“They fought to smile through the lines and the mud and the long hours, dancing under the stars and under the watchful eyes of their government, an Orwellian backdrop for a Rockwellian world.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
My parents were in the 7th grade when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They graduated from high school two years after the Japanese surrendered. In 1951, my father was drafted and was stationed in Germany during the occupation which lasted until 1955, a year after their second son was born. Even though I have been reading many fiction and nonfiction books set in World War II, it wasn't until this book that I paid attention to the dates in relationship to my own family. Although they were younger than the women and men in Kierman's book, the events she describes must have had a large impact on the lives of my parents.
At its height, over 100,000 workers were involved in the Oak Ridge uranium and plutonium enrichment operations in Tennessee. Until the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, few people knew the plant existed and even those that worked there only knew enough to do their job. The 'need to know' policy Kiernan described reminded me of the tactics of current terrorist groups; that is, by limiting the knowledge of individuals within the group no one person can jeopardize the operations by sharing what they know.
This book focuses on the lives of the women in Oak Ridge, how they came to be there, what their living conditions and jobs were like, how they spent their free time and their relationships. Kiernan visited with women who had lived and worked at the plants, and these women had served as secretaries, construction workers, custodians, and monitors of the enrichment processes. There were different living conditions for black and white families; a white family would live together in a pre-fab home, small but serviceable, while black couples were housed separately in tents or other small buildings. They also had separate recreational facilities, separate not being equal.
All had to battle to problems of a boom town: muddy streets, constant construction, lack of infrastructure. They also battled the neighboring towns, which were places where you might find goods you couldn't find on the site, but the attitudes there prevented you from being able to obtain those goods at the same price as the locals.
What was thought to be a temporary site just to serve the needs of the war machine grew into a town in its own right, and the facilities continued after the war. Kiernan describes the contrast between the security needed during the war-time operations and how strange it was when that security was removed. Some of the women still work in the area and others moved away, but the impact of what happened there lasts even now for the world.
Reading this story simultaneously while reading "Barefoot Gen" was extremely powerful, seeing the bomb from both sides. Last week we went to see the National WWI Museum in Kansas City, and I was struck by the stark contrast of the view of the war from the European and the U.S. perspectives. We as a nation need to recognize the comfort and lack of fear we live in compared to the others who lived through both World Wars and the other military conflicts we have been a part of. I tried to express this to my ex-husband when we were first dating. As someone who served in Viet Nam, he wasn't willing to hear what I had to say. And yes, there are individuals who have suffered from being in combat and losing loved ones. I am not ignoring their personal and individual losses, but when taken as a whole, we as a country have not since the Civil War experienced war in the way that the countries where we have fought have. We need to recognize the suffering of peoples and nations that is far beyond the suffering of our own nation.
Since I read this via a recorded book I didn't get to see the pictures that came with the text, but perused them at the book's website.
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