Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How Women Won WWII: The Women of the Secret Cities

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

Today, on How Women Won WWII, we talk about The Manhattan Project. The top-secret program ran for three war-filled years and employed over 120 thousand people. Most of those people had no idea that they were working on one of the most powerful projects of all time: creating nuclear weapons. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Thank you for joining me today. We're going to continue our series, How Women Won World War II. And last episode, we talked a little bit about women who did war work for a very specific, completely classified government research operation. And if you've listened, you know it by name, the Manhattan Project. The top secret project ran for three war-filled years and employed over 120,000 people. Most of those people had no idea that they were working on one of the most powerful projects of all time, creating nuclear weapons. They were just eager to help the Allied powers. But among their ranks, a few of them, women included, were just as eager to share America's nuclear secrets with the enemy.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. And here's where it gets interesting. By June of 1942, about seven months after the United States declared war on the Axis nations of Japan, Germany, and Italy, thousands of women packed up their belongings and moved to a new, rustic community in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. These women, many of whom were just out of high school, were drawn there by the promise of well-paying jobs and affordable housing. They showed up ready to work for a company called Clinton Engineer Works. Dorothy Wilkinson, one of the women who boarded a train for Oak Ridge in 1943, later joked, I just came here to work and got a job and met my husband. That's why I came to Oak Ridge, really, was to try to find a husband.

What Dorothy and thousands of other employees like Dorothy didn't know was that the company that they worked for, Clinton Engineer Works, wasn't real. Instead, it was a front. Clinton Engineer Works was a production branch of the Manhattan Project. The people who occupied the new secret city worked in three facilities, Y-12, X-10, and K-25 in the nearby valleys. There, they produced the enriched uranium that would be used in the 1945 bombing of Japan. A few years earlier, the global science community was growing nervous. In Germany, scientists, one of them a woman, who we'll talk about in an upcoming episode, were progressing quickly in their research of nuclear technology. Their advances meant it was plausible that Germany would succeed in developing atomic

weapons. The worried science community asked renowned physicist Albert Einstein to warn American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and convince him to start a nuclear research program in the United States. Einstein, who was Jewish, had been born in Berlin but renounced his German citizenship in 1933. His home and belongings were confiscated by the Nazi regime and his books and works were burned. He applied for citizenship in the United States in 1935 and worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, which had become known as a refuge for scientists displaced by the war. By the way, J. Edgar Hoover really wanted to keep Einstein out of the country. He believed Einstein was a communist.

And all of his compatriots were like, dude, he is one of the most famous scientists in the world. You cannot keep him out of the United States. And something else you might know about Einstein is that he escaped the United States, but he left behind one of his sons who was institutionalized in Germany. That is another episode for another day. We're also not going to get into Einstein's secret daughter. Okay, another episode, another day. I mentioned this last episode, but Einstein sent FDR a letter in 1939 and explained what the German scientists were doing. In the letter, he said a single bomb of this type carried by boat and exploded in a port might very well destroy the whole port together

with some of the surrounding territory. Einstein went on to advise the American scientists that they speed up the experimental work. In other words, Einstein saw the writing on the wall, and he was trying to encourage America to do everything it could as quickly as possible. His letter worked, sort of. For his part, FDR didn't outright see the urgency or the need for a nuclear weapons project, but he established an advisory committee on uranium. The paperwork and moving pieces took their sweet time, so it was February of 1940 before the government provided $6,000 to the committee to start their research. Now, $6,000 in 1940 is somewhere around $127,000 today, but it's still a shockingly small amount of money for an undertaking that saw itself as trying to beat the Nazis in a race to create atomic weaponry.

Can you imagine Congress today being like, let's try to invent technology that doesn't exist so we can defeat our enemies in warfare. And then they appropriate $127,000. That is literally absurd by today's standards, right? They would give them like billions of dollars today. But over the next few years, the budget and the project would expand to epic proportions. In September of 1942, three years after Einstein sent his letter, scientists in the United States, several who were, like Einstein, refugees from fascist regimes, had made so much progress with their research that FDR was ready to put a full-fledged plan into place. But it wasn't just the research that pushed Roosevelt to action. Let's think about what had happened by 1942. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The U.S. joined the war. Things had

definitely escalated. President Roosevelt appointed U.S. Army Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves to oversee the research work that was being done in several physics labs and warehouses in Manhattan, and Groves wanted everything about the project, especially its title, to reveal absolutely nothing about what they were working on. And it was common practice for the Army Corps to name regional operations after their districts, so he gave the project the most boring, run-of-the-mill title he could. The Manhattan Engineering District, nicknamed the Manhattan Project. And actually, the first name proposed for the project was the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials, which sounds dull, like eyes glazing over dull. But Groves rejected it because he worried it would attract too much attention and give away their work. How, he thought,

the general public would connect the dots between the vagueness of substitute materials and atomic bombs? I do not know. That's anybody's guess. But Groves immediately hired top scientists, chose secret locations, and diligently kept the Manhattan Project a secret, even from the employees who were working on it. Eventually, the project's budget grew to over $2 billion, and just shy of three years later, a test codenamed Trinity saw the first atomic bomb detonated at 5.30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo Air Force Base, 120 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. But a lot of dominoes had to fall in between Einstein's letter and an atomic bomb test in the desert. As I mentioned earlier, the Manhattan Project grew to employ over 120,000 people rather quickly.

And as you can imagine, it couldn't stay only in Manhattan. The massive undertaking of research and storage needed more space. General Groves chose sites in sparsely populated areas, which was strategic on multiple levels. Less populated areas meant that fewer civilians were put in danger if something went wrong. Less populated areas meant that fewer civilians were put in danger if something went wrong. He wanted locations outside of the coasts so they'd be less vulnerable to enemy attack by sea. And he needed sites that had large power supplies available, along with the space for villages where employees could live. Groves purchased tens of thousands of acres of land across the states of Tennessee, Washington, and New Mexico. And even though these areas were sparsely populated, it would be factually incorrect to assume that no one was displaced.

Farmers in the areas were paid an average of $47 per acre and given 30 to 90 days to move, while Indigenous Americans were given nothing more than visiting rights for hunting and fishing. The government would later revoke their access to the land altogether. General Groves bought 55,000 acres in East Tennessee, about 20 miles west of Knoxville, and built an enormous uranium enrichment plant and a small city for the employees. It would become the most populated site in the Manhattan Project, with over 75,000 people living there by the end of the war. In fact, Oak Ridge still exists today, and it's home to about 30,000 people. As with most industries during the war, the Manhattan Project was an all-hands-on-deck situation and brought in laborers from anywhere they could. FDR issued Executive Order 8802 in

1941, which stated, there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries of government because of race, creed, color, or national origin. Many, many people of color worked on the Manhattan Project, but they usually worked as construction workers, janitors, laborers, and domestic workers. In other words, they were given the lowest paying jobs. Also interesting to note that FDR did not desegregate the military. The United States military actively discriminated in the employment of its people based on race, creed, color, and national origin. Each worksite under the Manhattan Project was still subject to the laws and regulations of its state. So Black Americans were strictly segregated from white employees and earned less money.

Married Black couples working on Manhattan Project sites were not allowed to live together. Genders were separated by fences topped with barbed wire. Lulamay Little, a waitress in Washington, called the Manhattan Project's Hanford site the Mississippi of the North. Women, too, were specifically recruited for many jobs within the Manhattan Project because of the labor shortage. Like Dorothy Wilkinson from the top of our episode, they applied for jobs in droves, enticed by the decent wages, the opportunity to try something new, and their desire to contribute to the war effort. Remember, these were all employees who had no clearance to know about the real project they were contributing to. The government hired well-mannered, obedient women knowing they

would do the work without asking too many questions. Because by the 1930s, 40% of all bachelor's degrees were earned by women, which means that many women were qualified to do more specialized jobs in management or science. And yet, even though the thousands of women were appointed to menial work, to menial work. Others, in the minority for sure, were doing remarkable things at the heart of the Manhattan Project. For instance, despite Jim Crow laws and other regulations that limited roles for Black Americans, some Black women filled undeniably important positions. Blanche Lawrence worked as a research assistant in the Manhattan Project's Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, or MET Lab. After the war, she became a biochemist in a national lab. Carolyn Parker was a physicist who helped figure out how to detonate an atomic bomb,

and the first Black woman to earn a postgraduate degree in physics. And Ella Tyreeb was a lab tech working on radiation research. It was Ella's research that contributed to the advancement of cancer treatments. But by far, the largest group of women working on the Manhattan Project were the 10,000 Caleutron Girls in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends, and together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories,

hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays,

we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. your podcasts. Here's a quick and I promise mostly painless science lesson. A calutron was a machine that separated uranium isotopes. All atoms contain three parts, right? You remember this from high school? Protons, electrons, and neutrons. That should ring a faint bell, maybe. And isotopes are atoms that have the same number of protons, but different numbers of neutrons. At Oak Ridge at the Y-12 facility, there were over 1,000 calutrons that did the job of separating these uranium isotopes to make enriched uranium for the bomb. Each machine had to be monitored around the clock.

It was a science-y job, but there weren't enough scientists available to keep each machine monitored and running correctly. Clinton Engineering Works, aka the Manhattan Project, recruited young women, most of whom were new high school graduates from nearby cities, to do it instead. Their training lasted for three weeks. And while we might make the assumption they were given these like really high security clearances, we would be wrong. The knobs on the calutrons were labeled with letters and the women were not allowed to know what the letters stood for or what the knobs and meters actually did. Instead, they learned rules such as if you got your M voltage up and your G voltage up, then product would hit the birdcage in the E box at the top of the unit.

And if that happened, you'd get the Q and R you wanted. It makes complete sense. I don't know what you're talking about. That makes complete sense. It makes complete sense. I don't know what you're talking about that makes complete sense. Of course, I'm kidding. Caleutron girls sat on these high wooden stools for eight-hour shifts, seven days a week. They spent their time staring at the knobs and gauges to keep their machines from getting too hot. They could use liquid nitrogen to cool the machines down. And because the heat wasn't just contained inside the calutrons, sometimes they poured the liquid nitrogen on the floor underneath them and stood in it to cool themselves off. Leaders at the Oak Ridge site noted that the calutron girls were actually more efficient than the scientists and physicists at operating the calutrons. They think it was because the women concentrated only on the needles

and knobs and did not fiddle with the need to figure out why the machine had gone rogue. And I know I've said this a billion times already, but remember, this was all done in secret. I know I've said this a billion times already, but remember, this was all done in secret. Former Cagliotron girl Gladys Owens remembered what a manager told her during training class. We can train you how to do what is needed, but cannot tell you what you are doing. I can only tell you that if our enemies beat us to it, God have mercy on us. our enemies beat us to it. God have mercy on us. The Cagatron girls lived on site in Oak Ridge, and if they sent letters home to loved ones, those letters were opened, read, and often censored before they were mailed. Purses and work bags were searched daily, and there were even whispered reports of women disappearing after they talked a little

too loosely about their work or asked too many questions. At Oak Ridge, workers passed a billboard that overlooked the secret city every day. It showed Uncle Sam with his sleeves rolled up, his hat was off, and he wore an apron. Below him sat three monkeys we know as see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. One hand had its hands covering its eyes. One had its hands covering its ears. One had its hands covering its mouth. You know what I'm talking about? The billboard said in all caps, what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here.

With all that we know now about the devastation in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs were dropped, we might hear these stories and wonder how anyone was able to justify their work after they learned what they had contributed to. Several people who worked on the Manhattan Project have since been asked how they felt about the atomic bombs being dropped on Japan. While most of them had no idea at the time that they were part of the workforce that built those bombs, they almost all say that they remember feeling glad or even relieved that the nuclear bombs were used on Japan because it meant that the war was over. One employee at Oak Ridge said,

when the first bomb fell, I was elated. So was all of Oak Ridge. We really celebrated. By today's standards, it might sound cruel and heartless, but that is something we talk about on this podcast a lot, right? How it's important to avoid looking at the past solely through the lens of the present. This is called presentism. It can be very misleading. Judging the actions of the past based on the knowledge we have today assumes that our understanding of the world hasn't evolved over time, and that is simply just not true. Americans at the start of World War II were coming out of the Great Depression. They were trying to regain their footing and make ends meet, and women in particular were taking whatever opportunities they could get because there was

still so little available. The promise of steady work, even if it wasn't clearly defined, was extremely appealing. We also have to remember that patriotism itself would have been a huge motivation for a lot of citizens. One former engineer at Oak Ridge said, youngsters my age, when their country gets blasted like we were in Pearl Harbor, we get angry. We want to fight. And working on the Manhattan Project felt like I was doing what the country wanted me to be doing. And I was in uniform and I was proud of that. Dorothy Wilkinson agreed. She may have gone to work to find a husband, but she knew what else propelled her into a calutron job. She said, I came to Oak Ridge right out of high school when I graduated because I had a

brother killed on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, and I thought that I would like to do something for the war effort. For so many Manhattan Project employees, their work, as mysterious as it was, would help the United States win the war, and that is all that mattered to them. So they showed up every day and contributed to the Manhattan Project in secret. Posters around the work sites reminded people that loose lips sink ships, a phrase that first appeared during the war as propaganda to remind Americans to keep quiet because spies could be anywhere. And spies were very interested in the Manhattan Project. Certainly during the war, both Germany and Japan heard rumors that the U.S. was working on a

nuclear bomb. But their spies were often caught quickly, and none were able to successfully learn and pass on any of the project's classified information to their country leaders. The real threat of spies came from a different country. We weren't at war with the Soviet Union during World War II. In fact, they were part of the Allied forces working with both the U.S. and Britain to extinguish the Axis powers. I mean, truly, World War II would not have been won without the Soviet Union. The Soviet sacrifice towards the war effort is unbelievably significant. However, the United States and the Soviet Union didn't exactly share common political goals. Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt had kept open communication even before the U.S. joined the war in 1941.

Churchill believed that Great Britain needed America's help to win. Churchill and Roosevelt invited Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin to join the Allied powers pretty late in the game, with all three leaders signing the UN Declaration pledging to defeat the Axis powers on New Year's Day 1942. But Churchill made it pretty clear that the trust wasn't super solid when he said, there's only one thing worse than fighting with allies, super solid when he said, there's only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them. It was an alliance of necessity, not an alliance of trust. During the war, Churchill, FDR, and Stalin met only twice in person. You've probably seen the pictures. Outside of those meetings, Churchill and FDR kept in

communication by writing letters and using the phone. In fact, World War II was the very first time the telephone was used for war-related purposes. And it was a young British woman named Ruth who was tasked with listening to every phone call between FDR and Churchill for three and a half years. The U.S. and Britain knew that the Nazis were adept at intercepting phone calls, so a top-secret phone was used between high-ranking officials and leaders. A third person, Ruth Ive, always joined the line and was tasked with cutting it if something sensitive was mentioned or the call was in danger of being intercepted or overheard. something sensitive was mentioned or the call was in danger of being intercepted or overheard.

These VIP phone conversations were so top secret that Churchill kept the phone he used to speak to President Roosevelt in a literal broom closet, and only two people knew where it was. Before each call was connected, Ruth read out loud this warning. The enemy is recording your conversation and will compare it with any previous information in his possession. Great discretion is necessary. Any indiscretion will be reported by the censor to the highest authority. Ruth took her job very seriously and on occasion cut off Prime Minister Churchill's call when he was in mid-sentence, warning him that he could not share sensitive information. She was gutsy and Churchill, not exactly known for his patience and humility, demurred enough that Ruth was able to reconnect him.

While the U.S. and Britain kept the line of communication with each other open, they were considerably more tight-lipped when it came to their Soviet allies. Stalin ruled as a dictator, and the countries were well aware that the Soviet Union had potential to become a future enemy, as Stalin set his sights on expanding Soviet power in Eastern Europe. They didn't trust the communist nation, and they were not about to let them in on state secrets, especially when it came to building atomic weapons. Of course, that's exactly what Soviet spies were after. And unlike the Germans and the Japanese, some spies were able to penetrate the veil surrounding the Manhattan Project

and learn some of its secrets. Perhaps the best-known spy who infiltrated the Manhattan Project was Klaus Fuchs, a British physicist and communist who began working for the Soviets in 1941, passing them info about British atomic research. Fuchs was assigned to the New Mexico location of the Manhattan Project, which was called Los Alamos, and continued to send his knowledge about atomic weaponry to the Soviets. Even after the war was over and he returned home to Great Britain, Fuchs continued passing along sensitive information until he was caught in 1950 and confessed everything. The famous father of the atomic bomb himself, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was once suspected of being a spy. Oppenheimer, who was the head of the Los

Alamos lab, was stripped of his security clearance in 1954 because his previous sympathies with communism came to light. But on December 16, 2022, that is literally less than a month before this is being recorded. One month. Jennifer Granholm, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, cleared Oppenheimer's name once and for all, saying that the 1950s investigation that removed his security clearance was flawed. In the 1940s, the Communist Party of the United States of America had a large number of highly educated members who worked in sensitive wartime industries like the Manhattan Project, and hundreds of Americans provided information to the Soviet Union. Thousands more, like Oppenheimer, were suspected of espionage.

Elizaveta Zarubina was a Soviet agent who allegedly befriended Robert Oppenheimer's wife, Catherine, to gain knowledge of the atomic bomb. Zarubino was the first Soviet spy to learn that the U.S. was starting work on nuclear weapons, and she recruited a number of scientists to work for the Manhattan Project and pass their secrets over to the Soviet Union. their secrets over to the Soviet Union. British atomic secrets were fair game too, and Soviet spy Melita Horwood, codename Hola, reportedly knew more about the British atomic bomb program than some of their highest-ranking government officials. Hola spied undetected for over 30 years. Her activities were only discovered in 1992, when she was in her 80s and long retired. By then she'd earned the nickname Red Granny. Huller reflected on her spying days and said of her loyalty to communism, I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, good education and health service. She was never arrested for spying.

Margarita Konnikova, a Soviet spy known for seducing men to learn classified secrets, was sent to cozy up to Robert Oppenheimer and learn information about the Manhattan Project. It doesn't appear that she learned much from him, but notably, she did have a love affair with Albert Einstein, who later married his cousin. That's another episode for another day. I could give you a whole episode about Albert Einstein's secrets. Letters unearthed in the 1990s show that Konnikova was in fact in a relationship in the 1940s after his second wife died. Einstein was so infatuated with Konnikova that in his letters to her, he often used the pet name Almar, which was a combination of his first name, Albert, and her first name, Margarita, meaning that maybe

Einstein started the mashed up celebrity couple name trend long before Bennifer or Brangelina or Kimye. As far as anyone knows, Konnikova did not get any atomic secrets from Einstein, most likely because he didn't work on the Manhattan Project and didn't really have any secrets to give. What's notable about many of these women, like Ruth Ives and Melita Horwood, is that their wartime activities flew under the radar for decades. Women have long been unseen and undervalued by historical accounts. It's assumed that they're there somewhere behind the scenes, but we don't always take the time to dig into their stories.

It wasn't until the 1970s when women's history emerged as a discipline in schools, that it occurred to many people that large parts of our collective histories were missing, often the parts that centered around women. Many of these women went to their graves, with large parts of their stories remaining untold. In the case of spy work during World War II, it wasn't just Soviet women who were slipping in and out of important spaces with very little attention being paid to their activity. An American-born entertainer, a queen of the stage, and a dancer who dazzled French audiences, spent seven years as a covert intelligence agent. Parts of her story have only recently been revealed to the general public. And we'll talk about her next time.

Thank you for listening to Hearer's Work. It's interesting. This show is written and researched by Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin, edited and mixed by our audio producer Jenny Snyder, and is hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.