The Girls of Atomic City

I read Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City, The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II.  The story was very interesting.  Many of the women who worked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, are now elderly and living in assisted living complexes.  She gathered their story and told it in snippets of information.  Women were recruited to work in a government planned community.  The government provided a fair wage and living arrangements in the form of dormitories, small houses and huts.  Factories were built along with a store, a hospital, a church, and a dining hall.  Workers there were forbidden from telling anyone what they did at Oak Ridge and from asking anyone else what they did.  Everything was kept secret and that is why it wasn't until the bomb was dropped on Japan that the people at Oak Ridge finally understood the "tube alloy" they were working on was really plutonium and uranium.  Before that day, everything was so hush hush and on a "need to know" basis and so compartmentalized, no one aside from a few at the top knew the story.  All the 75,000 workers knew was they had to keep their mouth shut and what they were working on would shorten the war.  The government found that young, rural girls were good at enriching uranium because they kept an eye on the dials and did what they were told without trying to figure it out.  Scientists could not keep up with the production of the young, rural women.  I thought this was a fascinating story.