What the document says
This is the first volume of the Manhattan District History, the atomic bomb program's internal account of itself, written in eight books. It starts by listing what the public already knew: the announcement by President Truman in August 1945, the statements released afterward by the War Department, the first of them by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and the official report Atomic Energy for Military Purposes by Professor H. D. Smyth of Princeton University. The Stimson statement put total spending at about two billion dollars and named the main work sites.
The volume states the purpose plainly. The history should say in simple terms what the Manhattan District did, and how, when and where. It should give round figures for costs and describe how the work was authorized, how contractors were selected and how contracts were made and carried out. Judging people was left out on purpose. Writers were told to record the names of those involved but to strike words of praise, so each reader could weigh credit for themselves. Failures, uncertainties and differences of opinion were to be included.
The volume also lists the handicaps the writers worked under. Early in the program records were treated as dangerous and were avoided or destroyed, so writers had to gather scattered papers and lean on what people remembered. Compartmentalized security, which kept each person to their own piece of the work, meant no single writer understood the whole program. Staff turnover after the fighting stopped made past actions harder to trace. The official end date was fixed late, which forced finished volumes to be extended and unfinished ones rewritten.
Key points
- 01The official termination date of the history is 31 December 1946, the day the Manhattan District turned over its control of atomic energy matters to the Atomic Energy Commission.
- 02The District did not cease to exist on that date. It continued for some months during liquidation and was officially abolished on 15 August 1947.
- 03The period covered starts before the District was activated on 16 August 1942 and takes in work done earlier by the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which handed over its last atomic energy contracts in 1943.
- 04Writers were instructed to record names but to remove any evaluation of what individuals or groups accomplished, leaving the judgment of credit to later historians.
- 05Book I holds 12 volumes, with Volumes 2 and 3 omitted because the material reserved for them was finally placed elsewhere.
- 06The appendix map shows only sites where the District kept offices and assigned staff. Related operations reached nearly every state and foreign areas including the Belgian Congo and Great Britain.
Source: U.S. Department of Energy, OpenNet declassified document archive, OSTI ID 1123507, document number D00029694. The summary is written from the document’s own text. Old scans can be hard to read, so check the original for anything you plan to cite.