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

by Denise Kiernan

  Physics. Chemistry. Biology. The kind of research that was once relegated to underfunded university labs benefitted now from monies directed toward the burgeoning military industrial complex. The first light ever generated by atomic power. Advances in plutonium reactors. Submarine propulsion, pressurized water reactors, production of radioactive and stable isotopes, neutron diffraction, thermonuclear fusion, heavy ion nuclear research, investigations into bone marrow transplants and medical isotope scanning, and more found a home in the laboratories of Oak Ridge, along with the continued focus on research into the effects of ionizing radiation on human and other living beings. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, bullet fragments and paraffin casts were sent to Oak Ridge National Lab for neutron activation analysis.

  At work, Jane noticed many things were still under wraps. Although the Secret may have been out, others had taken its place. Though the greater purpose of Oak Ridge was now known, revealing details about one’s job was still forbidden. Not too long after the war, Jane had watched as a young couple who worked near her in Y-12 was quietly escorted out one day. Jane soon learned that they had been paying closer attention to what was going on at Y-12 than she had realized, and sharing what they had learned with people outside the fences. Jane did not know whom. She did not ask. You still did not ask.

  Soon babies came. Jim took a job in Tullahoma, Tennessee, home of Arnold Engineering Development Center, the University of Tennessee’s Space Institute, and Dickel Whisky. Jane left the lab behind, where Marchant and Monroe calculators and her “human computers” had been replaced by advancements such as the Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine (ORACLE) which, when it was created in 1953, was the most advanced computer in the world.

  Virginia continued working at Y-12 as well. One of her lab projects involved new developments from the Dow Chemical Company. Discussing uranium openly hadn’t made extracting and purifying it any easier. Tiny little pellets were supposed to absorb different forms of the now-freely-mentioned element, making recovery simpler. Virginia found the results murky at first, but results improved.

  A new man had arrived in the lab: Charles Coleman, a physical chemist with a PhD from Purdue, who specialized in separation chemistry. Virginia found him to be brilliant, his problem-solving ability eminently creative. The two soon went from coworkers to friends. Charles was a real match, someone who valued Virginia’s mind as well as her potential as a partner in life. The career chemist married at 29. She continued working but transferred to a different lab in an effort to keep her personal and professional lives separate. Babies followed soon after, along with Charlie’s many patents.

  Kattie and Willie decided to stay in Oak Ridge, though once the war ended many people they knew were moving on. They were finally able to bring their children from Alabama to Tennessee to live with them, where the couple had secured new jobs for the foreseeable future.

  One of the new postwar neighborhoods had been designated for black families and was located in the old Gamble Valley Trailer Camp, an area later called Scarboro. Scarce family-style housing had become available for black couples in 1945, but many lived in hutments until 1950.

  “It is the first community I have ever seen with slums that were deliberately planned,” Enoch P. Waters wrote in 1945 in the Chicago Defender, describing the planning of Oak Ridge “as backward sociologically as the atomic bomb is advanced scientifically.”

  Kattie, Willie, and their children moved into a home in the Scarboro area and were finally able to live again as a family. But change came slowly for the black community. Black residents still sat atop the hill overlooking the drive-in movie theater that remained off-limits, angling for a view of the far-off screen. In 1946, an elementary school for black students was organized. Older children still faced a long bus ride to Knoxville, which had a black high school, until 1950, when volunteers began teaching high school grades at the Scarboro School.

  In 1955, Oak Ridge became the first city in the state of Tennessee to follow the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against school segregation. It wasn’t without strife: Oak Ridgers for Segregation encouraged parents to keep their children home from school. Obscenities were scrawled across the sidewalk leading up to the school’s doors. (They were removed before the first day of classes.) Initially, only the school itself was integrated—black students had their own classes—but complaints raised by white and black members of the community soon changed that and classes began to be mixed as well.

  The spring before Oak Ridge integrated its schools, Kattie’s daughter Dorothye graduated as the last-ever valedictorian of Scarboro High School.

  With work no longer available to her as a cubicle operator at Y-12—K-25 was now the dominant and more efficient uranium separation plant at postwar CEW—Helen began working at Y-12’s library. There, one of her responsibilities was to help disseminate declassified information to other approved labs and libraries across the country. She had been asked to help keep secrets, she had been recruited to spy, and now she was being asked to help spread those words that had been cleared by Washington. Phrases and memos and techniques never known to her now passed through her fingertips on their way to be viewed by new and eager eyes of researchers and visiting scientists. Her focus stayed on the courts and ball fields, though. Lucky that. Helen’s softball team had found a softball coach: Lloyd Brown. But while impressed with Helen’s fielding abilities, Lloyd had other designs on the athlete. On their first date, the pair grabbed a bite at the cafeteria and spent the rest of the evening hitting buckets of golf balls at the driving range. Helen soon married Lloyd in the Chapel on the Hill.

  Rosemary was searching for suture material when her life took a turn. A young man had wandered down the hall from one of the research labs and into her office. His name was John Lane and he was recently discharged from the Navy. After working in the sick bay of an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, he now worked in a lab assisting research into permissible doses of radiation. Suture material was a must-have for his day-to-day responsibilities. Did she have any?

  “Where are you from?” John asked.

  “Holy Cross, Iowa,” Rosemary answered nonchalantly, and handed him a bit of catgut to tide him over until his next shipment arrived.

  “I’m from Cascade!” he said. “We used to play Holy Cross in baseball!”

  And so Rosemary met John in the clinic of a plant in Southern Appalachia, though they had grown up a mere 15 miles away from each other in a small Catholic corner of Iowa—he among the Irish, she, the Germans. The coincidence made an impression on the pair. They were soon married and moved into an E-2 apartment, followed by a B house when the children arrived. After a few years, John was transferred to Germantown, Maryland, and the couple moved their family to what would be their home for many years to come.

  Toni also married at the Chapel on the Hill, in November 1945. It had been a Lutheran wedding. Chuck’s mother would have approved of that much—but neither she nor Chuck’s father were invited.

  Chuck kept imagining his father leaping up the moment the minister said, “If any one here has any reason that these two should not be joined together, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.” Chuck didn’t want to risk that kind of outburst, and Toni certainly wasn’t going to complain that Chuck’s parents weren’t present. To avoid any discussion, Chuck kept one more secret in Oak Ridge. He did not tell his parents about the wedding until it was over: vows exchanged, reception finished, deal legally and spiritually sealed.

  Chuck’s work continued at K-25 and he then moved over to Y-12. Shortly after the war, Chuck discovered that one of his associates had been a member of the Counter Intelligence Corps—an official creep. It unnerved and angered him that a friend would keep that kind of information from him. Toni was relieved that nothing ever came of it. She was proud that Chuck excelled at work and began racking up quite a few patents of his own.

  He was transferred for a short time to Three Mile Island, a nuclear pow
er plant outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, located approximately 160 miles from Chuck’s parents’ home in Queens, New York City. This was technically in violation of the 300-mile “do not live” buffer zone that Toni had established when she issued her Empire State ultimatum. His work foray to Three Mile Island was thankfully a short one. Toni made a short visit then, and returned back down to the safety and seclusion of Oak Ridge.

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  Over the years, Oak Ridgers who had been there since the early pioneer days of 1943 had begun to feel a shift in attitude toward the work they had done during World War II. Three Mile Island eventually became known across the United States and the world when the nuclear power plant suffered a partial core meltdown. This, the worst nuclear accident in American history, occurred March 28, 1979, not two weeks after the release of The China Syndrome, the Jane Fonda thriller about dangers at a nuclear plant that garnered four Oscar nominations. Cleanup of the No. 2 reactor would last 14 years, and reluctance toward embracing nuclear energy reached an all-time high. A year before the accident, Oak Ridge’s science museum, dubbed the Museum of Atomic Energy when it first opened in 1949, was renamed the American Museum of Science and Energy, striking the word “atomic” and any of its perceived baggage from the name.

  Once her kids were a bit older, Dot took a job at the museum as a docent. She had enjoyed it at first, being able to share the work she had done as a cubicle operator. Veterans and civilians alike were proud of their contributions to World War II. Why shouldn’t she be?

  But times had changed. She was never quite sure what to say when asked how she “felt” about her work. Simple answers seemed hard to come by in those moments. And Dot eventually decided to quit her job as a volunteer at the museum.

  She could still hear the voice of the woman who was, perhaps, the final straw. Dot was standing at the Y-12 display, next to the replica of the calutron panels, where she would show visitors how she operated the knobs and dials. Most people would ask:

  “What’s it like to work on something you don’t know anything about?”

  “What’s a calutron?”

  “What was it like to live in a secret city?”

  But one woman in particular strode up to Dot, glaring, and asked, “Aren’t you ashamed you helped build a bomb that killed all those people?”

  The truth was, Dot did have conflicting feelings. There was sadness at the loss of life, yes, but that wasn’t the only thing she felt. They had all been so happy, so thrilled, when the war ended. Didn’t any of these people remember that? And yes, Oak Ridgers felt horrible when they saw the pictures of the aftermath in Japan. Relief. Fear. Joy. Sadness. Decades later, how could she explain this to someone who had no experience with the Project, someone who hadn’t lived through that war, let alone lived in Oak Ridge?

  Dot knew the woman wanted a simple answer, so she gave her one.

  “Well,” she said, “they killed my brother.”

  ★ ★ ★

  After dutifully attending their Catholic “instructions,” Colleen and Blackie were married November 29, 1945, also at the Chapel on the Hill. They made a striking pair: Colleen in her wedding gown from Cain-Sloan Department Store in Nashville, Blackie walking down the aisle in his Army uniform. Blackie had agreed to raise their children Catholic and, though he did not convert before the wedding ceremony, told Colleen he eventually would, though Colleen never asked. To her mind, he had done enough. The newlyweds went to Washington, DC, for their honeymoon, the first of many travels in their future.

  Colleen’s fears that she and Blackie would be transferred or that her new husband would decide to move them up north never came to pass. Instead, Blackie was formally discharged from the Army in March of 1946 and went to work for the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and Colleen had another acronym to add to her arsenal. She got to stay in Oak Ridge, where she was close to home, close to family. Colleen’s brother Jimmy had made it home safely from the war and moved up to Kentucky, where he found work in Paducah. Not long after, he died in a car accident.

  Funny how life turns out, Colleen would think when Jimmy came to mind. Her mother had prayed for him all through the war, and then assuming the worst was over, she thought it was safe to stop. Jimmy had been saved. Now Jimmy was gone.

  Colleen well remembered she hadn’t always been fond of Oak Ridge. She had recoiled at the thought of living here when she and her family first came to visit relatives in 1943. The women in dresses, shoes in hand, walking barefoot through the mud. The sight of her uncle’s tiny, one-room hutment.

  Her mother’s words came back to her once more: “It’ll be just like camping . . .” It was funny to think about now, after living here for so many years. Camping indeed.

  Temporary was the last thing that Oak Ridge turned out to be. When houses became available, she and Blackie bought one for their growing brood. There were eight of them now, five boys and three girls, just one shy of the nine Colleen’s mother had raised.

  Since the end of the war, Colleen had heard her town referred to as a lot of things, including a social experiment by anthropologist Margaret Mead. Colleen didn’t feel she was just part of some experiment. She was part of a very unique, unexpected community, one the Project never anticipated.

  Colleen’s pride in her home grew with each passing year as she added to the collage of pictures and memories of her time in Oak Ridge. She wanted to share what she had done with future generations and newcomers who came to town. She spoke at schools, telling stories to students about her job at the plant and about the war that Oak Ridge worked to win. Inevitably she, too, was asked what she thought about the destruction and death that the bomb caused. She never knew quite what to say, but tried to explain that in her mind, war was different. That war, in particular, had touched the lives of nearly every person in the entire country. All Americans wanted was to bring their loved ones home. Colleen hoped never to see the bomb she helped fuel used again. She continued to hope that the first time was the last.

  The relationship between the United States and Japan had changed dramatically since the days when Colleen first came to Oak Ridge and the prime mission was to defeat the “Japs.” Now Japanese scientists regularly came to Oak Ridge to do research, exchange ideas. The wife of one such scientist became one of Colleen’s students when Colleen volunteered as a teacher of English as a second language at the YWCA. The two women struck up an easy friendship. Colleen had no knowledge of her student’s past when they first met, but soon learned that the woman, Kisetsu Yamada, was a hibakusha, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. She had been 10 years old at the time of the bombing and had stayed home sick that day, avoiding the center of the city. As the two women worked together, Colleen encouraged Kisetsu to write about her experiences.

  From opposite sides of an ocean and a war, Colleen and Kisetsu shared a bond few outside either community could understand. There was not only scientific collaboration but growing cultural exchange as well, an effort that has manifested itself in myriad ways over the years. The most symbolic of these is the bell that stands in the middle of Oak Ridge’s public green, hanging within a small, wooden structure vaguely reminiscent of an arts-and-crafts take on a small pagoda. The International Friendship Bell.

  When this traditional bonshoo-style Japanese bell—designed in Oak Ridge and cast in Japan—was first proposed, it was one of several cultural exchange programs that had launched over the years between Oak Ridge and various Japanese cities and towns. The driving force behind the bell was Kyoto-born Shigeko Uppuluri and her husband, Ram. But this particular effort struck a nerve with some citizens. Letters flooded the local paper, pro and con. Some believed that creating a site for this bell was too close to offering an apology to Japan for the bombings, though the committee organizers insisted it was not. Others argued that there was nothing wrong with embracing peace as a common goal.

  In 1998, two years after the bell was dedicated, Robert Brooks sued the City of Oak Ridge, alleging, “the
Friendship Bell erected in a public park on the fiftieth anniversary of the city’s founding is a Buddhist symbol whose presence results in an endorsement of the Buddhist religion.” According to this logic, continued Brooks, the bell violated the laws of Tennessee and the US Constitution.

  “They’re praying to a god when they ring that bell,” he proclaimed angrily on the nightly news. The City of Oak Ridge prevailed and the bell remains. Japanese children and scientists flew to Oak Ridge for the inaugural ringing. There was no praying, there was no chanting. The bell is free for all to ring and people of all backgrounds do so on many occasions, official or not, August 6 among them.

  ★ ★ ★

  The ride on the Navy shuttle was a brief one. The memorial itself was long, rectangular, white, and concave in the middle, as if pulled downward by what rested beneath. The ship’s rusted gun turret protruded up through the surface of the water.

  After docking, Dot disembarked along with the rest of the passengers, making her way toward the narrow structure in the water.

  What had started with Pearl Harbor resulted in the development of a technology that ended a war and recast the political and emotional landscape of the world. Dot had moved from rural, post-Depression Tennessee to a secret government city, to the biggest wartime development in modern history and now here to where it had all begun.

  The waters of the Pacific acted as a blanket of stillness covering the remnants of the violence that once was, seeds of history now buried in the sea floor. They were over the middle of the ship now, its mammoth form lurking upside down beneath them. Dot looked out over the harbor. The barnacled and algae-ensconced outline of the remains of the ship was visible through the greenish-blue water.