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

by Denise Kiernan

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  It was used again, August 9: “Fat Man,” an implosion bomb using plutonium—49—like the model tested at Trinity, fell on Nagasaki. Roughly another 40,000 people died instantly. If this second attack, coupled with the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan a day earlier, did not convince Hirohito to surrender, there was yet another bomb almost ready to go.

  “The next bomb of the implosion type had been scheduled to be ready for delivery on the target on the first good weather after 24 August 1945,” General Groves told Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall in a memo dated August 10.

  “We have gained 4 days in manufacture and expect to ship from New Mexico on 12 or 13 August the final components. . . . the bomb should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather after 17 or 18 August.”

  Before a third bomb was dropped, Japan’s surrender arrived: August 14, five days after the Nagasaki bombing.

  World War II left no life untouched. An estimated 16 million American men had gone off to fight. More than 400,000 lost their lives. Military and civilian deaths worldwide were estimated to be as high as 80 million.

  Women—well over a million by 1942—had gone into factories and offices, and countless others rationed, collected scrap metal, bought war bonds, and danced with soldiers at the USO. While the entire country erupted, Oak Ridge was in a particular state of exuberance. Relief and pride mixed with shock and pensive consideration at the news of a second bombing. This new atomic bomb had brought an end to the war, and the people of Clinton Engineer Works had been a part of that One Thing that appeared responsible for victory. For many, knowing they had been a part of helping end the war was enough. For others, knowing was too much. One young K-25 worker left the singing and celebrating and retired to her dorm room. She sat there, thinking about the small role she had played in the bombings, and cried.

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  VJ Day. Ed Westcott, the Photographer, worked his way across the Reservation capturing reactions to Japan’s surrender, from the plants—still working around the clock—to the dorms and trailer camps. The celebration raged. Jackson Square, the heart of town, was crawling with young men and women.

  Sprawled across the front page of the Knoxville Journal, a banner headline proclaimed the news the world had waited six years to hear:

  PEACE.

  Westcott’s shutter was on fire. The same shutter that had captured the birth of Site X now captured images of a dummy of Hideki ToJo, the prime minister of Japan who had authorized the bombing of Pearl Harbor, burning in effigy. Cars cruised muddy streets. Children ransacked kitchens and garden sheds and took to the streets banging on old buckets, pots, and pans, clanging lids, and thumping wheelbarrows. Anything that could make a noise did. Anyone who could raise a glass—whether beer or local moonshine “splo” or homemade wine—raised it high. Horns honked, people sang, couples danced. Chests across the country heaved a collective exhale at the long-awaited news. The war was over.

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  Bill Wilcox, the spiffy young chemist, and others like him who had missed fighting overseas, had, on more than one occasion, found themselves on the receiving end of cynical glances and suspicious inquiries.

  Why weren’t they doing their duty?

  For years they had endured veiled—and sometimes direct—criticism without any kind of recourse, without being permitted to respond. Now, they had an answer for those who had doubted their patriotism, who had accused them of taking the easy way out.

  Wilcox sat relaxing with friends at the Norris Dam, sitting alongside the water, enjoying the sun and company, processing recent events and his role in them. He began writing:

  “At last, thank God, it’s all over,” he wrote his parents in Pennsylvania in a letter dated August 15, 1945. “After the din of battle dies for the last time, and after the first exuberant moments of rejoicing, one cannot but be sobered by the feeling that an end of another era has come . . . Never before has the knowledge of so vital a nature been entrusted to so many with so great success . . .”

  For the first time, he poured out details of the life he had kept from his parents for more than two years. The writing was cathartic, taking pages out of him.

  “You can pent up a hell of a lot of emotion in two years with people saying ‘Why are you not in uniform and calling you a draft dodger . . . ,’ ” he wrote. He described the mind-boggling size and scope of the operation, the 16-hour days, the living conditions, and the strain. There were, in his words, love and admiration for the men and women with whom he had served and lived.

  Never before in the history of the world has so much responsibility been placed on the shoulders of such young people . . . no place for old men . . .

  Oak Ridge is not a town, city, or name alone, it symbolizes a great and unique philosophy which is felt only by those who have stormed, sweated, and cussed here for two years.

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  The Oak Ridge Journal had suffered the scoop of all scoops.

  The biggest story of the war had been right under their noses and they were not permitted to know it, let alone report it. They were a weekly publication to boot, so by the time they got the information, they couldn’t cover the story in their own pages until days later, after every major media organization on the planet had offered its take.

  “Oak Ridge Attacks Japanese!” was the headline that finally appeared in the Oak Ridge Journal.

  The feast of information fed from the War Department to the hungry media was, at first, enough to sate editors and reporters nationwide. But soon the public was hungry for more. More about the science. More about how the government kept this Project under wraps. More about the damage in Japan. And most important, more about what was next on the atomic frontier. But more was not available, except in discrete, periodically declassified batches.

  “More has been written about Oak Ridge in the newspapers and magazines of the nation this week than the Oak Ridge Journal has been able to print during the almost two years of its existence,” the August 16 edition of the paper quipped.

  In the Letters section, someone suggested a new name for the paper—The Atomizer. The Oak Leaves section of the paper related the tale of a newsboy in nearby Knoxville, home of Oak Ridge’s oft reluctant neighbors, howling on a street corner, extolling the region’s change of heart toward the shadowy Reservation:

  “Extra! Extra! Oak Ridge Makes Atomic Bomb! We used to hate ’em and now we love ’em!”

  Hordes of reporters and news agencies descended on the town.

  Press releases were primarily crafted by William “Atomic Bill” Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter from The New York Times, who had been at Trinity and aboard an observation plane during the bombing of Nagasaki. Releases included the first bit of insight into the Army Counter Intelligence Corps, one of the forces responsible for keeping the story locked down.

  The first issue of the Oak Ridge Journal after the Hiroshima bombing featured a profile of public relations officer George O. “Gus” Robinson in the “You’re in the News” section. Robinson had been responsible for helping keep the news about Oak Ridge and the Project under wraps across the country. He had met with editors and newspaper reporters for more than two years and finally, in the past week, was able to host them at CEW, his muzzle loosened—if not removed.

  “He always manages to give the impression that he knows more than he is telling—which is usually the case,” the paper wrote of their colleague Robinson.

  Elsewhere in the paper were signs that life in Oak Ridge was humming along. Knight’s store in Grove Center was expanding on August 17: “We Are Not Whispering . . . We are Shouting About Our New Millinery Department.” A carnival was running through August 25 at Elza Gate—Special Dare-Devil Act! Tilt Whirl! National Velvet was playing at the Middletown Theatre and James Cagney was starring in The Frisco Kid at the Skyway Drive-In. Special VJ Day services were being held at the Chapel on the Hill. In other news, the dorms would move
to a cash-only basis at the end of the month. Everywhere you looked, people were already packing up and leaving.

  The message around the Reservation remained “Stay on the Job.” It was on the billboards, it was printed in the upper-left-hand corner of the newspaper. A letter on the front page from Colonel Nichols, the District Engineer, drove the point home.

  “We must become sufficiently equipped with our new and stupendous weapon so that no aggressor will ever dare attack us again.”

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  Kattie watched as a coworker welcomed her boyfriend—just returned from the war—through the gates. Kattie was happy for her. But while everyone kept talking about how the world had changed, as far as Kattie was concerned, much was still the same. She was still living far away from her children. She was still sending home money to her family in Alabama. The community of black Oak Ridgers she had met over the past few years was divided. Maybe half of them wanted to go now that the war was over, half wanted to stay. But no one would want to stay without somewhere to raise their children and a place to send them to school. This place would never be home if she could not have her children with her. She and Willie had celebrated the end of the war along with everyone else, but they could not stop wondering if and when they would be able to bring their children to live with them, or if their time in Oak Ridge was finally coming to an end, the snows of East Tennessee melting into memory.

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  For Helen, the end of the war meant her brother Harold was coming home. She had never really gotten over the fact that he had shipped out right after training, without being given the opportunity to come home to say good-bye. He had been gone three years now, with not one leave. The letters she had received from him had been routinely cut to frustrating ribbons by censors. Helen assumed the same was true of the letters she had mailed him. It took at least a month for letters to get to her, and she just knew that her mama must have had an even worse time of it: the lack of contact, the silence, the not-knowing.

  Helen finally got word. After arriving back in the States, Harold had been debriefed and flown to Nashville. Once there, he was dropped off on a country road, left to his own devices to travel the rest of the 25 miles to the family home in Eagleville. Once Harold was spotted by a neighbor, Helen’s father hopped in the car and started driving down the road toward Nashville to find him. There was Harold, hiking home with all his gear, his father’s car a welcome sight.

  Helen didn’t think that was any way for a returning soldier to be treated, but she was glad he was home safe and couldn’t wait to see him again. But it wouldn’t be for good. She had decided she wanted to stay in Oak Ridge. She had a job, softball, basketball, and a good place to live. Well, she thought she had a job. Right after the first bomb dropped, before Japan surrendered, word had begun to spread that the plants were closing. Some women at Y-12 were already making plans to move to Kingston, where Tennessee Eastman’s main operations were based. Sections of the Y-12 plant were shutting down and reducing shifts. She would have to find a new job. Could she? Would the whole town pack up? Some people said it was just a matter of time. She, for one, hoped they were wrong.

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  Rosemary had a new offer of work. She didn’t want to take it, but Dr. Rea kept hounding her. She felt flattered, but was not sold and had a decision to make, like most everyone in Oak Ridge. About half of the doctors in the hospital were heading home to their practices or the facilities they had left behind. Others were placing bets on the future of Oak Ridge, setting up their own local offices for the town’s first private practices. The clinic she had come to know and shape was changing rapidly.

  The bombings themselves were still hard for her to fathom, and she knew others who felt the same way. Anybody who had been working in Oak Ridge and had contributed to the development of something so tragic, so devastating, had to ask themselves the question whether it was the right thing to do. She felt incredibly relieved the war was over. She knew there were people who wondered if the death of so many thousands, so many civilians, was too big a price to pay, but she didn’t think most people who worked in Oak Ridge felt that it was. The devastation after the bomb was hard to yet get a handle on; it was so unclear. She could not imagine being in President Truman’s shoes, having to make that kind of decision. What a horrible responsibility, she thought.

  Rosemary’s first instinct was to go back to Chicago, back to the last place she had worked before coming to Tennessee. She did not necessarily want to work in a hospital setting and thought she might go back to school and study public health. A couple of the doctors in Oak Ridge had asked her if she wanted to come to work for them in their new offices, but that didn’t feel like the right fit.

  Dr. Rea’s offer was on behalf of his friend Gene Felton, head of the medical facility at the X-10 plant. Felton was looking for a nursing supervisor for the plant’s on-site facility.

  Rosemary wasn’t interested, but Dr. Rea went so far as to arrange for a car to pick her up at the hospital and drive her out to the X-10 plant to talk with Felton directly. Rosemary felt obligated to make the trip. If for no other reason, she was curious. It would be the very first time in her now two years at Oak Ridge that she had ever laid eyes on any one of the plants that stood within the confines of the Clinton Engineer Works. She had known they were there, but had only seen the residential parts of the Reservation. The big plants that occupied so many of the lives that came through the doors at the hospital had remained unknowable to her. Off-limits. But not today.

  Rosemary liked Gene Felton immediately. She knew the plants had clinics of their own, at which they could deal with on-the-job injuries, ranging from falls from ladders to exposures to various chemicals. In some ways the position would be very similar to the job she had had in Chicago at the munitions plant, before she took the job in Oak Ridge. She decided to give the new job a try. If it didn’t work out, she could always go back to Chicago.

  In her new position, she would learn a lot more about radiation. She had of course heard about it when she was working in the hospital in Chicago, primarily associated with precautionary measures taken during the administration of X-rays. The long-term effects of radiation on a large scale were not yet clearly understood. There were precautions that CEW workers could take, film badges to measure exposure, blood tests. And X-10, home of the pilot plutonium plant, had already had its own share of exposures that needed to be dealt with.

  Workers who found themselves exposed—either to plutonium or other damaging chemicals—would come to the clinic at the plant, where they were showered and scrubbed down intensely. Sometimes they had to stay overnight, as Henry Klemski had, often leaving their spouses to wonder what had happened, and with little more than a phone call from a supervisor letting them know that their husbands wouldn’t be home that night.

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  Celia decided to make Saint Theresa the object of her nine-day daily devotion. The patron saint of headache sufferers seemed appropriate considering the discomfort that had plagued Celia throughout her entire pregnancy, not to mention the new headache that Henry’s pending relocation was inflicting.

  DuPont was transferring their workers to other sites now that the war was over. For Henry, that meant Charles Town, West Virginia. Henry may not have wanted to move, but he did want to stay with the company, the same one that he’d worked for back in Alabama and in Wilmington before that. But Celia could not face a move, not now.

  “I can’t go,” Celia had said to Henry when he first broke the news. Celia was three months shy of her December due date. Flustered, Celia weighed her options. They seemed few, and none that appealing. The thought of packing up their home and moving to another town sounded like a nightmare, especially in her condition. There was only one solution that she could think of.

  “You go on to West Virginia,” she told Henry, “and I’ll go back home to have the baby, and I’ll join you later.”

  It was not ideal, but at the time it seemed
the best choice. Still, Celia didn’t want to give up hope on another solution, one she hadn’t thought of. But she needed time and some outside guidance.

  Enter Saint Theresa.

  Celia did not want to be separated from Henry. And their friend Lew Parker had told Henry and Celia that West Virginia was even worse than Oak Ridge had been in the early days. Celia just wanted to stay where she was. It was home now.

  On the ninth and final day of Celia’s novena, Henry burst in the door, having just come from work.

  “I got another job!” Henry exclaimed.

  “Where?” Celia asked, wondering what this now meant about West Virginia.

  “Here in Oak Ridge,” Henry said. “Monsanto came in and said I could stay here and offered me a hundred-dollar-a-month raise.”

  Celia thanked Saint Theresa and began preparing the house—not to pack it up and move it, but to bring their first child into what looked like would be their home for at least a little while longer.

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  “Remember that thing you asked me a while back?” Colleen said.

  “Yes, I do,” Blackie answered.

  That was a relief. But, Colleen wondered, is it too late to say yes?

  Since the very first time Blackie popped the question, while hiking at Big Ridge, he had repeated it on a fairly regular basis. And on just as regular a basis came Colleen’s response: No.

  Colleen liked Blackie. Her dad liked Blackie. Colleen’s mother was fond of him for all the reasons mothers usually like potential son-in-laws: He was nice, he was polite, and he seemed to smile all the time. Colleen thought his smile was one of his best assets, wide and effortless. True. Blackie liked Mrs. Rowan as well, though there were some cultural differences to move past.