The Manhattan Project

by Cynthia C. Kelly

Tennessee Girls on the Job

  In this selection, Colleen Black discusses her experience at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as a leak detector. Because most of the able-bodied young men were off fighting the war, Oak Ridge hired a large number of young women to serve as machine operators and perform other essential duties.

  From AHF Oral Histories

  INTERVIEW WITH COLLEEN BLACK

  I came with my parents in early 1944 and got a job at Ford, Bacon and Davis. I was a leak test operator. I would find leaks in pipes in the welding and mark it. I would send it back if it had a leak or if it didn’t put an “OK” on it. I didn’t know where it was going or what it was carrying in those pipes and I didn’t ask. We weren’t supposed to. Security was very tight.

  My mother was an inspector because she was older and had more sense than I did, but there were many girls just my age out of high school who were working. One time, they sent these mass spectrometers (we weren’t supposed to say that word) which could only be operated by Ph.D.s. Eventually they found out that if you taught these Tennessee girls how to use these machines, they did a good job. We climbed all over the pipes and did a good job finding the leaks with helium. I didn’t know whatever went into it. The GIs knew exactly what they were doing and why the machines worked, but I didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t ask questions. We were doing something for the war effort and I wanted to win the war quickly and get back home to Nashville, Tennessee.

  U.S. Department of Energy

  Many of the workers at the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, were women because of wartime labor shortages.

  Ode to Life Behind the Fence

  The following is a poem that Colleen Black and her husband, Clifford Black, wrote for a reunion of the Special Engineer Detachment stationed in Oak Ridge. The reunion was held in 1970 and marked the group’s 25th anniversary.

  We’re fighting the war in a secret city.

  It’s crowded. It’s muddy. And it ain’t pretty.

  We’re fenced in—in barracks, a hut or a dorm.

  Army life here is not exactly the norm.

  Oak Ridge, Tennessee is the city. It’s not on any map.

  We can’t give you directions. We don’t want to take the rap.

  Nearby residents will not say.

  Nor the workers who commute every day.

  We’re secret. Security is tight.

  Guards on horseback patrol at night.

  MPs guard the seven gates and search cars too.

  No cameras, firearms or fire water get through.

  We’re fenced in behind barbed wire, and by the way,

  We’re paid the usual Army pay.

  No, GI calisthenics must we do.

  And ID badges must be worn in plain view.

  We work with civilians, helping each other.

  Our mission is secret. Can’t even tell mother.

  The mail is late. The laundry’s lost.

  Meat is rationed. No steaks at any cost.

  We chow down three times a day, but not the usual army mess.

  We eat in cafeterias with civilians, no less.

  We slosh through the mud to get anywhere.

  And we have mud on our feet clear up to our hair.

  It’s hot. Buses are crowded. Some workers smell.

  “Don’t open the windows,” the women all yell.

  “Or you will be covered in dust head to toe,

  And we’re out of soap to add to our woe.”

  We work in shifts. We do what it takes.

  Making whatever our plant makes.

  We’re special GIs. The chosen few

  Selected for knowledge and high IQ.

  We work hard all day, and play hard all night.

  But don’t worry, we never get tight.

  The project is dry. No liquor allowed.

  But that doesn’t seem to bother this crowd.

  We head for our PX. It isn’t far.

  And settle for a beer at the Casablanca Bar.

  Or go to the Rec Hall for dancing or ping-pong.

  Or maybe join the girls for a sing-a-long.

  We love this life, the work, the softball games.

  The girls here are pretty and wear badges with their names.

  We love the tennis court dances. Bowling. The spirit.

  We’re happy behind the fence. We do not fear it.

  We attend church each Sunday at the Chapel-on-the-Hill.

  It’s for all denominations, with different hours to fill.

  Many GI weddings take place here. So sweet.

  Brides in white dresses with muddy boots on their feet.

  Whatever we’re making… shhh. We’re making it well.

  And someday we’ll be able to tell…

  How we built something that helped win World War II.

  And I hope everyone will be proud of us too.

  INSIDE THE FENCE AT OAK RIDGE

  Oak Ridge was a frontier town but a very different frontier town. It was populated with scientists, some Nobel laureates, mixed in with local people, some of whom had never even used indoor plumbing. You had a complete range of education levels, social status and economic background. And yet it was a very friendly community. We were all “inside the fence,” a place where kids could play and you didn’t worry about them getting hurt.

  —THEODORE ROCKWELL

  U.S. Department of Energy

  Female technicians proved to be highly skilled operators of the calutrons at the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

  Operating Oak Ridge’s “Calutrons”

  In this oral history, Theodore Rockwell talks about the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge where the calutrons were operated by young women, many just out of high school. Rockwell, an engineer during the Manhattan Project, recounts the practical problems of working around the giant magnets inside the cyclotrons.

  From AHF Oral Histories

  INTERVIEW WITH THEODORE ROCKWELL

  At its peak, the plants at Y-12 had 22,000 workers who ran the “calutrons,” machines designed after the cyclotron or “atom smasher” invented by Ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California. The Y-12 “calutrons” were used to separate the two nearly identical isotopes of uranium. The heavier isotope, U-238, is very stable and makes up most of the uranium found in nature. The other isotope, U-235, which can be used to fuel an atomic bomb is less than one percent of naturally occurring uranium.

  The process involved heating up uranium salts with electric heaters and vaporizing them. The vapor would rise, go though an ionizing path with electron-producing filament. And as each atom became ionized by giving it an electrical charge, it would take off, attracted to the opposite, negative or positive, charge.

  The atoms would be pulled by a strong magnetic force that caused them to accelerate around the D-shaped tank following a semicircular path. The heavier isotopes (U-238) would be flung a little further out because they were heavier and end up falling into one receiver while the lighter atoms (U-235) would fall just short, ending up in a different receiver, just a little closer. Of course in real life, the isotopes would get scattered and the separation into the two receivers was very incomplete. But in theory you could get 100 percent separation this way.

  Individually, the separation units look like a capital D. The units were lined up in big ellipses that were called “racetracks,” which they resembled. Facing out were the faceplates or the straight part of the D. The curved part of the D formed the inner part of the racetrack. The material was fed into the bottom part of the D, accelerated up to the top and then collected in receivers.

  The control panels for the process were located on the floor above the racetracks. At each panel an operator controlled one of these Ds, adjusting various knobs to maximize the output. To do this well was quite a feat as it was a very complicated, tricky process. Only Ph.D.s were allowed to run the cyclotrons at Berkeley. With the shortage of labor, however, the calutrons at Oak Ridge had to rely on young women, many of which had just graduated from high sc
hool.

  To the surprise of the scientists, the women operators did extraordinarily well, especially considering they were not told that they were separating isotopes of uranium but merely that they were making some sort of catalyst that would be very important in the war. An analogy is the country kid who has an old Model T who doesn’t know anything about engineering but can really tune up the engine with his fingertips and make it run just right. And these women were really incredible. While they had no idea what they were doing, they understood how to optimize this mechanism and make it sing.

  And sometimes one of the Ph.D.s would come along and say “I think we could do this a little bit better.” And he’d start trying to tune that thing but instead of improving the performance, he would cause it to deteriorate. Pretty soon the operator would have to take over and readjust the controls to get it back on track. The women just had a feel for it that the more highly trained men did not.

  The calutrons involved high-voltage electricity and the huge magnets. If you walked along the wooden catwalk over the magnet you could feel the tug of the magnetic field on the nails in your shoes. It was like walking through glue. People who worked on the calutrons would take their watch into the watch-maker and discover that it was all smashed inside. The magnetic field had grabbed the steel parts and yanked them out by the roots.

  You weren’t supposed to bring any magnetic material, any steel, anywhere near the magnet. If it got anywhere near the magnetic field then “Wham-o!” it would slam up against the calutron. One time they were bringing a big steel plate in and got too close to the magnetic field. The plate pinned some poor guy like a butterfly against the magnetic field. So the guys ran over to the boss and said, “Shut down the magnet! Shut down the magnet! We got to get that guy off.” And the boss replied, “I’ve been told the war is killing 300 people an hour. If we shut down the magnet, it will take days to get re-stabilized and get production back up again, and that’s hundreds of lives. I’m not going to do that. You’re going to have to pry him off with two-by-fours.” Which is what they did. Luckily he wasn’t badly hurt, but that showed what our priorities were.

  “MUDLUSCIOUS”

  People literally left their shoes in the mud sometimes. They would step in the mud and they would pull their foot out and there would be no shoe on it, and they’d just keep going. So when they’d have dances at the tennis courts women would show up with these big boots and then take the boots off with all the mud and then slip on the golden sandals and away they’d go. Women had an incredible ability to sort of float above all the dust and mud and look gorgeous all the time, where the rest of us were kind of wallowing in what was there.

  —THEODORE ROCKWELL

  “Men, write home for Christmas”

  In this excerpt, Norman Brown talks about the Special Engineer Detachment, or SED, at Oak Ridge, including an account of what General Groves said to the Army’s women and men serving at Los Alamos in December 1944.

  From AHF Oral Histories

  INTERVIEW WITH NORMAN BROWN

  The Special Engineer Detachment was a group of soldiers who were scientists with graduate degrees, bachelor’s degrees, or some college education. In my case, I had two years of college. With a shortage of scientists, the Manhattan Project leaders created the SED to help with the scientific and technical work as sort of junior apprentices. In our case, we were experimenting with chemical methods of purifying plutonium. The press called the Special Engineer Detachment “soldier scientists.”

  Those of us in the SED didn’t have too many opportunities to deal with Dr. Oppenheimer or “Oppie” as everybody called him. But he did come around to our laboratory occasionally. We all liked him very much. He was a wonderful speaker; he was a sensitive man, and whenever he spoke to us, we really enjoyed listening to him. General Groves, on the other hand, was roundly hated by all of the enlisted men. I have no idea how the officers regarded him, but the enlisted men certainly did not like him. He came one day to D building for an inspection and came to our lab and we all gathered out on the hallway to be there.

  I had in my hand a flask containing sulfuric acid that I was using to clean the flask, and when he came around I was sorely tempted to drop that flask at his feet, but I didn’t. I restrained myself. His only comment to Art Wall, who was this wonderful civilian who was the head of our group, was, “Hmm, you’re the man who lost the gram of plutonium.” Then he turned around and walked away. The gram of plutonium he was referring to was, I believe, the amount of plutonium that Jim Gergan and I discovered in a graduated cylinder that was graduated in millimeters that we found sitting on a shelf with brown liquid in it. We had no idea what it was. We were cleaning up the lab one day and discovered this, so I took a tiny sample of this and sent it to Becky Bradford [now Diven] for radio assay and it turned out that there was a gram of plutonium that had not been noticed by the quality control people.

  At Christmastime in 1944, members of the SED and the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) lined up outside the War Department theatre because we were going to be addressed by General Groves. The WACs went in first while we waited outside in the snow. When they came out, we asked them what happened. After the commandant introduced him, Groves said to them, “Girls, take a good look because this is probably the closest you’ll ever come to seeing a general.” When we filed in, we sat down and after being introduced, Groves came up and simply said, “Men, write home for Christmas, even if you put your name on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope. Write home for Christmas. Thank you.” And that was General Groves’s speech for the Special Engineer Detachment, Christmastime 1944.

  TEXTBOOK SECRETS

  We had come from all over the country with training in electronics, chemistry, physics, engineering, or something related. They only told us about our specific jobs and said the rest was top secret. But eight or ten of us sitting around our dorm room and consulting a recently published textbook by Pollard and Davidson [Applied Nuclear Physics, 1942], we figured out what we were doing and why.

  — DONALD ROSS

  “An answer to their prayers”

  Historian Valeria Steele discusses the experience of African Americans who worked on Manhattan Project operations in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

  From “A New Hope”

  BY VALERIA STEELE

  In 1942 recruiters roamed the South in search of Negroes to work on a mysterious project located in the East Tennessee hills. Word spread rapidly among relatives and friends about the new hope that awaited them in this war-born community. Talk of jobs, high salaries, and newly built homes stirred their imaginations and prompted many of them to leave their home places, hoping finally to escape the hardships of the Depression and the longstanding legacy of blacks in America. A job opportunity in Oak Ridge seemed an answer to their prayers.

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, in 1941, had seemingly opened this door of opportunity for blacks when he stated in the order that “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries of Government because of race, creed, color or national origin… and it is the duty of employers and of labor organizations… to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination.” This action by the president was taken after threats of a march on Washington, D.C., by fifty to one hundred thousand black Americans. But to reinforce this executive order, a prohibition-of-discrimination clause was written in all defense contracts; and a committee on fair employment practices was established to function as overseer of complaints about discrimination.

  While still in the planning stage, army officials in Oak Ridge expected a population of only 2,500. But as construction began and plant facilities expanded, the population grew, exceeding many times its original estimate. Soon, the number of cemesto houses proved inadequate, with temporary housing and prefabricated homes being brought in by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Because of this miscalculation, the army abandoned plans for a “
Negro Village” which was to have been a wonderful community of nice homes for blacks.

  The Negro Village would have been located at the east end of town. Though segregated from housing for whites, it would have been composed of the same type of homes. The community would have consisted of fifty houses, four dormitories, a cafeteria, a church, a school, and some stores. But in the end, the plan was completely abandoned. The influx of people into Oak Ridge was so great that East Village became another white community. Since blacks had such low-level jobs, they were not entitled to the better housing. Moreover, it was rumored that blacks did not like the better-type housing.

  The black men and women who came to Oak Ridge believed that it was a city of opportunity. They came by the hundreds from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee. They arrived with great anticipation of how life could be improved and how they could make a new start. But soon, they realized the hollowness of such a dream. For coming to Oak Ridge only reaffirmed one rude fact: that they still lived in America, in the country that had always denied them freedom and equality. In Oak Ridge, as in other places, segregation would continue to play a central role in their lives.

  Still, there was a bright side. Many blacks in Oak Ridge received more pay than they had ever known, their living conditions were in some cases improved, and, indeed, their opportunities for the future were enhanced. For many blacks the ordeal of the Depression years had been a harsh and forbidding one. Life had been a sheer struggle for survival, living on the bare edge of existence. In Oak Ridge some of these conditions were at least alleviated, if far from eliminated.

  Those blacks who consented to go to Oak Ridge were provided with transportation—usually by bus—to their destination in East Tennessee. It was an arduous task to leave their familiar homes. Many of the men, for example, had to leave their families and go alone. But the pay of fifty-eight cents and more per hour was a blessing, and difficult to refuse. One early resident of Oak Ridge said, “Everybody was so glad to have a job making some money. We weren’t making money back home.”