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Saturday 23 September 2017

The Secret Girls of Atomic City

History always remembers men who developed the atomic bomb that forced the surrender of Japan and won the Second World War. However, it seems to have forgotten all about the secret women of Atomic City. Without them, no atomic weapon would have ever been possible.

Tens of thousands of young women from across America - both white and black, college educated and high school dropouts, wealthy and poor - moved to a muddy boom town in the Appalachian Mountains in 1942 to work on the top-secret project of refining and enriching uranium.
None of them knew exactly what was happening at Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They were purposely kept in the dark about the nature of their work. They only knew that it was something that they were told would help win the war.
Shops and bunk houses, homes and roads sprang out of the Tennessee clay mud. By war's end, the town had one of the largest bus systems in the nation - ferrying workers to their top-secret jobs. But it wasn't on any map.
Author Denise Kiernan tells the story of the secret city through the eyes of nine living Atomic City girls who watched the town grow and unfold in front of them.

Celia Szapka was a Polish Catholic girl who fled a coal mining town in Pennsylvania in search of good work. She rose to become a personal secretary for some of the top leaders of Oak Ridge.

Kattie Strickland left her three children in Alabama so she could make money to send home. Katie and her husband were not allowed to live together because they were black. Her children were not welcome on the compound either.
Jane Greer is the daughter of a wealthy Tennessee businessman who, when she tried to apply for an engineering degree at the University of Tennessee, was told that the school 'did not matriculate girls for engineering.' She studied statistics instead and eventually led a team of women who tracked uranium production.

'It was the others, the great and often unseen, who made the theories of scientists a reality,' Kiernan writes. 'Tens of thousands of individuals - some still reeling from the Depression, others gripped by anxiety and fear as loved ones fought overseas in the most devastating war any of them had known - worked around the clock on this project, the details of which were not explained.'

Despite the empowerment and the high-paying jobs, the women couldn't entirely break out of the 1940s gender roles. The leaders of the base were all men and men called all of the shots.
Toni Peters, whose family was kicked off a farm in Oak Ride they had owned for generations to make way for the new facility, remembers being barked at by her 'big 'ole Yankee' boss when she first approached the base for a job. When she tried to take dictation from him, she recalls, she 'couldn't understand the words he said.' Her dictation pad included numerous blank words as she tried to understand his northern dialect. When the boss realized this, he admitted that he could hardly understand her, either. Peters got the job anyway.

Secrecy was most important. Signs like 'What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here - LET IT STAY HERE' dotted the compound. Workers were forbidden from speaking about what work they did. Instead, the common question was 'Where are you from?'
Indeed, it was not until August 1945 - after the atomic bomb Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, killing 166,000 - that the workers really found out exactly what their efforts had been for.


The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan is out now.

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