The answer is that initially most of the published history about the SED involved Los Alamos.  There is little written about the other locations even though they made tremendous contributions.  This section of our web site will correct that and, for the first time anywhere, tell the complete story.

This is an evolving process as we hear from more and more former members of the SED.  For instance we now have more than 50 members of our organization who were with the Special Engineer Detachment at Oak Ridge.  This rich 'treasure-trove' of history is priceless as we develop the complete history of the Special Engineer Detachment.  "Click" here to find out how you can help develop and shape this history.

In October 1943, the 9812th Technical Service Unit of the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) began to supply technical personnel to the various laboratories and production facilities involved in the development of the atomic bomb. Physicists, chemists, engineers, metallurgists, and a host of others with technical backgrounds, who had not been recruited in the early days of the MED, but who had been drafted into the Army, were now routed to secret locations around the United States.

Bernice Brode, the wife of Robert Brode who was in charge of the group that designed fusing and firing of the bomb at Los Alamos, recalled in her "Tales of Los Alamos," "The SED boys were quite different from the regular post soldiers. They looked, in spite of the uniforms, like budding professors instead of combat troops.

Originally, the MED had established the detachment with an initial allotment of 675 men, divided into a headquarters detachment and four separate companies. Soldiers were recruited through the Army specialized training program, at universities and colleges throughout the country, and the Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel. The National Defense Research Committee, founded to mobilize academic and industrial science in 1940, had compiled the roster.

     The establishment of the 9812th SED allowed the MED to route civilian scientists and technicians whose deferments they could not or would not arrange to the Manhattan Project. The MED was often reluctant to intervene with local draft boards to secure deferments because it could not reveal the nature of its work. In late 1943, however, when fathers and those with occupational deferments began to be drafted, Laboratory Director J. Robert Oppenheimer predicted disaster for the project. The MED's Selective Service Section took drastic steps to secure their deferments, and by the end of the war, more than 60,000 deferment actions, involving scientific personnel at Los Alamos; Oak Ridge; Hanford; Columbia; Chicago; and Berkeley, Calif., among other MED installations, were processed.

     Nevertheless, when in February 1944 the War Department forbade the deferment of men under 22 in the employment of the Army or its contractors, a number of the younger civilian scientists found themselves drafted and reassigned to the Laboratory as members of the SED. They thus joined those who had already been inducted and wound up far from the front.