Soldiers and scientists wanted to return to their peacetime pursuits, and there was a danger that wartime knowledge would be lost, leaving no one who knew how to handle and maintain nuclear weapons, much less how to improve the weapons and processes. The military side of the Manhattan Project had relied heavily on reservists, as the policy of the Corps of Engineers was to assign regular officers to field commands.[4][5] The reservists were now eligible for separation. To replace them, Groves asked for fifty West Point graduates from the top ten percent of their classes to man bomb assembly teams at Sandia Base, where the assembly staff and facilities had been moved from Los Alamos and Wendover Field in September and October 1945.