scientists and a few dignitaries had removed themselves 10,000 yards away to observe as the first mushroom cloud of searing light stretched 40,000 feet into the air and generated the destructive power of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. The tower on which the bomb sat when detonated was vaporized.

The question now became-on whom was the bomb to be dropped? Germany was the original target, but the Germans had already surrendered. The only belligerent remaining was Japan.

A footnote: The original $6,000 budget for the Manhattan Project finally ballooned to a total cost of $2 billion.

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The first atomic bomb test is successfully exploded - Jul 16, 1945 - HISTORY.com

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On this day in 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project comes to an explosive end as the first atom bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Plans for the creation of a uranium bomb by the Allies were established as early as 1939, when Italian emigre physicist Enrico Fermi met with U.S.

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Some facts about the Manhattan Project

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The Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb

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In 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, ending World War II.

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The United States’ manned spaceflight project launched the first American astronauts into space. Astronauts made a total of six spaceflights during Project Mercury. Two of those flights reached space and came right back down. These are called suborbital flights. The other four went into orbit and ci…

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"One giant leap for mankind," thanks to the Apollo program.

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The historic event captivated the world—and helped people look to the future.

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Space Race

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DK Learning: Make every lesson your best yet

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DK's uniquely visual approach engages students, enhancing their learning experience

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Kids learn about the Allied Powers of World War II in history. The Allies such as Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States fought the Axis Powers.

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This has all the ideas you will need to pick a subtopic

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Kids learn about the timeline of World War II in history. Major events leading up to and during the war. Battles, alliances, and treaties.

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The carnage of World War II was unprecedented and brought the world closest to the term "total warfare." On average 27,000 people were killed each day between September 1, 1939, until the formal surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945. Western technological advances had turned upon itself, bringing about the most destructive war in human history. The primary combatants were the Axis nations of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and the Allied nations, Great Britain (and its Commonwealth nations), the Soviet Union, and the United States. Seven days after the suicide of Adolf Hitler, Germany unconditionally surrendered on May 7, 1945. The Japanese would go on to fight for nearly four more months until their surrender on September 2, which was brought on by the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese towns of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Despite winning the war, Britain largely lost much of its empire, which was outlined in the basis of the Atlantic Charter. The war precipitated the revival of the U.S. economy, and by the war's end, the nation would have a gross national product that was nearly greater than all the Allied and Axis powers combined. The USA and USSR emerged from World War II as global superpowers. The fundamentally disparate, one-time allies became engaged in what was to be called the Cold War, which dominated world politics for the latter half of the 20th century.
What Happened in WWII?
Facts & Information

September 1, 1939

September 2, 1945

Latest Stories about World War II

What Happened in World War II:

When did World War II begin?

Some say it was simply a continuation of the First World War that had theoretically ended in 1918. Others point to 1931, when Japan seized Manchuria from China. Others to Italy's invasion and defeat of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935, Adolf Hitler's re-militarization of Germany's Rhineland in 1936, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 are sometimes cited. The two dates most often mentioned as "the beginning of World War II" are July 7, 1937, when the " Marco Polo Bridge Incident" led to a prolonged war between Japan and China, and September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, which led Britain and France to declare war on Hitler's Nazi state in retaliation. From the invasion of Poland until the war ended with Japan's surrender in September 1945, most nations around the world were engaged in armed combat.

Origins of World War II

No one historic event can be said to have been the origin of World War II. Japan's unexpected victory over czarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) left open the door for Japanese expansion in Asia and the Pacific. The United States U.S. Navy first developed plans in preparation for a naval war with Japan in 1890. War Plan Orange, as it was called, would be updated continually as technology advanced and greatly aided the U.S. during World War II.

The years between the first and second world wars were a time of instability. The Great Depression that began on Black Tuesday, 1929 plunged the worldwide recession. Coming to power in 1933, Hitler capitalized on this economic decline and the deep German resentment due to the emasculating Treaty of Versailles, signed following the armistice of 1918. Declaring that Germany needed Lebensraum or "living space," Hitler began to test the Western powers and their willingness to monitor the treaty's provision. By 1935 Hitler had established the Luftwaffe, a direct violation of the 1919 treaty. Remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936 violated Versailles and the Locarno Treaties (which defined the borders of Europe) once again. The Anschluss of Austria and the annexation of the rump of Czechoslovakia was a further extension of Hitler's desire for Lebensraum. Italy's desire to create the Third Rome pushed the nation to closer ties with Nazi Germany. Likewise, Japan, angered by their exclusion in Paris in 1919, sought to create a Pan-Asian sphere with Japan in order to create a self-sufficient state.

Competing ideologies further fanned the flames of international tension. The Bolshevik Revolution in czarist Russia during the First World War, followed by the Russian Civil War, had established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a sprawling communist state. Western republics and capitalists feared the spread of Bolshevism. In some nations, such as Italy, Germany and Romania, ultra-conservative groups rose to power, in part in reaction to communism.

Germany, Italy and Japan signed agreements of mutual support but, unlike the Allied nations they would face, they never developed a comprehensive or coordinated plan of action.

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World War II: Facts & Info About the Bloodiest War in History

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Facts, information, and stories about World War II, the global conflict that killed tens of millions between 1939 and 1945.

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World War II: Crash Course World History #38

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Nuclear weapon Facts for Kids | KidzSearch.com

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A nuclear weapon is a weapon that suddenly releases the energy in the nucleus of certain types of atoms. When triggered, these devices release a huge amount of energy in the form of an explosion. Nuclear weapons are also known as "atomic bombs", "atom bombs", or "A-bombs".

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As America stood on the brink of a Second World War, the push for aeronautical advancement grew ever greater, spurring an insatiable demand for mathematicians. Women were the solution. Ushered into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1935 to shoulder the burden of number crunching, they acted as human computers, freeing the engineers of hand calculations in the decades before the digital age. Sharp and successful, the female population at Langley skyrocketed.

Many of these "computers" are finally getting their due, but conspicuously missing from this story of female achievement are the efforts contributed by courageous, African-American women. Called the West Computers, after the area to which they were relegated, they helped blaze a trail for mathematicians and engineers of all races and genders to follow.

"These women were both ordinary and they were extraordinary," says Margot Lee Shetterly. Her new book Hidden Figures shines light on the inner details of these women's lives and accomplishments. The book's film adaptation, starring Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson, is now open in theaters.

"We've had astronauts, we've had engineers- John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft," she says. "Those guys have all told their stories." Now it's the women's turn.

Hidden Figures | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX

Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1970s, Shetterly lived just miles away from Langley. Built in 1917, this research complex was the headquarters for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which was intended to turn the floundering flying gadgets of the day into war machines. The agency was dissolved in 1958, to be replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as the space race gained speed.

The West Computers were at the heart of the center's advancements. They worked through equations that described every function of the plane, running the numbers often with no sense of the greater mission of the project. They contributed to the ever-changing design of a menagerie of wartime flying machines, making them faster, safer, more aerodynamic. Eventually their stellar work allowed some to leave the computing pool for specific projects- Christine Darden worked to advance supersonic flight, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. NASA dissolved the remaining few human computers in the 1970s as the technological advances made their roles obsolete.

The first black computers didn't set foot at Langley until the 1940s. Though the pressing needs of war were great, racial discrimination remained strong and few jobs existed for African-Americans, regardless of gender. That was until 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, pioneering civil rights activist, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the continued injustices of racial discrimination. With the threat of 100,000 people swarming to the Capitol, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, preventing racial discrimination in hiring for federal and war-related work. This order also cleared the way for the black computers, slide rule in hand, to make their way into NACA history.

Exactly how many women computers worked at NACA (and later NASA) over the years is still unknown. One 1992 study estimated the total topped several hundred but other estimates, including Shetterly's own intuition, says that number is in the thousands.

As a child, Shetterly knew these brilliant mathematicians as her girl scout troop leaders, Sunday school teachers, next-door neighbors and as parents of schoolmates. Her father worked at Langley as well, starting in 1964 as an engineering intern and becoming a well-respected climate scientist. "They were just part of a vibrant community of people, and everybody had their jobs," she says. "And those were their jobs. Working at NASA Langley."

Surrounded by the West Computers and other academics, it took decades for Shetterly to realize the magnitude of the women's work. "It wasn't until my husband, who was not from Hampton, was listening to my dad talk about some of these women and the things that they have done that I realized," she says. "That way is not necessarily the norm"

The spark of curiosity ignited, Shetterly began researching these women. Unlike the male engineers, few of these women were acknowledged in academic publications or for their work on various projects. Even more problematic was that the careers of the West Computers were often more fleeting than those of the white men. Social customs of the era dictated that as soon as marriage or children arrived, these women would retire to become full-time homemakers, Shetterly explains. Many only remained at Langley for a few years.

But the more Shetterly dug, the more computers she discovered. "My investigation became more like an obsession," she writes in the book. "I would walk any trail if it meant finding a trace of one of the computers at its end."

She scoured telephone directories, local newspapers, employee newsletters and the NASA archives to add to her growing list of names. She also chased down stray memos, obituaries, wedding announcements and more for any hint at the richness of these women's lives. "It was a lot of connecting the dots," she says.

"I get emails all the time from people whose grandmothers or mothers worked there," she says. "Just today I got an email from a woman asking if I was still searching for computers. [She] had worked at Langley from July 1951 through August 1957."

Langley was not just a laboratory of science and engineering; "in many ways, it was a racial relations laboratory, a gender relations laboratory," Shetterly says. The researchers came from across America. Many came from parts of the country sympathetic to the nascent Civil Rights Movement, says Shetterly, and backed the progressive ideals of expanded freedoms for black citizens and women.

But life at Langley wasn't just the churn of greased gears. Not only were the women rarely provided the same opportunities and titles as their male counterparts, but the West Computers lived with constant reminders that they were second-class citizens. In the book, Shetterly highlights one particular incident involving an offensive sign in the dining room bearing the designation: Colored Computers.

One particularly brazen computer, Miriam Mann, took responding to the affront on as a her own personal vendetta. She plucked the sign from the table, tucking it away in her purse. When the sign returned, she removed it again. "That was incredible courage," says Shetterly. "This was still a time when people are lynched, when you could be pulled off the bus for sitting in the wrong seat. [There were] very, very high stakes."

But eventually Mann won. The sign disappeared.

The women fought many more of these seemingly small battles, against separate bathrooms and restricted access to meetings. It was these small battles and daily minutiae that Shetterly strove to capture in her book. And outside of the workplace, they faced many more problems, including segregated busses and dilapidated schools. Many struggled to find housing in Hampton. The white computers could live in Anne Wythe Hall, a dormitory that helped alleviate the shortage of housing, but the black computers were left to their own devices.

"History is the sum total of what all of us do on a daily basis," says Shetterly. "We think of capital "H" history as being these huge figures-George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King." Even so, she explains, "you go to bed at night, you wake up the next morning, and then yesterday is history. These small actions in some ways are more important or certainly as important as the individual actions by these towering figures."

The book and movie don't mark the end of Shetterly's work She continues to collect these names, hoping to eventually make the list available online. She hopes to find the many names that have been sifted out over the years and document their respective life's work.

The few West Computers whose names have been remembered, have become nearly mythical figures-a side-effect of the few African-American names celebrated in mainstream history, Shetterly argues. She hopes her work pays tribute to these women by bringing details of their life's work to light. "Not just mythology but the actual facts," she says. "Because the facts are truly spectacular."

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The True Story of "Hidden Figures," the Forgotten Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

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A new book and movie document the accomplishments of NASA's black "human computers" whose work was at the heart of the country's greatest battles

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About one-third of U.S. children and teens eat pizza or other fast food every day, a new government report shows. Researchers say that figure is about the same as it was in the 1990s.

"At least we're not seeing it go up," said one of the report's authors, Cheryl Fryar. The report was released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There's also been no change in the proportion of calories that kids get from fast food daily. It's been at about 12 percent for the last decade, slightly more than the 11 percent previously reported for adults.

Healthier Happy Meals: Would new law make a difference?

Fast food is considered heavy in calories, and scientists have pointed at drive-thru french fries and takeout pizza as contributors to kids being overweight. Childhood obesity, a national health concern, has been stable at about 17 percent over the last decade.

For the study, the CDC asked about 3,100 children ages 2 through 19 (or their parents) what they ate over the previous 24 hours. The survey was done in 2011 and 2012.

The findings are averages, meaning they include some children who almost never ate fast food as well as others who ate a lot of it.

The researchers found:

- Adolescents got about 17 percent of their daily calories from fast food, compared to about 9 percent in younger children.

- Black, white and Hispanic youth all got roughly the same proportion of their daily calories from fast food, around 12 percent. For Asians, the average was significantly lower, at 8 percent.

- There was no significant difference between kids from families of different income levels. Some studies have found a difference, Fryar noted.

The study didn't give calorie totals, but other government research suggests kids consume about 1,900 calories a day. That means kids average about 245 calories each day from fast food. That's about the equivalent of a basic McDonald's hamburger.

In addition to impacting children's health and obesity rates, other research suggests that too much fast food could also take a toll on their academic success.

A study published in Clinical Pediatrics last December found that kids who ate the most fast food in fifth grade had lower improvements in test scores in reading, math and science by eighth grade. More than two-thirds of fifth-graders in that study reported eating fast food at least once in the previous week. One in five said they'd eaten at least four fast food meals during that time.

A number of proposals have aimed to reduce fast food marketing to kids or to increase healthy menu options. One bill proposed recently by a New York city council member would require lower calories, sodium and fat content in any fast food children's meals sold with a toy, and add more nutrition through fruit, vegetables or whole grains.

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About one-third of U.S. children and teens eat pizza or other fast food every day, a new government report shows. Researchers say that figure is about the same as it was in the 1990s. "At least we're not seeing it go up," said one of the report's authors, Cheryl Fryar.

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Newsela | Fast-food companies feed millennial generation's healthy appetites

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Millennials as a group spend about $1 trillion eating out and they want healthy menu choices. Restaurants are evolving to entice these customers, while knowing many still want a burger.

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Newsela | Customers not lovin' it: McDonald's to replace low-quality menu ingredients

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Newsela | Fast-food protesters want minimum wage increase on front burner

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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The 1936 Olympic Games are remembered today because Adolf Hitler was forced to watch an African American track and field star win four gold medals in Berlin. Hitler had seen the Olympics as a way to prove the superiority of German athletes to the rest of the world at a time when he was building the Third Reich for European, if not world, domination.

Jesse Owens gave the United States reason for pride, but he wasn't the only U.S. medal winner that summer. There was also the U.S. Olympic rowing team, whose individual and collective stories are every bit as quintessentially American as that of Owens.

"The Boys of '36," an "American Experience" documentary airing on KQED on Tuesday, Aug. 2, is the kind of film that reminds us why, in spite of Russian doping scandals, the Zika virus, and the bloated hype by NBC and its various content platforms, the Olympics are important not just as a show of athletic prowess but also as part of the American story.

"Boys" was inspired by "The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics" by Daniel James Brown, who is among those contributing valuable insight to the rich story of the 1936 team.

Rowing has always been seen as an elite sport, something that Oxford and Cambridge boys do on the Thames, or Harvard guys on the Charles. But the 1936 U.S. team comprised "grunts," as writer Timothy Egan puts it. These boys weren't even Ivy League. They were students at the University of Washington, and most were from blue-collar backgrounds.

They were "having trouble putting a couple of meals a day in front of themselves," Brown says.

Team member Joe Rantz, Spokane-born, saw his mother die of lung cancer when he was just a boy. His father remarried, but Joe didn't fit in with his new family, who left him when they set out for a new life away from Spokane. He was in high school, living with his older brother, when he was recruited by University of Washington coach Al Ulbrickson.

Every rower at the University of Washington had his eye on the prize in 1935 as the Olympic trials began. But the rivalry was fierce between the sophomore Huskies and the upperclassmen, led by a pint-size, hyper-competitive coxswain named Bob Moch.

He and his boat mates knew they had to beat the sophomore upstarts if they wanted to get to Berlin, and the competition between the teams is almost as thrilling as the finals with U.S., German, British and Italian rowers in Berlin the following year.

Brown's book's subtitle refers to nine Americans: the cox and the eight rowers, including the stroke, Don Hume, who rallied from a respiratory illness to set the pace for the U.S. win at the Olympics. Also important was Ulbrickson, who had been a great rower in his day but had never made it to the Olympics.

Technically, the winning effort could be attributed to 10 Americans and one Brit. That would be George Yeoman Pocock, a master builder of racing shells whose knowledge of the sport was so keen that he was able to figure out why Rantz was uneven and schooled the young man on the most important element for any team member: knowing that you are part of a human machine and that you have to trust your teammates.

The men who made history that summer day in Germany are all gone now - the last surviving member of the crew, Roger Morris, died in 2009. But some of their children are able to give us a sense of who they were as men. Rantz's daughter, Judy Willman, and Moch's children, Marilynn and Michael, are among the film's interview subjects, as are more recent rowing veterans, coach Robert Ernst and former Husky coxswain Eric Cohen.

Director Margaret Grossi is an admirably efficient filmmaker. She makes excellent use of vintage film footage and doesn't fall back too heavily on talking heads. The result is that the experience of watching "The Boys of '36" comes close to that of watching a well-scripted thriller. Even knowing the ending doesn't detract from the joy of watching the film.

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV Follow me on Facebook.

The Boys of '36: "American Experience" documentary. 9 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 2, on PBS.

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Story of 1936 Olympics rowers is truly an 'American Experience'

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The 1936 Olympic Games are remembered today because Adolf Hitler was forced to watch an African American track and field star win four gold medals in Berlin. Hitler had seen the Olympics as a way to prove the superiority of German athletes to the rest of the world at a time when he was building the Third Reich for European, if not world, domination.

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Exclusive Clip: The U.S. Rowers Who Beat the Nazis in the 1936 Olympics

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Watch an exclusive clip from a PBS documentary about the stunning defeat of the Nazi team by American rowers at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin

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All the best photo and video highlights of Rowing at the Berlin 1936 Summer Games Olympics, plus official results and medals by event and athlete.

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The Miracle 9 - 1936 Olympic Men's Rowing Team

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The Miracle 9 - 1936 Olympic Men's Rowing Team Before the boys of Miracel on Ice, there was another miracle team, and they were the 1936 NCAA Rowing Team of the Washington Huskies. This group of boys are among the greatest underdog champions in American history because of their unique and inspiring story.

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Animation shows the deadly evolution of nuclear weapons

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DK Find out Atomic Bomb

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DK Find Out! | Fun Facts for Kids on Animals, Earth, History and more!

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Visit DK Find Out! to learn about dinosaurs, space, animals, nature & more. Fun learning activities for kids with videos, quizzes & galleries at DKFindOut.com

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Kids learn about the history of the Atomic Bomb during World War II. Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki of Japan to end WW2.

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Kids learn about nuclear energy and fission in the science of physics including E=mc2, power plants, uses of nuclear power, and fusion.

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History for kids - Free history network for kids

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Atomic Bomb

Background

Before the war, many scientists had been investigating the possibility of generating energy and even weapons from the atom, the building block of the universe and everything that surrounds us.

The famous scientist Albert Einstein represented these leading thinkers by writing to the American president Franklin Roosevelt in August 1939.

He told him about their ideas and the danger of the Nazis in Germany developing such a bomb for military use.

Roosevelt responded by setting up a group of experts to develop the idea in the United States.

The idea only really got going after the Japanese bombed the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbour in December 1941.

Other countries also saw the appeal in having a very powerful weapon that would prevent their soldiers being killed in large numbers, as well as being able to stop enemies from making possible attacks on them.

These countries included Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. However, none of them were able to make the bomb before the Americans.

Between 1941 and 1945, the scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, led a group of experts on the Manhattan Project with the aim of making the world's first atomic bomb.

Many of the people on Oppenheimer's team were scientists who had escaped Nazi Germany.

They all worked at a special research site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The decision to use the bomb

Throughout the war, Allied forces heavily bombed Japan killing hundreds of thousands of people. But the Japanese survived these attacks and were still very strong.

They refused to surrender and so President Harry Truman thought about a possible invasion of the country.

The Japanese army was huge and the President knew that he would lose hundreds of thousands of men, if he embarked on such a plan.

So, in July 1945, Truman offered the Japanese the chance to surrender.

He knew that the bomb had now been completed and effectively tested in the New Mexico desert and was ready for use.

The Japanese wanted to negotiate the conditions of surrender and refused to give in to the demands of the Allies.

Hiroshima

The Americans targeted Hiroshima because it had not yet been hit by their air raids.

This meant that it would be a better testing ground to examine the effects of the atomic bomb over a particular area. Hiroshima also had an important military base.

On the morning of the 6th of August 1945, Paul Tibbets flew an American B29 bomber plane, called 'Enola Gay', over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped the bomb named 'Little Boy' at 08:16 am local time.

The explosion was devastating and instantly wiped out the entire city. 140,000 people were killed at the time of the explosion and by the end of 1945.

The intense heat of the blast led to fires throughout the city which continued for three days, making survival more difficult for those who were not killed in the initial explosion.

Nagasaki

On the 9th of August, Charles Sweeney piloted a second mission on another B29 called Bockscar with the 'Fat Man' bomb, as it was known.

The main target of the bomb was in fact another Japanese city, Kokura. Due to cloud and smoke over Kokura, visibility was poor and Japanese fighter planes were drawing near.

So the pilot decided to target the city of Nagasaki as an alternative.

Nagasaki was picked due to the fact that it was an important port.

The bomb was dropped.

It was not as devastating as the Hiroshima bomb, but thousands of people died with the total reaching around 70,000 by the end of the year.

Several days later, on the 14th of August 1945, Japan gave its unconditional surrender to the Allies.

At noon the next day, Emperor Hirohito told the Japanese people of the decision.

Consequences

The atomic bomb changed the world forever after the end of the war.

As well as the high number of people who lost their lives, those who survived the blast suffered from terrible illness.

Several years after the war, the Americans and Soviets had created even more powerful hydrogen bombs which could now be fired at long-range targets all over the world, using missiles.

These new bombs made ordinary people fearful that one day there might be an all out war causing mass destruction.

Many people fought against nuclear weapons and still do. But they were unable to stop leaders developing more and more weapons.

Despite the fears, the two main powers after the war, America and the Soviet Union, never used the weapons even though there were many close calls.

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki - History for kids

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Atomic Bomb Background Before the war, many scientists had been investigating the possibility of generating energy and even weapons from the atom, the building block of the universe and everything that surrounds us. The famous scientist Albert Einstein represented these leading thinkers by writing to the American president Franklin Roosevelt in August 1939.

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Video

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The Boys Who Challenged Hitler by Phillip Hoose

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The Churchill Club of Denmark: A Young Rebellion on Bicycles

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You can make a difference at any age. Consider the Churchill Club: a rogue group of teenagers that frustrated the Nazi occupation in Denmark.

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The Power of Conscience-Danish Resistance Groups

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During the first years of the Occupation, active resistance activities were few in number, undecided about active or passive resistance and consisted mostly of the production of underground newspapers. This lack of active fighting prompted Winston Churchill to refer to Denmark as "Hitler's Pet Canary".

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It has been proposed that a group, or several groups, of professional computers be set up in the Engineering Department at Curtiss in order to increase the accuracy and speed of such work while at the same time reducing the net cost. It is known that the clerical aptitude rating of women is, in general, somewhat higher than the general average for men and particularly, that men who have good engineering aptitude ratings will usually score well below average as to clerical accuracy and speed. The computing work at NACA is done almost entirely by women who are more or less specially trained for such work. The whole situation at NACA with regard to this arrangement is reviewed in some detail. It is generally agreed that the computing set up at NACA is quite satisfactory and economical. It is recommended that an experiment along this line be initiated at Curtiss.,
This memo was originally prepared as an A.V.O. from Mr. R. H. Cramer, current Curtiss representative at NACA, to Mr. R. A. Darby, dated 4-14-42.

S. H. Hahn
4-27-42

April 24, 1942

To: Mr. R. A. Darby
Subject: Computing Group Organization & Practices at NACA
Reference: (a) Conference with r. Harrnstein, Mr. Maller, Miss Tucker, Mr. Dearborn, Mr. Valentine, etc.

Purpose of Memo

For possible use in instituting a similar group for general benefit of the Curtiss-Wright Engineering personnel (in particular, Flight Test, Aerodynamics, Wind Tunnel and Structures), we have made some inquiries about the present set-up of the Computing Group, which seem to work very successfully, here at the LMAL of the NACA.

Original NACA Set-up

The idea and organization of the computing section grew most rapidly within the last two years, when the number of computers nearly doubled. Although there are approximately 75 computers now as compared with the 450 engineers (total employees at LMAL at Langley Field is somewhat over 1000) there was at first some opposition to the plan so that it began with only a handful of members. The first organization was conducted as a computing "pool," much as a typing pool. All the work to be turned out at that time was sent to this central pool, because there was some saving in equipment and the facilities for teaching and delegation of each type of work would be done most efficiently this way.

Now that the idea has won general acclaim, the "pool" has decreased in size, but there are now individual computing groups attached to each section (such as Aerodynamics, Physical Research, . . .), and each section has several groups (consisting of about an average of three computers) attached to each Tunnel or Laboratory. Some tunnels have as many as ten computers while others have one computer who often devotes a part of her time to typing and secretarial duties. That is a rather recent innovation, developing from the desire of the LMAL to formalize their work and reports more than it has in the past. To this end the computers have been urged to attend evening classes in such subjects as mechanical drawing and typing. These classes are open to the public at the local high school. Thus, most of the data and charts now obtained in any of the Sections is organised in a neater and more uniform manner than the former freehand and often penciled and hurried data sheets.

The central pool still does the overflow work from the various sections, or that from small sections or individuals not having a computer permanently assigned to them. The central pool also serves as a training center and personnel supply station, since from the greater variety of its work, a trainee's ability can better be judged and guided to best advantage there.

Group Organization

Each section has a head computer, but this designation is not very formal, and it is not necessarily an indication of her earning a greater salary, especially among smaller groups. A large section is apt to have an acknowledged head computer, however, who is recognized as such by salary and authority. Her duties, besides including the usual computing work, consist of the delegation of the work items, and the laying out of a program and method of work on each project sent to her section, It is generally felt that the ability of the head computer in the direction of delegating responsibility and getting the most volume of work from her available group is the paramount factor in the efficiency and general working atmosphere of the whole group.

Personnel

The personal qualifications for these computers are not very rigid. These computers are all women who have obtained their jobs through Civil Service. Some entered merely through the "unassembled" or no-examination-required type of application, the selection being made merely on the basis of stated education and experience. Even in this case the candidates were chosen, it seems, from lists with carious designations, for example-Engineering aid, which merely requires a sort of general intelligence tests. The girls who operate the Comptometers have usually passed a proficiency test on that type of machine, and they are usually not college graduates. There is ample room for their talents, however, because the volume of work often necessitates computers who can perform the routine machine operations with great speed, but who need not have much logical insight into what the result should be or how they should check, etc.

The heads of the groups are college graduates, as are the majority of all the computers. Preference is given to those with major interests in mathematics or science (preferably physics), but of late these restrictions are being lowered so that one college course in mathematics has been accepted as qualifying. A good number of the computers are former school teachers. Their ages may average near 21, but there are a surprising number nearer 30 years old. There is no restriction because of marriage; in fact, some of the computers are wives of the engineers of various classification here at NACA.

Equipment

What opposition there seemed to have been toward establishing the computer groups was directed mostly toward the expense of the computing equipment. The automatic computing machines and comptometers cost over $500.00 each, while they may not be available today. The automatic calculator is usually the Friden or Marchant, while the comptometer was the Comptometer (Trade Name). The computers were also furnished with 20 inch (log-log duplex) slide rules. Each computing section has one slide rule at least, but in some sections (such as one case where a section contains three girls), each of the computers has one.

The selection of the calculating machine is usually left to the discretion of the computer or computers who are to use it. If the computer has proficiency in the operation of a comptometer (which takes about three months training to attain), she can perform all the same operations available on the automatic calculating machine in practically the same time. The comptometer has the advantage of slightly more rapid adding and subtracting facility. The automatic calculator, however, can be mastered in about two weeks or less. The preference for one machine or the other is thus usually based on the computer's background in this type of work. The section heads have a decided preference for the automatic calculating machine. They point out the ease of teaching and also more means of checking, and for the type of computer who has some mathematical background the type of work required of her could probably be better done on the calculating machine. The computers required at Curtiss would tend to be of this more versatile type.

Each computing section has one light-table for tracing purposes. These are not very elaborate units in general. A set of five-place logarithmic tables and trigonometric tables is also provided, together with a few scale, triangle and French curves.

Salaries

The other large expense item is the salaries of the personnel. It is felt that enough greater return is obtained by freeing the engineers from the calculating detail to overcome any increased expenses in computers' salaries. The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they would. This is due in large measure to the feeling among the engineers that their college and industrial experience is being wasted and thwarted by mere repetitive calculations. Mr. Herrnstein himself, for example is glad to admit that, where he used to take a day to work about 1 ½ propeller test runs, now one of this [sic] computers can do 3 runs in a morning.

The salary range is between $1440 and $1620 (which is standard Civil Service sub-professional salary). One or two head girls who have had as much as five years service earn $2000, and the directing head with nearer double this amount of experience is believed to receive $2600. Of course, they will now be paid for 8 hours overtime in addition. The feeling seems to be prevalent, however, that a private industry engaged in more or less temporary war work should be willing to pay slightly higher salaries than would be expected from the more conservative governmental agencies.

The $1440 position carries the title of Junior Computer, while the better salaried position ($1620) would be for an Assistant Computer, and finally a Computer would be the title corresponding to the $1800 bracket. A Head Computer earns $2000 (as does the directing head at present), but there seem to be two unfilled positions called [illegible] ($2300) and Chief ($2600). There is a general agreement no that the new computers with college training begin at $1620, while the $1440 position is reserved for the comptometer operator's beginning salary.

Type of Work

There is a large amount of simple calculation required in the work here at NACA. Most tunnels have means for taking photographs of banks of nearly a hundred manometers at a time. The computers read off the liquid levels and complete the analysis. On the other hand, some of the calculations are sent to the computers in the form of complicated formulas which necessitate a knowledge of trigonometry and sometimes of mathematics involving the calculus. In general, however, the group head would reduce this more complicated work down to tabular form requiring rather routine operations before it would be given to the machine operator. Most of the work coming from the engineers is accompanied by a memo of calculating instructions or work-of-mouth explanations. The computers in any one section soon learn what the usual type of calculation required of them would be.

Special data sheets and forms are usually available for the more common calculations.

The consensus of all employees here at the NACA is that the plan is very effective and satisfactory.

R. H. Cramer

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The Hidden Figures story sheds light on the significant contributions of the three women-Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson-but also the broader impact that women had behind the scenes at NASA.

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When the Computer Wore a Skirt: Langley’s Computers, 1935–1970

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Human computers played an integral role in both aeronautical and aerospace research at Langley from the mid-1930s into the 1970s, helping it keep pace with the high output demanded by World War II and the early space race. Along with their contribution to the field, Langley’s computers also stood ou…

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Newsela - A forgotten story: Black women helped land a man on the moon

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Newsela | Inventors and Scientists: Katherine Johnson

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As a young girl she loved numbers, which paved her way to career solving complex calculations for America’s space program.