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

by Denise Kiernan

  As she worked, she kept one eye on the gauge of the machine connected to the pump. She watched the needle. She kept moving the probe, nice and slow, looking to see if the needle jumped. If it stayed put, the pipe was okay and was taken away. If the needle moved, then she had a leak. When that happened, she moved the probe over the suspected area one more time, working to locate the trouble spot. As she finished with each pipe, Colleen would take a piece of chalk and mark it as “OK” or designate any spots that had caused her needle to wiggle. After she finished each, an inspector checked her work.

  Most times it was a GI. Sometimes it was Bess Rowan, Colleen’s mother, another supervisor.

  Once all was done, Colleen signaled the millwrights, who took the pipe away and brought in the next one. There was no end to these pipes. Where did they come from? That door over there. Where were they going? That other door right there. What was on the other side of those doors? Probably more pipes.

  Then Colleen was then offered a new assignment. One of the GI trainers, Clifford Black—Blackie, they called him—came to her section looking for a handful of women to work in another part of the building.

  Colleen was always up for a change of scenery and happily volunteered. The group made their way down into the basement of the conditioning building. Colleen’s new assignment was explained in the usual fashion: a lot of information about how to do what you were doing, but precious little about what you were doing. An important distinction. As Colleen understood it, she would be working on converters. At first glance, the work appeared to be similar to what she had been doing upstairs. The main difference, as far as she could tell, was that all of the pipes here appeared to be fixed in place—no millwrights ferrying back and forth overhead—just one seemingly endless labyrinth of metal.

  She would still be testing pipes for leaks, but there was a difference: These pipes were giant. For some of the largest ones, she had to get a ladder and physically climb up on top of the pipes in order to be able to run her probe along all of the various welds. At times, she had to maneuver substantial heights. Though she had already started getting used to wearing pants, this new assignment got her fully broken in in a jiffy.

  Dressing like men was still a bit of an adjustment for some women, but Colleen kind of liked it. She remembered the first time her little sister Jo saw their mother in pants and a kerchief. Jo just started sobbing and wouldn’t stop. She wanted to know where her mother had gone. Colleen used to think the only women who wore pants were Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich. (And only fast women wore bobby socks.) Images of Hepburn and Dietrich sporting two-legged fashions in Modern Screen captivated many a young woman in the 1940s. And now here Colleen was, scaling pipes all day in mixed company. She had little choice when it came to apparel.

  Welds, probes, and gauges. Colleen did not know what those pipes carried and she never asked. One day, while she was working, one of the GI supervisors approached her with some friendly advice.

  “If you smell something . . . anything funny,” he warned her, “you be sure to get out of here.”

  “Okay,” Colleen said, and went about her business.

  The GI walked off.

  Huh, Colleen thought to herself. Whatever’s going through these pipes must smell real bad . . .

  ★ ★ ★

  Rosemary, perhaps more than the other women, interacted at work with just about every walk of life at CEW. But early in the morning on July 7, 1944, work and tragedy brought her in close contact with those outside the fence, as well.

  Rosemary had spent the night at Dr. Rea’s home, having babysat for the couple’s children. Dr. Rea had been called to the hospital in the middle of the night, and when he returned early the next morning, he told Rosemary she needed to go back there with him. There had been a terrible accident.

  Many of the soldiers had been lying in their berths when it happened. Others were headed there, having just come from the chow car. The train’s passengers, just over 1,000 of them, were all new inductees into the Army.

  It was around 9 PM, and the train was moving along at a good clip, already jostling some of the boys as they crawled into the tiny beds, or maneuvered the Lilliputian sinks and bowls in preparation for rack time. This section of the L&N line on the Louisville-Nashville leg boasted more than its fair share of hairpin turns as it twisted its way through the Cumberland Mountains that straddled the Kentucky–Tennessee line, just south of Jellico, Tennessee. One quick turn had tossed a few privates from their bunks, alarming some, barely rousing others. But then the impact came, and with it, gasps and cries as steel wheels departed the iron rails and hit rock and earth. Then 6 of the 14 cars sailed downward, careening 50 feet to the bottom of the Clear Fork River Gorge at the Jellico Narrows.

  Tons of buckled steel from the derailed cars stacked one atop the other in the bottom of the ravine. Some of the soldiers were pinned and trapped beneath debris and wreckage, others had been thrown clear or had stumbled away, dazed, into the night. The crushing sound of metal brought local men and women down from their mountain homes. They fashioned block and tackle pulleys to retrieve the injured from the wreckage. No small feat, hoisting the battered bodies up the steep incline of the overgrown bank, where they would lie until more help arrived.

  Ambulances, medics, and officials were soon on the scene, but as much as 12 hours after the initial crash, soldiers were still stranded. One private lay helplessly pinned down beneath the weight of four dead soldiers. He had been in the Army 13 days.

  CEW was the best first option for the soldiers before plans could be made to move them to a larger facility. When Rosemary walked through the door of the hospital, injured soldiers lined the halls. As head of emergency she worked her way down the corridor, making sure soldiers were comfortable, medicating those who needed it. Of the 34 soldiers who died, Oak Ridge’s hospital issued 31 of the death certificates and cared for dozens more. Just two months later, in September 1944, Dr. Rea would write a memo entitled, “Number of Deaths at the Oak Ridge Hospital.” In ten months, he noted, the average number of deaths per month—not counting those from the Jellico wreck—was 8.8. This statistic raised the question as to “whether it is desirous to have a funeral home on the Area,” which would also likely require a cemetery. Rea’s recommendation was, for the time being, to continue using embalming facilities in the surrounding areas. This was perhaps another reminder that no matter the Project’s initial plans for Site X, Oak Ridge was fast becoming less of a temporary military outpost and more of a permanent home. Fences could not isolate them from neighbors in need when disaster struck, and though Oak Ridge had been born of youth and vigor and determination, it would eventually need to care for the elderly, the infirm, and those who were gone.

  ★ ★ ★

  Mr. Diamond called Toni into his office, as he had so many times before. But this time he had an unexpected proposition, almost as unexpected as the day he decided to hire her.

  “Would you like a promotion?” he asked Toni.

  Toni thought. A promotion would sure be nice. The extra pay, the new title, maybe even better benefits.

  But then she remembered the constant trips to fetch coffee just so Mr. Diamond could trot her out in front of his Yankee friends and get her to talk like a “native” for his amusement. But now, for once, the decision was hers.

  She looked Mr. Diamond square in the eye and gave her answer.

  “No.”

  “You don’t want a promotion?”

  “No.”

  “You do realize that it would mean a pay raise,” he asked, bewildered.

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Toni answered.

  Mr. Diamond’s round face appeared puzzled and annoyed. Toni knew the poor man had no earthly idea what to make of her—probably never had—but she did not care one bit. Deep in her bones, her Clinton, Tennessee, bones, she felt good, proud, and satisfied.

  She would work, yes. She would work hard. But in whatever way she could, she would do so on her own te
rms, no matter how it looked or sounded to anybody.

  Mr. Diamond had nothing else to say. He was not happy.

  Toni was.

  She walked out of the room, a native strolling with her head held high, her East Tennessee twang carried on the dusty Oak Ridge breeze, never to be muffled.

  TUBEALLOY

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  THE COURIERS

  Two couriers boarded the train. First stop: Chicago. The containers they carried were composed of nickel and lined with gold, but the couriers weren’t privy to those specs, nor the container’s contents.

  At the end of the Beta production process, Y-12’s Product, enriched Tubealloy, was combined with fluorine for a clandestine coffee-container trek by courier to Site Y in New Mexico. In this form—Tubealloy tetrafluoride—it waited to depart CEW. The pretty teal crystals of TF4, called green salt by some, sat in a bunker nestled into the ground near one of the remaining farmhouses still standing on the grounds of CEW. Cows grazed, a silo loomed, but machine guns and guards also hovered, safeguarding the Tubealloy until couriers came to collect it.

  The first shipment of Product from Site X to Site Y had been sent via courier in early March 1944: roughly 200 grams of all that Y-12 could belt out, about 40 teaspoons. Y-12’s first successful production run had been January 27, 1944. The concentration of the Product wasn’t what they were hoping for—only about 12 percent T-235—but it had been a start. It had been enough to keep the experimental beast of Los Alamos temporarily sated with some T-235 left over to feed Y-12’s first Beta track, which came on line in March. Since then, production had improved. There had been two shipments of Tubealloy, enriched to about 60 or 65 percent T-235, sent to New Mexico in June.

  Clad in suits, the couriers could have been mistaken for salesmen, which was, of course, the idea. The containers were placed in small briefcases and handcuffed to the arm of one of the men. If the couriers could manage to sleep, they did so on top of the briefcase. Most stayed awake. From Chicago it was on to the Santa Fe Chief for the second leg of the trip. “Extra Fast-Extra Fine-Extra Fare,” was the Chief’s slogan. The maroon-and-gold Pullman train emblazoned with a headdress streamed along the passenger cars as it barreled west toward the coast through mountain and desert. The Chief had been known for carrying its share of starlets and other Hollywood types from Los Angeles to points east and back again. Native Americans had first followed these trails, conquistadors after that, then mules gave way to stagecoaches and the gold rush blew the Santa Fe trail wide open, iron and steel and steam linking Hollywood glitz to the plains of the Midwest. A lot of history had transpired along this route. This trip was no different.

  Site Y had no train station. The couriers descended at Lamy, New Mexico, where they were met by a car. The calutron-enriched Tubealloy was handed off and sent up the desert highway into nothingness, until it reached the hands of the waiting scientists. There, they would extract the Tubealloy from the TF4 and transform it into a metal as they continued to design the Tubealloy’s ultimate container: the Gadget.

  CHAPTER 7

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  Rhythms of Life

  [W]e learned to confine the conversation with men to the lighter topics, and we did appreciate how nice they were about finding one a chair or lighting a cigarette.

  —Vi Warren, Oak Ridge Journal

  Thunderstorms were a blessing and a curse in the summer of 1944, as they had been the summer before. The downpours came, eradicating dust and replacing it with sludgy yellowish muck, bursting the swollen seams of a humid-heavy sky. The release of tension would only build up and rain down again the next day. This weather cycle offered both frustration at the muddy conditions and temporary respite from the stifling heat. Predictably violent outbursts in the afternoons, a cool breeze in the evening if you were lucky, followed by quietly growing swelters again the next day.

  Life on the Reservation had its own rhythm as well, cycles of work and lines and food and work and then more lines again. The war overseas was present in every moment, yet strangely distant, oceans away with news arriving in fits and starts. If you were lucky enough to have a radio, you could keep up with the latest developments. If not, you were left to ferret out nuggets of information from newsprint and word of mouth, perhaps the occasional piece of mail arriving at last from far away. Any details offered within those precious letters was already weeks or months out of date by the time its intended reader gazed upon the words. Or worse, the reader found nonsensical sentences, the words having been blacked out by censors.

  June 1944 brought the liberation of Rome and the storming of the beaches at Normandy. The situation in the Pacific continued to escalate. For some at Site X, concern for family or friends fighting was augmented by the stress of a life of secrecy. Americans were making due everywhere. Everyone was rationing, volunteering at the USO, waiting for sweethearts and sons to come home. But not every American was enduring those hardships while managing round-the-clock work schedules and living behind armed gates amid legions of rumored informants.

  The result made for a potent mix of anxiety and inspiration for some: the anxiety of not knowing, of being watched, of worrying you might say something out of turn, and the inspiration to stay on the job and do it well, because whatever you were working on was going to help end the war. That much you knew, that much you had been promised.

  But drive and goals were not enough to keep some spirits buoyed. Morale, though often boosted by patriotic duty, remained vulnerable to the strain of daily life. Those in charge knew that there needed to be more diversion, or people would be more vulnerable to stress and, worse, lose their motivation.

  ★ ★ ★

  As early as December of 1943, roughly one year into Oak Ridge’s existence, a pervasive “discontent” was reported in the documents of the Recreation and Welfare Association. Project representatives and Roane-Anderson took notice at the urging of a Mrs. Brown, special assistant to the District Engineer, that the people at CEW—especially single young women in the dormitories—needed something to occupy their time.

  “Anyone not living that way can’t realize how drab existence is there,” she told the group of nine assembled. “You just get through work, freshen up, eat, and go back there.”

  What do they want to do? How can we help? were the questions from the others at the meeting. A lengthy discussion followed.

  “Here there are no organizations to start with,” Mrs. Brown continued. “In an ordinary town you have paid commercial recreation, you would have various school clubs, college alumni, church groups, YWCA, and YMCA . . . Dormitory life, for everyone except the very young, is very abnormal and difficult . . .”

  This sentiment was echoed later by psychiatrist Dr. Clarke when he arrived in spring. Bringing together people from all walks of life with a common purpose but, in most cases, no familial or societal ties certainly encouraged individuals to get to know one another rather quickly. But the rate of adjustment varied. It took more than houses to make homes, more than cafeterias and bowling alleys to build community. Dr. Clarke noted upon arriving that homesickness, especially among the young women, remained a concern, as did morale and depression.

  For many women, Oak Ridge was in some ways similar to the colleges they had attended; for others, it was how they imagined college might be, had they had the chance to go—minus the gates, guards, and guns, of course. Rosemary, the nurse from Iowa, was finding life at the Clinton Engineer Works to be a real pip—young, single, and with good money to boot. But she, too, had noted the depression cases that made their way to Dr. Clarke’s office, just around the corner from her own. When she observed women with children, and others who had never left home before, she realized it could be quite jarring for the less adventurous, and especially tough for housewives and young mothers.

  But in a town where groups of folks chatting in the streets might be broken up by plainclothes informants, Mrs. Brown and others knew there would be challenges.

 
; “I presume the feeling would be that Military Intelligence wouldn’t want to bring in various organized groups,” Mrs. Brown stated.

  “You will never get permission of security to let organized personnel come in,” a Captain Teeter later added, “for the same reason for disallowing information to leave here about the size of the town . . .”

  Recreational groups should, like everything else, be organized and controlled from the top down as much as possible. A controlled system of recreation would keep everyone, at the very least, distracted.

  A lot had happened in the six months since this December meeting. The Project knew activities were not going to sprout up out of the mud without a little fertilizer. So at first they had helped get things started by instituting groups and game nights and dances in the existing rec halls.

  Everything will be taken care of . . .

  But soon, the enterprising, hardworking, and optimistic among residents began creating their own activities to fill the void, and through Roane-Anderson, the Project provided facilities wherever possible. Individuals were actively encouraged to form their own clubs. If they did, space and sometimes a little bit of money might be available.

  The results were stunning. Activities at CEW had grown from Monday “quiz night” and dancing at the far end of the Townsite’s only cafeteria to beer taverns, a drive-in, miniature golf, roller skating, and trampoline tumbling. The newspaper pleaded for residents to suggest activities. This eventually resulted in groups that served every interest imaginable: music appreciation, jazz records, Boy Scouts, Girls Scouts, chorus, and drama. Virginia’s favorites were hiking and photography. Bridge was a huge hit, as was bowling, with leagues forming at all the plants. Gardening—don’t forget those Victory gardens!—volleyball, softball, baseball, basketball, horseshoes, tennis, badminton, archery, men’s glee club, arts and crafts, an ornithological group, the Rabbit Breeders Association, and the Red Cross, which also sponsored a sewing room in the Townsite recreation center. There was the Civil Air Patrol, concert band, American Legion, Masons, DAR, VFW, and the symphony, founded by Waldo Cohn and John Ramsey and conducted by Cohn himself, a biochemist who had arrived in 1943 with his cello in tow. And of course, the Miss Oak Ridge contest was not to be missed.