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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