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

by Denise Kiernan

  Some took to the Reservation immediately. Others found the surroundings a little more raw than they had anticipated. There was always a sympathetic ear close by, a make-the-best-of-it spirit infusing the brand-new yet dust-covered town.

  We can do it! That’s what Rosie would have said.

  Stop your belly-achin’! That’s what Appalachian folk would say.

  None had figured the Clinton Engineer Works into his or her plans. How could they have? Nonetheless, this is where they were going to make their stand: together, knee-deep in mud, for the remainder of a hellish war that seemed to have no end. They were told they were going to help bring that end about. They had to believe that was true. And no matter what, they were All in the Same Boat.

  Summer’s searing edge was softening into an autumn much warmer than those in Pennsylvania, but still a welcome relief. Celia thought it must have rained every single day that first August of 1943. Hot summer rains exploding into the middle of a steamy southern afternoon, tearing through the sky and sun and leaving in their wake a sultry memory. Steam rose off concrete and tar, mud swirled beneath ever-present wooden sidewalks, cutting rivers into recently denuded soils. Real “frog stranglers”—that’s what the locals sometimes called a good downpour. Luckily, the few shops, cafeteria, rec hall, and bus were close by, because the only real deterrent to walking remained mud, which Celia soon learned was not the result of some sort of climatological fluke. It was there to stay, occasionally upstaged by its dryer, hack-inducing cousin, clay dust.

  “You’ve got a case of the Oak Ridge croup . . . ,” more than one doctor would quip in the face of a wheezing patient.

  The main cafeteria was a short walk from the dorm and right on Celia’s way to the Castle on the Hill. The food served up there was basic, affordable, plentiful, but a far cry from her mother’s cooking. The cafeteria also served as a coffee klatsch/sing-along lounge for not just women, Celia noticed, but many, many, oh-so-many young, single men that had come to work all day, every day, on whatever it was this place was working on.

  On her drive in that first day, Celia hadn’t noticed any stores lining the dirt roads, but with so much construction and all the buildings cut from the same prefab construction cloth, it was hard to tell what was going up where. Williams Drugstore and a few other shops had since opened in Jackson Square, the shopping and cafeteria complex in the middle of Townsite. And there was even a pint-sized version of Miller’s of Knoxville and a grocer that boasted rationed and unrationed picnic lunches, along with potted meats and far-from-Vienna sausages. That month’s Journal advertised rayon panties—with elastic bands!—dickies, and even 25-gauge rayon hose. But if a gal wanted to do some serious shopping, Knoxville was the place to go. Twenty miles away was not a quick trip. There were buses moving in and around the area 24 hours a day, bringing workers who lived off-site onto the Clinton Engineer Works, and transporting Townsite residents to and from Knoxville and surrounding towns. But cars were better, faster, and less crowded.

  Celia, like most residents, did not have one.

  So when Lew asked her if she was interested in taking a drive over to Knoxville to pick a friend up from the train station, Celia jumped.

  She’d met Lew Parker at one of Father Siener’s youth group meetings. Celia was always hearing about this or that different “group” forming. Was this what college was like? Maybe she hadn’t missed much after all. Attending mass had helped ease Celia’s transition and proven a boon for her social life. There were, she soon learned, plenty of good Catholic boys to be found.

  When she first arrived, there was no church, but she had heard that one was being built. She met Rosemary Maiers, a young nurse recently arrived from Chicago who was helping to get the clinic up and running. The two went to mass wherever they could. In the very early days, all denominations had to make do: Services in the rec hall could be conducted by topping off a couple of 3.2 percent beer kegs with some plyboard and covering it with a simple tarp. Instant altar. Mass was held at Father Siener’s home on Geneva Lane, his living room converted to a small chapel.

  The Chapel on the Hill was finally dedicated at the end of September and copies of keys were passed around to various religious representatives, all of whom offered prayers and invocations for the single, wooden white building that would serve Jews, Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians, and more. But Celia still liked the intimacy of Father Siener’s house best. Potlucks and prayer groups, the familiar rise-and-fall cadence of the Latin mass, the kneel-sit-stand-kneel Catholic calisthenics that were soothing in their repetition. That’s where she had met Lew.

  Lew had been working for DuPont in Alabama before the company transferred him to CEW, where it was managing the X-10 pilot plant. Now his old roommate, whom he’d convinced to apply for a transfer as well, was arriving at the train station. Afterward, Lew told Celia, “we’ll all go to dinner at the Regas.” Done deal. Even if it was only a quick drive over and back, Celia thought, at least she’d get a good meal.

  They picked Henry up at the station, and soon Celia and the two men were at dinner. Celia listened as the friends played catch-up, but couldn’t help but notice a definite shift in her mind from one to the other.

  Who is this guy? she wondered. Easy on the eyes, polite.

  During the long car ride home, Celia listened as Henry sat in the backseat and talked about some girlfriend he had left back in Alabama, about his family.

  What’s that? Polish? He’s Polish?

  Maybe he would ask her out, Celia thought. She hoped Lew wouldn’t mind. He seemed to be getting serious, but serious was not for Celia. There were too many available men behind these fences. Dating around was the ticket. Lew drove through the gates and back into Townsite, dropping Celia off at her dorm. She said good-bye to both men, hoping that wouldn’t be the last time she’d hear from that charming Henry Klemski.

  ★ ★ ★

  In the meantime, Celia had no trouble keeping herself occupied. She worked from 8 AM to 4:30, Monday to Friday, overtime when needed. She was happy not to have shift work, unlike women she’d met in the dorm or cafeteria who worked in the factories and had changing schedules that sometimes required them to work through the night. Nothing ever seemed to shut down here.

  The short distance between her dorm and the Castle on the Hill remained a sticky obstacle course to be maneuvered at least twice a day. And vanity be damned, the I. Millers were gathering dust in the tiny closet she shared with Maybelle. She more regularly opted for a trusty yet fashionable pair of ladies’ saddle oxfords—Now available at Miller’s in Jackson Square, shoppers!—but even those weren’t immune to the pervasive shoe-sucking gunk. It wasn’t long before, on her way to work, she stepped right where she should have stepped left and found herself knee-deep in the mire. By the time she managed to extricate her foot from the soppy goop, her brand-new saddle shoe was no longer attached to it. She felt sick. Hard-earned money sucked into the earth.

  Days were busy at the Castle on the Hill, now headquarters for the entire Project. The day Celia arrived, August 13, 1943, Kenneth Nichols (now a full colonel) had officially taken over as District Engineer and was in charge of all things administrative for all the Project sites. Celia was in the secretarial pool that served Lieutenant Colonel Vanden Bulck, Colonel Nichols’s righthand man, but spent most of her time working with Mr. Smitz. Typing up letters and memos and taking dictation occupied a sizable slice of Celia’s time, though the office also handled some sort of insurance, hazard insurance, based on the little she had seen, taken out for individuals working at the CEW. There was a lot she didn’t know. She had heard about the big factories located elsewhere on the Reservation, but she had never actually seen them. Lew worked in one, she thought; Henry, too. She saw people getting on buses labeled Y-12, K-25, and X-10, which she guessed were the factories. But you didn’t go anywhere your pass didn’t permit you. If you did, at the very least you’d get a good talking-to. At the most, there might be one last bus ride—right off th
e Reservation for good. And, she had been told, people were watching, to make sure you didn’t shoot your mouth off about what you did and where you did it.

  When necessary, she also filled in for Lieutenant Colonel Vanden Bulck’s personal secretary, Sherry. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when she was called in to take Sherry’s place one morning. She walked into Vanden Bulck’s office to find the colonel and another man awaiting her.

  “Sherry’s not here,” Vanden Bulck said. “I’ve got someone visiting me and I want you to take dictation from him.”

  Celia stood, her notepad and pen at the ready.

  General Leslie Groves stepped forward. To Celia’s eyes, he was a military man in uniform, maybe in his late forties. He had a thick swath of wavy hair combed straight back over his head, with a small streak of gray sprouting over one eye. His mustache was thick but tidy, like the rest of his appearance, and his midsection ample. There was no reason for Celia to recognize this particular man, of course. They had never met before, their paths had never officially crossed in Manhattan, though they had both been there. Still, she could tell he was important by the way everyone was scurrying around him, looking at him. There were few other visual clues. His uniform bore no name tag. And Vanden Bulck didn’t bother to introduce Celia to the big man, either.

  Celia didn’t ask who the man was, why he was there, or what all the multicolored stripes on his uniform meant. But she liked something about him immediately. He smiled at her and was polite and had a serious sort of warmth when he spoke. But that wasn’t enough. Celia liked to know how to address people. That’s how she had been raised. So she asked Lieutenant Colonel Vanden Bulck’s nameless friend what she should call him.

  “Just call me GG,” he said.

  ★ ★ ★

  Christmas 1943. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” wafted from radios across the country, its wistfully hopeful lyrics striking a somber chord for those who knew loved ones remained thousands of miles away as the 25th rolled around. Mothers scoured the few stores that had opened in the Townsite area of Clinton Engineer Works for anything that might pass for a present. A new game called Chutes and Ladders was all the rage, but wartime and rations had affected children, too. Any child who longed to see a brand-new Lionel Train chugging around the base of their Christmas tree would be disappointed: the company had ceased production of metal trains in order to build compasses for the war. They offered only paper train sets this year, a dollar apiece, that were notoriously frustrating to put together, with their flaps and perforations. Chemists and cubicle operators sat in cafeterias that remained in operation as if the holiday didn’t exist, toasting each other with contraband booze that quickly dissolved the feeble glue holding together tiny cone-shaped paper cups designed for water and nothing more.

  December. A month of personal evaluation and remembrance, one that would now live in infamy. For the Project, it was a month that had historically brought shifts in fortunes.

  Just a year earlier, in December 1942, Project scientists had ushered in a new age of power, one they were rapidly working to fully understand.

  December 7, 1941, brought Japan to the shores and skies of Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into World War II.

  But in December 1938, events had transpired that would send the first ripples across the Atlantic of the unleashed power of what the Greeks called atomos, news that had resulted in the birth of the Project.

  TUBEALLOY

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  LISE AND FISSION, 1938

  Four years after Ida Noddack had challenged Enrico Fermi’s findings, another female scientist was struggling to make sense of unexpected data. December snow crunched beneath Lise Meitner’s feet as she walked steadily alongside her nephew Otto Frisch over frozen Nordic ground. The Austrian physicist kept up on foot as Frisch glided along on cross-country skis through the woods near the coastal village of Kungalv, Sweden.

  Lise was frozen in thought, icy cold air needling nostrils and skin and eyes, infusing the already tense atmosphere with a frigid alertness. Night was falling on 1938, a year in which the radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s fictional War of the Worlds had terrorized Americans, and another very real world war was fast becoming fact. A man named Adolf Hitler had just been named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.” Lise mulled over the latest advancement in her field of physics, and its potential ramifications on an increasingly unstable political landscape, one which had led to her own exile from Berlin months earlier.

  Lise had recently received a letter from her now long-distance colleague, Otto Hahn, a radiochemist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, in Berlin. She had just seen Hahn a month ago in Copenhagen. Mere exile wasn’t enough to keep the shy but driven woman from consorting with her old team, even if at a great distance. She had little choice: Once Austria had been annexed by Germany she began to abandon hope that her Austrian citizenship and scientific standing could protect her from the likes of SS head Heinrich Himmler, on whose radar she had eventually landed. Though she had been baptized at birth and long considered herself a Protestant, she was, in the eyes of the Nazis, a Jew.

  She had waited too long to leave, perhaps, keeping her head down and buried in her work, as the political situation deteriorated around her. Once the Anschluss and concerned friends convinced Lise it was time to flee, she boarded a train for Holland. The reason for travel given to all but a handful of those closest to Lise was vacation. She had an invalid passport, prompting friends to pull whatever strings they could with political contacts in Holland and officials with Dutch immigration. Hahn had given her a ring that belonged to his mother, feeling it might be useful in case of an emergency. On the way to the station, she wanted desperately to turn around and go back. As the train approached the Dutch border, Lise’s anxiety grew. The train stopped. Patrolmen walked through the train. Her friends’ efforts had been successful, and Lise passed into Holland without incident. She eventually made her way to Sweden, where physicist and friend Niels Bohr had secured a spot for her in the laboratory of Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn at the Physics Institute of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.

  Lise was grateful for the position but missed her daily interaction with Hahn and the third member of their team, chemist Fritz Strassmann. She would sing quietly to herself in the lab as she did her experiments alongside Hahn, a man with whom she’d worked for decades, a man who knew her back when she was banished to research in a basement workshop because a superior thought women in the chemistry labs were dangerous—their hair might catch on fire. She corresponded with Hahn and had arranged for their clandestine Copenhagen meeting to discuss their ongoing work. The Meitner-Hahn-Strassmann team were still focusing much of their research into the bombardment of Tubealloy with neutrons, spurred on as many in their field were by the work of Enrico Fermi. Fermi had just been awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize for his work on nuclear reactions with slow neutrons. Lise’s lab was among others now firing up the neutrons, publishing their results. Bombardments away.

  Ida Noddack’s husband, Walter, mentioned to Otto Hahn that Hahn should incorporate Ida’s critique of Fermi’s work in his publications and talks on the topic. Hahn was unimpressed, saying he didn’t want to make Ida look “ridiculous.” Her “assumption of the bursting of the . . . nucleus into larger fragments was really absurd.”

  However, the results of Hahn and Strassmann’s latest experiment had turned Lise’s holiday stroll in the woods of Kungalv into a mental marathon. They needed answers. And Hahn thought Lise would be the one with the smarts to provide them.

  THE “LIQUID DROP” MODEL

  Hahn’s letter to Lise had arrived on the shortest day of the year, rendered even more brief by both latitude and urgency. After bombarding Tubealloy with neutrons, Hahn and Strassman had found isotopes of barium of all things, an element just about half the size of Tubealloy. How could that have happened? Tubealloy couldn’t have split apart, could it? Lise had written Hahn back immediately. She, too, found
the results “amazing.”

  “Perhaps you can suggest some fantastic explanation,” Hahn wrote in response. “We understand that it really can’t break up into barium. . . . So try to think of some other possibility. . . . If you can think of anything that might be publishable, then the three of us would be together in this work after all.”

  Lise sat and sketched in the woods, working to give shape to the physics storming through her winterized mind. Her 34-year-old nephew, Otto Frisch, the better artist and himself working in nuclear physics with Bohr in Copenhagen, refined the images. Frisch hadn’t wanted to discuss Hahn’s findings at first. This visit in Kungalv, Sweden, with his 60-year-old aunt was for the winter holidays, and he had his own experiments to ponder. But Lise wouldn’t drop it. She found her thoughts inspired by Bohr’s “liquid drop” model of the nucleus—a model that hadn’t been available for consideration when Ida Noddack put forth her views on Fermi’s findings.

  Nobel Prize laureate Niels Bohr had already contributed much to the understanding of the atom. He first introduced the theory that electrons traveled in specific orbits around the nucleus. These were also called at different times and under different circumstances shells, clouds, or energy levels. (Visual interpretations of Bohr’s model of the atom would inspire Styrofoam ball mobiles and science-fair entries for decades to come.)

  His liquid drop model was exactly as it sounded: The nucleus of an atom shouldn’t be viewed as a hard, spherical entity, but was more akin to a drop of liquid, capable of moving, elongating . . . dividing? If a nucleus did divide, the tremendous energy that held the atom together would be released in the process. That energy would be proportional to the mass of the nucleus. Lise had attended Albert Einstein’s lecture in Salzburg in 1909, where he discussed a revolutionary concept: the conversion of mass into energy.