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

by Denise Kiernan

  The downtown buildings loomed high for Knoxville but not so much in Celia’s eyes, accustomed as she was to the cloud-grazing rooftops of New York City. The car turned down Gay Street, one of Knoxville’s main drags. The streets were starting to awaken. Deliverymen carted what rationed meats and sundries were available to the shops vying for their share, the bark of a newspaper vendor cut through the early morning hum and shuffle of workers heading off for the early shift. The town car slowed and halted at 318 North Gay Street. Celia looked up. Nestled beneath the Watauga Hotel sat the Regas Brothers Cafe.

  She exited the car and entered the restaurant, a long, large, open space with soaring ceilings. Booths lined one wall and a long counter anchored the opposite side of the room, its length measured by 18 swivel stools. Six larger tables stretched between them down the middle of the room, draped in starched white tablecloths and flanked by arched, cane back chairs. Men in crisp white shirts, long ivory aprons, smocks, and narrow, black ties hurried across the polished tiled floors. Celia and the other girls sat at the counter pondering the menu.

  One menu item puzzled them. Like Celia, most of the women hailed from Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. None had heard of any such thing as “grits.” At the Szapka house, it was Polish food three times a day, and that suited Celia just fine. Even when things were tight—and they almost always were—her mother put a good meal on the table. Neighbors who lacked Mary Szapka’s baking prowess shared extra butter and flour in exchange for a share of the treats that popped out of the Szapka oven. And whenever Celia’s mother sent Celia to the butcher with a dollar—“Get as many potatoes as you can!”—the butcher, who had known Celia her entire life, always threw in a few extra. Potato pancakes, potato pie, potato dumplings. Potatoes.

  When Celia heard the word grits, her curiosity was piqued by anything that was not of spudlike origin. A tall black waiter in a long white apron gave the girls a simple and straightforward description: Grits were little white things made from corn. And you put butter on them. Just like potatoes. The waiter encouraged Celia to give them a try. The bowl of hot, butter-soaked hulled corn arrived and Celia put a steaming, slippery spoonful in her mouth, enjoying the first taste of her new life.

  Once the women had finished their morning meal, they piled back into the limo again. The driver, pleasant enough yet wordless, drove on. Knoxville soon disappeared behind them. The landscape opened wide in every direction, framed by the low rolling hills that marked the timeless tail end of the Smokies. The rising sun of the East crept farther up the backdrop of morning sky behind them.

  Though these country roads were far from where Celia had started off in Pennsylvania, their history, too, was being shaped by a burgeoning industry, one also built upon a rock—not as lustrous as anthracite, but one that held tremendous power. This rock, unknown to most Americans, was recasting not only this once-quiet slice of Appalachian farmland but the landscape of warfare forever.

  Celia did the only thing that she could: wait.

  While she did, other women on other trains kept pulling into the very same station, their routes like veins running down the industrial arm of the East Coast, extending from the heart of the Midwest, the precious lifeblood of a project about which the women knew nothing, all of them coursing toward a place that officially did not exist.

  TUBEALLOY

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  THE BOHEMIAN GROVE TO THE APPALACHIAN HILLS, SEPTEMBER 1942

  “Weaving spiders, come not here.”

  This has been the motto of the Bohemian Club since 1872, and is emblazoned on the plaque outside its San Francisco headquarters. It was not long before this exclusive, invitation-only, all-male organization, originally founded by journalists, had a waiting list decades long and boasted a membership of US presidents, industry magnates, and cultural tastemakers. However, San Francisco was not the place to be. That honor fell to the Bohemian Grove. About 70 miles north of the city by the bay, on a secluded 2,700-acre parcel nestled deep among towering redwoods, the Bohemian Grove was the club’s annual summer encampment, its most enticing and intense gathering. It was here, far from the prying eyes and ears of the uninitiated, that members of the Project had come to meet in September of 1942.

  The summer encampment kicked off with the opening ceremony, a ritual known as the Cremation of Care, which featured hooded, torch-bearing men, setting fire to an effigy dubbed “Dull Care,” in a ritual described as having Druidic and Masonic overtones—Mardi Gras–style fun to some, creepy to others. The focal point of this fiery fete was the altar of the Great Owl of Bohemia, which stood at the end of the Grove’s lake. An imposing, roughly carved wooden owl, symbol of the Bohemian Club, hovered forty feet high atop an altarlike, semicircular stone platform, watchful in its way. The remainder of the two-week, three-weekend encampment had something for everyone: performances, plays, and concerts. Swimming and skeet shooting. Long lunches, lots of liquor, lectures, blazing bonfires, and bonhomie. Nonmembers lucky enough to receive an invitation to the exclusive enclave received written instructions beforehand: no cameras, no recording devices, and so on. Bohemian Grove was—is—viewed, by many, as a kind of ritual male bonding deep in the woods, the kind that members believed unattainable in the outside world.

  Bohemian Grove attendees were organized into distinct groups of “camps”: Hillbillies. Poison Oak. The elite Mandalay. Some camps were known for a particular drink that was always on hand, or a historical artifact that they proudly held in their possession. These groups of men often shared some sort of association, occasionally related to the business they were in. The Pleasant Isle of Aves camp, for example, boasted almost exclusively members that had some sort of association with the University of California at Berkeley.

  While the “no women” rule was hard and fast, the “no weaving spiders” directive—no business—was oft flouted. The group of Project associates meeting at the Bohemian Grove not quite a year before Celia and others like her boarded southbound trains for an unnamed station in the long shadow of the Smokies had come to do just that.

  It wasn’t the first time that Ernest O. Lawrence, the prairie-raised former aluminum salesman and Nobel Prize–winning physicist from Berkeley, had entertained military guests at the Grove Clubhouse overlooking the Russian River. But the stakes were higher now and the group assembled far more influential. Among those gathered were members of the University of California radiation, or “Rad” lab, the director of Standard Oil, Project scientists James Conant and Arthur Compton, and the slight-of-build, large-of-brain J. Robert Oppenheimer, a scientist with a penchant for broad-rimmed hats and Eastern philosophy.

  Soon-to-be District Engineer Kenneth Nichols attended—then an Army lieutenant colonel. The bespectacled engineer was emerging as the General’s right-hand man and was learning, as best he could, how to manage and maneuver the General’s seemingly unreasonable-bordering-on-unrealistic expectations, without which the impossible goals of the Project might not become reality.

  He had news for the group gathered among the redwoods: Edgar Sengier, a Belgian businessman, had a tremendous supply of high-quality Tubealloy his company was willing to sell.

  Decision made: Buy it. All of it. Secure more if possible. Lock it down.

  Also up for discussion among the men was the location of Site X. It appeared that a spot in Tennessee held the winning lottery ticket, but this needed to be finalized.

  Decision made: Buy it. Do whatever necessary to secure the land. Prepare to break ground as soon as possible.

  Virtually no one in East Tennessee knew their region was even under consideration as part of any groundbreaking wartime venture, including those who would come to inhabit and work at the soon-to-be-built Reservation. Another version of this story, one perhaps steeped more in lore than location, holds that Site X was selected in a backroom deal in Washington, DC. As the story goes, Secretary of War Henry Stimson had approached Tennessee senator Kenneth McKellar, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committ
ee, asking if he might figure out a way to “hide” $2 billion for the funding of a secret war project. The dapper and oft-bow-tied McKellar had served longer in both houses than anyone else in Tennessee history—heck, practically anyone in the United States. McKellar wanted to help, but so much money? McKellar took his concerns directly to President Roosevelt and met with him at the White House. The request was the same: This project could bring a speedy end to the war. So when Roosevelt reiterated, “Can you hide $2 billion for a secret project that we hope will end the war?” Senator McKellar deftly replied, “Well, Mr. President, of course I can. And where in Tennessee do you want me to hide it?”

  Regardless of how it happened, more than half of the $2 billion eventually appropriated for the Project would go to Site X, whose primary function would be enriching Tubealloy to serve as fuel for the Gadget that this group gathered at the Bohemian Grove hoped would end the war.

  The man at the center of the Project, the General, did not attend the Bohemian Grove meeting but would officially take over the Project mere days later, on September 17, 1942. The bright star of the Army Corps of Engineers, the General had been the mastermind behind the speedy construction of the Pentagon. He was also known to have a personality and management style that strained the bounds of polite discourse much the way his expanding midsection was straining the bounds of the belt on his always perfectly pressed, Army-issue khakis.

  Within days of taking the helm of the Project, the General finalized movement on the Tennessee site and dispatched the Engineer to meet with a polite yet somewhat reticent Edgar Sengier at his offices in the Cunard Building at 25 Broadway in New York City.

  Did this man have authority to deal? wondered the cool, dapper Belgian with the thinning hair and impeccable styling.

  This was not the first visit Sengier had had from a military man curious about his holdings. And this man, though professing to be with the military, was dressed in civilian garb. The meeting was brief and to the point. The Engineer was pleasantly surprised to learn that Sengier’s mining company, Union Minière du Haut Katanga, had roughly 1,200 tons of high-grade Tubealloy ore sitting that very moment on Staten Island and much more where that came from: the Belgian Congo. Sengier had left Brussels for New York in 1939, shortly before the Germans invaded Belgium and Hitler’s shadow looked as though it might fall on Africa. Sengier moved not only himself but his ore as well to the United States, shipping container after container across the Atlantic to New York. This material, once considered handy for dyeing Fiesta ware, regarded by some as mere garbage, a geological nuisance that got in the way of mining more important materials like silver, now was the sun at the center of the Project’s secretive solar system.

  Roughly 30 minutes and an eight-sentence scribbling on a yellow legal pad later—with a carbon copy left behind for Sengier’s files—the Engineer walked out onto the noisy Manhattan streets carrying a piece of paper that gave the US government access to the richest Tubealloy ore ever tapped on planet Earth, a geological freak of nature, really, boasting nearly 65 percent purity. It was from deep in the mines of Shinkolobwe, a name that means “fruit that scalds.”

  Within days, the Project arranged for the purchase of Sengier’s Staten Island stash and another 3,000 tons still waiting in Africa. The price was $1.60 per pound, of which $1.00 went to Sengier and another $0.60 going to initial processing at Eldorado in Canada. Office buildings, the shipping containers, the storage facilities: All were now hidden in plain sight, shrouded by the asphalt chaos of New York City and its environs, all right under the noses of millions of Americans.

  The ore score was a real boon for the Project. The materials were coming together, but the scale was about to expand drastically. A month later, in November 1942, the Project chose Site Y, a spot 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, for development of the Gadget itself: Los Alamos. The General had heard from his newly appointed Site Y head that his team of scientists in the desert would need much more enriched Tubealloy than they had originally estimated, if they hoped to get the Gadget designed and tested in time—that is, before the Germans figured out how to do it.

  The spiders were weaving, Site X and Site Y were secure, and the Project had a line on a supply of Tubealloy and plans for gargantuan plants of never-before-imagined size and scope.

  Now all they had to do was find enough bodies to fill them.

  CHAPTER 2

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  Peaches and Pearls

  The Taking of Site X, Fall 1942

  In the Hills of Tennessee, where man has harnessed the power of rivers, there resounds again the roar of tractors and bulldozers, the thud of hammers, and buzz of saws. This time, however, American Brain and Brawn is transforming a peaceful tract of farm land into a thriving modern community. The “old-timers” at Oak Ridge (those of us who have resided here two weeks or longer) have already been instilled with a feeling of civic pride in the rapid strides made in establishing and improving Oak Ridge.

  —Oak Ridge Journal, September 4, 1943

  Toni Peters had no doubt that something big was going on over there near the Black Oak Ridge, and today she was finally going to find out just what it was.

  Sure as the day is long, she—and everybody else in her hometown of Clinton, Tennessee—knew that whatever was being built along the Clinch River was not your run-of-the-mill wartime factory.

  No, sir, not with the nonstop comings and goings. This was not the refurbishing of a cannery to make airplane parts or an assembly line pumping out shell casings. No one seemed to know what was going on, not even the people already working there. Lines of packed train cars snaked through the land and convoys of overloaded trucks headed into that strange new Reservation. But nothing ever seemed to come out: no tanks, no munitions, no jeeps. The perpetual rumble and hum of transport and construction seemed to carry on the wind, landing in Clinton’s ears, teasing those who lived there with its incessant song of mysterious progress.

  During the past year, Toni’s senior year of high school, work seemed to shift into high gear, and chatter about the war project just 10 miles down the road followed suit. The class of 1943, Toni among them, hoped there might still be jobs available after graduation. The people of Clinton were right next door to something of a size and scale that their little corner of the state had never seen.

  Everything’s goin’ in and nothin’s comin’ out. . . .

  That was the talk around town, from the drugstore to the hosiery factory. That, and talk of jobs. But that was just talk. Today was Toni’s birthday. She was going to find out for herself what was going on behind those fences.

  Toni’s family had learned early on about the new development in their corner of East Tennessee. Aunt Lillie, her mama’s sister, had found out firsthand. Whatever the government was building was far too grand to squeeze in between the existing lives and lands already carved into this corner of Southern Appalachia, and Aunt Lillie and Uncle Wiley’s peach farm in the community of Wheat was smack dab in the line of bureaucratic wartime fire.

  The Army Corps of Engineers had been scouting the land since that past spring. They began surveying in earnest, walking property lines, and trying to make sense of boundaries that had lasted centuries but had never needed to be stated. The Project found the region appealing for a number of reasons. The Southern and the Louisville & Nashville railroads conveniently tracked along the northern reaches of the 83,000 acres that the Project was initially eyeing. The land backed up to an elevated crest called the Black Oak Ridge. The site skirted past the towns of Oliver Springs and Kingston, Harriman, and Clinton. Smaller established communities such as Wheat, Elza, Robertsville, and Scarboro were in an area that offered a lot of land at little cost. It was generally secluded, far enough from the coasts to avoid an easy attack, but easily reached by New York, Washington, and Chicago. The plants would fit snugly into the valleys between the ridges. And the Smokies stood starkly to the east like an ancient wall of secrecy, a towering guard all its
own. The mild climate was a fit as well. Plants needed to be constructed at blistering speed, requiring as close to year-round work as possible. Finally, the Norris Dam and the bottled-up energy of the Clinch River could provide a tremendous supply of electricity—the kind that was particularly suited to a colossal military reservation like Site X.

  ★ ★ ★

  Surveyors. They had been East Tennessee’s harbingers of doom for at least the last two decades, longer than that if you were Cherokee. At the first sighting of a tripod or transit, alarm bells should have sounded. The last time surveyors had taken to walking the back roads of Anderson and Campbell Counties, back in the early 1930s, the massive Norris Dam soon followed, spanning the Clinch, a tributary of the Tennessee, which had long supplied families near its banks with food and more. Most locals kept a fish gig or two on hand for spearing catfish, but the Clinch had also been known for the freshwater pearls that the mussels it nourished consistently produced. Toni’s town of Clinton played a key role in that iridescent industry. Market Street was home to pearl hunters hawking the gems and shells—ideal for buttons. With pearls going for as much as $100 a pop, it was enough to send anyone wading into the nearby waters, grasping hopefully for the molluskan riches.

  At 265 feet high and 1,860 feet across, the Norris Dam reshaped the region. The project was a product of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the first of its size and kind constructed by the Tennessee Valley Authority. It took three years to build. A new town was established just for the construction workers. The hydroelectric power the dam would supply would change the lives of the people living in and around East Tennessee, bringing jobs in the short run and electricity in the long.