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

by Denise Kiernan

  Celia was delighted to see Henry when he came to visit, and he began charming her family immediately. Celia could tell Henry was making a fantastic impression.

  Then Henry announced the real reason for his visit: He wanted to get married. Celia, on the other hand, wanted to wait.

  Why not wait until June? she thought. What’s the rush?

  But Henry was insistent. Celia couldn’t think of any real reasons not to marry him. He had a good job. He was from a nice Polish Catholic family out of Hockessin, Delaware. He’d won over her very demanding, no-nonsense mother. He worked to speak a little Polish with Celia’s father. And he was a good dancer, to boot.

  But Henry’s proposal was not the only news at the Szapka household: While she was visiting her parents, they learned that her brother Clem was coming home.

  He had turned up in an Army hospital in Germany. He had lost his memory for a spell but would soon be on his way home. Everything seemed to be falling into place. If Celia got married, Clem could be there to see it.

  But where to do it? If the two of them got married in Tennessee there would be the issue of securing visitor passes and finding a place for them to stay. And though she liked Father Siener, she wanted her darling brother Ed to do the honors. If it hadn’t been for him standing up to their mother, she wouldn’t be here, with someone like Henry. Father Ed had to be a part of this day. He had helped make it happen.

  So Celia had taken the train back into New York City, this time to pick out her wedding dress. She found a wonderful gown, a real beauty: long sleeves, tapered to a delicate point at the wrists, slightly fuller around her shoulders, but not too puffy. The bodice was sheer around her décolletage, but solid around the waist and gathered down the front and over the hips. The train was just long enough and the material smooth, not too fussy.

  She wore her brunette waves down around her blue eyes, with a flower in her hair and more on a veil that arrived at her knees. She had bought her flowers and bouquet from a florist who had discouraged Celia from ordering her favorite, gardenias, for the big day.

  “They’re not going to hold up,” the florist had warned. Celia bought them anyway. Then on January 27, 1945, she strolled down the aisle of St. Stephen’s Church in Paterson, New Jersey, her brother Ed presiding, her brother Clem home safe, clutching bunches of gardenias that looked as though their bloom would never fade.

  That was a few months ago now. Since then, she and Henry—now Mr. and Mrs. Klemski—had returned to CEW, moved out of the dorms and into a little E-1 apartment on Tennessee Avenue, quite close to the hospital and her old friend Rosemary in the nurse’s dorm. (They had arrived at the gates at 3 AM with a backseat full of wedding presents which conveniently camouflaged a load of booze left over from the wedding reception.)

  At first, Celia had gone back to work at the Castle, happy she still had a job after the inquisition in New York. Lt. Col. Vanden Bulck assuaged any remaining fears about how she had conducted herself during her interview. The New York office probably just wanted to better understand how things were in Oak Ridge in the early days when Celia first arrived, the lieutenant colonel said. But that was all water under the bridge now. She wasn’t working anymore. Henry was against it. Henry wanted a family and he wanted one soon. That meant no more work for Celia.

  It also meant more time on her hands. More time to think about phone calls that did or didn’t come at night when he was late for dinner. Whatever was going on at Henry’s job at X-10, she trusted that when she was allowed to know the truth, Henry or someone else would tell her.

  ★ ★ ★

  Stark. Bare. That’s how the apartment looked now.

  Rosemary barely recognized the place, though she had lived in it for several months. Naked, unadorned walls, no curtains to punch up the bland palette. Stripped floors, rugs that had lain there only recently now gone. Bars on the windows.

  It hadn’t been that long since Rosemary had moved out, but the space had been completely transformed—depersonalized—in preparation for its new purpose.

  Rosemary had been very happy in the nurse’s dorm, but when it was announced that some E apartments near the hospital were going to be made available for senior nurses in order to free up dorm space, Rosemary had jumped at the opportunity. Even better was the location: right next to the hospital. So she and Helen Madden, the hospital’s chief dietician, had decided to put their names into the hat and soon found themselves in their very own E-1 apartment on Tennessee Avenue in Townsite. There was one bedroom with two beds and a real kitchen, so they could cook their own meals, bake if they felt inspired, eat breakfast at home instead of waiting on line. It was a welcome switch from dorm life. Even though it was slightly more expensive than the nurse’s dorm, it was still affordable and the upgrade in lifestyle was absolutely worth it. The two women settled in quickly. They bought a rug, hung some curtains. It was turning into a real home.

  But it wasn’t meant to last.

  Rosemary could tell by the look on Dr. Rea’s face when she saw him in the hospital hallway that day that she did not want to hear whatever it was he had to say.

  “Rosemary, I hate to tell you this,” Dr. Rea began when he stopped her in the corridor. “But we are going to have to use your apartment for a mentally ill patient that is going to have to be contained.”

  Rosemary was disappointed but could never begrudge Dr. Rea for almost any request. Since she’d arrived, he and his wife had been incredibly kind and welcoming to her. Rosemary was happy to help him out, but nonetheless disappointed. Dr. Rea assured Rosemary that he had little choice in the matter. The hospital was short on space. Rosemary remembered when she’d first arrived in 1943 that the plan for the hospital was 50 beds. Fifty beds! But even now, with 337 beds, a new wing and constantly expanding facilities, there wasn’t proper space to treat such a specialized case. This particular patient could not be kept with the general population.

  So there it was. No more kitchen. No more living room. No more curtains and cooking. Luckily, the women hadn’t spent too much money. The apartment was already furnished with the usual military-issue, wrapped-in-plastic, wooden furniture. She had hoped that there would still be room for her back at the nurse’s dorm.

  Rosemary had never laid eyes on the mysterious patient. But she had known that he was on the premises. The young naval ensign’s arrival at the hospital got tongues wagging even beyond the hospital. Nurses on emergency-room duty had seen the young man brought in, but he was quickly shuffled away behind closed doors. In the day or two that followed, some hospital employees noticed that a trailer had appeared behind the hospital. Rosemary hadn’t seen it herself but had heard that someone highly agitated had been admitted, someone rambling about his job, talking about things he shouldn’t have been talking about.

  The doctors determined that keeping the man among the other patients was not going to work, especially if he kept going on about his work at Y-12. Bringing in the trailer was the first step. But it was soon decided that the trailer would not suffice. This patient needed a private, secure space of his own where he could be treated away from as many prying eyes and ears as possible.

  Dr. Rea explained the best place to keep such a patient was in an apartment near the hospital. Rosemary knew that her apartment made good sense. It was a small, one-bedroom end unit, easily accessible. The route from the hospital’s west side entrance to the apartment’s entrance was direct, following a short pathway and making it an easy trip for doctors and nurses to leave the hospital, administer treatment, and return without spending too much time traveling.

  Dr. Clarke, head of psychiatry, would be in charge of treatment. He had seen almost everything during his short tenure here and had developed a knack for creative problem-solving.

  There was little to go by, no other town quite like Site X to look to for guidance. During his first year, many of the issues he had dealt with as chief psychiatrist were the same types of problems that a psychiatrist would find in any community: ille
gitimate pregnancies, alcoholism, and, as he later put in his writings, the “occasional homosexual gang.”

  But what Dr. Clarke found surprising in his day-to-day observations of the population at the Clinton Engineer Works was a “lack of curiosity as to what was going on.” He felt this was indicative of the behavior of many individuals living here at Site X.

  “Those with basic paranoid tendencies found much to accentuate suspicions,” he wrote. “No one knew who belonged to the intelligence force or when one was under surveillance.”

  However, lack of curiosity was not the case with this latest patient.

  There were “noncritical” patients who, if they were not exposed to, or generally aware of, the more classified aspects of life at Oak Ridge, could be transferred to another hospital or treatment center if their needs could not be adequately handled on-site. Of course, hospitals in nearby Knoxville and elsewhere in Tennessee had their own space issues. The hospital staff at Oak Ridge had to make it work as best they could with the facilities that were available. But for those patients who did have some sort of classified knowledge—whether they knew how their piece fit into the whole puzzle or not—loose lips meant arranging for some sort of closed treatment. Even if the patient were to be transferred to another medical facility, even a military hospital, elsewhere in the country, it would present too much of a security risk, too much of a potential leak of secure information. Clarke knew that releasing the young Navy man from Y-12 to another facility was never going to be an option, not while the war was going on, and not while this man was spouting information about what he was doing at work.

  Not only was he talking out of turn, he also wanted to travel to Japan and warn the emperor about what was going on here at CEW.

  Once Rosemary and her roommate had been notified to vacate the apartment, it hadn’t taken long to get the place in shape and ready to receive its new resident. Dr. Rea got the news on February 9, 1945, from his associate psychiatrist, Carl Whitaker, that all was good to go:

  At your request the apartment at 207 Tennessee has been converted into an isolation ward with grille covered windows, soundproofing between it and the next apartment, doors which open from the outside so that emergency help can get in, but are locked from the inside, and an emergency bell connected with the emergency room for calling aid.

  Guards would work three 8-hour shifts at the apartment and the psychiatrist would make rounds at 8:30 in the morning and at 6:30 at night.

  The shock machine was reported as leaving Chicago the evening of February 6 . . . Patient himself is still in much the same state he has been with periods of assaultive behavior in which he might be dangerous to those about him and to himself.

  So here Rosemary now stood, inside her onetime apartment. If she had been led there blindfolded, there was no way she would have recognized it. There was an MP outside, guards to look after the patient. The bars on all the windows were the biggest shock. She had moved out in such a hurry that she had left a good bit of the decoration behind. Maybe Helen had taken the curtains? Now the main living area appeared stark and austere with just a single table and chair. There were nurses living in the apartment next door, and someone residing with the patient around the clock.

  When she first saw him, Rosemary didn’t think the man appeared dangerous. He seemed calm, not agitated at all. He was young, perhaps in his twenties, maybe thirties. During the time that Rosemary spent in the apartment, the patient didn’t do or say very much. Rosemary was left to assume that he must have been on medication to calm his anxiety. But the apartment remained locked down just the same.

  Rosemary was part of the small team of nurses who were assisting Dr. Clarke during the procedure. The machine had just arrived and regular treatments would now begin. She watched as the electrodes were placed on the patient’s head. Rosemary had seen this sort of treatment during her nurse’s training back in Chicago. There was a technician who physically operated the automatic controls on the machine and controlled the voltage, but Dr. Clarke oversaw everything. The patient was compliant and not hostile before or during the procedure. Rosemary didn’t think this was his first treatment.

  Though electroshock treatment had just been introduced in the United States in 1940, it was gaining in popularity among physicians and was a part of training for doctors in the military during World War II. Ads for electroshock machines soon began to appear in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Newer models boasted such advances as the ability to predict a patient’s resistance to certain currents. But one of the main concerns remained patient injury.

  One of the nurses placed a rubber block in the patient’s mouth. Rosemary’s role was a minor but important one. She and another nurse present carefully braced the patient’s legs and arms so that the treatment didn’t cause him to break any of his own bones or harm anyone else.

  The technician turned the dial. As the current coursed through the man’s body, his hands clenched and his muscles thrashed as he reacted to the voltage. It was akin to a grand mal seizure. Watching the patient’s reaction to the jolt, Rosemary was in fact reminded of seizures she’d seen. After his muscles contracted and went rigid, twitching followed. How long that lasted depended on the patient and the shock administered: maybe 10 seconds, maybe a minute. Eyelids and extremities, the seizure now past, quivered in the aftermath. The treatment was often used for depression. Depending on each patient’s situation, it might take a series of treatments to get results. In some cases, it took only a few treatments.

  Rosemary didn’t know how long the patient’s course of treatment would be or how many sessions he had already had. She hoped he would get better. But she doubted he would be able to go anywhere beyond the barred windows of her old apartment until the war was over, and Oak Ridge’s secrets revealed to everyone, including the Japanese emperor the man so badly wished to warn.

  ★ ★ ★

  The first time she heard it, Kattie found the noise deafening. It scared her to death at first, like someone had flipped a single switch and started the entire monstrous building running all at once. If she had been outside, even a town over, she would have seen the steam rising as it had been for months. Steam from K-25 could be seen miles away. But this was different. Something in her section of the plant was stirring.

  Inside, where she stood, she wondered if everything would be all right. Louder and louder, the din grew, bouncing off the towering walls, filling the vast, gaping yaw of a workspace. Now, she and her friend Small and the others had to holler just to hear each other. Where was it coming from? Had something gone wrong? The truth was, she had spent months cleaning in a factory that wasn’t fully operational. Now, as far as she could tell, the whole plant was kicking on at once. Work on the floor had never been quiet up to that point—far from it. But something in the concrete cavern she cleaned every day had come alive.

  It was spring 1945, and winter was winding down. Not a minute too soon, as far as Kattie was concerned. The winters here in southern Appalachia were something she never thought she would get used to. She had never seen so much snow. People would talk about how it wasn’t as cold as it was up north, in places like New York or Massachusetts, but she wasn’t from up there so it didn’t matter to her. She had seen a few flurries in Alabama. Dainty and harmless on their own, they seemed to magically appear out of a heavy gray sky but never got together with enough of their brethren to cause any real trouble. A little cold, a little slick, a little excitement for the children, and a little rush to the grocer and woodshed for the adults.

  Winters here were longer and colder and snowier. Kattie was sure it was the worst place she had ever seen in her life. The ground was hard, and it was cold when she tucked herself into her cot at night. When she arose early the next morning—she prided herself on being the first to clock in, so she could be among the first to clock out—it was even worse. She would look outside the door of her hutment (there were no proper windows) and all she could see in every direction was snow. Much worse
than any amount of shoe-sucking mud, as far as she was concerned. Spears of ice hung from the edges of the hutment, a little bit of sun and they would be sent spiraling downward, points glimmering, sharp, freezing and deadly. Seeing the white melt and sink into the brown beneath brought color and hope back into her days, her spirits rising with the temperature.

  Kattie worked cleaning the tanks and the floors, but was more than happy to clean the bathrooms when the opportunity presented itself. She couldn’t understand why some people didn’t want to do it. She got more privacy while she was working in the bathrooms, and there was less walking. If she cleaned it with a friend, the two could actually talk face-to-face. The tanks she cleaned were so massive that she couldn’t see Small working on the other side. Cloth in hand, Kattie scrubbed and cleaned the tanks each day until they gleamed above the floors that were her other primary responsibility.

  When they worked on the floors, there were always a few women in front, walking slowly, throwing damp sawdust on the concrete as they moved along. Then Kattie and other women followed in behind, sweeping it all up. They had a wheelbarrow to carry the spent sawdust away, making sure none was left on the floor. The sawdust did its job, absorbing grease, oil, and other sludge left on the floor from the prior construction, while the friction of the powdery wood remnants rubbed against the concrete and worked the surface into a shine like glass by the time Kattie and the others were done with it. There was a long row of workers walking to and fro, about 30 janitors in all, working their way down the length of what appeared to be a long lane in the K-25 plant. One appeared to Kattie to be as wide as some of the larger houses she had set foot in. It took them about an hour to get from one end to the other, sweeping and scooping as the sawdust piled up.

  Chatting had always been the way to pass the time. Now, though, she had to scream and yell at the top of her lungs just to be heard by coworkers who were standing on the other side of the huge steel tanks that populated the floor. Spread, sweep, pile it up, cart it away, do it again. From one end to the other then back again, each and every day, until it was time to punch out and go to Willie’s hut and get cooking. There she would leave the deafening rumble of mysterious and invisible progress behind. She and her coworkers would continue to wait in the shadow of steamy Appalachian skyscrapers for the war’s end, which they were all working to speed.