Forever Changed by ‘The Bomb’
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb exploded over Nagasaki. On August 15, Japan announced its surrender to the Allied forces, and the bloodiest war in history came to an end.
But the anxiety and fear raised by the prospect of nuclear annihilation was just beginning.
The Cold War policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, the development of nuclear weapons in places like Korea and Iran, the possibility of terrorists setting off a “dirty bomb” in New York or Washington: we have lived now for 73 years with the threat of some kind of nuclear war.
In The Atomic City Girls, novelist Janet Beard takes her readers to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the birth of the nuclear world. It’s 1944, and the federal government, desperate to develop an atomic bomb, has built a city in this valley, a complex surrounded by fences, watchtowers, and armed guards at every gate. Signs everywhere carry warnings: “WHAT YOU SEE HERE, WHAT YOU DO HERE, WHAT YOU HEAR HERE, WHEN YOU LEAVE HERE, LET IT STAY HERE.” At the peak of this war effort, 70,000 scientists and workers crowd into this camp, all of them part of the Manhattan Project.
Beard recreates life in wartime Oak Ridge by letting readers walk in the shoes of a variety of characters. Sam, a brilliant, work-obsessed Jewish physicist from New York, has lost many family members to the Holocaust, but nevertheless remains assailed by doubts as to the wisdom of developing so devastating a weapon. Joe, a black tenant farmer and a good family man, has left his wife and children in Alabama to earn money in Oak Ridge as a day laborer. The beautiful Cici, a young woman with a heart of ice who grew up dirt-poor, has transformed herself into a Southern belle and is on the make for a husband with a lot of money. Like so many of the civilian workers, June, age 18, has joined the project for the wages. A Tennessee farm girl from a close family, she finds herself in a new world, a tightly guarded capsule where the dull routine of work is broken by dances, dates, and games, a personal testing ground where she will learn about love, heartache, and betrayal.
Mixed in with these characters are some real historical figures. My favorite is John Hendrix, a visionary who—some 40 years before the federal government had conceived of the Manhattan Project—prophesized that Bear Creek, the location of Oak Ridge, would be filled with houses and factories, and would help win the greatest war ever fought.
The Atomic City Girls not only reveals how the bomb brings an end to the war, but also how the war transforms American society. The traditional role of females, especially in rural areas, changes dramatically. Young women like June leave their farms and small towns to work in factories and munitions plants, including the one at Oak Ridge. Women like Cici, who acquired her varnish of class in Knoxville, may look to a man for marriage, money, and power, but Cici still displays a striking independence compared to the older women of the story.
The exigencies of war also begin to tear down racial barriers. Joe focuses his attention on writing letters to his wife and thinking of ways to bring her and the children to Oak Ridge, but Ralph, a young man who is Joe’s unofficially adopted son, joins a group interested in improving working conditions for blacks. There he meets Shirley, who encourages Ralph in his activism and falls in love with him. Ralph takes to wearing a double victory pin on his shirt, meaning Victory Abroad, Victory At Home. For young black men and women like Ralph and Shirley, their participation in the war to defeat fascism gives rise to demands for racial justice and equality.
Janet Beard ends The Atomic City Girls with some helpful historic notes. She relates that she grew up near Oak Ridge and first visited the historic site on a school field trip at age seven. Subsequent visits roused her interest in the people who had worked there, particularly the women. She includes a helpful timeline of events, meshing events of the war and the Manhattan Project with scenes from the novel. Finally, and I found this inclusion a pleasant surprise, Beard, citing the importance of music to all these workers, provides playlists of songs from the period, with each playlist set in buildings mentioned in the story: The Recreation Centers for blacks and whites, Charlie’s House (Charlie was a friend of Sam); and June’s parents’ house. As a result, we get a mix of big band, blues, jazz, and country music: Lena Horne, Glenn Miller, Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, Benny Goodman, Gene Autrey, the Carter Family, and another forty or fifty artists.
Like all good novels dealing with the past, The Atomic City Girls reminds us that behind the events we study in textbooks are individuals, men and women who bring to the playing fields of history their own personal strengths, talents, ambitions, and frailties.
Highly recommended.