With Thanksgiving this week, I starting thinking about the holidays in Oak Ridge during World War II. In some oral histories, the interviewees mentioned that because of work demands it was hard for the workers to get back home for the holidays.
A few said it was a very blue time for them. Many of the workers had never been away from their parents, relatives and siblings during the holiday season. They said it was hard, but the workers were all in the same predicament and they were determined to make the best of it.
How often did they have to suffer the holiday blues? Twice. In 1943 and in 1944. It is yet another clue of how incredibly fast this whole massive project was moving. The government condemned the land for the project in the fall of 1942. There may have been many construction workers on site in December of 1942, but it was still early. Thehundreds of farmers weren’t evicted from their property until early December.
Things were certainly in full gear by the late fall of 1943. Dormitories were open, the headquarters was partially finished and Y-12 was racing toward the first phases of completion. Thousands of workers were in the town site and they would observe their first Thanksgiving and Christmas in Oak Ridge.
A year later, in 1944, the Secret City was close to full operational capacity. K-25 was a few months away from fully operating as the construction workers and professional operational workers celebrated their second holiday season in Oak Ridge.
Thanksgiving was very different in 1945. The war had been over for more than three months. Y-12 staffing had been slashed and the Secret City was coping with something new: peace.