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

by Denise Kiernan

  The WACs that worked in the Castle with Toni and Celia did their part, scouring every publication, making sure periodicals stayed in line. Infractions might result in a call or visit from a Project representative.

  Policing this policy had not been without oversights, ranging from local violations to wire stories. Enforcement was a challenge, and there were infractions: the Mutual Broadcasting Company mentioned Columbia University, atomic energy, and explosives in a broadcast. A newspaper in Atlanta wrote of the “hush-hush” Reservation outside Knoxville and referred to workers as “orderly, well-paid ghosts” who “pledged to unnecessary secrecy for the simple reason they do not know what they are working on.” Seeking to avoid a showdown between the Project and the press, heavy hands were replaced with those outstretched in patriotic cooperation. The press would be a reluctant partner rather than an adversary. As it was explained to them, everyone had the same goal in mind: Victory. Safety.

  CHAPTER 8

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  The One about the Fireflies . . .

  Q: What are they making in those plants?

  A: About 80 cents an hour.

  Frances Smith Gates found the restrictions a bit trickier to maneuver than most. She was editor in chief of the Oak Ridge Journal now, a widow of a West Point graduate and officer who had been killed in the war, and not unfamiliar with Army life and the need-to-know approach to information exchange that went along with it all. There was other news to cover. There was no shortage of pictures, most of which were courtesy of Ed Westcott, the man with access to everything. Dances and Boy Scout clothing drives, cigarette lines, and war bond rallies; if you saw a picture of Oak Ridge or the Project, it was likely first glimpsed via the lens of the Photographer’s Speed Graphic camera.

  The policy of the paper was explained to the residents of the CEW as follows:

  Editorial policy under this regime has been, and continues to be determined by the United States Engineering Department in any controversial issue. However, the editorial staff is allowed a maximum of freedom in reporting the news as they see it. The content of the news has always been limited to Oak Ridge events and personalities. No effort is made to cover outside events and news except in so far as it affects the Oak Ridge community. An effort is made to concentrate on future events, rather than to report past ones.

  Every week, Gates took her copy to Army officers for review, a requirement she found relatively painless, even if it seemed antithetical to the essence of journalism. There were still hiccups, some harder to anticipate than others. It wasn’t long before she learned that even the most innocuous of stories could be viewed as a security threat.

  Not even the Man of Steel could escape the power of the censors. When the McClure Newspaper Syndicate ran the first comic strip of a new Superman series titled “Atom Smasher,” in which our hero battles a cyclotron, the Office of Censorship was effectively kryptonite for the story line. McClure replaced the series with a safer, All-American alternative in which Superman single-handedly plays a baseball game.

  Within the fences, a story about local kids selling homemade comic strips featuring a character called Atom Man earned Gates a talking-to. On another occasion, Gates assigned a series on dorm life that mentioned 17 PhDs were living in one single dorm. The problem? Enemy agents might now view that dorm as an ideal target for infiltration. Another incident involved a story about the additions being made to the hospital to accommodate the growing population.

  Why so many more rooms? the enemy might ask. Is this top secret project dangerous? Are there a lot of injuries? Can we estimate how many people are living there if we combine this new hospital information with what we’ve been able to glean about the cafeterias and bus system?

  This particular editorial snafu made its way all the way up the chain of command and finally landed on the desk of the General, who had not approved the piece before it was printed at the Chandler printing press in Knoxville. Win some, lose some.

  Classifieds? Okay. Coupon updates? Sure. But no important names. Steer clear of births and deaths, especially the unfortunate suicide of an officer’s wife. But not all news was so easily dismissed. In early 1944, the Oak Ridge Journal reported that a welder who worked on the Reservation tried to get around a guard and drove his car into a restricted area. The guard tried to arrest him and a “scuffle” ensued. The man was shot. Twenty plasma injections, three blood transfusions, and one operation later, the man was pronounced dead.

  That made the paper, too.

  “Remember always,” the article continued, “that we are in a military area established for a vital war job.”

  ★ ★ ★

  Helen worked her fit frame up and down the basketball court, working off the day’s stresses. She had noticed the men in the dark suits sitting in the bleachers earlier during practice. They had been sitting there for a while, just watching.

  Helen wasn’t paying them much mind. They were probably coaches for the next team scheduled to practice. Schedules were packed for the available courts at CEW. With so many players on shift work, practice schedules took some coordinating.

  Once her session finished, Helen gathered her things and headed off the court with the rest of her teammates. Sweating and exhausted, the group of women walked toward the door, chatting and rehashing practice, ready to hit the dorms and rest up for another day’s work in the plants.

  As they reached the exit, one of Helen’s teammates approached her.

  “That man over there wants to talk to you,” she whispered.

  Helen turned.

  She eyed the man. He was standing now, waiting. One of the men in the suits. Helen guessed the two men weren’t there waiting to coach the next team after all.

  “Well, I don’t know him,” Helen said and kept right on walking.

  Another man in a suit wanting to talk to her alone.

  Not again, she thought. What do they want me for this time?

  Helen continued on her way, gear in tow. But she could feel the man behind her. He was following her.

  Who was it? Were they angry she hadn’t been mailing in her “informant” envelopes? She had in fact never touched them, and never intended to.

  “Helen Hall?” he said.

  Helen whirled around.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I coach a basketball team out of Knoxville. How would you like to come play for us?”

  Helen was surprised. Flattered. Relieved.

  “You don’t want me,” Helen said. “I work shift work. Besides, I don’t have any transportation to get to Knoxville for practice.”

  “That’s not a problem,” he continued. “We’ll come get you.”

  I love ball, Helen thought. Another opportunity to play, and with a team in the city.

  “Okay,” she said. “You come get me then and I’ll play ball with you.”

  That was how it so often began: A Very Important Man in a suit wanting to talk.

  A knock on a door, a seemingly chance encounter. An important man approaches a young woman to speak with her about something of the utmost significance and secrecy.

  Helen recalled the man whose words had brought her to the Secret City in the first place. He had come to the soda fountain on the main square in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, several times, often for coffee and a doughnut. Helen had served him at the counter or rung him up when she’d been working the register in the druggist’s. He was friendly but never talked about what he did or why he was in town. She had, however, noticed him going into the municipal building across the square a few times.

  When he asked Helen to step outside one morning, she was a bit nervous. When he suggested she go to work for Tennessee Eastman about 20 miles outside Knoxville, she was curious. But when he finally told her the pay—65 cents an hour, almost twice what she was earning—she was sold. She knew her parents wouldn’t approve, so she didn’t tell them. She got word to her sister Mary in Nashville—65 cents an hour!—where she was training as a beau
tician. Then Helen cashed her last paycheck and a war bond. She bought two one-way bus tickets—one for herself and one for Maude, an old friend from school who couldn’t afford the fare and who needed a good job. The two girls were gone the next day.

  Helen had been an ideal recruit—smart, independent, a high school graduate—and the pay scale overrode any uneasiness about the lack of details regarding the wheres, whens, and hows of the job itself. A job was a job.

  For Helen, gates, guards, inspections, and badges were off-putting at first, but they soon faded into the background and became a part of the everyday scenery that she passed on her way to and from dorm to cafeteria, from Y-12 to basketball practice. The folks who worked in the basement at Y-12 on the vacuum pumps, for example, had a 1 on their badges and couldn’t come upstairs where Helen worked as a cubicle operator. Guards stood on stairwell landings to make sure no one accidentally wandered onto the wrong floor. There were very few 4s seen on badges. You might never see a 5, but you heard about them. The 5s were the ones who knew what was going on here.

  Helen learned early and often that someone was always watching, whether innocuously as you played basketball or more carefully as you worked. She knew what she herself had been asked to do for the cause, evidenced by the still-unused envelopes that sat gathering dust in her dorm room.

  She had no doubt that other people who had been asked to perform the same task had agreed to do so, because she herself had seen what she believed to be the consequences. Twice, she had seen girls escorted from her workplace. One of them had been a bit drunk. That made sense to Helen. You couldn’t have that kind of behavior on the job.

  As for the other young woman, well, Helen was never sure why she had been whisked away in the middle of the shift, never to be seen again. Helen didn’t talk about it with any of her coworkers, and she certainly never asked her supervisor. The experiences made an impression, though, made her think before she said anything to anyone, before she answered unexpected questions. She kept her head down and did her job, coming up to play ball when the opportunity arose.

  ★ ★ ★

  Q: What do you do out there?

  A: As little as possible.

  Celia used the phone in the lobby to call home whenever she could, to see how her mother and father were faring and to hear if there was any news from her brothers overseas. She occasionally got letters from her brothers, but Clem’s had stopped coming. He had landed in Salerno, Italy, shortly after Celia arrived in Oak Ridge. His letters soon became less frequent, then stopped altogether. Then came word: Clem was missing in action. There had been no telegram confirming the worst, but with Clem officially MIA, Celia’s mother wanted her daughter to come home. Celia, however, wanted to stay with the Project. Celia worked in the headquarters of CEW after all, and had been told that their work there would bring a quick end to the war. She believed that was Clem’s best hope.

  Then one day, Celia’s mother called with an unexpected request: Stop writing home. This from the woman who never wanted her to move away in the first place.

  “I just can’t understand your letters!” her mother complained. “Stop writing them.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t understand them?” Celia asked when she got her mother on the phone. “Everything’s all blacked out,” Celia’s mother finally explained.

  Blacked out? Celia wondered.

  “There are these big, black bars covering all these words in your letters,” her mother continued. “I can’t make any sense out of them!”

  Every letter she received, her mother told her, was the same: Words and phrases struck through with black ink, leaving her to try to make sense of what remained.

  At least Celia’s mother’s letters had managed to get through.

  On occasion, people who tried to write family members living at Site X by addressing the letters to “Oak Ridge” got those letters returned to sender with a note reading simply: “There is no such place as Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”

  When Celia finally grasped that her letters were being censored, all she could think was, What have I ever written about that I wasn’t supposed to?

  She turned past correspondence over in her mind. It all seemed so bland and uninformative. She wondered if some sort of reprimand was in the offing. She had been with the Project longer than most and knew as well as anyone that she wasn’t supposed to write about work. She could not, for the life of her, imagine what her transgression might have been.

  But it must have been something. They wouldn’t censor her for no reason. Would they?

  I must have done something wrong, she thought.

  She just didn’t know what.

  ★ ★ ★

  And therein lay the magic.

  Not knowing what you were working on, what was important or irrelevant, meant anything you might do or say could pertain to the larger Project about which you knew nothing and, therefore, would be out of line. Possibly dangerous. So if you had even the slightest doubt, it was best not to say anything at all.

  What happened to loose-lipped folks? Where did they go when, one day, they ceased to appear? Interviews, security briefings, and the pervasive zip-your-lip reminders rarely spelled out specific consequences for security transgressions. The great unsaid left plenty of room for dramatic interpretation, vague allusions to damning consequences. The longer people stayed at CEW, the more their imaginations fed the already active rumor mill. Public information officers purposely fueled stories that subversives or dismissed workers could not only be fired, but then be immediately drafted and dropped in the South Pacific. Official warnings given at hiring were compounded over time by rumors that could neither be confirmed nor denied, fodder for increasingly nerve-rattling scenarios.

  The Project wanted it clear that valuable and dangerous details could be gleaned from the most seemingly innocuous of sources—even the trash bin. One of the rumors circulating throughout CEW was that illiterate individuals were hired to empty the garbage as an added security measure. One young woman was instructed never to speak to the workers on the shift before hers. Last names of children were kept out of printed materials as they might indicate who their parents were and therefore what kind of expertise that parent had, which could conceivably allow someone to deduce what type of work might be going on there.

  Sure, there were a lot of high school football teams that didn’t wear names on their jerseys—that was an expense many rural schools couldn’t afford—but the Oak Ridge High School team never gave rosters to their opponents.

  Most residents learned to take these limits in stride. Questions from family, friends, or even total strangers they ran into in a Knoxville department store were often greeted with whimsical replies. The heightened restrictions also offered a sense of security. Many residents did not bother to lock their doors. For some there was a sense that someone might not just be watching you, but watching out for you, as well.

  ★ ★ ★

  Q: How many people are working in Oak Ridge?

  A: About half of them.

  “Are you all right, Dot?”

  Dot jumped at the sound of a voice she did not recognize emanating from someone she could not clearly see in the dark.

  The man asked again, this time leaning in through the car window. She could see him now, but still did not know who he was. He clearly wanted their attention—Dot’s and her date’s.

  For a first date it had started out pretty nice. She stopped by his tiny, cramped trailer—he was a construction worker—and they had a little something to drink. She thought it tasted awful, local and illegal, but it was wet enough and par for the course considering their theoretically dry county. They had gone out to eat—his treat—and, finally ended up here, sitting in the car on a quiet country road. This was a far-from-unusual pastime for dates on the Reservation, since there was little privacy available anywhere and men were forbidden in the dorms. The stranger hadn’t interrupted anything too personal, but still, an unexpected visitor peering in
from the darkness was incredibly unnerving. Dot managed to regain her composure.

  How on earth does he know my name?

  Dot assured the man that she was fine, but the experience brought a quick end to the date and sent Dot scampering back to her dorm.

  It wasn’t the first time, after all, that she had felt eyes on her in unexpected places. Once, while waiting in line at the movies with a group of friends, a woman had suddenly appeared.

  “Spread it out!” she barked. “One behind the other.”

  And they did. Discouraging large groups kept things orderly, sure, but Dot had also heard that the powers-that-be didn’t want people congregating in large groups and talking. As house lights went down and the newsreel started, monitors—creeps, as they were called—might walk the aisles shining flashlights down the rows of patrons, checking to see who might be whispering in the dark.

  Dot took her place in front of her cubicle the next day, and got to work as usual. Men milled about in the vast space: delivering this, picking up that, speeding away with logbooks, tweaking the giant panels, or pretending to do any of the above when their only real intention was to flirt.

  A man approached Dot as she was minding her dials. Another maintenance man trying to get a date? Didn’t seem to be.

  “Are you Dot?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she answered. Again, she didn’t recognize him. He appeared to be a little older. He introduced himself as the boss of her date from the night before.

  “I don’t want you to see him anymore,” he explained.

  So, they did follow us, she thought.

  Whoever had approached the car last night had reported back to her date’s boss.

  She agreed. The man left. Dot never learned his name.

  ★ ★ ★

  Loose lips might not only sink a ship but also endanger the top secret Project. Should you forget this, there was propaganda plastered on every available surface, positioned in every line of sight, to quickly remind you.