Maurice Stamps

It seems a long time ago now but anyone who was alive at the end of World War II or has read any history in school must know that the Atomic Bomb ended the war suddenly and sooner than it would have ended otherwise.

Although it took several years work by scientists in a top secret effort called the Manhattan Project, it is amazing that when the first bomb was used, most of the world’s population, including those of us in service at the time, did not know that such a weapon existed.

And it was amazing to me when I learned after the war that my roommate and best friend in college had been a secret agent involved in the building of the atomic bomb from early in 1942 to the end of the war. The stories he could tell me beat any "cloak and dagger" spy mystery you could see on television.

My roommate at Knox College was a big Italian-American boy from Farmington, Ill., named John Baudino. His parents knew little English and spoke only Italian in the home, for Farmington, like Seymour had been, was a coal mining town and John’s father was a miner. In fact, John expected to go to the mine with his father when he graduated from high school, but the head of the miners union, John L. Lewis (from Lucas, Iowa), called the miners out on an extended strike, so John decided to see if he could get into a college.

John was accepted at Knox because he was a football player and he and I became roommates in a former office building that was unused because of the Depression, so had been taken over by the college and converted into a free dormitory for Knox athletes.

Although we were completely different in appearance and background, John and I became friends immediately. He called me Stamps and I called him Giovanni (Italian for John). We were both on the football team. We both had meal-time jobs at Seymour Hall, a dormitory for rich kids from Chicago who could pay their own expenses. And the Athletic Department put us both on government programs that paid all our college tuition.

John developed into a good student and decided to enroll in pre-law subjects. When we graduated in the spring of 1939, John enrolled at the University of Illinois Law School. In the spring of 1942, he received notice from his draft board that he was to report for induction immediately after he was awarded his law degree. Because of his size and appearance, the fact that he spoke fluent Italian, had taken four years of French and had a law degree, John was assigned to a unit training to be special agents. Although they didn’t tell him, John believed government agents had tagged him for induction while he was still in law school. He and four others were trained to be parachuted into Sicily to contact the underground before General Patton invaded the island.

Then John’s assignment was changed but the four others were sent in and the Germans captured them all. John later believed that the government never intended for him to be part of the Sicily operation but wanted to see if he could stand the rigors of the training. Instead he was sent to the Pentagon where he met in a small room with an Army colonel who told him, "This is a super top secret operation. Talk to no one," and handed John a small folder of travel orders that instructed him to proceed to Oak Ridge, Tenn.

John asked, "Sir, where is Oak Ridge?" and the colonel answered, "Hell, I’ve never heard of the place. There is a map in your orders."

Well, John found his way to Oak Ridge and met with various officials for a day before he was assigned as the personal bodyguard and interpreter for Dr. Enrico Fermi, the great Italian-born American atomic and nuclear physicist who developed the way to achieve and control a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. He and Dr. Albert Einstein were the brains behind the Bomb.

In his assignment as guard and protector of Dr. Fermi, John was his constant companion from 1942 to the end of the war. John was not a scientist, he was a trained secret agent. The rest of my story is about some of the human interest situations that John found himself in and which he was allowed to tell me about after the war.

There were 14 top scientists in the Manhattan Project and each of them had a personal bodyguard assigned to them as John was to Dr. Fermi. Actually, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist, was chairman of the scientist group, but the ability to control the chain reaction was the key and in that Dr. Fermi was in charge. Army General Leslie Groves was in command of the military supervision and security aspect of the project, so he was actually in charge of John and other bodyguards.

Each agent was not only to protect the scientist he was guarding from possible harm from an enemy spy, but each agent was also secretly trained to observe the scientist he was guarding to make sure he was not an enemy spy in disguise. A sort of double agent situation you read about in spy thrillers. In fact, John said it was discovered later in the program that one of the scientists was passing information to the enemy, but I’ll tell about that later.

Shortly before they were ready to move from Oak Ridge to Los Alamos, New Mexico, Dr. Fermi wanted to have a conference with his old friend, Dr. Albert Einstein. So John accompanied Dr. Fermi to the Einstein home in Princeton, New Jersey. When the two great scientists went upstairs to Dr. Einstein’s office, John stayed with Mrs. Einstein. There was no need for an interpreter for both men spoke Italian, German, French and more English than they ever let on.

When they came downstairs, Mrs. Einstein served tea and the four of them sat and visited for awhile. Presently, the conversation turned to, of all things, United States income tax laws. Dr. Fermi said, "John’s a lawyer. I have him fill out my tax papers."

And the famous professor with the greatest mathematical mind in the world replied, "Perhaps I can have him do mine, too. I don’t understand it!"

John Baudino told me the first time he felt they were in a tense or perhaps dangerous situation was when he went with Dr. Fermi to the University of Chicago, where in a secret laboratory under the Field House, they had assembled a "mass" of radioactive material and Dr. Fermi planned to see if he could order and control the chain reaction.

Putting it in simple terms, John said, Dr. Fermi would order to pull Rod A and the Geiger counters would begin to chatter or he would order rods inserted and the counters would slow down. John said everyone present breathed a sigh of relief when at last Dr. Fermi seemed satisfied and ordered, "Shut it down!" Then John went with the doctor as he sent a famous telegram to Washington and presumably to President Roosevelt, "The Italian navigator has landed and the natives are friendly!"

After the Manhattan Project moved from Oak Ridge to Los Alamos, all secret work was done underground with very tight security controlling who could enter or leave, so the bodyguards were not required to stay with their assigned scientist at all times. They were sometimes assigned to other duties such as taking secret reports to Washington or certain universities where parts of the project were being developed or to security duty where spying or espionage was feared.

As the development of the Bomb neared a critical stage, security became suspicious of a British scientist who was not one of the 14 the United States had assigned agents to guard. It was feared that he was making contact with a Communist spy when he traveled from Los Alamos to the University of California at Berkley. Although Russia was our ally in the war against Germany, the Bomb was kept secret from them. The Cold War had started.

So, when the suspect took a plane from Los Alamos to Berkley, swift fighter planes from a nearby base flew two of the bodyguard agents ahead so they could shadow him when he landed and try to detect him meeting his contact. But for some time they failed. Finally, John said, General Groves called a meeting of all the agents. The head of the general’s security staff addressed them, "You have to catch this guy," he told them. "We know he has a contact and we absolutely must get him out of here before X- Day (the day they expected to detonate the first experimental bomb)."

"But what if we just can’t catch him in the act?" one of the agents asked.
"Then," the security officer said, "One of you will have to kill him!"
"But if we do that," the agent continued, "And the California authorities arrest us for murder, will you bail us out?"
"If you get caught, we don’t know you," the security officer said, "We never heard of you."

Fortunately, the scientist in question was caught meeting a Communist undercover agent soon afterward. He was turned over to the British government. (I remember there was a lot of publicity about this spy after the war was over.)

John’s usual assignment during this period was to carry secret reports Dr. Fermi wanted sent to Washington. (They did not even trust coded radio communications. We had broken the enemy codes, so perhaps they had broken ours.)

Most seats on commercial airplanes were taken over by military officers, but John was given a government pass that gave him priority on any flight. On one trip that John made, the plane stopped at Kansas City and when it continued all seats but one double seat were taken by military officers. John shared this seat with a middle-aged gentleman and they exchanged a few words. John assumed his companion to be important or he would not have rated a seat while dressed in civilian clothes, so when he asked John what line of business he was in, John answered, "I am on business of a confidential nature for the government."

The man shook hands and said, "I am Senator Truman of Missouri." In less than two years, he would be President Truman and give the order to use the Bomb!

On another trip to Washington, they booked John in a Pullman compartment on the Sante Fe. "It might look suspicious for you to fly in and out of the Pentagon too often in civilian clothes," the security officer told him. "Besides, the train will get the message there on time."

So, John enjoyed the comfort of a compartment on a train where all the regular seats were filled by the military, but he noticed that a young lady had the compartment next to his. When the compartments were made up for day travel they were in view of each other and exchanged greetings. At first, she was rather reserved, but when she realized that the big, friendly "dumb" John had no idea who she really was, she became friendly and told John to call her "Kate." On the second day, she said, "John, have lunch with me. I don’t go to the dining car, but they will bring it here."

John had been too busy and too hard up at Knox College and law school to go to many movies, but he became suspicious when he heard her giving instructions to the porter. The porter was bowing low and saying, "Yes, Miss Hepburn. Certainly, Miss Hepburn."

As they were eating lunch, John asked, "Kate, are you in the movies?" She threw back her head and laughed. "John, you are precious! Since you won’t tell me your business, I’ll not tell you mine." It wasn’t until after the war that John saw Katharine "Kate" Hepburn in a movie.

Early in the summer of 1945, they were ready for the ultimate test, the firing of an experimental bomb. John said the bomb was placed on a steel tower out at the Los Alamos firing range. Then the scientists, their bodyguards and all the other high officials of the Manhattan Project took positions behind a bunker two miles, or perhaps more, I don’t remember the distance John said, away from the tower. They were each given thick dark goggles and at a command just before the countdown reached zero, all were to fall flat and a heavy rubber cover would drop over them. Dr. Fermi would not give the okay to look out until so many seconds after he felt the vibrations of the shock wave pass by.

In one of the moments before the final countdown, Dr. Fermi asked, "How do you feel, John?"
John said, "Doctor, I’d rather be in Farmington, Illinois!"
Dr. Fermi replied, "If you are not safe here, you might not be safe in Farmington."
In other words, they were not sure when they exploded the first atomic bomb how far the effects might reach. But they were safe behind the bunker. The first experimental bomb was a success. The second one would fall at Hiroshima!

This story and more will be in Maurice Stamp's upcoming book,
Shoal Creek Legends