Meet Esther Branson. She was a secretary in Los Alamos, New Mexico during World War II. When she entered the Army, She was twenty-four years old and single. She entered the army in 1944. She really wanted to be in the navy, but she couldn't enlist because of a heart murmur. Many of her friends and her brother were enlisting in the army so she went in the same direction.
She was not allowed to tell her family about any of the work she was doing.
Esther was sent to work on the Manhattan Project, a secret project for the purpose of building the first atomic bomb. She was not allowed to tell her family about any of the work she was doing. The people who worked with her knew they were working on secret experiments, but they did not know what kind of bomb they were building. As a secretary, she did not know any of the secrets. She did not even know that she was going to Los Alamos, they told her she was stationed at Santa Fe.
When they arrived in Santa Fe, they were put on a bus and taken to Los Alamos. People were not allowed to talk about what they were working on. There were many securities set up in the United States concerning the atomic bomb. The reasons for having security were so that the word would not get out that the United States might have a weapon that could end the war. Some other measures included control of the phones and mail. The phones were monitored so that they could not say anything that they weren't supposed to say. The things they were not supposed to say included the word bomb, their location in Los Alamos, or any information about anything going on there. You were allowed to write letters but you could not seal them because they would be opened by the censors and read. They also had to have passes to go anywhere at the test site.
One of Esther's jobs was to type out peoples' last wills and testaments before they tested the bomb. This was because people were afraid something could go wrong with the experiments.
Mrs. Branson felt that there were many good reasons for the atomic bomb. Hitler was trying to make one so we had to make one faster. She said that another reason we built the bomb was to win the war sooner. The faster the war was over, the fewer soldiers that would die. Esther Branson is a heroine of WWII. She and others contributed to the building of the atomic bomb.
- Cinnamon Evans, Kimberly Knifer