Free Martian's Daughter: A Memoir by Marina von Neumann Whitman

finding a way to partner with my father in one aspect of his all-consuming work. As he was developing the modern stored-program computer, he trained her, at her request, to become one of the original programmers, writing instructions for different computational tasks in a form that the machine could understand. She was a quick study, and I remember the flowcharts she produced, filled with rectangles and arrows and circles, on huge sheets of white paper that spilled over onto the floor. The Princeton household, like the one in Cambridge, was totally consumed in the job of winning the war. And, by failing to pay attention and never learning to make sense of Klari's flowcharts, I passed up completely the unique opportunity to become an early expert in computer programming. To this day, I'm profoundly ignorant of what is going on inside my desktop computer, or how to fix it when something goes awry.
     
    From my vantage point, the adults saw the war as an onerous task that required maximum effort from everyone, but one in which we would ultimately be successful. I knew nothing of the extent to which European civilization was being destroyed by the horrors inflicted on huge swaths of civilian populations—Jews, Poles, Russians—by the Nazis and their allies. It never occurred to me, listening to the conversations that swirled around me, that the conflict would end any way other than with a victory for our side. I was startled to learn years later, from old copies of Life magazine when I was helping to clean out my father's Princeton home after his death, that in the dark days of 1943 an Allied victory was by no means assured.
     
    By the spring and summer of 1945, the job was finished. Although the radar and other electronic technology developed and produced at RadLab had played an important role in the Allied bombing attacks that inflicted huge damage on Germany's industrial structure and civilian population, it was the capture of Berlin by Russian infantry that brought about Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8, V-E Day. My friends and I joined in the shouting and hugging and banging of pots and pans in the streets until dark, when my mother, fearing for my safety in the general crush, made me come inside.
     
    Although the war in the Pacific still raged, the general sentiment was that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The big question, we learned later, was whether the United States should proceed with an invasion of Japan, which was sure to produce enormous casualties on both sides, or take the shortcut offered by the fearful new weapon my father and his colleagues had developed at Los Alamos, the atomic bomb. President Harry Truman authorized the dropping of two such bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a week later World War II was truly over.
     
    I don't recall, though, the same unalloyed jubilation in August that had filled the streets in May. Whether this feeling of anticlimax arose from a sense that the issue was no longer whether we would win but when, or whether relief was clouded by a sense of foreboding regarding the new and terrible weapon we had unleashed, I don't know. But for one young lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, who had just received orders to leave for the Pacific as navigator, photographer, and nose gunner on one of the B-29s that would fly over Japan to map it for the invasion, there was no ambiguity. Facing an assignment in which the mortality rate was said to be 70 percent, Robert Whitman—the man who would become my husband a decade later—felt certain that the bomb had saved his life.
     
    With its job completed, RadLab was disbanded and its scientists dispersed to old jobs or new ones. My mother and Desmond found jobs in New York, she doing for the Sperry Gyroscope Company the same kind of training of women technicians that she had pioneered at RadLab, he as a department head at the Federal Communications Laboratory. There wasa severe housing shortage, but my mother, master