The Girls of Atomic City (12 page)

Dot, the baby of seven and Farmer Jones’s youngest daughter, was the last to leave home. Her sisters had left town to find work. Her brothers had been long gone, off to war, Woodrow and David in the Army, and Shorty . . . Shorty had been a deck gunner for the Navy. She had always looked forward to the crazy postcards he’d mail home to her. Her favorite was a photo of Shorty—no doubt drunk as a skunk—wearing his fancy Navy whites up top and a grass skirt down below that he’d mailed her all the way from Hawaii.

He had been only 23 years old when her family got the news, right before Christmas.

Believed to be among the missing . . .

That’s all she and her parents were told. No one ever came right out and said he was dead. But they all knew, even before word arrived. Once the world learned the fate of the USS
Arizona
, she and her family knew. He was probably still there, with so many others, trapped beneath the murky waters.

“Somewhere in East Tennessee” was more than a job. Dot felt it was a way to help end the war that had taken Shorty from her. The last time she’d gotten one of his postcards, Shorty still called her “Baby.” Funny, she thought. He was the one who never really got to grow up.

★ ★ ★

Spring was in the air, Townsite was growing by leaps and bounds—
“McCrory’s 5, 10, & 25 Cent Store Now Open in Jackson Square next to the Ridge Theatre!”
—and
The Oak Ridge Journal
paused to ask residents, “Does Your Tongue Wag?”

. . . Specialists in Axis espionage and sabotage activities are standing before their leader . . . they are about to embark on a vital mission for Naziland . . . and here are typical instructions to enemy agents . . .

We have reports that somewhere in the American state of Tennessee there is a new war project about which you MUST get DETAILED information . . .

Talk and listen: Get public opinion and current speculations about the work being done. . . .

The natives and workers will aid you—they will talk, talk, talk. Listen. Some will tell you because they are unsuspecting, have faith in everyone they meet, others are plainly ignorant that they are giving information. . . .

Search discarded plans and trash. Listen to every possible conversation—these Americans talk constantly about their work . . . psychological sabotage is your weapon of which our Dr. Goebbels is the master. When you hear a rumor spread it to every ear that will listen . . . bad food, mud, sickness, poor pay, strikes, waste, discrimination, race prejudice and persecution—make the place sound so dirty and miserable, so poorly managed and inefficient that no decent person would want to remain there. . . .

Make them hate the state of Tennessee until they leave in droves. . . .

Let the looseness of their tongues and the softness of their brains do your work for you. Bring me the report that this project in Tennessee will be entirely useless to America. Heil Hitler!

★ ★ ★

A sudden knock came at the door.

Helen looked up, startled, as she sat in the middle of her dorm room floor folding laundry. She wasn’t expecting anyone to come calling.

It must have been a mistake.

Helen had returned home from another interminable day at the bull pen—still no clearance, still no word on when she would be officially starting her new job. She got back to the dorm as quickly as possible to get her laundry done before the washing rooms got too crowded with girls rinsing out their unmentionables for the next day.

She had heard the laundry service was not to be trusted.

Then the knock came again, more insistent this time. Whoever was out there wasn’t going away. Helen stood up and crossed the room, gingerly avoiding the carefully stacked laundry, and opened the door. It was her dorm mother.

“There are two men downstairs here to see you,” she said.

“I’m not expecting anyone,” Helen replied. “I don’t know any men.”

“Are you Helen Hall?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, they asked to speak to you. You need to come downstairs.”

Helen did as she was told. As she walked down to the small lobby of her dormitory, her mind began to race.

Who could these men be and what do they want?
she worried.
Have I done something wrong already? Oh, no, I hope I haven’t already made a mess of things.

Once in the lobby the dorm mother pointed out the two men. Helen looked at them. They wore dark suits, and once Helen got a look at their faces she was sure beyond a doubt that she did not know them.

Helen walked over.

“I’m Helen Hall,” she said, and waited.

The two took a few furtive glances over their shoulders, seemingly surveying the other young women and visitors gathered in the lobby—people picking up mail, using the phone, chatting.

“Would you mind if we stepped outside to speak?” one of the men asked.

Helen agreed. What else could she do?

The three exited the dorm. It was dark. She may have been a small-town girl, but she knew that speaking in the dark with strange men was not advisable. But these were clearly Very Important Men.

The men began to speak.

Helen listened, and she soon learned that she wasn’t in trouble—that wasn’t it at all. The real reason they wanted to speak to her was almost as disconcerting.

Would she mind,
the two men wondered,
paying very close attention to what the people around her were doing and saying?

Helen kept listening.

The men wondered if she would be willing to listen to conversations taking place around her at work and in the cafeterias. She should also pay particular attention to any individuals who seemed to be speaking out of turn, maybe talking a bit too much about what they did at the plant, for example.

All she had to do was write down all the relevant information she had gathered—names, dates, locations, what was discussed—and deliver it to them. She wouldn’t have to give it to them in person. Her notes would be delivered to an unmarked box that no one else would know anything about.

It would all be completely confidential.

As they spoke, it dawned on Helen that she, an 18-year-old girl from Eagleville, Tennessee, recruited from a diner-drugstore in Murfreesboro to come work at a war plant she’d yet to lay eyes on, was being recruited to spy.

The two men stood waiting for Helen’s answer.

Well? Yes or no?

It was very important, they stressed, to the work they were doing there. It was important to the war effort.

She
did
want to do her part to help, didn’t she?

The men handed Helen a stack of blank envelopes preaddressed to the ACME Insurance Company in downtown Knoxville and told Helen that she could fill them in with all the pertinent information. They told her where the drop box was located. Not to worry. It was all quite anonymous. She would be able to leave information there without arousing suspicion from anyone at all.

Though the men were asking, Helen didn’t feel she had a choice. She did the only thing she felt she could do:

Of course she would help
, she said.

She took the envelopes. The two men thanked her and walked off into the darkness. She turned and went back inside her dorm.

She made her way upstairs and back to her room, careful not to disturb the pile of laundry in the middle of the floor. She walked over to the small desk and put the envelopes in the drawer.

TUBEALLOY

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

LEONA AND SUCCESS IN CHICAGO, DECEMBER 1942

“He sank a Japanese admiral,” Leona said.

Laura Fermi’s question had floored Leona Woods, and she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Doublespeak. Metaphors. These were the tools of those bound by secrecy, even in the face of friends and family.

Why,
Laura had asked,
was everyone congratulating her husband?

It was a question the 23-year-old Leona had no permission to answer regardless of the fact that Laura had extended such kindness to Leona since she began working at the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago not quite six months ago. Post-laboratory evenings spent at the 55th Street promontory swimming in Lake Michigan with Dr. Fermi often ended up at his home, where Leona had enjoyed many meals prepared by the beautiful Laura, listening eagerly to stories of their life in Italy before leaving the country to escape Fascist rule. The Fermis initially lived as enemy aliens in America, constantly in fear of how others perceived them, nervously stashing emergency getaway money in a pipe under their first house in Leonia, New Jersey, when Fermi was still working at Columbia. Leona did not want to lie to Laura. But the truth was not an option.

The truth was, earlier that day, Leona had watched as her Italian mentor orchestrated the proceedings on the former doubles squash courts under the west stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1) loomed in front of them, costing in the neighborhood of 2.7 million 1942 dollars. The pile was a 57-layer matrix made up of 380 tons of graphite, six tons of Tubealloy metal, and about another 50 tons of Tubealloy oxide. It stood roughly 20 feet high and was 25 feet wide. It was the Project’s hope that this pile would create the world’s first ever self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

His shirt removed, Fermi and the team of scientists waited as Tigger, Piglet, Kanga, and Roo sprung into action. Forty-one-year-old Fermi had been reading A. A. Milne’s
Winnie the Pooh
in order to help him improve his English and had decided to nickname his instruments accordingly. This lent a playful air to a procedure risky enough to require a so-called “suicide squad,” standing by to halt proceedings in case they got out of hand.

Leona’s contribution to the pile was a boron trifluoride counter inserted after the fifteenth layer. Leona’s counter measured neutron activity as each successive layer of the pile was added. These measurements would determine how large the pile would need to be in order to achieve “criticality,” the point at which a chain reaction would be self-sustaining. In other words, the point at which enough neutrons would split enough atoms to trigger ongoing fission in their neighbors.

Fermi described a chain reaction as similar to a “burning of a rubbish pile from spontaneous combustion.” A tiny portion of the pile would “burn” and soon ignite another portion and yet another until, “the entire heap bursts into flames.” In the pile, neutrons, not sparks, are emitted from the fission of Tubealloy and bombard other nearby atoms. This would then “ignite” or result in other small fissions, which then, of course, resulted in even more neutrons and more fissions until the little pile of atomic leaves was sparked by enough neutrons to get a fire going.

But no one wanted it to burst into anything too big.

If the reaction needed to be stopped, an emergency bell would ring and rods covered in neutron-absorbing cadmium could be inserted into the matrix, stopping the reaction. One rod was controlled by hand. Others were automatic. There was an additional rod tied to the balcony on the courts and controlled by SCRAM—the Safety Control Rod Axe Man—and the suicide squad was ready to douse the entire pile with a cadmium solution if all else failed.

Fermi had calculated that the 57th layer would be the one to make the pile jump to criticality. On the morning of December 2, 1942, the measurements proved his estimation correct. He instructed everyone to return that afternoon ready to go. Leona, Fermi, and Herb Anderson, a nuclear physicist and one of Fermi’s right-hand men, went to Leona’s apartment near Stagg Field, where Leona served the anxious group plates of very lumpy pancakes.

When afternoon came, Leona put on her sooty, blackened-by-graphite lab coat and went to join the other freezing team members gathered on the spectator’s platform of the old courts. She prepared to take notes during the procedure and monitor the various instruments as the reaction progressed. The suicide squad was in place. A few scientists present openly admitted to being scared, but Fermi appeared calm and collected, almost Pooh-like. At 2:30 in the afternoon, it began.

One by one, control rods were removed, allowing more neutrons to roam free within the pile. Physicist George Weil, who had also worked with Fermi at Columbia, controlled the last rod, pulling it out of the pile a bit at a time. The counter clicked away, percussively increasing with each increment of removal. Leona took the measurements, calling out the escalating readings to the anxious crowd, as Fermi directed George to continue removing the final rod.

“Another foot, George!”
Fermi shouted.

Clickclickclick . . .

“Eight! Sixteen!”
Leona called out.

“Another foot, George!”

Clickclickclickclick . . .

“Twenty-eight! Sixty-four!”

“Another foot, George!”

Voices and clicks and measurements and calls continued in an anticipatory cadence punching through the graphite-coated tension as each click became indistinguishable from the next. Finally, Fermi announced, “The pile has gone critical!”