Intersection Column | Uncovering Secrets

by Michelle Shocklee

Secrets. We all have them. During World War II, there were so many secrets kept, I imagine some still have yet to be uncovered.

As the daughter of a World War II veteran, I’ve become a student of the history of those turbulent days. During my childhood in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I heard fascinating stories about the hush-hush work that took place at Los Alamos, just up the mountain from our beautiful New Mexico-style adobe home. I thought it quite fascinating that Los Alamos had been a “Secret City” during the war, brimming with brilliant scientists, physicists, and military men, all intent on producing a weapon the likes of which the world had never seen. On July 16, 1945, deep in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first ever nuclear bomb was detonated at 5:30 AM. Codenamed ‘Trinity,’ the results of that test would change the face of war forever.

But the scientists weren’t the only witnesses to the unusual explosion that morning. My grandparents and my mom, a 17-year-old teenager at the time, lived approximately fifty miles from the Trinity test site. Ever an early riser, Grandma stood in the kitchen at 5:30 AM that morning, looking out the window. Suddenly, the dark sky—the world, it seemed to her—was filled with the whitest, brightest light she had ever seen. An all-encompassing, blinding burst of light. A few seconds later, it was gone. Everything went dark again.

So, between having a father who was in the war and growing up in Santa Fe with Los Alamos a stone’s throw away, as well as hearing my grandmother’s eyewitness account of seeing the flash from an atomic bomb, I thought I knew just about every secret there was to know about that extraordinary period in history.

I was wrong.

A few years ago, my husband and I moved to Tennessee, and I was invited to speak and sign books at a church in the eastern part of the state. An older woman approached and said something puzzling: “If you’re looking for a new topic to write about, my mother worked at Oak Ridge.”

I’m sure my face went blank. What was so special about Oak Ridge? The woman didn’t elaborate and our conversation ended as the next person in line moved forward. On the way home to Nashville, we passed the exit to Oak Ridge, piquing my curiosity. While my husband drove, I grabbed my phone and was absolutely astonished by what I read, convinced of two things: I’d found the subject of my next novel and I owed the woman a huge thank you.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a lovely, small town, tucked in the hills of the Appalachian Mountains, twenty miles east of Knoxville. Before 1942, the town did not exist. Instead, farms and small communities dotted the land. Everything changed when the area was chosen by General Groves and Robert Oppenheimer as the site for three enormous plants where all the uranium for an atomic bomb would be enriched. By the end of the war, over 75,000 people, including tens of thousands of young women, lived and worked in Oak Ridge, a “Secret City” just like Los Alamos.

The Women of Oak Ridge takes readers to the Secret City in 1944. Mae Willett wants nothing more than to do her part to help bring an end to the war. She leaves her home in Kentucky and travels to an unknown destination in Tennessee to do a job she neither understands nor can she talk about it to anyone. Like the vast majority of real people who worked in Oak Ridge in the 1940s, Mae and the others are unaware their work will result in an atomic weapon. All they’re told is that it will help end the war and bring our boys home, and isn’t that everyone’s goal?

But all is not as it seems. Secrets abound. When Mae finds herself caught up in a dangerous situation, she comes face-to-face with a life-altering revelation that comes at significant cost. Years later Mae’s niece Laurel is researching Oak Ridge for her dissertation, but Aunt Mae refuses to share about her time in the Secret City. As Laurel works to put the pieces together, the hidden pain and guilt Mae has tried so hard to bury comes to light . . . with potentially disastrous consequences.

I had a grand time researching this story. Because the history wasn’t familiar, I felt I was reading the novel as I wrote, discovering the secrets of Oak Ridge along with the characters.

What kind of secrets?

You’ll have to read Mae’s story in The Women of Oak Ridge to find out!

---

About the Author

Michelle Shocklee is an award-winning author of several historical novels, including All We Thought We Knew, Appalachian Song, and Under the Tulip Tree. Michelle and her husband have two married sons and make their home in Tennessee. Visit her online at www.MichelleShocklee.com.

---

About the Book

In the hills of Tennessee, two women work at a Manhattan Project site and uncover truths that irrevocably change their lives in this compelling dual-timeline novel set during World War II and the 1970s.