Just after the “Trinity” test, in July 1945, General Leslie Groves headed back from the New Mexico desert to Washington, D.C. There he met with Ed Westcott, an Oak Ridge photographer, who was told to take a portrait of the General looking at a map of Japan, determined to win the war. It would be part of the materials released to the press along with Truman’s announcement after the use of the bomb.
Westcott, despite documenting the construction and life at Oak Ridge in some detail, didn’t know that the end goal was making the atomic bomb. He asked Groves to look at Tokyo on the map, which had been recently firebombed. Groves supposedly replied, “I’ll look somewhere else.”1
Here’s the resulting photo, from the Library of Congress:
General Groves looking at Japan (?), by Ed Westcott, July 1945.
Where’s the General looking? According to Westcott, he later realized that Groves was looking at Hiroshima.
But is he? I’m not sure. It’s very hard to see Groves’ iris in the above photo, even at the maximum resolution available from the Library of Congress (who has the highest resolution scan that I was able to find).
Let’s look at it a bit closer.
Above is a crop of the above photo at the maximum resolution, so you can play along at home (click to enlarge).
Is Groves looking at Tokyo? Probably not. Here’s what the angle of his eye would have to be to be looking there:
Groves looking at Japan – Tokyo angle.
Seems a little low to me. What about Hiroshima?
Groves looking at Japan – Hiroshima angle.
Possible? Maybe. It’s still a pretty low angle, though not as bad as Tokyo.
If his iris was dead in the middle of his eye, this is the result:
Groves looking at Japan – middle angle.
Vaguely looking into China? Looking at Manchuria? (That would be ironic, given the role that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria plays in debates over the importance of the atomic bomb towards accomplishing Japanese surrender.)
What if the iris was instead not centered, but slightly raised in the eye — that is, what if Groves was looking up slightly rather than centered or down? We end up with this:
Groves looking at Japan – upper angle.
Is General Groves looking at Russia? Now that’s an interesting possibility!
Here’s a very simple interactive version of the above — click on the image to draw your own laser lines! (Not tested in all browsers.)
Update: Stan Norris, author of the Groves biography, Racing for the Bomb, wrote to say that Westcott had wanted to photograph Groves on July 17, just after Groves returned from New Mexico, but Groves put him off and it isn’t clear exactly when the photo was taken. The relevance? Over those few days after “Trinity,” Groves was trying to put Kyoto back on the target list — as is pretty well known, it was removed at the personal request of Secretary of War Stimson, on account of it being a center of Japanese cultural heritage — only to be vetoed repeatedly by Stimson. The finalization of the target list — Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, Nagasaki — did not take place until the end of July. So that adds a bit to the possibility that Groves was not necessarily looking at Hiroshima directly.
- Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra, Picturing the Bomb: Photographs from the Secret World of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 167. [↩]
As a professional retoucher for the past twelve years, this is my read looking at the enlarged image. It is difficult to see much if any of the general’s iris, only the white of his eye. This indicates his eye was turned slightly toward the map. It looks to me that the iris appears ever so slightly at the very top of eyeball at one end of the dark blotch that also extends into the eyelash on the top lid. The angle of his head, slightly cocked forward, and the position of his eyebrow, slightly raised says to me he is looking to his right and up at the Kamchatka Peninsula.
That’s an interesting possibility! The more I look at it, the more I think you’re right that he’s looking up and right, not down and left. It would fit into the revisionist narrative of Groves if he was thinking about Russia at this time, when he was supposed to be thinking about Japan…
That obscure object of his desire.
Is Robert Norris’s nickname Stan?
He goes by Stan, yes.
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