INTERVIEW: Author Jamie Holmes on the ’12 Seconds of Silence’ that still reverberate today
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In any given year, the publishing world sees the release of many World War II-themed books, focusing on the European theater, Pacific theater or both areas of the global conflict. Historical figures, like Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often emerge as central protagonists, and major battles, such as the siege of the Philippines and the Battle of the Bulge, dominate the prose.
Within this annual collection of WWII nonfiction are occasional stories about the lesser-known aspects of the war, highlighting people and circumstances that have not made it to the history books and somehow escaped the headlines. Jamie Holmes’ new book, 12 Seconds of Silence: How a Team of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Spies Took Down a Nazi Superweapon, fits that category.
Within these pages, Holmes details the scientific efforts of Section T, a “team of physicists, engineers, and everyday Joes and Janes,” all headed by the charismatic figure of Merle Tuve. Their inventing and tinkering led to a “smart” weapon using a proximity fuse that revolutionized how the Allies fought the war. As the book jacket contends, and Holmes’ descriptions confirm, this technology changed the trajectory of the conflict and ranks with the atomic bomb as one of the most influential (and startling) devices developed during WWII.
For Holmes, the book project was many years in the making.
“I probably began in late 2016 or 2017,” the author said in a recent phone interview. “I consider myself a science writer, and almost everything that I’ve written involves science, psychology, technology in some way. And I’ve always had an interest in World War II. Both of my grandfathers fought in the war. I grew up hearing war stories, so I was looking for a science story involving the war.”
When he sat down and went through the possibilities, a few of the well-known tales popped into his mind: the atomic bomb and radar development at MIT. But he wanted to go deeper and look behind the headlines, and that’s when the fuse (sometimes spelled fuze) grabbed his attention.
“There had been one insider’s book on it in 1980,” Holmes said. “It didn’t use the archival resources that I knew were available. … So I thought that there was an opportunity to use the resources that were in D.C. at the National Archives, at the Library of Congress and at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and write something original and contribute to the record in some way.”
He was fascinated by the fact that Tuve and Section T have been largely missing from the history books. This is doubly strange because back in the mid-1940s, their scientific explorations were widely publicized. As Holmes put it, everybody knew Tuve.
“He was in all the papers and was widely celebrated, and the story somehow became lost, overshadowed by the atomic bomb,” he said. “And then there was never really a good history of it, so, yeah, I think he has been lost a little bit to history, certainly in relation to how he was seen at the time and how people who studied the world closely know what he did and know what he accomplished. I thought it was too bad that people hadn’t heard of him more widely.”
Within 12 Seconds of Silence, which is now available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Holmes takes time to describe and contextualize the atmosphere of Section T. It must have been a dynamic place to work, with PhD scientists toiling alongside radio operators and engineers. It was a hodgepodge group of people brought together by a common, immediate cause.
“There was a shortage of qualified personnel fairly quickly in the run up to the war and certainly when the war began,” Holmes said. “So it became clear very early on that you had to bring in other qualified people. With Section T it was anybody who had experience with electronics. … They brought in a bunch of Texas oil men. They had one key worker who was an astronomer, so Tuve’s philosophy by necessity was anyone we can get who is good. And secondarily he also had a philosophy of pairing people who had practical experience, maybe some guy who is a radio hobbyist, who is really good at it, with a PhD. His favorite pairing within groups was a PhD and a radio ham, and they would bring these separate perspectives. So I think that was very much his philosophy, and he managed them and he pushed them and he gave them all the resources they needed. Then if he felt like something was stalled, he would mix up the groups, so this was something that he did of necessity. But he also used it and deployed it well.”
As the technology of the fuse developed and eventually was deployed, Tuve began to have reservations about the marrying of science with warfare. He could see the future of how these discoveries and inventions would lead to both an Allied win (a good result for his patriotic mind), but also the potential for mass casualty (a fact that kept him up at night).
“I think it’s one of the themes of the book, Tuve’s ambivalence towards weaponizing science,” Holmes said. “He certainly felt that the atomic bomb program should not have gone forward. His argument was the Germans are in no position to seriously pursue a nuclear program. … [With] Dick Roberts, who was his colleague who was also on the Uranium Committee before the war began, they argued it was going to take the Germans too long. It would take them five years to do this, and it’s going to cost them way too much money. Then they knew the Germans couldn’t really afford to gamble so much money on a long-term project. The Germans’ entire strategy was a fast war, and … their theory was we’re going to have to quickly overwhelm the enemy.”
As far as the fuse, which allowed the Allies to revolutionize their antiaircraft defense, Tuve was excited by the prospects of the technology but dismayed when it was used for other reasons. Holmes called it ambivalence.
“Tuve was kind of ambivalent about even his contribution, even the fuse, and he says in the end he never visited Germany because there are too many orphans there on his account,” the author said. “He regretted the physical destruction caused by his weapon and thought of it as a defense weapon and didn’t like when it was used — instead of being used against aircraft, which was the original purpose — against troops as an anti-personnel weapon.”
He added: “I think that’s the contradiction that doesn’t get resolved. This was wonderfully heroic and brave, and it’s stunning and interesting how they accomplished creating the fuse. It also was a weapon of war, and these were scientists who didn’t really want to hurt anyone. So it’s both horrible and heroic simultaneously, and I think that’s how Tuve thought about it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
12 Seconds of Silence: How a Team of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Spies Took Down a Nazi Superweapon by Jamie Holmes is now available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Click here for more information.
