While U.S. servicemen were fighting battles in the European and Pacific Theaters in World War II, American families in Oak Ridge, Tenn., were living under harshly restricted freedoms for a reason that would not become clear until Aug. 6, 1945.
Emporian Sally Holliman, then a teenager, was among the residents who managed to ignore being guarded round-the-clock, and learned to tolerate not being able to travel outside the town at-will. The families there knew only that the work underway in Oak Ridge was important and the pay was better than good.
“We knew it was a secret,” Holliman said of the work done at Oak Ridge. “After a while, you got used to it. ...It was a place that just mushroomed in the mountains.”
Later, residents learned that their home town was the production site of the Manhattan Project, a massive government operation that developed the atomic bombs that eventually were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war in the Pacific.
The attacks had not come as a surprise, although the weapons used were unexpected.
The United States, joined by the United Kingdom and the Republic of China, on July 26, 1945, had issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding that the Japanese surrender. The Japanese ignored the ultimatum.
Within weeks, the U.S. exploded their newly developed atomic weapons in Japan — “Little Boy” fell on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, followed by “Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki three days later.
“Of course, the local radio station came on,” Holliman said, remembering how the townspeople had gathered outside, and how Oak Ridge’s secret came to light. “Now it’s revealed what we were making here. We thought, ‘Where else?’ I knew when we all gathered after the bomb was dropped and there were thousands and thousands of people” killed.
“You knew it was a secret weapon, but when you talk about the weapon — atomic was not anything you knew much about,” she said.
Tucked into the hills
Oak Ridge had been chosen carefully for its role in the Manhattan Project.
Nestled in a low, sparsely populated area surrounded by ridges, the land in Anderson County, Tenn., had seemed to be a perfect spot for maintaining both a city full of people and a weapons project that would go almost undetected by outsiders.
According to historical accounts, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had begun acquiring property in Anderson County, Tenn., in October 1942.
Some residents whose property had been taken by the government were given six weeks to evacuate; some had as little as two weeks, the records stated. Some were forced out before they received compensation. Adding to the dissatisfaction of those displaced residents was the claim that because of the federal government’s takeover, Anderson County had lost $391,000 in annual property tax revenue.
Housing in the new city went up quickly, with dormitories initially, then “huts” and pre-fabricated houses.
“They were up on sticks because it was very muddy there,” Holliman said. “It was awful.”
The building blitz had raced along at a pace that outdistanced the city’s ability to install streets.
Holliman and her family lived in a “cemesto,” a three-bedroom house with cement exterior.
“They were very nice, and they kept moving up every year,” she said.
Holliman’s parents, Harold and Nora Wentworth, and brother, Harold Jr., had moved to Oak Ridge in 1944; Holliman had stayed with a family friend to finish her junior year in high school before joining her family in the secret community.
Harold Wentworth Sr., an engineer, worked as supervisor of the town’s water department and was not affiliated with the plant. Within the community, however, many adult workers held jobs at one of the secrecy-surrounded plants — K-25, where uranium was enriched; Y-12, where uranium was separated electromagnetically, and X-10, the site of a test graphite reactor, according to history reports.
Holliman said the plants were separate units, to prevent accidents from happening and to prevent workers from piecing together too much information that might reveal Oak Ridge’s purpose.
Keeping the
secret safe
And, no matter where the adults worked, all had been carefully scrutinized before being hired and brought into the community.
“They had already been cleared to (live) there,” Holliman said. “You had to be investigated, fingerprinted ... They were very careful. The FBI would come by about every year and interrogate,” she said. “They wouldn’t interrogate you about you, they would interrogate the neighbors about you. Then they would interrogate you about your neighbors.”
Workers and family members alike were required to wear identification tags at all times. Few visitors came in from the outside and when they did — Holliman’s grandparents, for example — family members were required to meet relatives at the gate and vouch for them.
Overall, though, Holliman’s experience at Oak Ridge was an exceptionally pleasant part of her growing-up. She talked enthusiastically about getting to meet and make friends with teenagers from across the country, whose parents all had accepted jobs in the mysterious community.
The teachers and schools were good, and Holliman took part in many extracurricular activities, like glee club, drama club, and writing for the Oak Leaf, the high school newspaper.
The town boasted three malls, three recreation centers and other options to keep adults and children entertained and most necessities supplied.
The clothing stores, however, didn’t provide enough options for Oak Ridge residents, who occasionally would board a bus to travel to Knoxville to shop. The pleasure of an out-of-town shopping trip to a larger city was only mildly diminished by the occasional embarrassment that resulted when Oak Ridge authorities meticulously searched every bag and personal effects of the shoppers when they returned home.
The restrictions placed on everyday life, however, soon became the norm for the people who lived there.
Only once during her stay in Oak Ridge did an unusual situation arise, and even then, residents were more puzzled than frightened:
“I do remember that one time they told us all to go home and take a bath or a shower,” Holliman said. “We thought, what are they talking about? We didn’t know about radiation, of course.”
A day to remember
After the bombs were dropped, Holliman remembered well how townspeople gathered outside to talk about what had happened and to console each other; many felt some guilt, knowing that they had been part of creating a weapon that had killed so many people.
“I had a professor that just went berserk when he heard what we had done,” Holliman said. “He said, ‘We just can’t do that. He said this is wrong. ... I can see him now. He was just horrified. Well, we were all horrified. He made an impression on us.”
As the days passed, Oak Ridge residents as well as the rest of the nation saw photographs and watched newsreels of the mushroom clouds that rose after the bombs were dropped on the devastated cities. Pictures also showed the people who’d been killed or critically injured by the explosions and the scorching heat of the nuclear blast.
“It got worse and worse and worse — and the fact that it could have happened at the plant!” Holliman said. “Then we realized why that day we had to go home and take a shower.”
The professor who’d been so affected by the bombings, English teacher Phillip Kennedy Sr., quickly organized the Youth Council on the Atomic Crisis, a group of high school students dedicated to focusing on the use of the new atomic weapon.
Holliman is among those pictured among the group’s photo in the school’s year book.
“He was saying, ‘Let’s do something peaceful with this,’” Holliman said, “and it turned out that we did.”