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

by Denise Kiernan

  Wanting to leave home didn’t mean Dot wasn’t scared. She had been surprised how quickly she got the news that they had already found her a position. Her father drove her in their truck to the bus stop in Nashville. When she arrived in Knoxville there was a bus waiting to take her through the dusty gates and onto the Reservation where she would build a new life. She was the only person—male or female—who had made the trip from Hornbeak to Knoxville to work.

  But it wasn’t exactly what she was expecting.

  When she first spied the guards and the fences and the Wild West–looking, mud-covered, half-built town that had sprung up in the Cumberland Foothills, she thought, If I had enough money I would turn around and go back home! The recruiters and the handbook and the billboards had rattled her. Dot worried she would say something wrong, sure she’d slip up and be arrested or shot. She was a country girl far out of her comfort zone.

  Good gracious—at least Hornbeak had sidewalks.

  But she soon got comfortable. There were other girls in the dorm just like her—out of their element, waiting for clearance, enduring training on fantastical machines. And there were women who seemed very much on the ball, or at least they acted like they were.

  She missed her mama, though. A good ol’ plump woman with a welcoming lap no matter your age, a soft bosomy shelf that held the answer to any crisis, a pillow for your troubles. But Dot wouldn’t run home. Her parents were happy that she found a good job. She had always been useless on their farm and she knew it. Simple tasks like making runs down to the pump for water turned into long spells of sitting by the radio and listening to soap operas.

  Dot, the baby of seven and Farmer Jones’s youngest daughter, was the last to leave home. Her sisters had left town to find work. Her brothers had been long gone, off to war, Woodrow and David in the Army, and Shorty . . . Shorty had been a deck gunner for the Navy. She had always looked forward to the crazy postcards he’d mail home to her. Her favorite was a photo of Shorty—no doubt drunk as a skunk—wearing his fancy Navy whites up top and a grass skirt down below that he’d mailed her all the way from Hawaii.

  He had been only 23 years old when her family got the news, right before Christmas.

  Believed to be among the missing . . .

  That’s all she and her parents were told. No one ever came right out and said he was dead. But they all knew, even before word arrived. Once the world learned the fate of the USS Arizona, she and her family knew. He was probably still there, with so many others, trapped beneath the murky waters.

  “Somewhere in East Tennessee” was more than a job. Dot felt it was a way to help end the war that had taken Shorty from her. The last time she’d gotten one of his postcards, Shorty still called her “Baby.” Funny, she thought. He was the one who never really got to grow up.

  ★ ★ ★

  Spring was in the air, Townsite was growing by leaps and bounds—“McCrory’s 5, 10, & 25 Cent Store Now Open in Jackson Square next to the Ridge Theatre!”—and The Oak Ridge Journal paused to ask residents, “Does Your Tongue Wag?”

  . . . Specialists in Axis espionage and sabotage activities are standing before their leader . . . they are about to embark on a vital mission for Naziland . . . and here are typical instructions to enemy agents . . .

  We have reports that somewhere in the American state of Tennessee there is a new war project about which you MUST get DETAILED information . . .

  Talk and listen: Get public opinion and current speculations about the work being done. . . .

  The natives and workers will aid you—they will talk, talk, talk. Listen. Some will tell you because they are unsuspecting, have faith in everyone they meet, others are plainly ignorant that they are giving information. . . .

  Search discarded plans and trash. Listen to every possible conversation—these Americans talk constantly about their work . . . psychological sabotage is your weapon of which our Dr. Goebbels is the master. When you hear a rumor spread it to every ear that will listen . . . bad food, mud, sickness, poor pay, strikes, waste, discrimination, race prejudice and persecution—make the place sound so dirty and miserable, so poorly managed and inefficient that no decent person would want to remain there. . . .

  Make them hate the state of Tennessee until they leave in droves. . . .

  Let the looseness of their tongues and the softness of their brains do your work for you. Bring me the report that this project in Tennessee will be entirely useless to America. Heil Hitler!

  ★ ★ ★

  A sudden knock came at the door.

  Helen looked up, startled, as she sat in the middle of her dorm room floor folding laundry. She wasn’t expecting anyone to come calling.

  It must have been a mistake.

  Helen had returned home from another interminable day at the bull pen—still no clearance, still no word on when she would be officially starting her new job. She got back to the dorm as quickly as possible to get her laundry done before the washing rooms got too crowded with girls rinsing out their unmentionables for the next day.

  She had heard the laundry service was not to be trusted.

  Then the knock came again, more insistent this time. Whoever was out there wasn’t going away. Helen stood up and crossed the room, gingerly avoiding the carefully stacked laundry, and opened the door. It was her dorm mother.

  “There are two men downstairs here to see you,” she said.

  “I’m not expecting anyone,” Helen replied. “I don’t know any men.”

  “Are you Helen Hall?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, they asked to speak to you. You need to come downstairs.”

  Helen did as she was told. As she walked down to the small lobby of her dormitory, her mind began to race.

  Who could these men be and what do they want? she worried. Have I done something wrong already? Oh, no, I hope I haven’t already made a mess of things.

  Once in the lobby the dorm mother pointed out the two men. Helen looked at them. They wore dark suits, and once Helen got a look at their faces she was sure beyond a doubt that she did not know them.

  Helen walked over.

  “I’m Helen Hall,” she said, and waited.

  The two took a few furtive glances over their shoulders, seemingly surveying the other young women and visitors gathered in the lobby—people picking up mail, using the phone, chatting.

  “Would you mind if we stepped outside to speak?” one of the men asked.

  Helen agreed. What else could she do?

  The three exited the dorm. It was dark. She may have been a small-town girl, but she knew that speaking in the dark with strange men was not advisable. But these were clearly Very Important Men.

  The men began to speak.

  Helen listened, and she soon learned that she wasn’t in trouble—that wasn’t it at all. The real reason they wanted to speak to her was almost as disconcerting.

  Would she mind, the two men wondered, paying very close attention to what the people around her were doing and saying?

  Helen kept listening.

  The men wondered if she would be willing to listen to conversations taking place around her at work and in the cafeterias. She should also pay particular attention to any individuals who seemed to be speaking out of turn, maybe talking a bit too much about what they did at the plant, for example.

  All she had to do was write down all the relevant information she had gathered—names, dates, locations, what was discussed—and deliver it to them. She wouldn’t have to give it to them in person. Her notes would be delivered to an unmarked box that no one else would know anything about.

  It would all be completely confidential.

  As they spoke, it dawned on Helen that she, an 18-year-old girl from Eagleville, Tennessee, recruited from a diner-drugstore in Murfreesboro to come work at a war plant she’d yet to lay eyes on, was being recruited to spy.

  The two men stood waiting for Helen’s answer.

  Well? Yes or no?


  It was very important, they stressed, to the work they were doing there. It was important to the war effort.

  She did want to do her part to help, didn’t she?

  The men handed Helen a stack of blank envelopes preaddressed to the ACME Insurance Company in downtown Knoxville and told Helen that she could fill them in with all the pertinent information. They told her where the drop box was located. Not to worry. It was all quite anonymous. She would be able to leave information there without arousing suspicion from anyone at all.

  Though the men were asking, Helen didn’t feel she had a choice. She did the only thing she felt she could do:

  Of course she would help, she said.

  She took the envelopes. The two men thanked her and walked off into the darkness. She turned and went back inside her dorm.

  She made her way upstairs and back to her room, careful not to disturb the pile of laundry in the middle of the floor. She walked over to the small desk and put the envelopes in the drawer.

  TUBEALLOY

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  LEONA AND SUCCESS IN CHICAGO, DECEMBER 1942

  “He sank a Japanese admiral,” Leona said.

  Laura Fermi’s question had floored Leona Woods, and she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Doublespeak. Metaphors. These were the tools of those bound by secrecy, even in the face of friends and family.

  Why, Laura had asked, was everyone congratulating her husband?

  It was a question the 23-year-old Leona had no permission to answer regardless of the fact that Laura had extended such kindness to Leona since she began working at the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago not quite six months ago. Post-laboratory evenings spent at the 55th Street promontory swimming in Lake Michigan with Dr. Fermi often ended up at his home, where Leona had enjoyed many meals prepared by the beautiful Laura, listening eagerly to stories of their life in Italy before leaving the country to escape Fascist rule. The Fermis initially lived as enemy aliens in America, constantly in fear of how others perceived them, nervously stashing emergency getaway money in a pipe under their first house in Leonia, New Jersey, when Fermi was still working at Columbia. Leona did not want to lie to Laura. But the truth was not an option.

  The truth was, earlier that day, Leona had watched as her Italian mentor orchestrated the proceedings on the former doubles squash courts under the west stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1) loomed in front of them, costing in the neighborhood of 2.7 million 1942 dollars. The pile was a 57-layer matrix made up of 380 tons of graphite, six tons of Tubealloy metal, and about another 50 tons of Tubealloy oxide. It stood roughly 20 feet high and was 25 feet wide. It was the Project’s hope that this pile would create the world’s first ever self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

  His shirt removed, Fermi and the team of scientists waited as Tigger, Piglet, Kanga, and Roo sprung into action. Forty-one-year-old Fermi had been reading A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh in order to help him improve his English and had decided to nickname his instruments accordingly. This lent a playful air to a procedure risky enough to require a so-called “suicide squad,” standing by to halt proceedings in case they got out of hand.

  Leona’s contribution to the pile was a boron trifluoride counter inserted after the fifteenth layer. Leona’s counter measured neutron activity as each successive layer of the pile was added. These measurements would determine how large the pile would need to be in order to achieve “criticality,” the point at which a chain reaction would be self-sustaining. In other words, the point at which enough neutrons would split enough atoms to trigger ongoing fission in their neighbors.

  Fermi described a chain reaction as similar to a “burning of a rubbish pile from spontaneous combustion.” A tiny portion of the pile would “burn” and soon ignite another portion and yet another until, “the entire heap bursts into flames.” In the pile, neutrons, not sparks, are emitted from the fission of Tubealloy and bombard other nearby atoms. This would then “ignite” or result in other small fissions, which then, of course, resulted in even more neutrons and more fissions until the little pile of atomic leaves was sparked by enough neutrons to get a fire going.

  But no one wanted it to burst into anything too big.

  If the reaction needed to be stopped, an emergency bell would ring and rods covered in neutron-absorbing cadmium could be inserted into the matrix, stopping the reaction. One rod was controlled by hand. Others were automatic. There was an additional rod tied to the balcony on the courts and controlled by SCRAM—the Safety Control Rod Axe Man—and the suicide squad was ready to douse the entire pile with a cadmium solution if all else failed.

  Fermi had calculated that the 57th layer would be the one to make the pile jump to criticality. On the morning of December 2, 1942, the measurements proved his estimation correct. He instructed everyone to return that afternoon ready to go. Leona, Fermi, and Herb Anderson, a nuclear physicist and one of Fermi’s right-hand men, went to Leona’s apartment near Stagg Field, where Leona served the anxious group plates of very lumpy pancakes.

  When afternoon came, Leona put on her sooty, blackened-by-graphite lab coat and went to join the other freezing team members gathered on the spectator’s platform of the old courts. She prepared to take notes during the procedure and monitor the various instruments as the reaction progressed. The suicide squad was in place. A few scientists present openly admitted to being scared, but Fermi appeared calm and collected, almost Pooh-like. At 2:30 in the afternoon, it began.

  One by one, control rods were removed, allowing more neutrons to roam free within the pile. Physicist George Weil, who had also worked with Fermi at Columbia, controlled the last rod, pulling it out of the pile a bit at a time. The counter clicked away, percussively increasing with each increment of removal. Leona took the measurements, calling out the escalating readings to the anxious crowd, as Fermi directed George to continue removing the final rod.

  “Another foot, George!” Fermi shouted.

  Clickclickclick . . .

  “Eight! Sixteen!” Leona called out.

  “Another foot, George!”

  Clickclickclickclick . . .

  “Twenty-eight! Sixty-four!”

  “Another foot, George!”

  Voices and clicks and measurements and calls continued in an anticipatory cadence punching through the graphite-coated tension as each click became indistinguishable from the next. Finally, Fermi announced, “The pile has gone critical!”

  A new era had begun, the theoretical made provable, a monumental if secret gain achieved in their own snowy hundred-acre wood.

  Theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner opened up a bottle of Chianti he had brought from Princeton to Chicago. The wine was poured into paper cups, its straw-bottomed bottle signed by those in attendance. Laboratory head Arthur Compton called James Conant, then head of the National Defense Research Committee, and relayed the news in a manner reflecting both secrecy and a lack of secure phone lines:

  “The Italian Navigator has just landed in the New World,” Compton said. “The earth was not as large as he had estimated and he arrived sooner than expected.”

  “Were the natives friendly?” Conant asked.

  “Yes. Everyone landed safe and happy.”

  Success. A sustained nuclear reaction was possible. What’s more, the Project could now build a reactor that would use Tubealloy to produce another new and highly fissionable element, Element 94, also known in the Project as “49.”

  ★ ★ ★

  Some hours later, Leona and the Italian Navigator trudged through the snow, reeling from the day’s events. It was bitterly cold, even by Chicago standards. Leona was bundled to the brim, black eyes peeking out over the collar of her overcoat. Hers was a captivating face, and the only female one in the crowd on the courts that day. She walked briskly alongside her small, fiery mentor, each of them quietly wondering if they really had been the first to pull this off, or if the Germans had already surpassed thei
r achievements without any of them knowing.

  They were headed to a gathering at the Fermi home that had been in the works for weeks. The date, when initially chosen, was random. However, in light of what had happened, the party took on an added level of celebration, at least for those guests privy to the day’s events. Laura Fermi was not.

  Laura had done her best to adjust to the new level of secrecy in her life. She hadn’t always been out of the loop. She had spent many an evening surrounded by her husband’s colleagues, discussing his work over wine and food. It was different now, but her curiosity would not be so easily dodged. With every coworker who walked through the door, a “Congratulations” was given to her husband. As the list of backslappers and well-wishers grew, Laura began asking what her husband had achieved that was so remarkable. She wasn’t getting very far.

  Ask your husband . . . Go talk to Enrico . . . You’ll find out sometime . . .

  Laura turned to Leona for an answer. Leona was younger, yes, but imposing in her own way. She was tall and attractive with a strong build, and Laura had heard that Leona possessed a stratospheric IQ. But when Leona started talking about sinking admirals, Laura had no idea how to react. For a time, Laura had felt as though Leona looked down on her. Now she felt her husband’s protégée was ridiculing her.

  . . . a Japanese admiral . . .

  But Leona’s creative metaphor was immediately and emphatically backed up by other scientists present and Laura let it pass.

  Laura would later write that she thought it significant that so many of the project scientists were not from the United States, that many were recent immigrants like her own brood. Maybe others thought it commonplace that experts, no matter their citizenship, should be involved in ventures of such importance. But Laura read more into it. These scientists—Hungarians, Italians, Germans—knew the power and speed with which a dictatorial state could mobilize. Universities. Military. Research. Back in their war-ravaged homelands, these entities, each with their own expertise and power, were under a single direction, guided and controlled by one hand.