page_title: Leslie Groves
section_title: After the war
hierarchical_section_title: Leslie Groves / After the war
caption_attribution_description: English: Presentation of Army-Navy E Award at Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos, NM. J Robert Oppenheimer is at left. Colonel Nichols, commander of the MED is in the center, wearing glasses. To the right is Major General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project; Robert Gordon Sproul, the President of the University of California; and Commodore W. S. Parsons
context_page_description: Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves Jr. was a United States Army Corps of Engineers officer who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project, a top secret research project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II.
  The son of a U.S. Army chaplain, Groves lived at various Army posts during his childhood. In 1918, he graduated fourth in his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and was commissioned into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 1929, he went to Nicaragua as part of an expedition to conduct a survey for the Inter-Oceanic Nicaragua Canal. Following the 1931 earthquake, Groves took over Managua's water supply system, for which he was awarded the Nicaraguan Presidential Medal of Merit. He attended the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1935 and 1936; and the Army War College in 1938 and 1939, after which he was posted to the War Department General Staff. Groves developed "a reputation as a doer, a driver, and a stickler for duty" and in 1940 he became special assistant for construction to the Quartermaster General, tasked with inspecting construction sites and checking on their progress.
context_section_description: Responsibility for nuclear power and nuclear weapons was transferred from the Manhattan District to the Atomic Energy Commission on 1 January 1947. On 29 January 1947, Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson and Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal issued a joint directive creating the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP) to control the military aspects of nuclear weapons. Groves was appointed its chief on 28 February 1947. In April, AFSWP moved from the New War Department Building to the fifth floor of the Pentagon. Groves had already made a start on the new mission by creating Sandia Base in 1946.
  The Army Chief of Staff, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, met with Groves on 30 January 1948 to evaluate his performance. Eisenhower recounted a long list of complaints about Groves pertaining to his rudeness, arrogance, insensitivity, contempt for the rules and maneuvering for promotion out of turn. Eisenhower made it clear that Groves would never become Chief of Engineers. Groves realized that in the rapidly shrinking postwar military he would not be given any assignment similar in importance to the one he had held in the Manhattan Project, as such posts would go to combat commanders returning from overseas, and he decided to leave the Army. He was promoted to lieutenant general on 24 January 1948, just before his retirement on 29 February 1948 in recognition of his leadership of the Manhattan Project. By special Act of Congress his date of rank was backdated to 16 July 1945, the date of the Trinity nuclear test.
caption: Presentation of the Army-Navy "E" Award at Los Alamos on 16 October 1945. Standing, left to right: Oppenheimer, unidentified, unidentified, Kenneth Nichols, Groves, Robert Sproul, William Parsons
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