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

by Denise Kiernan

  “Your mother’s real nice,” Blackie had once said to Colleen, “but I can’t understand a word she says.”

  Colleen’s mom always smiled right back at him, grins making up for any linguistic hurdles the two had to clear. Over time he had developed more of an ear for the Rowans’ Tennessee accent and had come a long way from his first trip to the S&W cafeteria on Gay Street.

  Colleen had discussed Blackie with Father Siener, wondering what her priest thought.

  “This is a wartime situation,” Father Siener had said. “When it’s over, you’ll be going back to Nashville with your family.”

  The young woman had originally taken the message to heart: Don’t get serious. Father Siener had turned out to be right. Colleen’s family and many others were moving out. The residential population was taking a nosedive. It would soon be at half its wartime peak of 75,000. Friends at the dorm were leaving and Colleen was feeling more certain with each passing day that she would be let go at the plant. But this feeling was in direct contrast to the message and billboards around town: “Stay on the job,” and people began talking about “winning the peace.” Bess Rowan was among those preparing to leave, ready to get back to Nashville so that they could all be there when Jimmy came walking through the door. From the beginning, the Rowan family’s avowed purpose for coming to Oak Ridge was better jobs and a chance to help bring her brother Jimmy home. Goal achieved. But for Colleen, heading home meant leaving Blackie.

  Staying without her family didn’t seem to be an option, and leaving Blackie didn’t feel right. Father Siener had another argument against the marriage as well: Blackie wasn’t Catholic. Father Siener went so far as to say that if she persisted in the relationship he would not marry them, though Blackie had started going to church with Colleen. But now, with her family packing for Nashville and the possibility that Blackie might be shipping out somewhere else with the Army—maybe even overseas—Colleen was ready to change the answer to the question he had asked so many times.

  Problem was, she hadn’t been asked recently.

  How about that! Colleen had thought at first. But she knew a man could take only so many no’s. She was relieved to hear that Blackie at least remembered asking her. But it was clear he wasn’t going to ask her again. So after reminding him, she gave a belated and revised response.

  “Well,” Colleen said. “Okay.”

  Blackie was over the moon. The pair soon took the train to Monroe, Michigan, to meet his parents, making sure to stop off in Cincinnati along the way in order to attend mass. Monroe was a little paper mill town between Toledo and Detroit. The visit was a short one. Colleen liked Blackie’s mother and father, and the feeling appeared to be reciprocated. The couple returned to Oak Ridge and entered wait-and-see mode, as so many had, hoping for a job that would keep them there. In the meantime, they began taking their instructions in preparation for a fall wedding that, Blackie agreed, would be a Catholic one. Colleen was going to stay with Blackie, this much was clear. Whether they were going to stay in Oak Ridge, she hadn’t a clue.

  ★ ★ ★

  “Here’s a bottle for your nightcap,” Mrs. Schmitt said, offering Toni the bottle.

  The knock had come at the guest-room door of the house in Queens, where she and Chuck were visiting his parents. Toni had retired to her room for the evening. So far, she did not like how the trip was going. And this late-night visit from Chuck’s mother was no different.

  “Oh, no, thank you, I don’t drink,” Toni answered.

  But Mrs. Schmitt insisted. “Just take it in there with you, anyway.”

  Toni tried once more to refuse, trying so hard to be polite to her husband’s mother, who, up to this point in their short visit, had been less than hospitable.

  “No, ma’am, no, thank you, I don’t drink.”

  Mrs. Schmitt physically leaned inside the doorway and placed the bottle on top of the dresser near the door. Then she disappeared down the hall. Not wanting to appear disrespectful, Toni didn’t argue. She closed the door to her room and left the bottle on the dresser, unopened and untouched.

  “My family is a little strange,” Chuck had said to Toni before their trip. His parents did not like bright lights, for example, and had painted the lightbulbs in the house red. They didn’t like the idea of Chuck, their only child, getting serious with anyone, especially a non-Lutheran. Chuck was still served first at every meal while everyone else, including Toni, waited.

  Toni’s own upbringing had not been perfect, but it had been full of love and joy. She lived every day knowing she was the light of her father’s life, and was raised by a mother who periodically exploded into her room, exclaiming, “You’re radiant with joy! There never has been, there never will be, there won’t, nor there can’t, nor there couldn’t be anyone more wonderful than you!” Toni found Chuck’s family perplexing and this visit to be uncomfortable, but she consoled herself knowing it would be a short one.

  Even worse than the odd treatment she received from Chuck’s mother was the rapid disintegration of Chuck’s mood. Toni was exhausted from having spent the last several days doing her best to be what she considered to be a proper Tennessee girl with good manners. All sweetness and light, as her mother liked to say. All the while, Chuck only became more brooding and puzzling. Finally, he had asked her if she wanted to go into Manhattan. Yes! came Toni’s answer. They had taken the train that morning, and from the moment they stepped out of Pennsylvania Station and out into Midtown, Toni had loved it.

  But the change of scenery had done nothing to alter Chuck’s disposition. He was still grim, silent, avoiding Toni’s gaze. So there she stood, looking down 102 stories at tiny, bright yellow taxicabs. There were rows of them—four rows—all lined up, with passengers streaming in and out. She was fascinated by the perspective, the hum, the skyscraping quiet in the middle of metropolitan chaos. She broke away from her meditative moment and turned suddenly toward her beau.

  “Chuck, I want you to tell me what’s wrong with you,” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said, lifeless.

  “That’s not true,” she continued. “Something is wrong and I want to hear what it is.”

  No response, only the occasional chatting of other tourists fumbling for change for the viewfinder. Is it the lipstick? she wondered. Yes, she’d worn some. She wanted to be herself. These strange people had adored her brother Ben; how could they have taken so badly to her?

  “Chuck, please . . . ,” she begged him. She stood, waiting, the hot summer wind blowing. Then Chuck finally began to speak.

  Oh dear, Toni realized as Chuck started relating what his mother had said to him, it’s not the lipstick.

  “First, I was shocked you asked my mother for a bottle,” he began. “Number two, you exposed yourself indecently to my uncle Freddy. And number three, you insulted my mother by leaving a menstrual pad in the bathroom for her to clean up.”

  Toni was flabbergasted at the lies Chuck’s mother had told him. But she was now beginning to realize the depths to which she would sink to destroy her son’s relationship. Toni remained silent until Chuck had finished. She had started counting cabs now, trying to see how many she could find from her perch above Fifth Avenue. It was oddly calming. She knew one thing: She had no intention of defending herself against these ridiculous lies. She looked up at Chuck, into eyes that had gazed down at her since that night long ago on the tennis courts, and asked him a simple question:

  “Do you believe your mother?” she asked, fire flashing in her eyes.

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  Toni looked down at her ring finger and the engagement ring she was already wearing.

  “Chuck,” she said. “I will not marry you unless you promise me that I will never have to live in a town that is within three hundred miles of your parents.”

  Toni stood at the top of the world’s tallest building, battered but not beaten, and told Chuck that if he wanted to spend his life with her, this was the one condition to which
he would have to adhere, the one issue on which she would never bend. She had sprung from a family steeped in love even when they lacked for niceties. She had lived two years in a world steeped in secrets and mysteries. She had known devotion and dedication, sacrifice for the sake of her community and her country. A marriage based on limits and criticisms, one borne of lies and manipulation, could never be in the cards.

  The world may have changed, but she wasn’t about to.

  CHAPTER 15

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  Life in the New Age

  Good morning friends. The housewives of Oak Ridge are speaking to the outside world from behind the barbed-wire fence. Yes, we’re still here. Did you forget about us? We just wondered, because we didn’t find ourselves mentioned in the Smyth Report. We are the ones who do the chores for the men who make atomic bombs, and we bring up their children, bomb or no bomb. The kids are two years older now, and we are at least ten. That’s the way you grow old—fast, when the going is tough.

  —Vi Warren, radio address

  The shuttle boat pulled away from the dock and began its short trip across the harbor. It was clear and sunny as passengers awaited to arrive at the nearby destination, many of them quiet, pensive. Dot held the lei in her hand. You could buy them onshore in any one of the countless refrigerated stands she had seen since arriving in Hawaii—in hotel lobbies, baggage claim areas, gift shops.

  Her journey was almost complete. She had traveled more than 4,000 miles to do a single thing.

  During the ride she must have thought of Shorty. She had lived a big life in the years since that news had arrived, and had made her own contribution to his war: the knobs and dials and gauges that, unbeknownst to her, helped unleash the power of the smallest known part of the cosmos, a power that helped to end the conflict that had taken her brother’s life.

  She had entered the conflict herself as a teenager, soon became a wife and mother, a member of a tight-knit community that was never supposed to exist. The prospect of learning the answer to the question “What are we doing?” had been thrilling at first, but the reality snuck up on her, like it did most people she knew. What a strange mix of feelings it was after the bomb dropped. That was what was so hard for her and so many others to explain to those who hadn’t lived through it—how she could feel both good and bad about something at the same time, pride and guilt and joy and relief and shame. She wasn’t alone; so many of them now lived a life of jobs and husbands and babies, still saddened by memories of those who were lost forever, no matter how hard they had worked to bring them home.

  ★ ★ ★

  General Groves addressed workers at Clinton Engineer Works at the end of August 30, 1945. If he had picked up a copy of the Oak Ridge Journal that day and perused the “As They See Us” column, he would have read the following editorial, reprinted in part from the Washington News.

  Oak Ridge is a new town in a new world, a world born the instant its maiden product destroyed Hiroshima . . . Utterly out of date are all the philosophies that gave Oak Ridge its birth . . . If the existing Oak Ridge and the potential Oak Ridgers are continued in the original spirit of aggression, their success can lead to nothing but extermination . . .

  The people of Oak Ridge, Tenn., indicate they are willing to go along with their baffling chores. They are content in their town of modern gadgets. In the beginning they asked only to help defeat the Nazis and Japs. They realize now that their assistance was stunning. With all that accomplished, they ask for jobs for today and for their tomorrows, there in the Cumberland hills.

  Oak Ridgers have not yet mastered twenty-first-century thinking, no more than have the rest of us. But instinctively they express what we all hope. In their own fashion they are saying: “We’d like to see all this new work turned into helpful things” . . . Men and women, wherever they are, must insist that Oak Ridgers be allowed to strive with atomics in the constructive measures of peace.

  Stafford Warren, head of the Manhattan Project’s medical section, traveled to Japan to assess the aftermath. Meanwhile, research into the effects of radiation continued in Oak Ridge and elsewhere. A radiology professor at the University of Rochester medical school before joining the Project, Warren was on the road in Japan from August 7 through October 15.

  Warren—and the rest of the Manhattan Project—relied almost exclusively on Geiger counter tubes made by one woman at Chicago’s Met Lab, Nancy Farley Wood. Nancy had the touch. She had worked on designs of several radiation detectors and when she tried to train others to make the tubes, no one, Warren thought, was as good as Nancy. She later went on to start her own company, the N. Wood Counter Laboratory. The “N.” was so that no one would know she, a woman, owned it. It had been an odd trip, Warren remembered, following the trail of the fallout with their Geiger counters as random kamikazes ran up, swords in the air, trying to surrender.

  Heading into central Hiroshima, “it stunk terribly, and there were flies everywhere,” Warren later said. “The flies were so bad that we had to close up the windows of the car to keep them out. You would see a man or a woman with what looked like a polka-dot shirt on, but when you got up close, there was just a mass of flies crawling over a formerly white shirt.”

  And in Nagasaki:

  We had descriptions from the Japanese of the trains backing down into Nagasaki about ten o’clock in the morning, two hours or so after the detonation, and thousands of people packing themselves on the trains. Then the trains would stop ten or fifteen miles out from the city, wherever there was a school or a flat. A lot of the more seriously wounded or burned would get off there. An awful lot of them would be found dead. They had been squeezed in the train all standing upright like sardines. These deaths I’m sure were due to a combination of shock and a high dose of gamma radiation. And then there were those who had lethal doses of a less amount, which had produced bloody diarrhea and the small intestine then fell apart. Four to six weeks later the bone marrow was destroyed and bleeding and the pallor were evident. It was about that time when we arrived.

  Weeks into his trip, Warren traveled to the Tokyo home of Admiral Masao Tsuzuki, a Japanese doctor and the country’s top radiation authority. After six weeks together, despite the circumstances, the two men had grown to like each other. Tsuzuki lived in a part of Tokyo that had escaped burning during the spring bombings. Warren didn’t think he needed to tell his security detail where he was going. He entered the admiral’s home, removed his shoes, and the sliding door shut behind him.

  The admiral introduced his wife and son, but his daughter remained in the back of the house. Major Motohashi, who worked with Tsuzuki, sat across from Warren as they shared a pot of hot tea. Warren thought the major looked almost like a caricature, with his thick-framed glasses, dark hair, and squat build. He had been a broadsword fencing champion of Japan. Warren, a fencing buff himself at Berkeley, shared his passion for swords, and a sword presentation ceremony commenced after tea.

  Motohashi unsheathed a samurai sword from its scabbard, presenting the edge to Warren. “More than three hundred years old,” he said, showcasing the blade’s balance. Warren, accompanied by a single aide and his whereabouts unknown to his security detail, thought about how this sword would have been used for decapitation. He felt sweat beginning to coat his skin. He looked at his aide; he, too, was exhibiting an unhealthy color.

  Swords came and went, one a cavalry sword from the Russo-Japanese War that had belonged to Tsuzuki’s father, and his father before him.

  Warren admired it, sweating as the serrated edge hung within inches of his face.

  “On behalf of Dr. Tsuzuki, I have great pleasure in giving you this,” Motohashi said.

  It was exceedingly generous—these men had nothing else to give. They had lost everything. Warren tried to refuse the family heirloom, but there was no way around it. Samurai swords were offered for General Groves, General Farrell, and (soon-to-be-General) Nichols, too. Though all had gone well, Warren was ready to extricate himself f
rom a small room chock full of so much weaponry.

  In exchange, Warren left a battery for Major Motohashi’s electrocardiogram machine. There was bowing and pleasantries. And though Warren respected the men he’d come to know, he didn’t even bother to lace up his boots before getting in the jeep and punching the accelerator.

  Years later, Stafford Warren would return to the country with his wife, Vi, on a vacation with a mission. They would track down Tsuzuki’s family—the man himself would be already deceased—and return one of the swords to them.

  ★ ★ ★

  In the first several weeks after the Hiroshima bombing, the only readily available information had been prepared under the auspices of the War Department and under the close watch of General Groves himself. Japan sought to control the story as well. An intrepid journalist named Nakamura—one of three men who paid a boatman to ferry them down a delta clogged with dead bodies to get the real story about what had happened to their homeland—described his trip in concise, harrowing detail:

  Suddenly a burnt arm stuck up out of the water and the hand grabbed onto the side of the boat. We couldn’t ignore it and tried to pull it up. But the skin came off in sheets . . .

  While Nakamura did manage to get word of what he witnessed to his editors in Tokyo, his story alarmed the censors. The news in the next day’s Asahi Shimbun stated that “two B-29s had caused ‘a little’ damage to the city.”

  In September, a month after Little Boy was dropped and Warren’s arrival in Japan, the first Western journalist, Australian Wilfred Burchett, entered Hiroshima. He documented what he called “an atomic plague” that continued to kill people. His story was published in London’s Daily Express on September 5, 1945. General MacArthur tried to get the journalist removed from Japan and declared that no civilian journalists would be allowed in Hiroshima.