The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

by Denise Kiernan

E = mc2

  Using this and various other formulae—Lise’s nephew was amazed at the equations his aunt kept effortlessly on call in her mind—the two scientists scribbled and computed. They estimated that the division of a nucleus of Tubealloy would result in not only the emission of other neutrons but a release of energy in the neighborhood of 200 million electron volts for each individual atom.

  That was enough power to be noticed. Frisch would later describe this as enough energy to make a grain of sand, visible to the human eye, jump. And one mere gram of Tubealloy—one-fifth of a teaspoon, less than what one would spoon into a cup of coffee—contained an estimated 2.5 x 1021 atoms. That’s 2.5 sextillion, or 25 followed by twenty zeroes.

  In one gram.

  Forget jumping grains of sand—that was enough energy to displace a chunk of desert.

  THE PROJECT IS BORN

  Back in Stockholm, Lise wrote Hahn that she was “fairly certain now that you have a splitting towards barium . . .”

  For Hahn, publishing with his longtime, yet exiled, non-Aryan collaborator posed difficulties. Lise understood at the time. She knew that while isolating evidence was essential, being able to explain what you have witnessed was equally as crucial if not more so. So she and her nephew did. She helped put into words what Fermi had seen years earlier but failed to fully explain, what Noddack had deemed possible when everyone else doubted her. Hahn and Strassmann had found the evidence, but Lise made sense of it.

  Fission.

  That’s what Lise and Frisch decided to call it.

  Frisch got word to Bohr just prior to Bohr’s boarding the ship Drottningholm bound for America. There he would discuss the findings with all the right members of the scientific community. In January 1939, Hahn and Strassmann published—without Lise—in the scientific journal Naturwissenschaften a paper describing what they had witnessed. Their findings arrived in the United States shortly after Bohr’s ship. Lise collaborated with Frisch over the phone—he in Copenhagen, she in Sweden—and composed their own paper explaining what Hahn and Strassmann had observed, which was published in the British journal Nature. It was the first theoretical interpretation of the fission process. Much research followed under the flags of several nations, and the emission of neutrons during fission was confirmed—as was the release of cosmically confounding amounts of energy that went along with it.

  Bohr’s ship was met by Enrico Fermi and his wife, Laura, who had arrived in the United States earlier that month with their family. After picking up Enrico’s Nobel Prize in Stockholm they had just kept going. Laura was Jewish, and Benito Mussolini’s Italy was not safe for her, no matter who her husband was. Also in the United States, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard and others believed secrecy was now needed: The scientific community should work to keep any further discoveries quiet. There was a war on. Szilard and another Hungarian physicist, Eugene Wigner, met with Albert Einstein in Princeton, explaining the snowballing developments in the field of nuclear physics and convincing the genius professor with static-electric locks that President Roosevelt needed to support Tubealloy research efforts in the United States. They warned that Germany was already conducting their own research and drafted a letter saying so. Einstein put his signature to it. Alexander Sachs, an economist and a friend of the president, delivered it.

  Shortly thereafter, in October 1939, the first of a long line of committees and advisory groups and classified brain trusts that would eventually evolve into the Manhattan Engineer District and the Project was formed and given a paltry $6,000 in funding. On December 6, 1941, one of these administrative incarnations—the S-1 Section of the Office of Scientific Research and Development—met and proposed not only another administrative reorganization, but more importantly an “all-out” effort to work on unleashing this new power. If anyone present had had any misgivings about committing time, money, and manpower to what would become the Project, they may likely have changed their minds the very next day, December 7, 1941.

  The snowy realizations of an exiled female Austrian physicist had resulted in an unprecedented mobilization of military, industrial, and scientific worlds. Fast-moving bullets and slow-moving neutrons were aimed toward a single objective: a victorious end to the war. Ida Noddack’s theories and Lise Meitner’s explanations had resulted in a chain reaction of their own, science colliding with military and industry, splitting into compartmentalized and mobilized units, each moving along its own trajectory, ready to make sand jump in the desert.

  CHAPTER 4

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  Bull Pens and Creeps

  The Project’s Welcome for New Employees

  Perhaps we just don’t know where to begin. Judging from pre-war standards, a three-year accumulation of shop-talk should add up to quite a total for the average man.

  —Vi Warren, Oak Ridge Journal

  Virginia Spivey was stuck in limbo, the kind that existed for those lacking appropriate paperwork—and in triplicate. If there were a penance designed specifically for the shy-yet-spunky, 21-year-old woman, it came in the form of a daily challenge to devise something of value to teach the other fidgety individuals who were stuck with her in a place called the “bull pen.”

  Before new arrivals to CEW could be given free reign to work at their new jobs, the appropriate clearances had to be earned, physicals passed, photographs and fingerprints taken, urine collected, and stacks of “I swear I won’t talk” papers signed. They could move into housing, but it was life in the bull pen until job clearance came through. The amount of time this process took depended on the individual and the job. Someone working in an area of a plant that was a degree closer to the Secret required much higher clearance than someone working in the cafeteria.

  Until the precious stamp of approval arrived, life went on. People got settled in their trailers, houses, or dorms, and many spent their days in the bull pen near the Castle. There they smoked, read, possibly learned skills that may or may not have anything to do with the new job they had yet to secure, or they sat idly by, waiting for their chance to move on.

  The mind-your-own-business ethos permeated life at CEW. The moment you passed through the guarded gates, the veil of secrecy descended: No specific information about the world within the gates, no matter how mundane, was to be shared. When in doubt, shut your mouth.

  New residents were often briefed unofficially by “old-timers” who had lived on the site for at least a few weeks. Signs and billboards posted throughout the Reservation reminded all to mind their “loose lips.” The following appeared on the first page of the resident’s handbook:

  This military area contains a vital war project. Like other installations contributing to the war effort, its security depends upon the whole-hearted cooperation of all concerned in the observing of regulations designed to safeguard the place, the people having access to the area and the information, material, and operations pertaining thereto.

  Accordingly, a safe rule to follow is that What you do here, What you see here, What you hear here, please let it stay here.

  Background checks were only one step and did not always guarantee employment. Officials also used the waiting period and training process to screen people’s behavior.

  One story described a locksmith who sat bragging about his lock-picking prowess to the rest of his training group. He was chomping at the bit to get into those plants so that he could show the military just how lax their security was.

  He promptly disappeared from Y-12 training classes.

  Others might be dismissed for problems at home, the personal kind that most individuals would consider none of an employer’s business. But this was no ordinary employer. Money issues, for example, might make someone more likely to do or say things for personal profit. Despite the Project’s desperate need for labor, empty chairs routinely appeared with no explanations given.

  Some new recruits viewed orientation films depicting the enemy cloaked in blazing terror. Others were asked questions like:

&n
bsp; Do you drink? How often?

  If someone close to you revealed a secret, would you report them?

  Have you ever belonged to any group with communist ties, or that opposes the democratic form of government?

  Someone was always watching. One man training to be a supervisor at the Y-12 plant was told that one in four persons here was FBI. Those who worked in processing sometimes broadcasted anecdotes meant to drive home the “zip it” message for new recruits. These were specific enough to be believable, yet vague enough to leave you wondering about the fate of the offending individual.

  A woman thoughtlessly wrote her family describing the size and number of facilities in her new town . . . Someone kept a diary . . . A man told a friend about the type of machinery he saw in his plant . . .

  During processing and training, individuals, no matter the rung they occupied on the information ladder, were given just enough detail to do their job well, and not an infinitesimal scrap more.

  While waiting for his Q clearance, one young scientist in training received a refresher course about topics he’d studied in high school. During the briefing, he asked the instructor to clarify one of his statements. The response from the instructor was clear: Curiosity for curiosity’s sake was not appreciated. If the young man wanted to stick around, he had better shift his focus to his work and trust that everything he needed to know would be told to him precisely when he needed to know it.

  ★ ★ ★

  Oddly enough, Virginia had already received clearance. She had answered the questions, signed the forms and gone through the rigmarole when she came to CEW in December 1943 for her interview. At the time, she was still in school and not available to work. Now, no one seemed to know where her clearance was. She was assigned a dorm room in the newly established West Village, and each day she reported to the bull pen. Because she had a college degree, she was thrust into the unexpected role of teacher.

  Back at the University of North Carolina, Virginia had specifically decided not to teach. Initially majoring in English, the first teaching course she took at Chapel Hill changed her mind. She found it rote and uninteresting. But she had always been inclined toward science; she found it endlessly fascinating. There was always something new to learn, always something that had applications to what was going on in the real world, today. She switched to chemistry and never looked back.

  A recruiter came to speak to Virginia shortly before graduation. Virginia listened as the woman described a 90-square-mile area, with plants operating for the war effort and free buses running all night and day. There Virginia could put her science background to use. This magical place was in Tennessee, and Virginia was invited to come out for an interview over Christmas break.

  It had been Virginia’s first train trip. She left home in Louisburg, North Carolina, where she had been spending Christmas with her family, and caught the bus to Greensboro. She spent the night with some friends at Greensboro College and caught a cab to the station the next morning. The train headed west and the flat Piedmont terrain exploded upward as they got closer to Asheville in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She had driven through Asheville before with her family. The Blue Ridge scenery was so different from her usual sea-level surroundings. Wisps of cloud clung to the rugged slopes of the Smokies, seeming to dance alongside the car just beyond the window. “Roll your windows down,” her father used to say, “and wash your hands in the clouds.”

  Virginia’s friend Johnny, who had already begun work at CEW, met her at the Knoxville station, flower in hand. It was late, and she went straight to a boardinghouse in downtown Knoxville where the recruiter had arranged for her to stay. Virginia’s friend Virginia Kelly, also from Chapel Hill, had made the trip down from her hometown of Rochester, New York. The city appeared booming, jam-packed. Virginia was glad to have someone she knew to share the experience with.

  Breakfast couldn’t have come soon enough. Not knowing how much a meal would cost in the dining car, Virginia had ignored the porter’s call to dinner and gone to bed hungry. Afterward, a car whisked the girls away to a Knoxville office where they were given physicals. Then the driver took the two Virginias down the highway through guarded Edgemoor Gate, onto the Reservation and straight to the Y-12 plant. Virginia enjoyed the view on the way in, passing along the frosted Clinch. Once through the gates the palette shifted. Slushy construction trails sprouted where wide tires had cut into the frozen earth.

  The interview at Y-12 was mercifully brief and offered little more information than the recruiter who had visited campus. Virginia was offered a job and had accepted it. She was going to be a lab assistant on a very important war project. She would start after graduation.

  Now after arriving at CEW no one could find Virginia’s paperwork. Officials instructed Virginia that the other workers in the bull pen with her needed to be trained. For what, specifically? The officials couldn’t say.

  Virginia racked her brain to come up with interesting and impromptu lessons. The individuals were as varied as the jobs they were going to fill and they had arrived from farms across the state, and states across the country. Southern. Northern. Educated. Dropouts. City. Country. Male. Female. Virginia thought some looked bored to death no matter what she had planned for the day. Others were surprisingly interested. Virginia made the best of the uninspiring surroundings. She even performed small chemical experiments, designed to help explain, for example, how reactions took place and what “gases” were. She trotted out the old chemistry class standby of baking soda and vinegar. The hydrogen in the vinegar slammed into the bicarbonate of the baking soda, the resulting acid transformed into carbon dioxide and water, releasing a bubbling over of foaming energy, a visual show of new expanding forces resulting from the collision of two quiet and inert ones.

  Virginia taught everyone how to read water and electric meters. Some had never used or even seen a yardstick or meterstick before, and Virginia explained the difference between the two. If nothing else, it gave her something to do besides sit and wait. Occasionally someone would stand up and wander out of the room mid-lesson. Sometimes they would come back in an hour, sometimes never.

  There were a fair number of young women, many still in their teens, who had just strolled out of rural Tennessee high schools. Another part of the training was to show this fresh-faced group how to read dials and gauges and what, precisely, dials and gauges were. Virginia didn’t know why the women would be reading the instruments, so the instructions covered basic concepts. All the better, considering the limited education some possessed. She explained what she considered to be the rudimentary movements and logic. Some dials, gauges, and knobs move in both directions, she explained, around a zero or central position, and not just simply from left to right, from smaller to bigger. That idea was slightly counterintuitive, especially for an 18-year-old coming from a home that lacked plumbing or electricity. But Virginia loved meeting so many new people and found many of the women to be attentive and quick learners.

  One of the bull pen regulars was a man named Mac Piper, who had been paying particularly close attention to Virginia. He introduced himself and explained that he was going to be a personnel head for the division at Y-12, to which Virginia was originally assigned. Mac wanted to know if Virginia would like to work as his assistant. The job would be in human resources and not a lab. But she needed to get out of the bull pen. This offer seemed to be the quickest path to freedom. She took it.

  This wasn’t the first time things hadn’t gone the way Virginia had planned. She had learned early on in life to make the best of what came your way, even if it was painful or seemed unfair. She had seen both. This was just an unexpected twist in the road and she would happily follow it.

  ★ ★ ★

  Dorothy Jones must have spent six weeks in training working on those darn machines. She had just graduated high school, finally free of schedules and teachers and yet here she was—back in class again.

  Dot knew the panels in front of her we
ren’t the real thing. But she wouldn’t see the real thing until training was over and her building at the plant was ready. In the meantime, she learned about knobs and dials, the likes of which she had never seen back in Hornbeak, Tennessee. Her quiet little hometown in the sparsely populated northwest corner of the Volunteer State sat roughly 20 minutes from the state line, where the Mississippi snaked in and out along the southernmost foot of the state of Missouri.

  The Project liked high school girls, especially those from rural backgrounds. Recruiters sought them out relentlessly, feeling young women were easy to instruct. They did what they were told. They weren’t overly curious. If you tell a young woman of 18 from a small-town background to do something, she’ll do it, no questions asked. Educated women and men, people who had gone to college and learned just enough to think that they might “know” something, gave you problems. The Project scoured the countryside of Tennessee and beyond looking for recent graduates.

  Dot had no fixed plans beyond high school, and she wasn’t alone in that respect. She could only think of two or three kids from her graduating class of 12 or so who were going to college. When the job notice went up at school, she jumped at the chance to take the short, handwritten test the recruiters administered. She was shaking in her boots when she took it and couldn’t remember much of it, but it had been blissfully free of math.

  For the life of her she couldn’t figure out why more students weren’t meeting with the recruiters, why anyone would want to stay in Hornbeak for the rest of their lives. She had always dreamed of traveling, of flying off to somewhere like Paris, even though she had no idea how she would ever make it happen. She wanted to marry well, someone with a college degree, someone who would be a good supporter. It all seemed so far removed from her life on the farm. But she dreamed anyway. Why deny yourself that? And why not leave? How often did opportunities like this come along in Hornbeak? Opportunities to go and do something, anything, to go somewhere—else.