Through a Lense: The Story of The Manhattan Project:

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports, and from business to history and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. In 1938, German scientists learned the power of splitting an atom, and with that they gained a huge head start in what was truly the first nuclear arms race.

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Speaker 2: But instead of a stockpile, the

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Speaker 1: race was to just get it right, and then maybe they could replicate the results.

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Speaker 2: In the town that

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Speaker 1: housed the bulk of the work of the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, there was a single photographer, Ed Westcott.

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Speaker 2: This is the story that led to the end of World War II and the one man

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Speaker 1: that photographed it. Here’s Arthur Richard Cook with the story.

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Speaker 3: In August of 1934, President Hindenburg of Germany died. Chancellor Hitler moved quickly to consolidate the office of president and Chancellor and molded it into a new position as dictator.

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Speaker 4: His new title was Fura.

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Speaker 3: A national referendum weeks later was approved by 90 percent of the voters. Meanwhile, in Nashville, Tennessee, Ed Westcott’s father, after saving for a year, bought 12-year-old Ed his first camera. They found a used mobile lunch wagon, which they renovated into a darkroom. Family, friends, and neighbors could get film developed for 50 cents a roll.

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Speaker 4: He was largely self-taught.

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Speaker 3: He started working with portrait studios in Nashville while still a teenager. There were clues in East Tennessee. In September of 1942, a press release published in newspapers said the military was building an ammunition testing range outside of Knoxville, Tennessee. This partially explained the condemnation of 58,000 acres by the government. The reports in newspapers were a total lie. Farmers who owned the land were totally in the dark. Surveying crews asked permission to be on their land for a few hours. In November, owners found a single piece of paper attached to the screen front door announcing that the owners of the land had three weeks to vacate the property. It was being confiscated by the film federal government. Many of these families had farmed their land for generations. The farmhouses were bulldozed down in a matter

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Speaker 4: of days after the eviction date.

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Speaker 3: The ammunition testing range excuse was done on purpose. It discouraged squatters, and it worked. The families viewed their farms as a personal Garden of Eden. The land provided for all their needs, both physically and spiritually. Most families never ever got over the quick, harsh eviction. They were compensated for their land, but hundreds of farmers were looking for new farmland at the same time.

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Speaker 4: Prices went through the roof.

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Speaker 3: Many of the farmers ended up working at the industrial plants which were built on their former land. Meanwhile, 160 miles to the west, in Nashville, a 20-year-old man had a decision to make. Ed Westcott was a photographer for the Nashville office of the Army Corps of Engineers. The office was being closed. Ed was offered two options. He could transfer to the Alaskan Highway to document the construction of it, or he could go to a new installation outside of Knoxville. Ed had spent all of his entirely too brief life in Tennessee. He had recently gotten married and had a newborn son. Knoxville it was. He accepted the job in November and would start in January of 1943. His employee number was 29.

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Speaker 4: Little did he

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Speaker 3: know that in less than three years he would create the most important photographic archive of 20th century American history. Ed said there wasn’t much going on when he reported to work. Putting in roads and rail lines was the first order of business. Ed said, “If this was a war project, it wasn’t much of a project.” Ed dove into his work from January 1943 until the end of the war in August of 1945. He took somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 photographs. In an era where everyone has a camera on their cell phone, that doesn’t sound like much—16 to 21 photographs every single day. But it was a different time. The cameras were heavy, and often he needed heavy tripods to mount his camera on. During the war, Ed had a four-by-five Speed Graphic, which used roll film with six exposures on each roll, and then he had an eight-by-ten Deerdorfer, which used a single sheet of film for each photograph. If he was shooting inside, he had to use bulky floodlights, which took a long time to set up and oftentimes for just a single shot. And at the end of the day, he had to go back to his darkroom and develop the day’s film and print proof sheets. Then there might be a dance to shoot later that night. Cameras were banned in the Secret City. His was the only camera in a town of 75,000, and for a guy with ambition, his side hustle as a photographer was almost a full-time job on its own. There were many weddings each weekend. The fastest-growing department at the hospital was the maternity ward. If you needed photos of your firstborn, Ed was the man.

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Speaker 1: And when we come back, we’ll continue this remarkable story of a man, a town, and a time. Ed Westcott’s story here on Our American Stories.

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Speaker 2: Folks, if you

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Speaker 1: love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture, and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life, and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free

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Speaker 2: and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more.

00:08:09
Speaker 1: And we’re back with Our American Stories and the story of the Manhattan Project, the perfecting of atomic weaponry, and the building of a 75,000-person town in less than three years.

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Speaker 2: We continue with Richard Cook.

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Speaker 3: The speed and scale of Oak Ridge was unlike anything the country had ever seen. From the time the farmers were evicted until the day Japan surrendered was a mere 20 days. This top-secret installation went from cows grazing pastureland to the fifth largest city in the state and one of the largest industrial complexes in the history of mankind. Splitting an atom was an astonishing new energy source, and it was fully realized in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Timing, both good and bad, can be a terribly random thing. In December of 1938, two scientists in Germany discovered a uranium atom could be split and release a massive amount of energy. Barely eight months later, Germany invaded Poland, and World War II started. The first perception of atomic power by the world would be during a war. General Dick Groves ran the Manhattan Project. He was a no-nonsense, impatient taskmaster. His second in command was Colonel Ken Nichols. They were hired in September of 1942. Things happened quickly. They made the decision to step up the process to condemn 60,000 acres of farmland west of Knoxville, Tennessee. They also obtained from the War Production Board a AAA priority rating. It was the highest rating possible. There were shortages of thousands of materials during the war. The Manhattan Project would be first in line for anything and everything. Another objective was to borrow from the U.S. Treasury 14,000 tons of silver for the industrial plants

00:10:43
Speaker 4: in Oak Ridge.

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Speaker 3: That is equal to the weight of 9,000 cars. And finally, they also contracted with a uranium mine owner in the Belgian Congo for 1,250 tons of high-quality uranium ore. Dick and Ken completed these four vitally important objectives during the first four days on the job. In 18 months, they built the fifth largest city in the state. During the peak, a home was completed every 30 minutes. There were over 6,000 massive industrial machines separating two isotopes of uranium. Oak Ridge devoured 10 percent more electricity than New York City. During the war, New York had over seven and a half million residents, Oak Ridge about 75,000. For safety reasons, workers lived miles from the industrial sites. These were new experimental processes creating a new type of uranium. There were worries an accident would be catastrophic, so to ferry workers to and from the plants, they built the ninth largest bus system in the country. A bus arrived or departed from the main terminal every 60 seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Even with the industrial plants, the speed of construction was head-spinning. The problems were huge. For every 2,000 pounds of raw uranium, there was only 14 pounds of the precious uranium-235. The plants were named S-50, K-25, and Y-12. The names were total gibberish. They were created to make sure absolutely nothing was conveyed to the workers or the outside world about the purpose of these plants. Normally, after a theory is proved out in the laboratory, a prototype is built to see if the idea is scalable. There was no time for that. K-25 used a filter method. There was a two percent difference in the size of uranium-238 and the smaller uranium-235. A filter would have holes small enough that the larger 238 could not pass through it easily, but the smaller 235 could.

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Speaker 4: A filter the

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Speaker 3: size of your thumbnail would have over 15 million holes in it. When they started building K-25, the scientists had not

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Speaker 4: developed a filter which worked.

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Speaker 3: The scientists just kept grinding out possible solutions until they developed one which worked. Much of what happened in Oak Ridge was based mostly on blind faith. Why such a rush? Only people in the highest echelons of the military, government, and science knew the horrible secret which kept all of them awake at night. Hitler had his own atomic weapons program. We knew almost nothing about it, but what was known was nightmarish. Hitler had a two-year head start. This was the original arms race. If Hitler got the weapon first, London would be gone, Moscow most likely too. If Hitler could get an airfield in Greenland, the entire East Coast of the United States would

00:14:44
Speaker 4: be under threat.

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Speaker 3: The resulting carnage would make the Holocaust look like a tiny blip on a moral radar screen. There were 75,000 workers in Oak Ridge. Only 200 to 300 workers knew the purpose of the giant industrial site, but all the workers were highly motivated to end the war. They had family and friends dying in distant lands. The loss of American life during World War II would equal a 9/11 attack every five days for three and a half years. From the bottom up, workers were pleading with their bosses, “What can we do to end the killing?” And from the top down, the leaders did their own pleading, “Faster, just work faster.” Forces from the very top of the Manhattan Project and the fears of workers on the bottom rung of the labor pool all came together in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Unlike anywhere else in the nation, the officials kept the purpose of this place secret, almost against all odds. But there were two aspects of the top-secret project which could not be hidden from the workers. One was the scale of what was going on.

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Speaker 4: Nobody knew what it was, but it

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Speaker 3: was the biggest effort they had ever seen in their young lives, and it would be the biggest effort of their entire lives. The other aspect, which could not be hidden, was the

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Speaker 4: speed of the effort.

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Speaker 3: Everyone could see it was moving at a blistering pace. It seemed that housing and industrial plants were built almost overnight. These two elements—speed and scale—made the atmosphere electric. Throw into the equation youth and hormones, and it was the most amazing place in the country.

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Speaker 4: The worker said

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Speaker 3: it was the most exciting time of their lives, and the scariest too. The terror and carnage of war was the backdrop for everything.

00:17:13
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Richard Cook telling the story of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the Manhattan Project, which, by the way, this should be a story that every schoolchild knows, right? I mean, how we don’t know this story—well, shame on all of us in the end. In a very short time, going from the eviction of farmers to the fifth largest city in a state, most of the people there not knowing precisely what was going on. The folks there, the folks fighting, the generals, the President had no idea what was going to happen, and that’s why the rush and the speed. When we come back, we continue with Richard Cook, the story of the Manhattan Project, here on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories and the story of the Manhattan Project, America’s World War II project that was hellbent on beating Germany to the atomic bomb. But with the immense size and scale of this enterprise and all the people involved, how the heck did they keep it a secret?

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Speaker 2: Back to Richard Cook.

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Speaker 3: You can’t hide a town of 75,000 people. But what was going on out there? Folks in Knoxville wondered. In other military plants, the narrative was straightforward. Thousands of railcars of draw materials would be shipped in, and thousands of jeeps or tanks would come out, or the locals could see thousands of newly finished planes taking off. No mystery at all. Oak Ridge was different. Thousands of railcars delivered draw materials, and nothing, absolutely nothing, was coming out. Well, something was coming out, but nobody saw it. It was a single piece of gray-looking metal the size of a volleyball. It was made up of 90 percent uranium-235. Not thousands of volleyballs, but a single one. Over 75,000 workers were working desperately around the clock making a volleyball. And if they could make one, they might be able to make a second one. In 2020 dollars, they would spend 14 billion dollars on a single 140-pound volleyball.

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Speaker 4: Of course, if this was a

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Speaker 3: hum would movie, the entire volleyball would be delivered to Los Alamos, New Mexico, in a security convoy. There’d be 40 trucks and security guards with machine guns and American flags waving. It didn’t happen that way, though. As enough uranium was separated, a military officer dressed in a business suit would be given a sealed briefcase. Inside the lined case was two teacup-sized containers with screw lids nestled in a special carrier. The officer would go to Knoxville, get on a public train, and travel to Chicago. At the train depot, he would meet another officer dressed as a businessman. He would take the briefcase and get on a train bound for Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then he would drive to Los Alamos. The officer going to Chicago from Ukridge never knew where the briefcases were going, and the other officer never knew where the briefcase came from. Sometimes workers went to Knoxville to shop or eat, and they were trained how to answer questions from nosy natives. “So what are you making out there

00:21:31
Speaker 4: anyway?” “About 85 cents an hour.” “What do you do out there anyway?”

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Speaker 3: “I’m in project management.”

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Speaker 4: “How many people work out there?” “Oh,

00:21:47
Speaker 3: about half of them.” The obsession with secrecy and security was well-founded. Officials were deeply concerned that the Germans learn the extent of the American efforts and would double down on their own program, or, more likely, the Germans would infiltrate Oak Ridge and steal industrial secrets about American methods so it could aid their own work. When all workers were hired in Oak Ridge, they went through an eight-hour orientation. Six hours of it was, “Keep your mouth shut, don’t talk about your work to anyone, including your spouse. You could be fired and possibly go to prison for espionage.” There were billboards everywhere in town which said, “Shut up and do your job.” Every six months, there was a refresher course in case you couldn’t get the message.

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Speaker 4: The other four times.

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Speaker 3: Outgoing mail was opened, read; portions were blacked out if necessary. One of the tragic, unintended consequences of these dictates was that nobody kept diaries or journals. Workers were petrified that military police would find them if they searched their homes. Oral histories, done decades after the war, will be the only record of the memories of these ignored heroes. There was something very conflicted about working and living in Oak Ridge during the war. At work, there was little to node job security. There were prohibitions, procedures, protocols, and security standards. Asking too many questions was a sure to be fired.