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By Al Zdon
Catherine Filippi Piccolo grew up in a small town in northern Minnesota, the daughter of an iron miner.
By the time she was in her 20s, she was playing a key role in the development of the
atomic bomb — first as a member of a team of WACs that handled the classified material for the Manhattan Project, and later as the officer in charge of those WACs.
"I like a challenge. I don't like to do just any
job. It has to be a challenge," she said.
Piccolo grew up in a one-story house in the St. Paul Location, a tiny cluster of houses perched on the edge of an iron mine. Later the family moved a mile south to the
bustling metropolis of Keewatin, a mining town with 1,300 souls.
After graduating from Keewatin High School, she attended Hibbing Junior College for a year-and-a-half before dropping out after her mother had a
stroke. She took care of her four brothers and her father.
When her sister returned to Italy for health reasons in the late 1930s, Piccolo joined her for a year. In Rome, she had a chance to listen to speeches by
both Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
'I was in the crowd when Hitler was talking, and I was going, 'Boo, boo, boo,' but my sister hushed me up. I said, 'I can do what I want, I'm an American citizen.'
She said, 'I'm an American citizen too, but I have to live here.'
She said there were others in the crowd who also were voicing some displeasure with Hitler, but Mussolini quieted them with a wave of his hand.
Another time at a rally for Mussolini, someone in the crowd took a shot at him, missing him by inches. "But, you know, not one word ever appeared in the newspapers about it. Not one word."
She was still in Europe
when the war broke out, and she quickly headed back.
Back home in America, she volunteered for the Women's Army Corps and after basic training was sent to a clerk's school. Her dream was to be sent back to Europe.
At one point, the Army gathered 210 WACs in a room and interviewed them all. They told Piccolo, who was Private Filippi at the time, to stand off to one side. "I was so excited because I thought they were going
to send me to Europe."
Instead, she was informed that she was assigned to a top secret project in New York in the Manhattan District of the Army Corp of Engineers. "I thought I was going on a transport ship. I
said, 'Oh, phooey.'"
Asked why she had been picked for the project from such a large group, she answered quickly, "Because of my looks." Then she smiled and said, "No, it was probably because I had taken science
and chemistry in college and high school. I really have no idea why they picked me."
She wasn't told what the project was about. In fact, she was never told what the project was about.
"Well, we kind of had a
hint it was a bomb, but that's about all. What made it hard to understand
was that the project was being run through the Corps of Engineers and not the Army's Ordinance Department. I supposed they did that to confuse the enemy."
Piccolo lived for a year, beginning in June 1943, in a
Manhattan hotel. Her job, along with six or seven other WACs, was to handle, process and destroy top secret documents that were flooding in from the various sites around the country where work was being done on the
difficulties of splitting the atom.
One incident that Piccolo remembers involved a time when she suspected that somebody was trying to steal the code from her cryptographic machine. "We had been told that if we
even suspected that somebody was trying to get the code, that we should immediately destroy the machine."
Taking the order very seriously, Piccolo took an axe to the machine and smashed it to pieces.
"Years
later, at a function at the University of Minnesota, I met Niels Bohr (one of the top scientists working of the atom bomb project) again. When we were introduced, he said, "Oh, I remember. This is the little lady
with the axe."
Piccolo quickly advanced through the ranks, helped by the priority given the Manhattan Project. She was a private on Oct. 10, 1942, and was promoted to staff sergeant by March of 1943. She quickly
advanced to tech sergeant and master sergeant by February of 1944.
"Plenty of the guys were mad at me, I'll tell you that."
But her race up the ladder wasn't over. Piccolo was sent to Officer's Candidate
School and by Feb. 17, 1945, she was commissioned a second lieutenant. By the time she left the service in 1950, she was a captain.
When she returned from OCS, she was put in charge of the WAC detachment at the
Clinton Engineering Works at Oak Ridge. "I didn't put up with any foolishness. I was very strict."
Occasionally she would be asked out on a date, but she rarely agreed. "I was just so busy I never had time. Just
coordinating that job took all the time I had. It was so interesting."
Piccolo made trips to Los Alamos to work with the WAC group assigned there. "There had been some friction between the WACs and Dr. (Robert)
Oppenheimer." Oppenheimer oversaw the massive bomb-building project.
Piccolo straightened out the Army personnel about Oppenheimer. "He was a genius. He knew the whole shebang. He was a very outstanding
individual. He was nice to me, he treated me nice."
She also worked closely with the overall leader of the Manhattan Project, Gen. Leslie Groves, who also had a reputation as being rude and forceful. "He know how
to get things done. When they needed the money, he got it. He was very good at going to Washington and getting the money.
"The army knew where to go when it wanted to get things done. He built the Pentagon, you
know. He just got things done. He was very structured about everything he did.
"He was also a very big man. He was a huge man. He knew what he wanted, and you just did it."
Piccolo also had a chance to meet
Enrico Fermi who created the first controlled atomic chain reaction, the experiment that led to the bomb. She said she refrained from talking to him in Italian because there were other people around.
When it
became clear that the bomb would be used, the Army began to gear up for expected media onslaught about one of the world's most closely guarded secrets.
"You've got to remember that this was the best kept secret
of the war. We had to work very hard to keep that stuff out of the newspapers," Piccolo said.
"Everybody attached to the project had to keep their mouth's shut. That was hard to do for some of the women," she
said with a smile.
Piccolo was put in charge of working on developing the press releases and other material that would be needed after the bomb was dropped. She worked closely with Gus Robinson, a reporter from
Knoxville. In the end, the Army brought in Bill Laurence, the science editor for the New York Times, to do the writing.
With Piccolo providing the information, Laurence cranked out dozens of press releases over a
six-week period on all aspects of the Manhattan Project. All of it was classified until the Army said so.
When the Trinity test was successful at Alamagordo in New Mexico — the first atomic explosion — Piccolo
said there was great rejoicing at Oak Ridge. "You should have seen the people dancing around."
And when the bombs were used to end the war, the crush of reporters seeking information was stunning. "We allowed 350
in for a press briefing, but there had to be another 300 at the gate who never got in because they didn't have the right credentials."
Piccolo later spent time at the Hanford Engineering Works in Washington,
where they developed the plutonium for one of the two bombs. Again, she was in charge of the WAC detachment.
She later attended an intensive schooling, along with about 50 lawyers, to learn the judge advocate's
skills.
After leaving the service, Piccolo stayed very active in the St. Paul area. She worked for several companies including two stints with 3M, interrupted because she was raising her three children. She had
met her husband, who was originally from the Iron Range, in Italy. 10 years later, she married him.
She became the business manager at Hill-Murray High School for eight years, and was elected to the St. Paul
School Board for two terms. She served on the St. Paul Civil Service Commission and the St. Paul Planning Commission.
She has visited Italy 14 times, and has met five different popes.
Editor's Note:
Material for this story came from an interview with Catherine Piccolo and also from her participation in the World War II History Roundtable at the Ft. Snelling History Center.
The other short stories in this
section on the Manhattan project also came from the World War II History Roundtable. The Roundtable meets every second Thursday during the cold weather months at Ft. Snelling.
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