The Secret City

When the Marco Beach Boys and Girls began, almost everyone was from anywhere but Marco Island, and as a result, the newcomers to Marco, Goodland, and the Isles of Capri were always reaching out to share stories about their homeland, families, and the lifestyles that became what Marco Islanders are today. Motor City descriptions of Detroit and Dearborn were always a delight, and tales of the Windy City and Chicagoland were beyond captivating, but there were also strange mysteries and anecdotes of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project from the mountains of east Tennessee. 

Long before granny was old, there were whispers and quiet Tennessee gossip about what was going on in the empty valley below the rocky Cumberland Plateau. According to granny and the aunts and uncles who were living in the rugged Appalachians, there were mystifying and top-secret undertakings going on during World War II that would change the world but perhaps blow up and swallow Tennessee. Top-secret experiments that were so poisonous and so dangerous that the government decided an empty river valley surrounded by rocky top limestone mountains would be the best way to contain any mishap that might occur when science began to explore the unspeakable and the beginning of the atomic age.

The first of the rumors and the gossip began with facts. One of the first roads in Tennessee was the Walton Road that was completed in 1799. The Native American and stagecoach trail was popular for travelers and traders between Knoxville and Nashville, and after the road became the main thoroughfare from east to west, frustration and rumor began to explode when the government confiscated thousands of acres and forgotten crops were soon left to wither on a lonely valley floor.

By 1942, the Secret City truly began to erupt with crawling construction equipment, countless army trucks, and prefabricated housing. The rumors from travelers on the east-to-west road began to circulate wild speculation about the cause and effect of the cryptic activity in the valley with the soldiers, the guard gates, and the concrete that was pouring 24 hours a day.

One of the granny theories was that creatures from Mars were now captives in the growing Secret City and the government was studying them and learning secrets to help fight Hitler’s Nazis and the diabolical Japanese. The aunts and uncles and the grannies reasoned that if the famous War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells could be written and then broadcast over the radio by Orson Welles in 1938, the invading creatures were most probably real and living and working on who-knows-what in east Tennessee.

Another popular theory from whispering lips was that the popular radio show Buck Rodgers was true, and something similar was discovered in an abandoned coal mine under the Black Oak Ridge. If Buck Rogers, on the radio that was airing four times a week, told tales about the future and about a special gas from a mine that gave him special powers was true, then certainly that must be the truth about what was going on in the Secret City.

Another popular tale from the Appalachian mountain folk was about the Japanese prisoner of war camp stationed in nearby Crossville, Tennessee. Even before construction in the Secret City began, the military began shipping large Quonset huts to neighboring Cumberland County to house German prisoners of war for the duration of the conflict. Inspired by even more outlandish and futuristic radio shows, many members of the East Tennessee listening audiences began to believe crews from German U-boat submarines first came to the prisoner of war camp before being used to test the rocket ships that were being built in the nearby Secret City.

The real reason for the wild speculation was simple. No one really knew what was going on because Robert Oppenheimer and his top-secret scientists that were at the heart of the Manhattan Project and the creators of the first plutonium and the first atomic bombs did not share information that was not “need to know.”

Because of the war effort and that most of the men were away in the European or Pacific theaters, many of the workers in the Secret City were young women who were recently out of high school. The teenage girls were very good at monitoring some of the first atomic piles made of graphite and were meticulous recorders of valuable information critical to enriching uranium.

Well before the first atomic bomb became the first test of nuclear war at the Trinity Site in White Sands, New Mexico, Oak Ridge became the fifth largest city in 1940’s Tennessee, but the Secret City at the time was never shown or listed on any map of the United States. 

Between the inceptions of the Secret City that was Oak Ridge and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, scientists, ordinary men, and mostly teenage girls were responsible for the enriching of uranium that made “Little Boy,” which became the atomic bomb explosion over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The detonation destroyed the city and well over 100,000 lives.

Three days later, the delivery of “Fat Man” from a B-29 bomber over Nagasaki destroyed another Japanese city and killed many more thousands. The following day Japan announced an intention to surrender and end World War II.

When the news came out about the first atomic bomb in New Mexico and the two atomic bombs detonated above Japan, the scientists of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the men and women and teenage girls who did not know what they were working on went through an emotional explosion of their own. Some were proud of their work against the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor in a sneak attack. Many others, however, were guilty and grief-stricken over the work and the science that was the destructive creation of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.

The mountain folks of east Tennessee, however, soon began to feel vindication about their wild speculation of the once sleepy hollow that became the Secret City and futuristic birthplace of nuclear war.

Many years later, during the space race to the moon, granny always said. “The weather hasn’t been right ever since they have been sending up them rockets.”