In 1986, Seattle journalist Stephen L. Sanger took leave of his newspaper job to travel the country and interview dozens of men and women who worked at the Hanford Site in World War II. Recently, Sanger graciously agreed to allow the Atomic Heritage Foundation to incorporate his work into our Voices of the Manhattan Project website. Soon our Voices website will feature fifty-six new oral histories, all compiled by Sanger and originally published in 1989 as Hanford and the Bomb and again in 1995 as Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford.
Sanger cast a wide net, and came up with a rich, varied compendium of experiences of World War II Hanford. His subjects include construction workers, DuPont executives, cooks, secretaries, pre-war residents displaced by the government, camp security guards, and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner. They speak of everything from tricky metallurgical problems to rowdy dormitory craps games.
One recurring theme is the intense compartmentalization and code of secrecy surrounding work at Hanford. Secretary Betsy Stuart recalls, “The paper I took out of my typewriter I would have to put in a flat box and lock it. I would put the flat box in an inner tray and lock that. You locked the file drawer, then you locked your typewriter, and when I left, I locked the door to my office. That was five keys. You also had to do all that to go to the bathroom. I didn’t go to the bathroom very often.”
The Hanford Site was a massive operation, and for it to run smoothly there had to be creativity and innovation at every level. Harry Petcher oversaw the massive box lunch program that enabled tens of thousands of workers to eat on the job. He recalls an example of production line optimization, “The way we made our sandwiches, we would put 12 to 18 pieces of bread on a tray and one girl would put margarine on them, another would put meat on and another would put the top on and another would put it in the wrapping machine. We were having a terrific slow job spreading the margarine. It was a bottle neck. But Jimmy Green came up with a good idea. He took a paint spray gun and he filled it with margarine and then he put two cathodes with electric heat and put those down into the margarine. Then after the margarine got hot and liquid he would take the spray gun and spray the bread. Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Though most of the men and women whom Sanger interviewed speak with fondness, pride, and nostalgia, Hanford had problems like any other city. Plant protection supervisor Bob Bubenezer says, “Drunkenness was prevalent. And depression was quite a deal, and this was a big reason for people leaving there. Homesickness too, it was a depressing sort of a place. It was almost like being in prison. Wired in, barb wire. Men separated from the women, even husbands and wives were separated sometimes. We had a number of nervous breakdowns of personnel. It was loneliness and depression and they hit the booze very hard.”
These are only a few of the many stories collected by Sanger and soon to be featured on the Voices of the Manhattan Project website. Sanger took great care to find diverse people with diverse experiences, and we are hopeful that sharing them more widely will enrich understanding of the Hanford Site and the Manhattan Project.