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

by Denise Kiernan

  It was not the first time that the Project had considered the thermal diffusion process. Abelson had successfully enriched a small amount of Tubealloy in 1941. The verdict was, at the time, that the process would take too long, cost too much—even by the Project’s spendthrift standards—and wouldn’t produce enough highly enriched Product for the Gadget. But advances had been made. Maybe now whatever enrichment liquid thermal diffusion could achieve might help move things along in the other plants.

  The General sent a team to Philadelphia and liked their report. He decided a plant could be built at Site X, one that would be operational by 1945.

  Enter Eve Ferguson. H. K. Ferguson Company’s motto was “We design, build, and equip your plant—one contract, one responsibility, one profit,” and it fit the Project’s modus operandi to a T. Simplicity. Delegation. Compartmentalization. A subsidiary company, Fercleve, was created to handle operation once the construction was complete. But things had to move fast. The General wanted the plant operational in 120 days and its features had to be, as he put it, a “Chinese copy” of the Abelson’s pilot plant. But much bigger.

  Bigger! More! Now!

  This was precisely the kind of challenge H.K. would have loved. “Stop worrying” he was once quoted as telling an under-the-gun manufacturer. “Leave the worrying to Hitler and Hirohito.” The new plant, code-named S-50, wouldn’t have a paltry 100 separation columns, but instead would boast 2,142: each 48 feet long, comprised of nickel pipes surrounded by copper pipes, then swathed in a cool jacket of water, and then wrapped snugly again in galvanized iron. The columns were gathered into racks, or groups, of 102 columns. The location would be near K-25, which would provide the much-needed steam for the process.

  “You can’t win a modern war at thirty-five miles an hour,” H.K. once said, referring to his lead-foot tendencies on the road and in business. The General would likely have agreed. And a mere thirteen days after the General handed Eve Ferguson her company’s assignment, site clearing began. It was July 9, 1944: Eve’s 47th birthday and almost seven months to the day since she’d lost her husband. He couldn’t have done it better himself.

  Perhaps father of the calutron Ernest Lawrence was right when he said the General’s reputation depended on the Project’s success. But the success of the Project depended not solely on the General nor the brilliance of the men in New Mexico.

  The most ambitious war project in military history rested squarely on the shoulders of tens of thousands of ordinary people, many of them young women.

  CHAPTER 6

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  To Work

  Then we started stewing about the furnace and the laundry and the mud and the sitter problem—and forgot all about the project.

  —Vi Warren, Oak Ridge Journal

  The contest had been the Engineer’s idea, though it was unclear if the young women even knew they were competing.

  One of the Project’s more enthusiastic, ambitious, optimistic, and inspirational characters, Ernest Lawrence found it impossible to believe what the District Engineer was saying: Those high school girls they had pulled from rural Tennessee to operate his calutrons in Y-12 were doing it better than his own team of scientists.

  In Berkeley, only PhDs had been allowed to operate the panels controlling the electromagnetic separation units. When Tennessee Eastman suggested turning over the operation of Lawrence’s calutrons to a bunch of young women fresh off the farm with nothing more than a public school education, the Nobel Prize winner was skeptical. But it was decided Lawrence’s team would work out the kinks for the calutron units and then pass control to the female operators.

  Then the District Engineer gave Lawrence some surprising news: the “hillbilly” girls were generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs had. And Product was all that mattered.

  A gauntlet had been thrown down.

  The two men agreed to a production race. Whichever group generated the most enriched Tubealloy over a specified amount of time would win—though “winning” only meant bragging rights for the Engineer or Lawrence.

  By the end of the designated contest period, Lawrence and his PhDs had lost handily.

  They just couldn’t stop fiddling with things, Lawrence thought, trying to make things run smoother, faster, harder. Still, he was surprised.

  The District Engineer understood perfectly. Those girls, “hillbilly” or no, had been trained like soldiers. Do what you’re told. Don’t ask why.

  He and the General knew that was how you got results.

  ★ ★ ★

  Women occupied every corner of every workplace at CEW, from the personnel processing down to chemical processing. They were janitors, saleswomen, chemists, operators, and administrators. Those women who worked in personnel processing were considered a lucky bunch, as they often got first look at newly arrived men. News of a group of incoming GIs would spread rapidly through any affected offices. Oh-so-fortunate was the girl who filled out personnel security questionnaires (PSQs) for incoming men. Everything you wanted to know was there: age, marital status, education, where they were from. You name it. The PSQ had it all. In triplicate.

  CEW was a social limbo in many ways, neither here nor there, where transplants felt at once rootless and immediately grounded. New place, no history, instant community. A fresh start for some. Most GIs were sent to CEW without their wives, and not all of the married men working on the Project—GI or not—were quick to share details of their marital status at a dance or the bowling alley. Some advertised their status, some did not. It made more than a few women a little leery about falling hard for anyone, and made those women who worked in personnel processing at any of the plants or administrative offices particularly valuable as friends, and they were routinely quizzed by friends about potential new suitors.

  Is there a wife in the picture? Could you check . . .

  Knowing something might mean bearing bad news. (Yes, there was a wife. Children, too.) Other times, the woman in the know could wave a friend on toward romantic bliss. Green light, all systems go. A quick, highly forbidden glance at a file was enough to send a potential girlfriend to the rafters with joy or sulking away in disappointment. In a world of secrecy, where infractions—including the unauthorized accessing of personnel files—could be punished with firing and eviction from your home, this kind of delving was nonetheless seen as a necessary risk.

  ★ ★ ★

  Celia’s work in the Castle was happily predictable: she typed memos, took the transcription, completed insurance forms. She did not have to type or file any coded materials—words, numbers, strange names, and other gibberish—though some other secretaries did. “G.G.” visited now and then, and everyone continued to scurry like mice when he arrived. Celia still didn’t know why. It was a year later, and they had yet to be properly introduced.

  Being on a day schedule meant no graveyard shift. This made it much easier to find time to spend with Henry, which she did, often meeting him for dinner. Lew had taken it all quite well. The friends continued to socialize together. In a town as small as Oak Ridge, if you lost a date you moved on to whoever had room on their dance card. No one knew how long they would even be living here—certainly not once the war was over.

  Elsewhere in the Castle, Toni found herself on yet another coffee run. There were a number of secretaries in the pool who could have gotten coffee for the group visiting Mr. Diamond, but Toni had always been an antsy sort. Here was another opportunity to get up, move around, socialize.

  Across the hall from Toni’s office was a room full of members of the Women’s Air Corps. As far as Toni could tell, all the WACs did was read newspapers. She struggled to remember a time when she saw them doing anything else. All day they sat, periodicals in their hands, intently scanning each page. Toni wasn’t the only one who had noticed; some of the other secretaries had, too, and a theory about what they were doing had developed. (No one would dare ask the WACs directly.)

  Word around the p
ool was that the WACs were looking for secret words in the papers, words the government didn’t want mentioned. What were the words that were off-limits? Neither Toni nor any of the other secretaries had the slightest. But when one of the WACs spotted an offending word, that newspaper got a visit from . . . well . . . Toni didn’t know that part, either. FBI, maybe? FBI had become a kneejerk response to many questions without obvious answers.

  Who was back home asking about me? I don’t know, FBI?

  Whom did he get in trouble with? I think FBI.

  Toni’s work was routine, but the contracts she was always typing up for her immediate bosses in Lieutenant Colonel Vanden Bulck’s section, Sgt. Glen Wiltrout and Sgt. Ed Whitehead, were a bit strange. Despite her inauspicious interview, Toni took a lot of dictation. It still didn’t make much sense, but often it was because of the words rather than Mr. Diamond’s accent.

  To her mind, it sounded nonsensical, like repetitive, wordy say-nothingness:

  The subcontractor is hired and is given the responsibility to do the work prescribed to get the assigned task done . . .

  She thought the goal was to say as little as possible but to wrap that lack of information in as many sentences as you could. Each day, scads passed her eyes and ears, but as far as she could tell, they made no sense.

  Today’s latest trip to serve coffee to Mr. Diamond and his out-of-town visitors was followed by a visit from Sergeant Wiltrout.

  “Toni,” he began, “do you know why Mr. Diamond always asks you to get coffee when he has guests?”

  “No,” Toni answered. She hadn’t given it a second thought.

  “Well,” Glen continued. “He asks you to bring it in because he said he wants his guests to hear how the natives speak.”

  ★ ★ ★

  On a typical day, women who worked as cubicle operators arrived by bus at Y-12 and passed through yet another set of armed gates. There was an around-the-clock bus system on the Reservation. Bus trips to the plants were free, otherwise you could buy bus tokens to travel to places like Knoxville for shopping or a movie. Commuters living off the Reservation might have caught a bus at 4 AM to arrive in time for a 7 AM shift.

  CEW may not have officially existed, but it had a bus system the size of which rivaled some of the largest cities in the entire United States. Buses were packed, reminding cramped riders of the origin of the term “cattle car.” Some were retrofitted flattop trailers. Part of the transport fleet had originally been used in the World’s Fair in Chicago. Many buses had benches running down either side of the car and a wood-fired stove right smack in the middle. This was good, if crowded, in winter. In summer, sweltering, sweaty bodies swayed and jostled along roads that were dusty or muddy, depending on the weather.

  Guards checked badges at every turn. There were fences within fences here, with individuals monitored almost as closely as the Tubealloy they were processing. In addition to a resident’s pass that let workers roam freely about the nonworking areas of the Reservation, workers had badges dictating which plants or buildings they were allowed to enter. Coded by number or color depending on where you worked, badges announced to anyone looking—and someone was always looking—where you could work, which bus you could ride, and even which bathroom you could use. Near the entrance to the plants, guards would stop and board buses, shining their flashlights up and down the aisles if it was nighttime. Once through the plant entrance, a stop at the change house was first for some women, including Helen, an Alpha-3 cubicle operator. There she changed into zippy blue pants and a top. Calutron cubicle operators reported to their assigned buildings, depending upon which units, Alpha or Beta, they were operating.

  Cubicle control rooms were immense. Rooms were long, ceilings high, and the noise, at times, quite jarring. Piercing light, sparking sound. Cavernous. The soaring ceiling heights and concrete and metal surroundings of the vast rooms generated a cacophony of sound—work boots pounding concrete mixed with the chattering of voices, and was occasionally accompanied by an electrical short or the scrape of grounding hooks against metal.

  These women had never seen, let alone laid hands on, contraptions of such complexity and enormity. It may have been a day’s bus ride from a farm in western Tennessee to the guarded gates of the Y-12, but it was a world away in scientific development from just about anywhere in the world, no matter where you hailed from.

  Panels lined both sides of the room, creating a gauntlet of technology in which the women sat throughout their shift. There they monitored the instruments that controlled, as most of the workers called them, D units. They knew also that the units they monitored were arranged in something called the racetrack, which was located nearby, in an even larger room. The women were not supposed to venture there, though some did. Shifts were eight hours, but often seemed longer when you were perched on a stool the entire time. Operators usually minded at least two panels, each covered in knobs, dials, gauges and meters, all of which had to be carefully watched.

  Dot, Helen, and the other young women monitoring panels had been trained to keep their needles and gauges within a certain visual range. The basic operations explained to the women in training had been fairly straightforward: If your needle veered a bit too far to the right or left, a knob was adjusted until the needle fell back within the acceptable range. Most of the work was done by sight alone, though disruptive crackles might indicate a unit needed adjusting. Each young woman had four or five gauges or “needles” to monitor. And each control room had a supervisor who watched panels of their own at the back of the long room and monitored the women’s performance, troubleshooting when necessary. The supervisors weren’t completely in the know, either. No one in the cubicle control room had all the pieces of the puzzle of which they were an integral part.

  When needles started going haywire, sparking could start. For some women, this took getting used to. It sounded as though a breaker were blowing and if the correct adjustments couldn’t remedy the issue immediately, the unit itself might stop working completely. Each unit operated on a charge that would last for only a specified amount of time. Once the unit shut down, operators would pick up the phone next to their panel and call the men to come and empty what they called E boxes.

  They didn’t know what was in those E boxes, but it needed to be emptied regularly.

  Dot and Helen heard other letters thrown around as well, including Js, Ms, Qs, and Rs. When a needle on one of the gauges veered too far from center, the corresponding knob was adjusted. Helen didn’t know what the letters stood for, but she knew the idea was to get as much R as possible so that when the men came to empty the E boxes of the D units there would be a nice amount in there.

  But it could be tricky. The cubicle flew into what she started calling a “flurry”—the voltage kicking on and off, sometimes accompanied by what sounded like electrical charges—and the supervisor would have to leave and come to check and see what was happening.

  What’s in the E boxes?

  What does Q stand for?

  Smart girls didn’t bother asking. Those who asked too many questions or hazarded answers or theories were soon gone.

  But little bits of information did trickle about, words and phrases passed around.

  You wanted your R high. That was better than Q. There was a charge near the bottom of the D unit. Something was vaporized. There was a Z. The E box caught everything. Open the shutters. Maximize the beam. Supervisors spoke of striking a J. M voltage. G voltage. K voltage. And if you got your M voltage up and your G voltage up, then Product would hit the birdcage in the E box at the top of the unit and if that happened, you’d get the Q and R you wanted.

  It was that simple.

  There were always men milling about, fixing this or that, trying to talk to the roomful of fetching operators. Dot was adapting quite well to the social life in her new home. Dating, completely forbidden her by her stricter-than-usual father back on the farm, was now an option. When you weren’t allowed to date, stealing a kiss in the
middle of the road or the back of the bus on the way to football games was your only option. Not here.

  Here, her life and possibilities were wide open. Shift work didn’t just apply to her own individual schedule at the plant, it applied to her social schedule as well. Three shifts meant three times the dating opportunities, she liked to joke. But amid all the available men, the one that caught Dot’s attention was a young supervisor named Paul Wilkinson.

  When the machines started sparking or making noises, Dot would think to herself, What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get this thing to keep quiet? Then one day Paul walked the length of the room and sat on the stool next to her. Dot introduced herself and watched as he took over her panel. He had the nicest hands she had ever seen, almost like a surgeon’s. And his fingernails—so clean! Boys back home in Hornbeak never kept their nails groomed like that—they always harbored a week’s worth of dirt from farms and cars.

  From then on, whenever Dot had a problem, Paul would sit next to her and massage the knobs and dials until the machine subsided, purring like a kitten. Dot did not believe she had the same magic touch. It seemed to her that no sooner had she taken over than the machine would go berserk. However, it was nice to know that any problems she was having, Paul would come fix. Maybe the machine going haywire had its benefits. Paul had gone to college. He was well mannered. Dot took one look at him and thought he might have some real potential.

  Helen never told anyone she met that she was a cubicle operator. After her experience with the two men who recruited her to spy, she knew better than most that people were always listening, people you might never suspect. She noticed things, though. Helen had been told not to go back on the racetrack, but she occasionally walked back there anyway to fiddle with the units that her panels were controlling. Normally, you could pick up the phone at your panel or even yell back to one of the men who monitored the racetrack. But they weren’t always there. She knew she was not supposed to do this, but if there was no one back there to help out, what was her choice?