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

by Denise Kiernan

  Billboards, posters, pamphlets, notes in the newspaper. Blackboards throughout CEW offices and labs were stamped with reminders that users should erase all work at the end of their shift. Propaganda ranged from inspirational, up-by-the-bootstraps images designed to inspire patriotism and responsibility to ominous images depicting death by enemy hands, or losses on the battle front resulting from a moment’s indiscretion. These reminded anyone who wasn’t doing their part that they were aiding the enemy. Oak Ridge was inundated with the Message.

  Ride sharing and bond buying were popular themes. When you drive alone, you drive with Hitler! Other posters found throughout the United States were absolutely foreboding. Images of graves and injured soldiers. A lonesome dog or child alone at home holding a service flag embroidered with the single golden star of a now-gone brother. Drowning men and bodies impaled on barbed wire. Messages were crafted to keep individuals quiet and working hard. If you spoke out of turn, you were not only un-American, you were responsible for the senseless murder of troops. If you dared inquire too closely about your job, you were endangering the lives of innocent children, damning democracy, and joining the ranks of Hitler and Hirohito.

  There were messages of support and encouragement as well. Advertisements in magazines showed mothers and daughters standing side by side, canning food. Cookbooks like War Time Meat Recipes and Armour’s 69 Ration Recipes for Meat helped women maneuver the world of rations and coupons. They taught the value of all forms of protein and how to reproduce juicy, meaty flavors with the clever use of easier-to-come-by staples like potatoes and oatmeal, lessons modern-day vegans still use today. Advice columns and friendly tips were echoed in the Oak Ridge Journal, and were the refrain of many a man or woman who had grown up during the Depression:

  Use it up!

  Wear it out!

  Make it do!

  Or do without!

  Contests for good work attendance were routinely held at various plants. The importance of a plant’s work rate and production at the 24-hour Reservation were drummed into the workers’ minds. But reminders to keep quiet were perhaps the most prevalent.

  Who Me? Yes You . . . Keep Mum About This Job

  Think! Are You Authorized to Tell It?

  One large billboard on the Reservation featured a large looming eye, its black iris surrounding a large swastika-embedded pupil. It read:

  The Enemy is Looking for Information. Guard your Talk.

  Mandates greeted workers at every gate. Patriotism and secrecy went hand-in-hand. One of the most memorable Oak Ridge billboards featured a virile Uncle Sam, hat off, sleeves up, forearms thick with muscle. Three monkeys sat before him, one covering his eyes, another his ears, and the third his mouth:

  What you see here,

  What you do here,

  What you hear here,

  When you leave here,

  Let it stay here.

  Such propaganda was not exclusive to the Project, but arguably made for a disquieting backdrop to a nascent town striving to grow into a community. But many Oak Ridgers didn’t see it that way. These disparate residents had come together to work, to love, to get married, and plant Victory Gardens behind makeshift trailers and cemesto prefab homes. They fought to smile through the lines and the mud and the long hours, dancing under the stars and under the watchful eyes of their government, an Orwellian backdrop for a Rockwellian world.

  ★ ★ ★

  Q: What are you making over there?

  A: Babies.

  Guns and badges and checkpoints and propaganda were only part of the force that kept the lid on the Project. The Intelligence and Security Division had around 500 plainclothes agents in addition to its uniformed personnel. And the more informal creeps played a key role in maintaining the aura of secrecy that pervaded life and work in Oak Ridge and the other Project sites. The actual number of creeps on the Project would be difficult to estimate, but what many residents did know was that anyone—anyone—could be a creep.

  They came in all shapes and sizes, from official-looking, suit-wearing types to the workers next door. They could be anywhere: across the table from you in the cafeteria, down the hall in the dorm, in a dining car on a train, or even lying in bed next to you. They could be men or women. The real power of this unseen force moving in and among the population was not that these monitors were all-knowing, well-heeled government types, with some sort of high-ranking role within the Project. It was that the informants themselves were just like the people they were observing and writing reports about. For a young woman of 18 years like Helen Hall, whose experience beyond the family farm had been limited to the sleepy diner of a nearby town, being approached by dapper men and asked to inform on fellow workers, friends, and roommates likely felt like more of a directive than a request.

  What this meant for everyone living and working in Oak Ridge was that anyone you met, anyone you passed on the street, anyone you befriended could be reporting your conversations and activities. Anyone at all could be deciding whether your actions or discussions were endangering the Project. Anyone might pass judgment on your encounters and associations. When coworkers suddenly stopped showing up for work, no one dared ask why—because no one could be sure that the person to whom they were speaking was not a creep, too. That lack of details about what had happened to the individual in question amped up existing suspicions, leaving others to imagine anything from a simple firing to relocation to a remote island in the Philippines. Since mail was censored going in and out of Oak Ridge—albeit in a rather haphazard and unsystemized fashion—the possibility of word arriving from that recently departed coworker describing the details of their dismissal was slim.

  ★ ★ ★

  The work of the creeps dovetailed nicely with the Statement of Availability. It meant that once the Project got their hands on a worker, it was easier to keep them on and provided an added incentive to help keep workers focused and tight-lipped. If you lost your job as a result of subversive talk or seditious activity, it meant no Statement of Availability and no new job without a 30-or 60-day wait, sometimes longer. “Seditious talk” was loosely defined. To merely be accused by an informant was enough to cause a worker to be let go with cause. No SOA.

  From a memo dated June 14, 1944:

  “. . . personnel discharged for cause will not be permitted to work for any other organization on the area unless investigation reveals that discharge for cause was improper. . . .” Suggestions were made in an effort “to obtain maximum labor efficiency,” emphasis was to be put on “continuing urgency of the program,” “appealing to the sense of patriotism” and making it clear that “we now can afford to weed out inefficient personnel and that it is intended that such action will be taken . . .”

  So, if a creep dropped an anonymous letter about your seditious activity into any one of the cloaked drop-off points throughout Oak Ridge and that missive arrived at the offices of the fictional ACME Insurance Company, within 24 hours, you, your family, and all of your belongings might be plopped down outside the gates. If the worker in question had initially relied on CEW or one of its construction contractors, for example, to provide for transportation to the site, he or she had to foot the bill for their return to outside civilization. Or worse, in some cases the dismissed workers were required to pay back the money that had been spent to transport them to the site in the first place, money that would often wipe out the precious last paycheck that they had received.

  ★ ★ ★

  Q: What are you all doing over there?

  A: Pinning diapers onto fireflies.

  “What kinda bread y’all want today?” Kattie called out to the small crowd gathered around Willie’s hut.

  “Cornbread!” was more often than not the answer she got back. Cornbread or biscuits. Kattie quickly found that her brand-new, repurposed K-25 biscuit pans were coming in handy and in ways that she had never anticipated.

  Not only had she begun to solve her “what to eat” crisis, but she had discover
ed an entirely new use for her hut-baked treats: bribery.

  Cooking and eating was done at Willie’s hut. The couple was lucky that they could manage to work the same shift often enough. When they did, the two of them would head back to the huts right after work to get ready for dinner. Kattie had three pans in all and, thanks to some trial and error in the standing-room only hut, she had perfected her system for cooking with them.

  Her method worked equally well for biscuits and other breads. The key to it all was the potbelly stove in the middle of the tiny hutment.

  When it was cranked up, the stove got red-hot. So hot, in fact, that Kattie couldn’t set the pans right on top of it or the biscuits would burn on the outside before they were cooked on the inside. So instead, she carefully leaned the blackened pan at an angle against the stove’s potbelly. She kept them from slipping and sliding with a brick she’d found lying on the ground near Willie’s hut. She took her special biscuit mix, formed dollops of the sticky, southern staple, and put them on the pan near the bottom, closest to the floor. Once the first side was nice and brown, separating effortlessly from the metal, she carefully flipped the biscuits over to the other side.

  The savory smell filled the small hut, wafting out doors and windows and hanging in the air with the dust. Dinners became the highlight of their day, and she made an effort to make each of them as good as they had been back home. Kattie always left the pans at Willie’s hut, since she was allowed to go to visit him, but he was never permitted to visit her (although he did try scaling the barbed-wire fence once). Her friend Gerdy—lovingly called “Small” because she was—occasionally made a trip all the way to Knoxville to find affordable stew beef. Kattie adored Small. She came from Tupelo, Mississippi, and worked with Kattie at K-25. Kattie cut the meat up nice as was possible and the group might cook it in a little orange juice that one of them bought at the grocer or from one of the trucks that made the rounds near their hutment area. There were usually some greens to be had, perhaps some snap peas, bought from nearby farmers who sold their produce and chickens outside the gates. This meat was often available without coupons, which was an even bigger boon. Kattie would boil those together with the little bit of stew beef and serve it with the fresh-baked, brown-bottomed biscuits. It was as near a feast as you could get.

  There was always a little harassment from that young guard, the one with the attitude. Others had it far worse, as is evidenced by complaint letters from other residents detailing some of the harassment found in the hutment area:

  “Police guard can be found in these colored women hutments any time day or night and oftime when these Police Guards go to these colored women hutments the Police Guards never knock on the door,” one such letter read, “. . . and oftime our women are partly dressed when the police guards enter. . . .”

  Everyone had their own way of coping with the hardships and ill treatment. Kattie baked. Now, when a guard came by Kattie’s hut, there was a biscuit or two waiting. Cooking in the huts was off-limits. But once that guard had gotten a taste of those contraband biscuits, he didn’t ask about the misshapen biscuit pans or anything else. He just let Kattie keep on cooking. There were rules, but Kattie knew that she could not only learn them but work them, too.

  From the warped, discarded metal of a top secret war plant to her hands came a simple pan and some fresh biscuits. She gave them to that guard, kept him happy, kept him quiet, and kept herself at Willie’s hut a little longer, relatively free of hassle, blissfully free of stomach cramps.

  TUBEALLOY

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  PUMPKINS, SPIES, AND CHICKEN SOUP, FALL 1944

  This was a new one for the coroner.

  Philadelphia had had its fair share of mysterious deaths, but to have the causes of death of two men kept from the coroner’s office itself pushed the boundaries of credulity.

  In this case, the General stepped in personally and made sure that word did not get out about the three men working in the transfer room of the Philadelphia Navy Yard’s liquid thermal diffusion works.

  A simple clogged tube had been the culprit. But it was the Tubealloy—in liquid hexafluoride form—and high-pressure steam coursing through the concentric pipes that posed the real danger.

  The thermal diffusion process was still being perfected at the Philadelphia Navy Yard as the H. K. Ferguson Company neared completion of the S-50 plant at CEW. On September 2, 1944, physicist Arnold Kramish, then an SED soldier on loan from Oak Ridge, was working with Peter Bragg Jr. and Douglas Meigs. Bragg and Meigs were unclogging the tube when an explosion reduced it to nothing, spewing Tubealloy, steam, and hydrofluoric acid all over the men, their lungs filling with Tubealloy compounds.

  Bragg and Meigs died shortly thereafter. Kramish was badly burned and not expected to survive. A Navy chaplain, Father McDonough, arrived to administer last rites. As he approached Kramish, the Jewish soldier was strong enough to refuse the blessing before losing consciousness.

  He hung on, and several days later got an unexpected and unauthorized visitor. The stranger made short work of the guards posted at his hospital room door, got inside, quietly lifted up Kramish’s oxygen tent, and poured something down his throat.

  Warm liquid soothed Kramish’s gullet.

  Chicken soup.

  His mother, Sarah, had carried her soup in a jar for three days on her long trip from Denver. A cousin and newscaster had seen news of Kramish’s death come over the wire, and contacted Kramish’s parents. When Sarah learned her son was dead, she fainted on the spot. When she came to and was informed by station KLZ in Denver that her son was in fact alive and in a hospital, she was on a mission. She was going to get chicken soup into her son and no one was going to stop her. No one did.

  Information about the cause of the blast was not disclosed, nor was the fact that a large amount of radioactive materials had been released into the atmosphere.

  Kramish survived, his mother’s chicken soup in his belly, Tubealloy lurking in his bones.

  ★ ★ ★

  The same month of the Philadelphia tragedy, the General had decided to invite an Army Air Corpsman into the ranks of an elite group: those who knew of the Gadget.

  Twenty-nine-year-old Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets had returned to the United States from bombing missions in North Africa and Europe. He was a pilot, testing the new B-29 bomber, and the General thought he had found his man: someone with the experience—the big-plane experience—who knew the Army’s newest bomber as well or better than anyone else in the world. This was the man the General needed to oversee his cadre of deliverymen. Wendover Army Air Field in Utah would be the perfect place for them to start training. There they would eventually commence dropping their “pumpkins,” placeholders for the Gadget, until the General had something more for them to ferry.

  ★ ★ ★

  No one was immune to a little surveillance. Even top scientists, no matter how indispensable, were monitored by the Project. Many of them had left their lives in Europe behind. They worked throughout the Project—at the Met Lab, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford—and often traveled where they were needed, and under assumed names. Enrico Fermi was Henry Farmer, Niels Bohr was Nicholas Baker. It was a stellar group of minds: Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Ernest Lawrence, Richard Feynman, Eugene Wigner, James Franck, Emilio Segrè, George Kistiakowsky, and more.

  Scientists arriving from academic institutions were a particular security challenge. They had all been exposed to more than the usual amount of Communist literature on their campuses, when compared to the average American, which was a flag for the Project. Oppenheimer had close friends and associates who were associated with the movement, including a girlfriend who wrote for the Communist periodical Western Worker and a wife who had been a party member. The FBI opened a file on the scientist in 1941, before he became the Project’s “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.” The General wasn’t crazy about anyone with what appeared to be ties to Communism. But all the Project could do was pay close
attention to how strongly any one person in question appeared to follow the party line.

  The Americans and British each had their own means of investigating scientists who worked on the Project, and the General occasionally had his top scientists tailed. He considered this to be as much for their safety as for the good of the Project. Niels Bohr had proved an interesting subject for the General’s agents. One report of “Nicholas Baker” strolling with his son, Aage (“Jim Baker”), hardly made the Nobel Prize–winning physicist sound like a member of the brain trust behind the biggest wartime military project in history:

  Both the father and son appear to be extremely absentminded individuals . . . On one occasion, subjects proceeded across a busy intersection against the red light in a diagonal fashion, taking the longest route possible and one of greatest danger. . . . If the opportunity should present itself, I would appreciate a tactful suggestion from you to them that they should be more careful in traffic.

  ★ ★ ★

  Despite elaborate and far-reaching efforts, security was far from foolproof. Problems—and people—slipped through carefully watched cracks.

  The General was likely unaware of two SED recruits who had made their way to Oak Ridge in the summer of 1944. One had studied with Arnold Kramish at the City University of New York, and was a health physics officer at CEW. The General—and indeed the world—would not know for decades that this man had close and curious friends far away. The other recruit, an Army machinist, had left an Army base in Jackson, Mississippi, and been assigned to the Clinton Engineer Works in July. The General probably did not pay particular attention when this man was transferred to Site Y at Los Alamos in August. Nor did the General know that this man had a brother-in-law who was very interested in the work taking place at Site Y, and that this brother-in-law had contacts overseas equally interested in the Project. These contacts may have been citizens of a country that was, technically, an ally, but nonetheless the General did not want that country informed about the Gadget. Not yet.