The Girls of Atomic City (39 page)

Helen had been looking forward to spending some time relaxing with her old friend. But no sooner had she stepped foot on the cobbled streets of New Orleans than Pee Wee announced that she and her husband were heading to Tennessee. They were excited about news of the bombing, as everyone in the country was, but the news about Oak Ridge’s involvement was inspiring their change of plans. They were from Tennessee, and Tennessee, they had now learned, had played an important role in something big.

For Helen, it was as if she had stepped through some sort of time warp. She had boarded a plane in one world and gotten off in another; it wasn’t location alone that had shifted beneath her.

Helen understood Pee Wee’s reaction to the news and made the only decision that seemed sensible to her at the time.

“Well, I’m going with you, then.”

She didn’t unpack, just piled into the car with Pee Wee and her husband, and drove back toward her new vacation destination: Oak Ridge.

★ ★ ★

Toni had yet to hear back from Chuck.
Maybe he doesn’t know yet
, she thought. If he still had his nose to the grindstone, in that parallel universe of Oak Ridge where words like “uranium” and “bomb” were
not to be uttered, even in whispers, he must have thought Toni was out of her mind, about to get him—or more likely, herself—into some serious hot water.

Toni remembered a conversation she had heard just two days earlier when she and her friend Betty Coobs had run into Mr. Diamond outside the Castle. Toni now cast that exchange in a brand-new light.

“I figured out what they’re doing here . . . ,” Betty had said. Naturally, Mr. Diamond was all ears. Toni had stood stock-still, frozen in horror.

“They’re gonna split the atom, harness the energy, and make a bomb.”

It had all sounded like gibberish to Toni, who had laughed it off. She remembered that Mr. Diamond, however, was not as amused.

How on earth had she known that?
Toni now wondered. Betty had always been smart, but splitting atoms? Of course what Betty did not know two days ago when she brazenly shared her theory—and what they had just found out today, as the atomic cat was out of the bag—was that Mr. Diamond had reported the incident to security.

“Betty, I had a talk scheduled for you for today,” Mr. Diamond said.

But history had intervened and Betty had narrowly escaped a severe reprimand, if not the loss of her job.

Toni still didn’t understand the bigger picture, but she had more pressing issues on her mind and a trip to plan. She would soon be traveling with Chuck to New York City, to visit his family in Queens. She wondered if they’d like her. They had gotten along fine with her brother Ben when he was sent from his Air Force base in Florida to New York to take a two-week communications course. Chuck’s parents had invited Ben—a.k.a. Silver Buckles—to their home and he charmed them the way that only a nice southern boy from Tennessee could. But Toni knew it would be different for her. Chuck’s parents hadn’t even wanted their son to get a job or leave home and here Toni was, a woman, taking up a significant chunk of his emotional real estate. So much felt beyond her control.

What’s next?
Toni wondered.
Do I still have a job?

Would Chuck go back to New York for good? Maybe the war would even be over by the time they visited his parents. Gosh, if that happened, maybe Silver Buckles would be home safe. Wouldn’t that be something. Over. Finally.

★ ★ ★

It was a clear, sunny day as Virginia and her friend Barbara boarded the ferry on the banks of the Potomac that would take them down the Chesapeake Bay to Norfolk, Virginia, where Virginia’s sister lived. After a little trouble sleeping on the train, the remainder of the trip had been fantastic. The two young women walked through L’Enfant’s city, visiting museums and listening to bands playing on the mall near the Washington Monument. When she had left Tennessee with Barbara, Virginia had little idea how much the world was going to change during her short time away from Oak Ridge. Now in retrospect, the cryptic comments made to her in the lab before she left work made more sense.

“It’s about to happen . . .”

She now knew what “it” was.

Other things started to make sense: the absence of articles from the scientific journals, her work in the lab, the percentages, her hike with her physicist beau who theorized they were building some sort of bomb, the mutterings of dates from Yale and Harvard, the hints dropped by her coworkers days before she left. As she and Barb stood on the deck of the ferry enjoying the late summer weather, the topic of conversation among the guests inevitably turned to the bombing of Hiroshima.

Virginia listened as people discussed the top secret Project gracing the front pages of the nation’s papers. Soon someone mentioned that none of the people working in the plants had any idea what was going on.

Without thinking much about it, Virginia instinctively said, “Well, I did.”

The curious, chatty mood suddenly turned accusatory.

“Nobody knew!” someone hissed. “All the papers said no one there knew. How would
you
know?”

Virginia withdrew as the small crowd pounced on her words, implying that she was lying, pretending to be something she was not.

A person in the know? This young girl?

Virginia only wanted to join in, add an interesting perspective. She wasn’t intending to brag.
I never would have figured things out on my own,
she thought, though she knew the secret had to be chemical in nature, something to do with atomic energy. But she needed help putting the pieces together.

This had been perhaps the first time that she had said out loud—and to people who lived off the Reservation—what she believed. Their reaction made her feel as though it would likely be her last.

Virginia could finally
talk
about what she’d been doing all this time and no one wanted to listen.

Conversation ceased, the subject dropped, and Virginia kept any remaining thoughts to herself. But she found the whole revelation remarkable, that there were people at CEW who knew much more than she did, and still no one had really talked about it.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized: Oak Ridgers had kept the most amazing secret ever.

CHAPTER 14

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Dawn of a Thousand Suns

I heard one man break out fiercely and instinctively with a loud “Sh-sh-shush!” Secrets that he had guarded with his life for over two years were being shouted out for all the world to hear. Data that had only been recorded in code and labeled “Top Secret” were being flung into the air. Facts that he had withheld from his wife as if she were an enemy were being exposed in full detail to everybody.

—Vi Warren,
Oak Ridge Journal

Toni stood atop the Empire State Building, five blocks north—and more than 1,200 feet skyward—from one of the spots where the Project all began. There, shielded among the skyscrapers and office buildings, was the Madison Square Area Engineers Office, which had once been the center for securing raw materials for the bomb. What had begun on this small island had been brought to completion, in part, back in Tennessee, a scant few miles down the road from where she had grown up, all coming to fruition not far from where she’d picked peaches, gone on joy rides in “borrowed” cars, and known the unwavering love of two unique parents. She stood silently beside Chuck and considered her future, one full of more choices than she had ever imagined her little life would have, more than she wanted.

It was a different world in the days following the revelation. While everyone wondered if the war would soon be over, the people of CEW had additional concerns:

Would Oak Ridge continue to exist?

Retrofitted factories that had served wartime needs could well return to fashioning lipstick tubes or kitchen appliances. But Oak Ridge was not just a plant or a collection of plants. It was now a city, such as it was, sidewalks or not. Would everyone pull up stakes, leaving the monstrous edifices, temporary trailers, and prefab homes behind? Would it become a full-time military base? Would there still be a place for the thousands who had come to consider this just-add-water outpost their home?

★ ★ ★

After her trip to Washington, DC, Virginia returned to the lab. Work had not stopped. One of her immediate supervisors walked up to her in the lab, eager—as many were—to talk about the Big News.

“Virginia!” he said. “Did you know what was going on here?!”

What struck Virginia as odd was that he sounded as if he himself had had no idea.
How could he be so surprised?
she wondered. She would have thought someone in his position might have put a few things together during his time here. He was her supervisor, after all, and likely had access to more information than she did. But maybe not. She had no way of knowing without asking him directly, and she decided not to. Completely transparent discussions still weren’t happening, even after the big reveal.

New rules were evolving. Going forward, what could and could not be said out loud in Oak Ridge would continue to change; details about the intricacies of the bomb would be parceled out according to what the Project believed appropriate. For workers, there was still so much about the big picture left unsaid.

Everything and nothing had changed. Reminders came that it was to be business as usual at CEW, though some workers were already making plans to move on, assuming the existence of their jobs and the town were as temporary as they hoped the war would now be. The War Department issued the following letter to all workers:

7 August 1945

To the Men and Women of Clinton Engineer Works:

Today the whole world knows the secret which you have helped us keep for many months. I am pleased to be able to add that the warlords of Japan now know its effects better even than we ourselves. The atomic bomb which you have helped to develop with high devotion to patriotic duty is the most devastating military weapon that any country has ever been able to turn against its enemy. No one of you has worked on the entire project or known the whole story. Each of you has done his own job and kept his own secret, and so today I speak for a grateful nation when I say congratulations and thank you all. I hope you will continue to keep the secrets you have kept so well. The need for security and for continued effort is fully as great now as it ever was. We are proud of every one of you.

Robert R. Patterson,

Under Secretary of War,

Washington, D.C.

Jane Greer opened the letter from her sister Kathryn, written the night of August 6, the day of the Hiroshima bombing. Jane began reading.

“Well, this has been quite an exciting day—more for you all than for us, I’m sure . . . ,” the letter began.

Jane was always interested in what people on the “outside” had to say about her world, though she wasn’t permitted to indulge their curiosity. She relished reading news of her father, the family home in Paris, Tennessee, her siblings’ travels, and plans for the coming month. Jane herself was looking forward to visiting with Kathryn and the baby that was due to be born any day.

Their father was worried about Jane, “being so up there close to anything so powerful.” Kathryn instructed Jane to write him about all the precautions Jane was taking at work in an effort to calm his fears.

“Goodness!” Kathryn wrote. “It’s kinda scary the thing is so
horribly powerful. I can’t even imagine such a thing and when you think what destruction it can cause it really does scare you. If the wrong person gets hold of it, there we are or at least where are we? But I’m sure it will have many unbelievable and wonderful peacetime uses and let’s hope that’s what it will be used entirely for. It should shorten the present war—in fact, it seems as though they would be ready to quit tonight. I know I would. Let’s hope and pray it does that one good thing and then is never used again for destruction.”

★ ★ ★

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.