In the secret town, the biggest secret amongst 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 X, Kiernan shows how the commitment of these women to contribute to the war effort, their courage in the face of obstacles, and their resilient spirits made the women at Oak Ridge the glue that held together not only the daily labors at a top-secret industrial war site, but also the social experiment that was the creation of a small city from thin air. In Oak Ridge, what women found was rushed, temporary, and socially fragmented due to the exigencies of war. But they made homes, forged a community, and thus gave Oak Ridge a life of its own 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, chemical processing, and censors for the mail. 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 nine children, into Oak Ridge where they could all find work.

Perhaps, the most mysterious position within 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 series of needle gauges and adjusting a series of knobs which balanced the needle readings in the center of the gauges. They learned from supervisors that a high “R” reading was good, there were “M,” “K,” and “G” voltages to watch, and that an “E” box was collecting the “product.” 

Those who became too nosy about 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 plan to train farm girls to operate the machinery, which he and his physicists would subsequently monitor and tweak. Lawrence was shocked when Colonel Kenneth Nichols, the administrative head at Oak Ridge, informed him that the farm girls at the controls were far outperforming his PhD physicists in harvesting uranium. A friendly contest was held, and yet again the calutron girls easily outperformed the PhD physicists. Colonel Nichols understood exactly why: having been trained to not ask questions, do as ordered, and focus on the task at hand, 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 aware of exactly what they were building. Just as the war itself, however, the value of Denise Kiernan’s 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 be small, but whose achievements and character confirmed that they were an integral and indispensable part of the greater effort in World War II.