Chuck Metz climbed the water tower in Los Alamos in 1944 and snapped this forbidden picture.
Accounts of the many men and women who worked on the Manhattan Project in the secret town of Los Alamos tend to overlook “the kids.” Charles V. (Chuck) Metz had just turned 15 when he moved to Los Alamos in late 1943 with his parents. Dr. Charles F. Metz was a professor of chemistry and metallurgy at Colorado State University when he was recruited for the project. Because there was an enormous amount of work to do, young Chuck was quickly hired, too.
Chuck Metz climbed the water tower in Los Alamos in 1944 and snapped this forbidden picture. |
Metz, age 78 (as of Sept. 16, 2006) lives in Sequim, Washington, with his wife Bernice. He has vivid memories of his time in Los Alamos, where he attended high school (“as little as I could,” he adds). He has a better way to recall what the town looked like than other residents because one Sunday he climbed the metal water tower and took a strictly verboten photo of the townsite. Much later he gave one print to his girlfriend, Neva Wheeler. One copy made from that print made it to the Smithsonian and another one to the Los Alamos Historical Archives. Metz still has the negatives. |
One night his parents gave a dinner party in their duplex with Dr. Enrico Fermi among the guests. Chuck was ordered by his mother to get all his ham radio equipment out of the dining room so he put it upstairs. He was following his parents’ orders to be polite and stay out of the way when Fermi (father of Chuck’s classmate, Nella) asked him if he could see his radio. The two of them went upstairs and the boy enjoyed a spectacularly informative lesson.
“I learned more about radio in that half hour than I’d ever learned,” Metz recalls. “Dr. Fermi [a Nobel Laureate in Physics] knew all about electronics. I think he knew all about everything! He had an incredible intellect. He was so outgoing, and he never talked down to me.” “But was my dad ever ticked off! He chewed me out for ‘taking Fermi away’ from the party. It was a very big deal to have him there and the adults all wanted to talk to him. But I didn’t take him away, I just showed him what he asked to see.” |
Enrico Fermi, a dinner guest at the Metz home, talked ham radio with young Chuck. |
At 15 Metz was a big strapping lad, willing to work, so his first job was as a warehouse sweeper. He got promoted from that boring position when the head of Shipping & Receiving needed someone who could type. He moved into Special Receiving to open, inventory and deliver valuable, delicate scientific equipment and precious metals.
“The only time I ever went to my dad’s office in Chemistry and Metallurgy was to deliver a pre-war Zeiss binocular microscope. How they got that, I’ll never know.”
Once he took delivery of solid gold hemispheres formed by high precision machining. Another time he opened a case of blasting caps – “very carefully!” -- and took them to a site way out on a Mesa and got them signed for. Sadly, though, someone there used a screwdriver and a hammer to open the wooden box. It blew up, and Chuck recalls that it blew the man’s hands off.
With one of his high school classmates, Lloyd Williams, Chuck was sent down in a very secure area in Omega Canyon. The boys had never been down there before. “There were fences and armed guards all over.” They were given white coveralls and shown a great number of carbon blocks, sort of like logs. They were given a drawing and told to stack the carbon blocks, hundreds of them, as in the drawing. They worked and worked until they were black as coal themselves. The third day they were told to take the whole thing apart and do it a different way, so they did it all again.
“So I guess you could say Lloyd and I built the Water Boiler Reactor,” Chuck said.
Dr. Metz and his family left Los Alamos for several months, returning to Colorado State University. Chuck graduated from high school in Fort Collins in 1945 at age 16. Then the Metzs returned to Los Alamos just in time for the big show. That summer Chuck drove several times to Trinity Site near Alamogordo, delivering whatever was required. Early on the morning of July 16, he sat on a hill outside Los Alamos, looking to the south. Many of the watchers had field glasses, but they weren’t needed to see the flash of light, even from hundreds of miles away, as the first atomic bomb exploded.
Chuck Metz Manhattan Project badge photo |
Perhaps the most intriguing of Chuck Metz’s adventures and misadventures in Los Alamos was one top-secret trip to Kirtland. His best recall of the time was that it was in late May or early June 1945. He was told to drive a panel truck to the airfield in Albuquerque. There he was ordered to back up to a C-47 and stay in the truck. He could see through the truck that a large number of men were trying to move a big box into the truck. It was apparently extremely heavy, and the surface of the plane was not even with the panel truck. They rigged a board ramp to make the adjustment and then heaved it forward, inch by inch, until it was in the truck. |
Four armed guards got in the back and told Metz to lock the back door. He did so, then got in and locked his door. They ordered him to drive by a certain route. Things went well through Albuquerque until he came to a tangle of traffic. He called back to the guards that they’d have to go some other way, that there was some kind of festival parade up ahead.
He was ordered to, “Keep driving, just don’t hit anybody.” So he drove the wrong way through the parade. When they got to Santa Fe, the guards ordered him to stop at La Fonda, which was right on the only route from Albuquerque to Los Alamos, and to unlock the back door. The guards got out, told him to drive straight to Los Alamos. But they said if anyone stopped him, if anyone tried to steal the truck, he was to say the box was of no value and give it up.
He drove the long road home, alone, and arrived at the shipping and receiving facility around midnight. But then it dawned on him—he had a serious problem. He’d forgotten to bring his all-areas security badge with him! He either had to sleep in the truck outside the gate or figure out how to get his badge. So -- he parked the panel truck beside the fence, climbed on top of it, and jumped down into the secured area.
“It was a longer jump than I thought, too. That hurt.” He went inside the building, got his badge, and went OUT through the guarded gate. Then he drove the truck inside and backed it up to a dock. The box was too heavy to move even an inch, though, so he still ended up sleeping with the delivery.
| He told no one about his strange assignment – EVER. But he’s been giving it more thought lately since he read Carter Hydrick’s new history book, Critical Mass: How Nazi Germany Surrendered Enriched Uranium for the United States’ Atomic Bomb. On May 12, 1945 (four days after the German capitulation) U-234, a Nazi U-Boat three times larger than the standard German subs, surrendered to the United States and was taken to Portsmouth, N.H. On board were several high-ranking Nazi officers. The bodies of two high-ranking Japanese officers who had killed themselves rather than surrender had been disposed of at sea. In the cargo hold lay the ultimate secret of U-234. Destined for Japan was a completely disassembled Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter; the plans and material to build Germany’s ultra-secret V-4 rocket; plans for a mysterious “stratosphere plane”; and another treasure. Sealed in cylinders lined with gold was 560 kilograms of uranium oxide labeled U235. |
From left, front row, Laboratory director Norris Bradbury, Charles Metz, and Richard Baker. At rear, R. Gillette Bryan and Tom Marshall.
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“We needed that enriched uranium to build the bomb,” Metz says. “And maybe even more important, they had on that sub a trigger device, exactly what we needed. Our X-box wasn’t far enough along, and time was running out.”
Chuck Metz today |
The U.S. government knew well what was on that sub, or at least part of it, and although the history is murky, it has been documented that the U.S. Navy made sure the sub surrendered to an American ship rather than to Britain or Canada. The cargo was needed post-haste in New Mexico. “Maybe that’s what I picked up,” Metz says. “I can tell you the box was unbelievably heavy, probably lead, that it was very unusual to have something flown in on a C-47, and I also know the mood at Los Alamos changed drastically after that.” |
Within days of the Trinity Test, Chuck Metz (still 16 years old until September 18), got his parents to sign papers so he could go into the Army. He only spent four weeks in basic training before special orders (arranged, he’s sure, by Harry Allen, who always had his eye on him) sent him back to Los Alamos. One of his big projects there for Allen, before he even started college, was to arrange logistics for the “laboratory ship” (shipment of all the electronics and tech equipment) for the 1948 Sandstone nuclear test at Eniwetok. Allen wanted him to stay on as permanent head of logistics for the tests, going to college between tests, but he was called to active duty with the Air Force. He flew fighters in Korea and for years afterwards.
Lynnette Baughman is the author of the novels A Spy Within and Lost Almost. She lives in Sequim, Washington. She can be reached by e-mail at nmauthor@juno.com
Keeping Los Alamos History Alive
