![]() ![]() Army Air Forces bombers on a mission to Kiel, Germany. ![]() Two months after Bohr’s harrowing flight, on December 13, 1943, North American P-51B Mustang fighters accompanied 710 U.S. The effect of a possible British capitulation on subsequent events in Russia, North Africa, Normandy and the Far East can only be imagined. If the close-run Battle of Britain had gone the other way, Great Britain, with much of its armor, trucks and heavy weapons left behind in the evacuation of Dunkirk, would have been in a precarious position. Of course, he might never have been rescued if Britain had lost the ferocious aerial struggle for its existence in the summer of 1940. The Nazi atomic bomb project ultimately fizzled, but it might have ended differently if Bohr had been in charge, coerced by threats to his family. The Mosquito was the only aircraft fast enough to evade German fighters patrolling the North Sea to intercept the BOAC flights, which conveyed clandestine personnel and precision supplies such as ball bearings. On December 6 he flew from England to the United States to join the Manhattan Project. ![]() With the help of the British secret service, Bohr had been smuggled to neutral Sweden. Word leaked that he was about to be arrested and would face a stark choice: Join Adolf Hitler’s atomic weapon project or be sent with his wife and son to almost certain death in a concentration camp. By 1943 the Nazi roundup and deportation of Jews in Denmark put Bohr at great risk, as his mother was Jewish. And the passenger who emerged, stiff from being crammed into an improvised bunk in the bomb bay of the unpressurized aircraft, was physicist Niels Bohr, 1922 Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in nuclear fission research.īohr had determined that the uranium isotope U-235 could create a chain reaction, and therefore could be used to construct a powerful atomic bomb, findings he detailed at a January 1939 conference in Washington, D.C. The year was 1943, and although the plane carried civilian markings and the pilot and navigator were nominally civilian employees of BOAC, it was a de Havilland Mosquito bomber. The British Overseas Airways Corporation flight from Stockholm, Sweden, landed at an airfield in Leuchars, northern Scotland, one of several hundred round trips the airline made between the two cities. ![]()
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