World War II era

I came across the following items while reading the magazine The Week.  

First, in the book review of The Girls of Atomic City: The untold story of the women who helped win World War II by Denise Kiernan by Touchstone publishers.  The women were "young secretaries, chemists, and technicians" that were part of Oak Ridge, Tenn. working on the Manhattan Project.  The women  who were technicians "monitored panels of dials and never realized that they were enriching uranium", finally received the news of the bombing of Hiroshima, some were proud of the part they played and some felt "pride often mixed with shame and guilt".  I found this line interesting and as the reviewer wish for more details.  "A brief mention of an injured black worker who became a human guinea pig for radiation's effect on the body left this reader wanting more".  (Source:  Review in The Week for 4/19/13 on page 22).

In the same issue of The Week is a note about an internment camp for Japanese Americans in Heart Mountain Wyoming that was "packed with makeshift buildings on a patch of desert here that was ringed by barbed wire", is one of only two such camps open to visitors.  There is a web site for information, heartmountain.org.  The writer of the article in The Week states "the internees faced grueling conditions.  Multiple families shared tiny barracks with communal toilets, and when winter's sub-zero temperatures arrived, gaps in the walls let in cold winds".  As the writer says the climate conditions were "...almost as cruel  to these individuals as their government".  (I have always been amazed that our government could expect draft age men to volunteer for the armed forces while their parents faced these conditions.  Also that many such men did volunteer.

The third item I came across was a note about a PBS program that stated that during WWII "British intelligence planted listening devices among German POW's netting both military secrets and a glimpse of the Nazi's dark soul" (Source:  "Secrets of the Dead: Bugging Hitler's Soldiers".  In The Week 5/3/13)