"My story has to do with the end of World War II," Henry Linschitz said as he reflected on his role in Manhattan Project.
For the 89-year-old Waltham man, today is a day to reflect upon his role in World War II. A former Brandeis professor, Linschitz was part of an assembly team that created the plutonium bomb that decimated Nagasaki, Japan, effectively ending World War II.
"We were putting together the nuclear bombs that finished Hiroshima and Nagasaki," the Riverside Drive resident said.
On Aug. 6, 1945, President Harry Truman ordered nuclear attacks against Japan. A bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" was dropped over the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, "Fat Man" - the bomb on which Linschitz worked - was detonated over Nagasaki.
"I think that the Nagasaki bomb should not have been dropped, but it was," Linschitz said. "I think the first bomb gave the Japanese time to think about what was hitting them. The second bomb killed about 90,000 people. It was a terrible thing. However it ended the war. In that sense we saved a lot of American lives but at the expense of a lot of Japanese lives."
Linschitz said he tried to join the Army in 1943 after abandoning his studies as a chemistry graduate student at Duke University.
"I left grad school because I wanted to serve somehow in the military but was not drafted because I was a student of science," he said. "The local draft board in my home of New York City had a certain quota to fill. I was given a deferment to allow me to finish my studies. They thought I could be of greater service as a scientist than carrying a gun in the infantry."
Linschitz took a job at an explosives research laboratory outside of Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1943. The lab was performing tests on a new weapon called the bazooka, which fired a rocket from a tube that could be carried by a single soldier, he explained.
"That seemed to be the most directly warlike thing I could do. This was a government laboratory run by the Army," he said.
While working at the laboratory, Linschitz said he was approached by a Harvard University professor named George Kistiakowsky, who asked him to become involved in a top-secret project.
"He told me about this great project going on out west that had the capacity of winning the war and asked, 'Are you interested?' and I said 'Of course I'm interested,"' Linschitz said. "It was highly secret and if I went out there, I was expected to be living out there isolated for the remainder of the war, which sounded pretty exciting to me."
Linschitz said he soon traveled to Los Alamos, N.M., where he began working on the Manhattan Project developing atomic bombs.
According to a U.S. Department of Energy Web site, a bomb research and development laboratory for the Manhattan Project was created in the mountains of northern New Mexico and code-named "Project Y."
"It was not an easy task," Linschitz said of Fat Man's development. "It was a rather tricky bomb to assemble and fused a lot of new principles."
Linschitz said the Manhattan Project eventually took him to the Mariana Islands, where a series of military bases were used to house B-29 bombers and where teams assembled the nuclear weapons.
Linschitz said he held a quasi-military rank of captain as part of the 509th Squadron, a team made up of civilians and military personnel from the U.S. Army.
"We assembled the bomb and wired up the detonators," he said. "The components of the bomb were shipped separately. You don't ship a bomb with detonators ready to go. The Mariana Islands were the biggest staging base for the bombing of Japan."
After the second bombing decimated Nagasaki, the war ended "dramatically," Linschitz said. He soon returned to America to pursue higher education once again.
"When I came back after the war I went back to Duke University to finish my degree. That was in 1946," he said. "Then I took a post-doctoral job at the University of Chicago. I worked there for a couple years."
Following his teaching stint in Chicago, Linschitz went on to Syracuse University, but eventually ended up in Waltham.
"I was invited to come teach at the chemistry lab at Brandeis University when they were first getting started and that was around 1948," he said.
Linschitz retired about 20 years ago. A Brandeis Web page has him listed as a professor emiritus of chemistry.
Jeff Gilbride can be reached at 781-398-8005 or at jgilbrid@cnc.com.