Tuesday - December 16, 2008

ONE HELL OF AN AMERICAN THAT MAKES ME SO DAMN PROUD HE WAS OURS! RIP, Major Robert Furman.

This is in The Telegraph today.
How many American papers have told his story?  Has it been on TV back home?  I sure hope so.

Did this story at least make the papers in NJ?  NY? CT?  I have no idea why this is so late in coming as he passed away two months ago. But better late and learn about this guy then never know at all.  Damn it that was one hell of a generation!  What happened to us?

Major Robert Furman
Wartime intelligence officer charged with discovering the true extent of the German nuclear threat .

Robert Furman, civil engineer who helped to oversee the construction of the Pentagon and then played a clandestine role in the Manhattan Project. Photo: US Department of Defence.

Major Robert Furman, who has died aged 93, oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and played a vital part in the American struggle for nuclear supremacy when, in 1943, he was ordered to discover how far the Germans had advanced in developing the atomic bomb.

He began by interviewing scientists on campuses across the United States and was appointed the personal handler of Niels Bohr, the Nobel prizewinner who had worked on the understanding of atomic structure and had recently escaped from occupied Denmark. Furman was particularly impressed by the ability of Bohr and his associates to play chess without using a board.

Furman’s next task was to organise collection of water samples from the Upper Rhine and Lake Constance to check for evidence of German nuclear activity. After a failed attempt to kidnap the senior German scientist Werner Heisenberg, Bohr’s former assistant, he sent Moe Berg, a former baseball player for the Boston Red Sox among others, to hear Heisenberg address a scientific conference in neutral Switzerland. Berg was given a pistol to shoot him if he indicated that the Germans were working on a nuclear bomb and a cyanide capsule for himself in case the assignment failed. But after hearing Heisenberg’s talk, and then dining with him, Berg reported that he could find no evidence to support such suspicions.

As the Allied armies advanced across Europe, Furman ran Operation Peppermint, in which he led a team which searched for all existing uranium stocks, needed for nuclear fission. This involved his coming under German sniper fire in Belgium. But he eventually found a stockpile of 31 tons near Toulouse, which was duly dispatched to the United States. He also rounded up Heisenberg and nine other scientists; they were held at Farm Hall, Godmanchester, near Cambridge, to ensure that they did not end up in the Soviet Union.

When Germany surrendered Furman escorted a large consignment of uranium aboard the cruiser Indianapolis from the secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to Tinian island in the Pacific. Four days after the cargo was discharged the ship was torpedoed, with the loss of 800 sailors’ lives.

From Tinian, Furman watched the B-29 Enola Gay take off to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Later he visited Japan, but he continued to believe that the two atomic bombs had ensured that the Cold War “remained cold”.

The son of a bank teller descended from an immigrant who left Stoke-on-Trent in the early 18th century, Robert Ralph Furman was born on August 21 1915, at Trenton, New Jersey. He grew up a keen tennis player. On leaving Trenton High School he studied Civil Engineering at Princeton, where he joined the Reserve, then worked for the Pennsylvania railroad and the Turner construction company in New York.

After being called up in 1940 he was commissioned as an artillery officer with a horse-drawn unit and transferred to the Quartermaster Corps’ construction division. It was there that he attracted the attention of Colonel Leslie Groves, who was in charge of constructing the new War Department building in Washington, to be known as the Pentagon.

Groves appointed Furman the third-ranking supervisor of the project, but he soon took the major role, with responsibilities that ranged from the materials used to the 123,000-strong workforce. His duties involved staying overnight once a week to walk round the whole building, when he would stop workers on the night shift drinking on the job.

After 17 months the job was finished, and Furman was invited by Groves – who was by now a major-general and military director of the Manhattan Project – to become his chief of foreign intelligence.

When Furman left the Army in 1946 he settled at Bethesda, Maryland, and started a construction business building houses, schools, churches and offices, including the American embassy in Nicaragua.

He became a pillar of his local community, serving as an active president of the Rotary Club and becoming a member of the chamber of commerce and of his local Episcopalian church. He also sang baritone in a barbershop quartet.

For decades his role in the development of the atomic bomb was cloaked in secrecy, with his name eliminated from so many official documents that he was known to historians as “the mysterious major”.

His neighbours knew him to be a private man who was proud to have served in the war, but they were astonished when, in his last years, he appeared in a television programme about the Manhattan Project.

Recognising the growing interest in events that were receding from the public memory, he agreed to give a conducted tour of his old office in the Pentagon which, little changed in 60 years, now houses the Bureau of Verification and Implementation, which tracks arms control measures. Last December he took part in a seminar at the State Department on the atomic bomb.

Robert Furman died on October 14. He married, in 1952, Mary Eddy, who had worked for the Office of Strategic Services during the war. She survives him with their son and daughter and two daughters from her previous marriage.

TELEGRAPH

Hey .. is it just me or did the uniforms look better in his day then in the present time?  Seems that way.

Posted by peiper     on 12/16/2008 at 09:50 AM   
Filed Under: • History • News-Briefs • Patriotism • War-Stories •  
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