Memorial Day - Hal Leevee

Hal Leevee Edited:

On Greatest Generation

I think Tom Brokaw was right.

I think that because we grew up in the depression and we saw that our parents had so many problems making a living, getting us something to eat, and a place to live that it made us self-reliant and ambitious. We would do anything to make a career. That is true of so many of us.

On IIT

This is actually my 60th anniversary graduating from IIT. I had started at IIT before the war and was about half finished when I went into the Army. When I got out, I went back under the GI Bill of Rights.

My IIT instructors gave me what I needed to become a successful engineer. I very much appreciate what they did for me. IIT gave me the incentive and education to move ahead in my life.

One thing I remember at the time was that a new building by Mies van de Rohe was under construction. The structural steel was all exposed. The building was really something. It was unusual. I wasn’t sure it was sensible though.

In my days, it was a small school. It is amazing how big IIT is now and what they are doing.

On Manhattan Project

When I went into the service I did well on my examinations and they assigned me to the atomic bomb project at the University of Chicago. There I worked with and helped Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard. We dressed in civilian clothes and they called us academics. We all knew what we were working on, though we couldn’t talk about it to anyone.

The Colonel assigned me to help these two major scientists. They did all of their work on a blackboard. I was supposed to keep the Colonel informed of what they were working on, presumably to protect the US.

When they needed drafting help, I worked it out for them on a drafting board. One day Szilard was telling me to draw a line here and a circle there. I told him that I could do a better job if he could tell me the whole job. He pushed me aside and said do what I tell you. He and Fermi were brilliant though.

On August 6th, 1945 they called us into the auditorium and told us that what we were working on had been successful. That was the day that we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. I called my wife and told her to watch the news to see what I had been working on. They called us all back in again and told us not to tell anyone because the University of Chicago didn’t want anyone to know that they had been there working on the bomb. We all told them it was too late already. Three days later on my birthday the US bombed Nagasaki.

I felt after that fact that we saved a million lives. I could not join the group Atomic Scientists of Chicago because they were opposed to it. I still think it was the right thing to do.

On Career

I had no difficulty moving back into civilian life. The University of Chicago wanted me to stay on, but I couldn’t see the future of atomic energy.

I have spent many years supervising the construction and operation of coal-fired electric generating stations overseas. I worked in Milan, Italy and Orissa and New Delhi in India. I was manager of Far East for the engineering company Gibbs and Hill. I also supervised some power plant construction in the United States.

A company I was working for had a fire during work at the Wolftrap National Park for the Performing Arts. The opening was going to be delayed. I went out there and told them that I would personally supervise it to make sure it was ready for the season opening with the pianist Van Cliburn. President Nixon invited my wife and I to attend that first performance. I never got a chance to talk to him and tell him about my work on the Manhattan Project.

I worked on the first nuclear submarine project on land for General Electric. We built it on land without crew quarters to see how it would operate. Once it was built, Admiral Rickover was supposed to come down and pull out the nuclear control rods to see if it would work. I argued that we could not have him come down here without testing it. No one knows until this day that I pulled one of the rods out, it beeped indicating it was working, and I pushed it back in. Rickover came down, pulled out the rods and it worked. He was very happy.

Interestingly, his assistant with him at the time was Jimmy Carter.

I also worked on the first air transportable nuclear power plant. We built it in Baltimore and shipped it in pieces to Antarctica where it was reassembled.

Currently

My son and grandsons are running the mechanical engineering business I started.

I am still working as a construction estimator. Have a job on a project at Dulles Airport and am working on estimating a job at the Japanese embassy. I continue to work to keep my mind going.

When asked about working on the Japanese Embassy after working on the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he responds, “That is something, I never thought of that.”