"The Devil Reached Toward the Sky" by Garrett Graff

If you haven’t read an oral history before, it’s like flashing through comments that sometimes follow an online article. Only with a difference: you don’t see those back-and-forth arguments that always seem to break out among those commenting.

For Garrett Graff, it’s his third oral history effort. After 9-11 (The Only Plane in the Sky) and D-Day (When the Sea Came Alive), this time it’s the creation and delivery of the atomic bomb during World War II.

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky follows the first conceptualization by European physicists to the destruction that occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One of the unique powers of oral history is the way that it puts you back in the footsteps and experiences of the people who lived these events firsthand before they knew the outcome, said Graff.

Narrative history often makes events seem neater and simpler than they felt to anyone who was living them at the time, stated Graff. 

Reading through quotes delivered by major players of the time allows readers to feel the uncertainty that existed while the world was at war. 

Once it became clear—to the scientists, anyway—of the potential destructive power of atomic energy, the race was on. Physicists from across Europe, many of them Jewish and fleeing for their lives as Nazi power expanded, came to the United States with the hope that their work wouldn’t be too late—that Hitler wouldn’t get the bomb first.

Graff noted that sometimes the story of the Manhattan Project tends to center only on the Los Alamos outpost. The war was won by the vast industrial effort that went into the bomb’s creation, said the author. Just as important as the New Mexico lab where the first bomb was detonated were “secret cities” developed in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Hanford, Wash., sites where thousands worked on developing the materials needed to create an atomic reaction, he said.

As a native Vermonter, Graff compared the process of converting 4,000 pages of quotes and notes down to 500 to making maple syrup. “You just boil and boil,” he said of the editing process involved. When all the boiling was done, you’re still left with some 500 voices to relate the process, both scientifically and militarily, that brought about the bomb.

The oral history approach empowers the reader with the ability to skim at record speeds, choosing to skip passages at will to get to later developments. However you tackle the work, there’s a lot of history to consider. Graff said the atomic bombs represented the final part of a fierce U.S. bombing campaign that included that single night in March 1945 when 100,000 people died in the firebombing of Tokyo, the most destructive single day of a war that killed so many. A total of 66 Japanese cities were firebombed in U.S. B-29 raids before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There’s a section of the book devoted to the transport of the bomb. The U.S.S. Indianapolis, a cruiser back in the States for repair after a kamikaze attack off Okinawa, carried off the mission but was sunk by a Japanese submarine four days later. Of the nearly 1,200 on board, only 316 survived. The survivors spent four days and five nights in the water. Graff includes two quotes to close the chapter: “The Indianapolis was the last major ship to be lost during the war and the greatest single disaster in the history of the Navy,” said Col. Kenneth Nichols.

“If the Indianapolis had been sunk with Little Boy (the bomb) aboard, the war could have been seriously prolonged,” said Luis Alvarez, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist.

As for his next project, Graff said it wouldn’t be an oral history or cover an aspect of WWII. Right now, he’s leaning towards writing about the preservation of history in this country. “As America approaches its 250th anniversary, its history is under attack right now,” he said.