A Volume Review of The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City captures a wonderful social history of how women made the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee successful.

As nosotros celebrate women in Globe War II, information technology is a time to recognize their oft disregarded contributions in our history. One of the more than recent and interesting books on this theme is Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win Globe War Ii. Kiernan'southward story is about the central role of women in establishing a sense of customs in a place that didn't exist before the war, where people from many differing social backgrounds had to work together to brand successful a project that none of them actually knew what they were creating, and that ultimately the decision of the war depended upon: the uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Codenamed Site X, work on the Clinton Engineering Works in a 17 mile-long valley in rural Tennessee originally envisioned the creation of a boondocks of 13,000 people when General Leslie Groves ordered construction to begin in September 1942. Only the little town exploded in growth. By spring 1943, there were 300 miles of paved roads and 55 miles of railroad tracks inside the valley that could only be accessed through seven gates. Prefabricated housing sprung upward within for dormitories, apartments, and homes, although never in plenty supply, and trailers with mud in the wet and dirt in the dry out times were constant inconveniences. By 1945, over 75,000 people lived inside Site X, where over 82,000 employees worked, which meant that on any given day over 100,000 people were on the property. On a daily basis a armada of 800 buses moved 120,000 passengers daily, while 17 cafeterias served over forty,000 meals. On the grounds were schools, a newspaper, grocery stores, a post part, laundries, and even amusement with buildings for restaurants, dances, movies, skating, and fifty-fifty a rolling library.

None of it appeared on a map. It was all secret, office of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. Billboards placed at entry points and within the compound reminded the inhabitants not to talk about their work, admonishing them in i famous message:

 "What you run into here, What you practise here, What you lot hear here, When yous exit here, Permit information technology stay here."

In the cloak-and-dagger town, the biggest hole-and-corner amidst the inhabitants was that the vast majority of them did not know what they were working on.

Following the stories of several women who lived and worked on Site 10, Kiernan shows how the commitment of these women to contribute to the war effort, their courage in the face up of obstacles, and their resilient spirits made the women at Oak Ridge the glue that held together not merely the daily labors at a elevation-hole-and-corner industrial war site, but too the social experiment that was the cosmos of a small metropolis from thin air. In Oak Ridge, what women establish was rushed, temporary, and socially fragmented due to the exigencies of state of war. But they made homes, forged a community, and thus gave Oak Ridge a life of its ain that outlasted the wartime emergency.

Women were everywhere in Oak Ridge, staffing positions from janitors and cooks to saleswomen, chemists, accountants, managers, phone operators, and administrators. They worked in offices from payrolls and personnel to machine shops, chemic processing, and censors for the post. Given the secrecy of the project, speculation about what words or phrases might be worthy of censorship was rife. Social life went on: single women dated, fell in love and married, and had children in their time at Oak Ridge; married women often moved their entire family, sometimes with up to 9 children, into Oak Ridge where they could all find work.

Maybe, the most mysterious position inside Oak Ridge were the women who became calutron operators. Their work involved sitting on a high stool for an eight hour shift (there were three daily shifts beginning at 7am, 3pm, and 11pm) in rooms with high ceilings, concrete floors, electrical noises, and harsh lighting, watching a serial of needle gauges and adjusting a series of knobs which balanced the needle readings in the middle of the gauges. They learned from supervisors that a high "R" reading was practiced, there were "Thou," "K," and "Chiliad" voltages to watch, and that an "East" box was collecting the "product."

The then-called calutron girls did not know information technology, just they were harvesting uranium.

Those who became besides nosy most what exactly they were working on were soon replaced.

One of the leaders of the Manhattan Project, the Nobel physicist Ernest Lawrence, used PhD physicists to operate the calutron he had built at the laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Lawrence wanted his physicists to operate the Oak Ridge facilities, but due to labor shortages had to acquiesce to the program to train farm girls to operate the machinery, which he and his physicists would afterward monitor and tweak. Lawrence was shocked when Colonel Kenneth Nichols, the authoritative head at Oak Ridge, informed him that the farm girls at the controls were far outperforming his PhD physicists in harvesting uranium. A friendly competition was held, and all the same again the calutron girls easily outperformed the PhD physicists. Colonel Nichols understood exactly why: having been trained to not enquire questions, do equally ordered, and focus on the chore at manus, these girls had the mindsets of soldiers.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima exposed to the residents of Oak Ridge and the world the secret of what they had been working on. In all, over 125,000 Americans worked on the Manhattan Project, and most were never enlightened of exactly what they were building. Only equally the state of war itself, however, the value of Denise Kiernan'south The Girls of Atomic City is in illustrating how it took all Americans to achieve ultimate victory. In lifting up the stories of the women at Oak Ridge, this wonderful social history captures and remembers the everyday women whose voices might at first glance might appear to exist small, but whose achievements and character confirmed that they were an integral and indispensable part of the greater endeavor in Earth War II.

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The Girls of Diminutive City

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Keith Huxen

Contributor

Keith Huxen

Keith is the erstwhile Senior Director of Research and History in the Institute for the Study of War and Commonwealth at The National WWII Museum.

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