ORAL HISTORIES
Franklin "Monty" Stratton
I was born in Richmond Virginia, way back in 1915.
[In 1944], it so happened that the government was getting ready to build this plant here at Hanford, they were the first contractors here. Well, I was interviewed, I was available to be transferred out here, and they offered me a job...
My formal was as an electrical engineer. I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering... My hobby for many many years had been an amateur radio operator. I had a lot of experience messing with electronic equipment. Between the formal training in electrical engineering and my hobby as a ham radio operator, that type of background was the sort of thing that they were interested in for somebody to be assigned to their instrument department, here...
And I'd never been west of the Mississippi, so I figured, now’s a good time to come see what it’s like… So I accepted the offer and came out here...
[I came out in 1944] I came out on a train. I came in from Spokane, and arrived in Pasco; arrived about four o'clock in the morning. We got off the train; there were people from the plant there ready to greet us and grab us and take us over to Richland. I figure they were expecting people from all parts of the country to come in on the train because they were hiring at that time.
I came out as a single person, and while I was here, I met my wife to be; we were married in April of 1945... So that would be a year after I got here, we were married.
[The Plant was being built by the DuPont Company] They were able to build a plant like this, and maintain secrecy. One of the ways they did that was you’d be assigned to one small facility, and you only worked in that facility; you got familiar with that, and you were not so familiar with what went on in other parts of the plant. Due to the nature of the work we were doing here you were warned not to talk about your work. Secrecy was the number one priority here in the early days... I didn't know at first exactly what was being done here, but with the particular type of instruments we had, I pretty soon added two and two together and figured, “This has to be something of a nuclear nature.”
I saw from the ground floor up to full operation of the K reactors. I was assigned to a group of people who were watching the installation of instrumentation in the K reactors. And I’ve walked right out in the middle of a reactor pile when it was being built, donned clothing to be able to walk out on top of the graphite blocks, and looked at the instruments that were installed in the blocks. You had to don complete shoe covers and coveralls, because they wanted to keep the graphite perfectly clean.
We had a lot of safety training to be careful. We knew there were dangers, if we didn't do things right. I don't remember being really scared... even though there was a lot of things that could happen suddenly; otherwise I would never have lasted forty years...
Part of it that I was involved with here in Richland was actually maintenance. It was a shop in which they sent small instruments that were being used out on the Hanford project that had developed some problems so they'd be shipped in to this plant and we would overhaul them and do whatever was necessary to put them back into operation.
One thing we did in our shop here in Richland: there were some new instruments that were sent in, they happened to be new instruments, and they had a meter on the front. The meter said “milirankins.” That is a measurement of nuclear radiation. What we had to do: we had to black out that word. So we took the meter out of the instrument, painted the word “milirankins” with black paint so that you couldn't tell what the meter was reading, reinstalled the meter, and put it back in service. It was a matter of secrecy; they didn’t want people to know what we were measuring. It was a radiation-measuring instrument. Well that would have been in 1944.
Those instruments were used all over the project, and some of them in surrounding areas, outside of the project. The ones that were placed in homes were where people that worked here, on the project, knew what they were measuring... It was in their home. It would have been stuck away in the attic somewhere, so nobody else would see it... That would be, I'm pretty sure, 1944.
Secrecy was the number one priority here in the early days... I think a person tends to conduct themselves a little differently during wartime, when so many people are overseas fighting, you're going to do what you can to keep the war effort going smoothly, so if you're told to do something you do the best you can to keep things going smoothly. And of course there were a lot of FBI agents here at this plant, and you wanted to be careful that you didn't say something that would get into their hands, and if it was illegitimate to have said that you could be... They did not identify themselves as such; you could be working with someone right next to you, they could be an agent, you wouldn't know it. So you had to be so careful. That was amazing...
Once in a while you’d hear about some person: he worked here yesterday, but he’s not here anymore. He’s talked to somebody, said something that he wasn’t supposed to... He’s gone.
My wife and I took a trip up to Mount Rainier, the summer of ’45. When the announcement came out about what had been done here at Hanford, the official announcement came out in so many words; no other information was to be released at that time. My boss here in Richland was so afraid that I’d start to talking. And so they ran us down, got hold of me on the telephone, and warned me, “Just because it's been announced what we’re doing at Hanford, you're not supposed to talk about it.” I said, “Don’t worry, I'm not saying anything; I'm not even telling people I work at Hanford.”
I just don't remember my feelings, really I don't know. When the word came out that they’d built the material to make a bomb with...
About the only thing I have opinions on is the final use of the plutonium, as the bomb was dropped on Japan. We had to end the war. And if we hadn’t have used it, it would have been used on us... And it's a shame to have had to drop two bombs on Japan: all the thousands of people that lost their lives.
However, if we had not done that, most likely Germany would have developed the bomb and dropped it on us. If we had to go into Japan we’d have lost thousands of soldiers; they would fight to the end.
If you didn’t drop that bomb, there would be planes flying over, dropping other kinds of bombs. It was just part of the war effort. That's the way I felt about it.
Well now you’re asking questions I have a hard time answering. I don't know how to answer those. It was all part of the war effort. If we had not dropped an atomic bomb and killed one hundred thousand people, the war would have continued. And there would have been a lot more people killed on both sides, both Japanese and Americans, just to bring the war to an end, if we had to send troops in to fight on the ground. That’s a hard way to look at it, but it's probably true... It's a difficult question to try to answer.
I'm not in favor of wars of any kind; whatever it takes, to bring a war to an end.
The International Atomic Energy Agency was sending scientists from all over the world, and a lot of them were from Japan, sending them here to the Hanford project for training. And we met many Japanese scientists and engineers, as well as their families, from Japan. A person would come in, and he wouldn't know anything about the area. If he was here for six months, to a year: he’s got to find somewhere to live. And a lot of times my wife would help him find someplace. We got to meet the families; we loaned them pots and pans for the kitchen, to get started with… They’d come to our house and have a meal, and they in turn would invite us to wherever they were living, and share a meal...
When we were in Japan, one of our Japanese friends that was giving us a tour took us to one of the towns where there was a tree that been cut down. And he showed us the area, around the bark area, that was affected by the fallout from the radiation. He showed us the ring, that part of the tree.
It just stood out… Dark in color, and ruffled… A very prominent difference... He said, “That’s the year of the blast.”