The Girls of Atomic City

The Girls of Atomic City, the Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, by Denise Kiernan, Touchstone 2013  

Imagine yourself a young woman getting on a bus in 1943, bound for some secret place, “Site X”, in the heart of the Appalachians.  Now imagine yourself living with 75,000 other men and women in a city with no name, on a job with no name, for a top secret war project with no name.  What would cause you to get on that bus, to live in a hut or dormitory, leaving family and friends behind in a time when hometown roots provided the stabilizers that women and families needed with men away at war?

Well, as the women of Oak Ridge, the secret city, tell the story, there was opportunity here, and what has always drawn all Mill Girls -  freedom, money, and for some, a very special way to contribute to the war effort.  Secretaries, high school girls, nurses, a chemist, a statistician-mathematician, a farm girl, a pharmacy clerk and a janitor, all of them left their “normal” lives behind to walk through mud streets, building a committee that was dedicated to massive nuclear destruction.  One woman, a Mildred Batchelor, grew up in rural Cookeville, Tennessee, “without,” according to her granddaughter Justina Batchelor, the book’s publicist, “much at all.  One year during the Depression she couldn’t attend school because she didn’t have any shoes.”  The Mill Girl’s father told a similar story – stopping his education in grade 11 to join the Civilian Conservation Corp – “thirty dollars a month, and I got to keep $5.00.” 

They lived in dormitories and trailers; the African-Americans among them lived in rough “hutments.” Among them were officially recognized informants – “loose lips sink ships,” or in this case, betray the enormity of the problem Oppenheimer and Teller envisioned. 

Did the women of Oak Ridge have regrets, once they discovered the purpose of their work?  Like today’s anti-nuclear discussions, it’s a paradox.  Although no one there are the time understood the full potential of their secret project, in later years their opinions turned.  But there is no avoiding the unique story of how a government driven campaign in the midst of so many other bloody campaigns, within 2 years produced enough uranium and other critical components, to complete 3 nuclear bombs.

Readers will find the black and white photos fascinating, from the daily activities – hanging out clothes on lines strung among the trailers - to dances and clubs run by the Oak Ridge workers.  The oral histories are reminiscent of the Amoskeag textile worker stories and photos of Mill Girls now long gone (see Amoskeag, by Tamara Hareven).  And for a description of the making of a nuclear device in the era of slide rules and the Eniac, this book delivers.

***