The Girls of Atomic City (26 page)

There was always a little harassment from that young guard, the one with the attitude. Others had it far worse, as is evidenced by complaint letters from other residents detailing some of the harassment found in the hutment area:

“Police guard can be found in these colored women hutments any time day or night and oftime when these Police Guards go to these colored women hutments the Police Guards never knock on the door,” one such letter read, “. . . and oftime our women are partly dressed when the police guards enter. . . .”

Everyone had their own way of coping with the hardships and ill treatment. Kattie baked. Now, when a guard came by Kattie’s hut, there was a biscuit or two waiting. Cooking in the huts was off-limits. But once that guard had gotten a taste of those contraband biscuits, he didn’t ask about the misshapen biscuit pans or anything else. He just let Kattie keep on cooking. There were rules, but Kattie knew that she could not only learn them but work them, too.

From the warped, discarded metal of a top secret war plant to her hands came a simple pan and some fresh biscuits. She gave them to that guard, kept him happy, kept him quiet, and kept herself at Willie’s hut a little longer, relatively free of hassle, blissfully free of stomach cramps.

TUBEALLOY

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

PUMPKINS, SPIES, AND CHICKEN SOUP, FALL 1944

This was a new one for the coroner.

Philadelphia had had its fair share of mysterious deaths, but to have the causes of death of two men kept from the coroner’s office itself pushed the boundaries of credulity.

In this case, the General stepped in personally and made sure that word did not get out about the three men working in the transfer room of the Philadelphia Navy Yard’s liquid thermal diffusion works.

A simple clogged tube had been the culprit. But it was the Tubealloy—in liquid hexafluoride form—and high-pressure steam coursing through the concentric pipes that posed the real danger.

The thermal diffusion process was still being perfected at the Philadelphia Navy Yard as the H. K. Ferguson Company neared completion of the S-50 plant at CEW. On September 2, 1944, physicist Arnold Kramish, then an SED soldier on loan from Oak Ridge, was working with Peter Bragg Jr. and Douglas Meigs. Bragg and Meigs were unclogging the tube when an explosion reduced it to nothing, spewing Tubealloy, steam, and hydrofluoric acid all over the men, their lungs filling with Tubealloy compounds.

Bragg and Meigs died shortly thereafter. Kramish was badly burned and not expected to survive. A Navy chaplain, Father McDonough, arrived to administer last rites. As he approached Kramish, the Jewish soldier was strong enough to refuse the blessing before losing consciousness.

He hung on, and several days later got an unexpected and unauthorized visitor. The stranger made short work of the guards posted at his hospital room door, got inside, quietly lifted up Kramish’s oxygen tent, and poured something down his throat.

Warm liquid soothed Kramish’s gullet.

Chicken soup.

His mother, Sarah, had carried her soup in a jar for three days on her long trip from Denver. A cousin and newscaster had seen news of Kramish’s death come over the wire, and contacted Kramish’s parents. When Sarah learned her son was dead, she fainted on the spot. When she came to and was informed by station KLZ in Denver that her son was in fact alive and in a hospital, she was on a mission. She was going to get chicken soup into her son and no one was going to stop her. No one did.

Information about the cause of the blast was not disclosed, nor was the fact that a large amount of radioactive materials had been released into the atmosphere.

Kramish survived, his mother’s chicken soup in his belly, Tubealloy lurking in his bones.

★ ★ ★

The same month of the Philadelphia tragedy, the General had decided to invite an Army Air Corpsman into the ranks of an elite group: those who knew of the Gadget.

Twenty-nine-year-old Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets had returned to the United States from bombing missions in North Africa and Europe. He was a pilot, testing the new B-29 bomber, and the General thought he had found his man: someone with the experience—the big-plane experience—who knew the Army’s newest bomber as well or better than anyone else in the world. This was the man the General needed to oversee his cadre of deliverymen. Wendover Army Air Field in Utah would be the perfect place for them to start training. There they would eventually commence dropping their “pumpkins,” placeholders for the Gadget, until the General had something more for them to ferry.

★ ★ ★

No one was immune to a little surveillance. Even top scientists, no matter how indispensable, were monitored by the Project. Many of them had left their lives in Europe behind. They worked throughout the Project—at the Met Lab, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford—and often traveled where they were needed, and under assumed names. Enrico Fermi was Henry Farmer, Niels Bohr was Nicholas Baker. It was a stellar group of minds: Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Ernest Lawrence, Richard Feynman, Eugene Wigner, James Franck, Emilio Segrè, George Kistiakowsky, and more.

Scientists arriving from academic institutions were a particular security challenge. They had all been exposed to more than the usual amount of Communist literature on their campuses, when compared to the average American, which was a flag for the Project. Oppenheimer had close friends and associates who were associated with the movement, including a girlfriend who wrote for the Communist periodical
Western Worker
and a wife who had been a party member. The FBI opened a file on the scientist in 1941, before he became the Project’s “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.” The General wasn’t crazy about anyone with what appeared to be ties to Communism. But all the Project could do was pay close attention to how strongly any one person in question appeared to follow the party line.

The Americans and British each had their own means of investigating scientists who worked on the Project, and the General occasionally had his top scientists tailed. He considered this to be as much for their safety as for the good of the Project. Niels Bohr had proved an interesting subject for the General’s agents. One report of “Nicholas Baker” strolling with his son, Aage (“Jim Baker”), hardly made the Nobel Prize–winning physicist sound like a member of the brain trust behind the biggest wartime military project in history:

Both the father and son appear to be extremely absentminded individuals . . . On one occasion, subjects proceeded across a busy intersection against the red light in a diagonal fashion, taking the longest route possible and one of greatest danger. . . . If the opportunity should present itself, I would appreciate a tactful suggestion from you to them that they should be more careful in traffic.

★ ★ ★

Despite elaborate and far-reaching efforts, security was far from foolproof. Problems—and people—slipped through carefully watched cracks.

The General was likely unaware of two SED recruits who had made their way to Oak Ridge in the summer of 1944. One had studied with Arnold Kramish at the City University of New York, and was a health physics officer at CEW. The General—and indeed the world—would not know for decades that this man had close and curious friends far away. The other recruit, an Army machinist, had left an Army base in Jackson, Mississippi, and been assigned to the Clinton Engineer Works in July. The General probably did not pay particular attention when this man was transferred to Site Y at Los Alamos in August. Nor did the General know that this man had a brother-in-law who was very interested in the work taking place at Site Y, and that this brother-in-law had contacts overseas equally interested in the Project. These contacts may have been citizens of a country that was, technically, an ally, but nonetheless the General did not want that country informed about the Gadget. Not yet.

But those interested parties overseas did know about the young machinist and where he was headed. They had given him a code name, “Kalibr.” They also had their own name for the Project: “Enormoz.”

Maybe the General would not have been surprised at all, had he known any of this at the time.

Maybe he would have simply said, “See? I told you so.”

CHAPTER 9

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The Unspoken

Sweethearts and Secrets

It is a terrible shock to a woman when a usually companionable husband suddenly stops telling her things. At first she is hurt, then indignant, then determined to find out for herself. Fortunately, for security purposes, most of the women of Oak Ridge had passed through these preliminary stages before they arrived at the gates.

—Vi Warren,
Oak Ridge Journal

Jane turned the box over in her hands and gently tugged at the makeshift tab.

Process Statistics Office

9201-2 Y-12,

T. E. C.

Oak Ridge

Where Ever That Is.

Today.

There was more to the message. “SECRET” was stamped in bright red on the adding tape which was painstakingly rolled and concealed within an empty and innocent-looking box of Monarch Standard-Width Staples. A slit had been carefully cut into the box, and a small strip of the long roll of paper—topped off with a strip of cellophane tape—peeked out, forming a pull tab.

“Pull out gently and read other side,” the instructions read.

Jane began tugging and reading. On the reverse of the paper was an endless stream of tiny handwritten messages. Each little pull of the paper revealed more notes.

What have those girls gotten up to while I’ve been gone?
Jane wondered.

She was enjoying a brief visit with her sister Kat and brother-in-law Maurice, in Staten Island, New York. But here in her hands was a reminder of the strange place from whence she traveled, a memento from behind the fence.

How did they get this past the mail censors?
was one of Jane’s initial thoughts. Jane smiled and kept unfurling the adding machine tape, revealing message after message, all scribbled diligently on the tiny width of paper usually reserved for elaborate computations of Product percentages.

Dear comrade in arms . . . (Whose?)

You wanted us to rite to U sew hear wee hour, all reddy to go!

There must have been a note from almost every one of the nearly 100 clerks that she supervised on one shift or another. Her eyes moved down the ever-lengthening roll, reading the well-wishes, inside jokes, office gossip, and updates on the weather.

A lady statistician named Jane,

Said addition would drive her insane.

Screaming with rage,

She’d tear up a page,

And start adding over again.

Jane laughed. The dateline:
Oak Ridge. Wherever that is. . . .
That’s how they all coped with the heightened security, with winks and nudges and nods to the mystery. Some found the watchful eye of the Project unnerving, but Jane never let it get to her. On at least one occasion, the Scientist—a gangly man in a big hat visiting from an unnamed place—had entered her small Marchant-and-Monroe domain. He was intently interested in the numbers Jane was running. Those percentages clearly
meant
something to him. There was an entourage
of management types tagging along behind him, hanging on his every word, hoping he was pleased with what he saw as he peered over Jane’s shoulders.

Jane was never properly introduced. She didn’t mind. She knew she was being watched.

Humor in the face of watchfulness remained common, as was occasional hypothesizing about the Project’s purpose. Theories ranged from inspired to ludicrous: They were making flamethrowers. They were making fourth-term buttons for Roosevelt.

No, it was a special kind of blue paint that would be spread across the top of the ocean so that when submarines broke through the surface, it would appear to the enemy that the vessel was still submerged.

One woman was convinced she knew what the Secret was. She confided in a friend:

“It has something to do with urine!”
she said.

The woman worked in processing, where potential employees were given physicals. Not coincidentally, she asked for urine samples day in and day out.

Stories weren’t just for nosy outsiders or curious adults, either. They were for kids, too. Ask a child walking through the streets of Townsite, “What’s going on around here?” and they might answer, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “They’re making molasses!”

★ ★ ★

October 7, 1944, was a cool Saturday evening, the kind that made the tennis court dances all the more pleasurable, a brisk breeze comforting bodies warmed by sweat and heat of jitterbugs and Lindy hops. Fall had arrived and dulled the edge of the summer’s heat. Outdoor dances were even more of a treat, and less of a swelter. Bill Pollock was making a name for himself as the master of ceremonies at the dances. He provided recorded music from his own specially designed sound system—the Pollock Wired Music System—and kept the evening humming along with matchmaking dance games perfect for a dance floor full of relative strangers. Every few tunes that he spun,
Pollock would give the crowd a “Paul Jones,” a mixer dance that was always a hit and was designed to pluck wallflowers who were rooted to their solitary spots.