National Home Front Project - Meet Robert "Bob" Carter

The National Home Front Project is a major grassroots initiative under the leadership of historians at Washington College. Our innovative oral history program partners with individuals, communities, and organizations across the United States to record, preserve, and share audio interviews with civilians who experienced World War II.

By pulling together in the spirit of wartime Americans, we can ensure that future generations hear their voices and that our country never forgets its past. For this short entry, we’d like to share the story of Robert “Bob” Carter.

Robert “Bob” Carter was a Washington College graduate in 1942 from Berlin, Maryland. A day before being drafted into the Army that year, he was deferred to a graduate school physics program at Purdue University. A year and a half later, his professors invited him and his lab partner to come join them at a secret physics project in New Mexico. By 1945, he and his team had invented history’s first atomic bomb in Los Alamos as part of the Manhattan Project. Here he describes what it was like working on the project:

Listen to this account, and much more here: