CHAPTER TWO The "Bomb Powder" Folders: From Major Jordan's Diaries from archive.org

CHAPTER TWO 

The "Bomb Powder" Folders 

In my capacity as Liaison Officer, I began helping the Russians with 
necessary paper work and assisted them in telephoning various factories to 
expedite the movement of supplies to catch particular convoys. I soon got to 
know Eugene Rodzevitch, the field man who visited the plants and reported 
daily by phone as to possible expectations of deliveries. 

As Colonel Kotikov communicated with many different officials of the Soviet 
Government Purchasing Commission, their names became more and more 
familiar to me. For instance, Mr. LA. Eremin, a member of the Commission, 
was in charge of raw materials. Others were B.N. Fomin, in charge of powder 
and explosives in the military division; N.S. Formichev, assistant chief to Mr. 
Eremin in the chemical division under raw materials; and A.D. Davyshev, in 
charge of electric furnaces. 



These names appeared more and more frequently, because we were 
destined to accumulate chemicals and chemical plants in increasing intensity 
in the months ahead. Major General S.A. Piskounov was chief of the aviation 
section, with his assistants, Colonel A. P. Doronin, in charge of medium 
bombers; and Colonel G. E. Tavetkov, in charge of fighter pursuit planes. I got 
to know the latter two officers very well. 

Few of the American officers who came in casual contact with the Russians 
ever got to see any of their records. But the more I helped Rodzevitch and 
Colonel Kotikov, the more cordial they became. It became customary for me 
to leaf through their papers to get shipping documents, and to prepare them in 
folders for quick attention when they reported back to Washington. 

At this time I knew nothing whatever about the atomic bomb. The words 
"uranium" and "Manhattan Engineering District" were unknown to me. 

But I became aware that certain folders were being held to one side on 
Colonel Kotikov's desk for the accumulation of a very special chemical plant. 
In fact, this chemical plant was referred to by Colonel Kotikov as a "bomb 
powder" factory. By referring to my diary, and checking the items I now know 
went into an atomic energy plant, I am able to show the following records 
starting with the year 1942, while I was still at Newark. These materials, which 
are necessary for the creation of atomic pile, moved to Russia in 1942: 

Graphite: natural, flake, lump or chip, costing American taxpayers 

$812,437. 

Over thirteen million dollars' worth of aluminum tubes (used in the 
atomic pile to "cook" or transmute the uranium into plutonium), the 
exact amount being $13,041,152. 



We sent 834,989 pounds of cadmium metal for rods to control the 
intensity of an atomic pile; the cost was $781 ,472. 

The really secret material, thorium, finally showed up and started 
going through immediately. The amount during 1942 was 13,440 
pounds at a cost of $22,848.* 

*On Jan. 30, 1 943 we shipped an additional 1 1 ,91 2 pounds of thorium nitrate 
to Russia from Philadelphia on the S.S. John C. Fremont. It is significant that 
there were no shipments from 1944 and 1945, due undoubtably to General 
Groves' vigilance. 
Regarding thorium the Smyth Report (p. 5) says: 

"The only natural element which exhibit this property of emitting alpha 
or beta particles are (with a few minor exceptions) those of very high 
atomic numbers and mass numbers, such as uranium, thorium, radium, 
and actinium, i.e., those known to have the most complicated nuclear 
structures." 

It was about this time that the Russians were anxious to secure more 
Diesel marine engines which cost about $17,500 and were moving heaven 
and earth to get another 25 of the big ones of over 200 horsepower variety. 

Major General John R. Deane, Chief of our Military Mission in Moscow, 
had overruled the Russians' request for any Diesel engines because General 
MaCarthur needed them in the South Pacific. But the Russians were 
undaunted and decided to make an issue of it by going directly to Hopkins 
who overruled everyone in favor of Russia. 

In the three-year period, 1942-44, a total of 1,305 of these engines were 
sent to Russia! They cost $30,745,947. The engines they had previously 
received were reported by General Deane and our military observers to be 



rusting in open storage. It is now perfectly obvious that these Diesels were 
post-war items, not at all needed for Russia's immediate war activity. 

Major General Deane, an expert on Russian Lend-Lease, has this to say in 
his excellent book, The Strange Alliance, which bears the meaningful subtitle, 
"The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia": 

With respect to Russian aid, I always felt that their mission (that is, the 
mission of Harry Hopkins and his aide, Major General james H. Burns) 
was carried out with a zeal which approached fanaticism. Their 
enthusiasm became so ingrained that it could not be tempered when 
conditions indicated that a change in policy was desirable . . . 

When the tide turned at Stalingrad and a Russian offensive started which 
ended only in Berlin, a new situation was created. We now had a Red 
Army which was plenty cocky and which became more so with each 
successive victory. 

The Soviet leaders became more and more demanding. The fire in our 
neighbor' s house had been extinguished and we had submitted ourselves 
to his direction in helping to extinguish it. He assumed that we would 
continue to submit ourselves to his direction in helping rebuild the 
house, and unfortunately we did. He allowed us to work on the outside 
and demanded that we furnish the material for the inside, the exact use of 
which we were not allowed to see. Now that the house is furnished, we 
have at best only a nodding acquaintance. [1] 

It is true that we never knew the exact use to which anything sent under 
Russian Lend-Lease was put, and the failure to set up a system of 
accountability is now seen to have been an appalling mistake. But could 
anything be more foolish than to suppose that the atomic materials we sent 
have not been used for an atomic bomb which materialized in Russia long 
before we expected it? 

The British let us inspect their installations openly, and exchanged 
information freely. The Russians did not. Our Government was intent on 



supplying whatever the Russians asked for, as fast as we could get it to them 
- and I was one of the expediters. And when I saw "our Government," I mean 
of course Harry Hopkins, the man in charge of Lend-Lease, and his aides. We 
in the Army knew where the orders were coming from, and so did the 
Russians. The "push-button system" worked splendidly; no one knew it better 
than Colonel Kotikov. 

One afternoon Colonel Kotikov called me to the door of the hangar. He 
pointed to a small plane which bore a red star in a white circle. "Who owns 
this?" he asked. I recognized it as a Texaco plane, and explained that it 
belonged to an oil firm, the Texaco Company. 

What right had the Texas Company, he asked, to usurp the red star? He 
would phone Washington and have it taken away from them immediately. I 
grabbed his arm and hastily explained that the state of Texas had been known 
as the "Lone Star State" long before the Russian revolution. I said that if he 
started a fight about this star, the state of Texas might declare war on Russia 
all by itself. 

Kotikov wasn't really sure whether I was joking, but he finally dropped the 
idea of phoning. I always remember with amusement that this was one of the 
few times that Harry Hopkins was not called upon for help. 

The various areas of Russia that were being built or rebuilt were apparent 
from the kind of supplies going forward on Lend-Lease. Many of the suppliers 
were incredibly long-range in quantity and quality. Here are some of the more 
important centers: 

Soviet City -- Nature of U.S. 

Lend-Lease Material 

Chelyabinsk - Tractor and farm machinery 



Chirchik - Powder and explosive factories 
Kamensk - Uralski Aluminum manufacture 
Nizhni Tagil - Railway car shops 
Novosibirsk - Plane factory and parts 
Magnitogorsk - Steel mill equipment 
Omsk - Tank center 

Sverdlovsk - Armament plants 

The Russians were great admirers of Henry Ford. Often the interpreter 
would repeat to me such statements of theirs as, "These shipments will help 
to Fordize our country," or "We are behind the rest of the world and have to 
hurry to catch up." 

It became clear, however, that we were not going to stay at Newark much 
longer. The growing scope of our activities, the expansion of Lend-Lease, the 
need for more speedy delivery of aircraft to Russia - all these factors were 
forcing a decision in the direction of air delivery to supplant ship delivery. It 
had long been obvious that the best route was from Alaska across to Siberia. 

From the first the Russians were reluctant to open the Alaskan-Siberian 
route. Even before Pearl Harbor, on the occasion of the first Harriman- 
Beaverbrook mission to Moscow in September, 1941, Averell Harriman had 
suggested to Stalin that American aircraft could be delivered to the Soviet 
Union from Alaska through Siberia by American crews. Stalin demurred and 
said it was "too dangerous a route." It would have brought us, of course, 
behind the Iron Curtain. 



During the Molotov visit to the White House, Secretary of State Cordell Hull 
handed Harry Hopkins a memorandum with nine items of agenda for the 
Russians, the first of which was: "The Establishment of an Airplane Ferrying 
Service from the United States to the Soviet Union Through Alaska and 
Siberia." 

When the President brought this up, Molotov observed it was under 
advisement, but "he did not as yet know what decision had been reached." 

Major General John R. Deane has an ironic comment on Russian 
procrastination in this regard: 

Before I left for Russia, General Arnold, who could pound the desk and 
get things done in the United States, had called me to his office, pounded 
the desk, and told me what he wanted done in the way of improving air 
transportation between the United States and Russia. 

He informed me that I was to obtain Russian approval for 
American operation of air transport planes to Moscow on any of 
the following routes in order of priority: one, the Alaskan-Siberian 
route; two, via the United Kingdom and Stockholm; or three, from 
Teheran to Moscow. I saluted, said Yes, sir, and tried for two 
years to carry out his instructions. [2] 

Where the U.S. was not able to force Russia's hand, Nazi submarines 
succeeded. Subs out of Norway were attacking our Lend-Lease convoys on 
the Murmansk route, apparently not regarded as "too dangerous a route" for 
American crews. 

A disastrous limit was finally reached when out of one convoy of 34 ships, 
21 were lost. The Douglas A-20 Havocs, which were going to the bottom of 
the ocean, were more important to Stalin than human lives. So first we started 
flying medium bombers from South America to Africa, but by the time they got 



across from Africa to Tiflis, due to sandstorms the motors had to be taken 
down and they were not much use to the Russians. Nor were we able to get 
enough of them on ships around Africa to fill Russian requirements for the big 
offensive building up for the battle of Stalingrad. 

Finally, Russia sent its OK on the Alaskan-Siberian route. Americans 
would fly the planes to Fairbanks, Alaska: Americans would set up all the 
airport facilities in Alaska*; Soviet pilots would take over on our soil; Soviet 
pilots only, would fly into Russia. 

The chief staging-point in the U.S. was to be Gore Field in Great Falls, 
Montana. A few years before the war General Royce, who had been 
experimenting in cold-weather flying with a group of training planes called 
"Snow Birds," had found that Great Falls, with its airport 3,665 feet above sea 
level on the top of a mesa tableland 300 feet above the city itself, had a 
remarkable record of more than 300 clear flying days per year, despite its very 
cold dry climate in the winter. 

If you look at a projection of the globe centered on the North Pole, you will 
see that Great Falls is almost on a direct line with Moscow. This was to be 
called the new and secret Pipeline. The Army called it ALSIB. 
* Later it came out that we actually built bases for the Russians in Siberia. 
Colonel Maxwell E. Erdofy, the famous airport builder, and crews from the 
Alcan Highway project were ordered to Russia and kept in isolation and under 
Soviet guard as they build Siberian airports. I find no record anywhere of this 
work having been changed to Lend-Lease. 
SOURCES 
CHAPTER TWO 

1 - The "Bomb Powder" Folders 

2 - The Strange Alliance, John R. Deane, (Viking, 1947), pp. 90-91 . 



3 - Ibid, p. 78. 

CHAPTER THREE 

We Move to Montana