Day 989: Girls of Atomic City

Our book club selection for this month was my suggestion: The Girls of Atomic City, the Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win WWII by Denise Kiernan.  It profiles nine ordinary women who performed different jobs in the nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  Several were recruited right out of high school or jobs in small shops, one was a nurse, two secretaries, a chemist, a mathematician and a janitor.  Their stories represented some of the 40,000 women at the plant!  All were sworn to secrecy, never to discuss what they did with anyone.  All work was compartmentalized and each person knew only their own job.

It's a remarkable story of the sacrifices and contributions of women to the war effort.  I always favor books about heroic women so I was delighted that everyone loved it!  That's unusual for a book that I recommend because my taste is so different from everyone else's.  They have mocked for years one of my favorites titled, Follow the River, about a young woman captured by Indians with her baby.  She escapes and walks back along the course of the Ohio River.  The best part: it's true!

We talked about the choice to use the atomic bomb and Kate asked me what I thought.  Maybe I've already told the story.  I know I would never have been born if the bomb had not been used.  My dad was a young marine stationed on a tiny South Pacific island called Truk.  He was one of thousands of soldiers waiting for the invasion of Japan to begin and he would have been in the first wave.  That invasion never happened because the bomb finally forced Japan to surrender.  But, the terrible suffering that ensued!  A book that everyone should read is Hiroshima.   It chronicles the minute by minute events of the day the bomb was dropped and the weeks that followed.

The creek in September