Code Girls, page 15
In the Atlantic, things were going equally badly, if not worse. The late spring of 1942 marked the low point for Allied powers in both of the world’s great oceans. The United States now was an active partner in the Battle of the Atlantic, the deadly six-year contest between German U-boats and Allied convoys. The Battle of the Atlantic began on the first day of the war and did not end until the last. Winston Churchill described it as the thing that worried him most. Whoever won the Battle of the Atlantic, it was believed, would win the European war. Beginning in the spring of 1941, President Roosevelt authorized that supplies could be sent to England, and U.S. Navy ships could escort merchant vessels in the North Atlantic. This meant American sailors were put in harm’s way even before America was a formal combatant.
In 1942 the United States had begun to feel the U-boat peril in a much more violent and intimate way. After Pearl Harbor brought America into the war in earnest, German Admiral Karl Dönitz saw a ripe opportunity: the vast and unprotected Atlantic coast of the United States, from Maine to Florida. The U-boat commander dispatched his submarines to cruise the East Coast, where they roamed startlingly near shore—the Germans called this the “Happy Time”—sinking freighters, tankers, trawlers, and barges. The goal was to destroy supplies being produced to feed the Allied war effort. The U.S. Navy was slow to organize an escort system for coastal shipping, and ships were sunk in full sight of horrified American citizens, who could stand on beaches and watch freighters burning. The Outer Banks of North Carolina became known as “torpedo junction” because of the number of ships destroyed there. The men on the U-boat crews clambered on top of their subs and took keepsake photos of the wreckage.
U-boats were like terrorist cells in their ability to sow fear. They were invisible, ubiquitous, noiseless. To pluck off ships making the Atlantic crossing, the U-boats would place themselves across the convoy lanes and lie in wait. When a U-boat spotted a vessel, it would radio central command, which would alert other subs to close in. Some U-boat commanders were so daring that they would submerge and surface in the middle of the convoys, shooting at the Allies from the inside out.
The Battle of the Atlantic was a war of lives and of commerce. England needed food. The Allies needed troops and war materiel to press their campaigns in Italy and North Africa. American shipyards were churning out Liberty ships—low-cost cargo ships that were being mass-produced in unheard-of numbers—but the U-boats in 1942 were able to sink ships faster than America could make them. Making things worse was the fact that the Germans were reading the cipher the Allies used to direct their convoys, something the Americans suspected but the British were slow to admit.
To be sure, the Allies for some of this time were reading the German cipher, so the Battle of the Atlantic also was a battle of code-breaking prowess. U-boat messages were enciphered using Enigma machines, which the Germans believed could not be broken. To send a message, an Enigma operator inserted three rotors and positioned them in a certain order. When a single letter was typed on the keyboard, the rotors—which were facing one another, like hockey pucks stacked sideways—would turn, transforming the letter over and over. A light on the top side, an ordinary flashlight bulb, would illuminate the letter as it emerged in its enciphered form; that letter would be radioed. Each Enigma had more than three rotors to choose from, and each rotor could be set in twenty-six positions. The rotors were surrounded by movable outer rings, and there were plugs, called steckers, attached to a board. The upshot of all this gadgetry was that there were millions of ways a letter could travel through the encipherment process.
One major strength of Enigma was the setting order for the rotors and other movable parts, which was known as the key and changed each day. The Germans knew that commercial Enigmas had been circulating around Europe in the 1920s and early 1930s and that the Allies might have some idea how they worked. But they believed their enemies could not break the key, which was somewhat like guessing a computer password. Even if it was theoretically possible, the Germans figured, breaking the key would require a building full of machines to run through all the potential combinations, and they did not believe the Allies could produce a building full of machines.
Before the war, a team of Polish cryptanalysts had in fact figured out the workings of the Enigma. Small, vulnerable nations surrounded by big potential enemies—Poland is bordered by Russia and Germany—tend to be hypervigilant about their neighbors, and the Polish Cipher Bureau was remarkably good. The Poles broke the Enigma during the 1930s, in part thanks to a German who passed schematics and decrypted messages to French intelligence, who passed it to them, and to a commercial model they obtained. The Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski solved the wiring, and in 1938 they built six “bomby” machines that could detect possible daily settings.
In July 1939, before the Nazis overran their country, the Poles shared their discovery with the British and French. At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and others refined the design, developing a method in which cryptanalysts could use a crib and write it beneath the cipher, then figure out, mathematically, what combination of rotor settings, wheel settings, and steckers might produce the cipher. This “menu” permitted the machine to check for possible settings, and was in some sense an early form of a computer program. The British built sixty “bombe” machines, which, beginning in 1941, were run by some two thousand members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, or Wrens. The bombes would test a menu to see if it could be a viable key setting. If the bombe got a “hit,” then a smaller machine—an Enigma facsimile—was programmed with the setting and a message fed into it. If coherent German emerged, the code breakers knew they had the correct key setting for the day.
The British at first kept their bombe project secret, even from their allies, for fear the enemy would find out and change the codes. Churchill called his Bletchley code breakers the “geese that laid the golden eggs, and never cackled.” In February 1942, however, the hypercautious German Navy added a fourth rotor to the naval U-boat Enigma machines, increasing the possible combinations by a factor of twenty-six. The Allies called this new four-rotor cipher “Shark,” and initially it proved impenetrable. The Allies lost the ability to read U-boats. The whole system went dark. This crushing turn of events occurred just months after the United States entered the war, and it began an eight-month period of death and destruction and helplessness, a time when ship after ship went down and it felt very much as though the war could swing the wrong way.
This, then, was the demoralized atmosphere that the young women from the Seven Sisters colleges were entering when they traded their May Queen festivals, their end-of-year hoop rolls, their amateur theatrics, and other hallowed traditions for service in the hot downtown offices of the U.S. Navy. The Navy code-breaking program, as ever, operated separately and apart from that of the Army: While Arlington Hall across the Potomac River pursued its attack on diplomatic ciphers, the Navy, still in its downtown headquarters, wrestled with the task of breaking enemy naval messages in the two major oceans, with lead responsibility for code breaking in the Pacific. It felt, at the outset, like an undoable task. The women in the summer of 1942 were signing on with a Navy still reeling from Pearl Harbor and the swift Japanese victories that followed. Officers were being reassigned and lines of command reshuffled. America was losing the war on all sides—or so it felt—and the atmosphere was chaotic. In January 1941, naval code breaking consisted of just sixty people occupying ten office rooms in the sixth wing of the Navy building. By mid-1942 the number had increased to 720, with more arriving every day. The rooms were starting to overflow.
Up to that point, it’s worth noting, the Navy code-breaking office had employed some civilian women apart from Agnes Driscoll but treated them differently from men in terms of pay. According to a November 1941 proposed salary memo, female clerks, typists, and stenographers were paid $1,440 per year, while men doing the same job made $1,620. Women college graduates who had taken an elementary course in cryptanalysis made $1,800; men with those qualifications made $2,000. Women with master’s degrees made $2,000, compared to $2,600 for men. Women PhDs made $2,300; men with doctorates made $3,200. The early women came from a variety of backgrounds: Some officers’ wives and daughters liked to dabble in cryptanalysis, and there was a civilian, Eunice Willson Rice, who came from a staunchly naval family and worked on the codes of the Italian Navy. When she became pregnant, the men liked to call her Puffed Rice.
Despite these historic inequities, the young women’s arrival could not come soon enough for the Navy. In May 1942, none other than Commander John Redman—head of the code-breaking operation, known as OP-20-G—wrote each female student, begging her to get herself to the Navy building as fast as she could.
“Could you start within a week or two after the close of College?” Redman asked Ann White and Bea Norton and the other Wellesley seniors. He sent the same letter to each woman at Goucher and the other cooperating schools. “There is important work here waiting to be done,” Redman told them, adding that “it is a good opportunity for you, particularly since you are getting into this work in its early stages.” He gave each woman the address of the office and begged her to “keep me posted as to the approximate date of your arrival.”
By now the women’s ranks had winnowed. The students from the Seven Sisters and Goucher had been selected on the basis of ability, willingness, and loyalty, but tenacity was something they had to prove during the months-long correspondence course. Some had become discouraged and dropped out; others married and relocated to follow husbands; others did not answer enough problems correctly; others were rejected by the Civil Service Commission based on some aspect of their background. Back in the patriotically fervent winter of 1941, Barnard had enrolled twenty women, of whom seven stuck it out and showed up at Main Navy, the Constitution Avenue headquarters. Bryn Mawr started with twenty-seven and ended with twelve. Goucher’s ranks fell from sixteen to eight; Mount Holyoke’s, from seventeen to seven. Radcliffe had a bounty of fifty-nine women at the start and just eight at the finish. Smith’s first class fell from thirty to twelve; Wellesley’s, from twenty-eight to twenty.
In all, 197 young women had received a secret invitation. A hardy band of seventy-four survivors found their way to D.C., where they were employed as SP-4s, assistant cryptanalytic aides making $1,620 a year. Goucher graduates Constance McCready and Joan Richter were among the first to arrive, showing up at the front desk on June 8, 1942. Viola Moore and Margaret Gilman, from Bryn Mawr, walked through the doors of Main Navy on the fifteenth. The rest trickled in toward the end of June and beginning of July.
The Navy didn’t want to lose a single one. Fearful the women might quit if they couldn’t find housing, the Navy wrote each college president, seeking help in locating alumnae for the women to stay with. Some took rooms at the Meridian Hill Hotel for Women, a Washington residential hotel constructed to house g-girls. Others were scattered throughout northwest Washington, staying at homes on Klingle Road and Euclid Street and elsewhere. Vi Moore and Margaret Gilman lodged at 1611 Connecticut Avenue NW. Anne Barus, from Smith, found herself living at 1751 New Hampshire Avenue NW, with Bea Norton and Elizabeth “Bets” Colby and other Wellesley women. Their addresses changed often. Many would live in six or seven different lodgings during their wartime tenure. Navy memos show that clerks were constantly typing updated addresses as the women scrambled for rooms in basements, boardinghouses, and—in one case—the back half of the Francis Scott Key Book Shop in Georgetown, where a group of women were allowed to borrow books and use the telephone, in return for letting the bookstore staff use their lone toilet.
As quickly as they arrived, the women from the Seven Sisters found themselves put to work. The Navy operation was already on a twenty-four-hour, around-the-clock basis, and the women were divvied up between the three shifts, known in the Navy as “watches.” Fran Steen from Goucher and Ann White from Wellesley were among those who drew the midnight watch, from midnight to eight, while luckier souls drew the day watch, from eight to four, or evening watch, from four to midnight.
The summer of the Navy women’s arrival was punishingly hot. The women would start each day in high heels and clean cotton dresses and take the bus downtown. By the time they arrived—or after working for half an hour—they would be dripping with sweat and the thin fabric of their neat dresses would be plastered to their skin. They would lift their forearms from the table and find the paper beneath was soaking wet. Salt tablets were kept in dispensers—they were a fad of the time; it was mistakenly thought the tablets prevented perspiration—which made many of them sick. The old Navy headquarters was not just crowded but unclean. Vi Moore, a French major from Bryn Mawr, was assigned the task of reporting how many cockroaches were crawling around in the women’s bathroom.
Back at their colleges, the women’s training had been rigorous and they had taken it seriously. The naval course included exercises in which they had to memorize the most common English letters—E , T, O, N, A, I, R, and S—and take frequency counts. They had been introduced to old-fashioned methods like a grille, which is a template that can be put over an ordinary letter, with little holes that make certain words pop out to reveal a hidden message. They were instructed that “the motto of the cryptanalyst should be: ‘Let’s suppose,’” and that “the most important aid in cipher solution is a good eraser.” Weekly problems tested their mastery of “numerical cipher alphabets,” “polyalphabetic substitution,” and “diagonal digraphic substitution.” Each packet contained one problem that could not be solved, to show that sometimes, a jumble of letters or numbers doesn’t stand for anything; sometimes, a code breaker fails. The fine institutions the women attended had never encouraged them to fail, and they found the idea disconcerting.
It was a good course, and they had worked hard at mastering it, but the problems often didn’t dovetail with the actual work they found themselves doing; lots of the tasks they were facing had not been covered. And all of this was no longer an academic exercise. They were responsible for men’s lives, and the responsibility felt awful and real. Most of the women started out on the Japanese desk, but those few who knew German soon found themselves helping fight the Battle of the Atlantic. The British still had lead responsibility, but the Americans—who also had a stake in the outcome—were doing what they could to help crack Shark, the four-rotor Enigma cipher. Without the aid of bombe machines, the women used hand solutions to try to guess the day’s key setting. They were in constant communication with the British, trading notes and cribs.
Margaret Gilman, who had majored in biochemistry at Bryn Mawr but studied German in high school, was given a proficiency exam in German and put to work in a small sealed room attacking Shark. Her unit consisted of all women, with a lone male officer supervising. In a room guarded by Marines, Gilman labored over Nazi messages transmitted in the Bay of Biscay, the body of water off the coast of occupied France, where huge U-boat bases now were located. The U-boats had to cross the Bay of Biscay to reach the Atlantic convoy lanes. Before the subs left base, the Nazis would send out weather vessels to report back on conditions, using Enigma machines. There are a limited number of weather-related words—wind, rain, clouds—so it was sometimes feasible to come up with cribs. “BISKAYAWETTER” was a crib the women often would try as they made charts and graphs of common cribs and the places in messages where Germans were most likely to nestle certain words.
The urgency of the work was harrowing. American men, they knew, were trying to cross the ocean where the U-boats waited. “German submarines were literally controlling the Atlantic Ocean,” Margaret Gilman recalled later. “Can you imagine sending out American troop ships loaded with soldiers through an Atlantic ocean riddled with submarines? It was heart-rending, oh my God.” In the unit’s workroom, a detailed wall map displayed the Atlantic Ocean, with pins for every U-boat whose position they could locate. Margaret couldn’t stand to look at the map and would position her head to keep it out of her peripheral vision. The morale of the whole country would suffer when a troop ship was lost, and the women felt the burden of responsibility. “If we had any doubts about whether what we were doing was important,” she recalled, just let a few days go by with no progress, “and the brass were down there yelling at us—what are we doing, neglecting our duty.”
Ann White also was assigned to the Enigma unit, having majored in German at Wellesley. The work brought her into uncomfortable contact with the humanity of the enemy. The British were sending over items to help develop cribs based on things like lengths of transmissions, the locations of the boats they were addressed to, and instructions for returning to port. From time to time, the British would send documents found in a sinking or captured U-boat. These included personal effects, such as family photos, belonging to German sailors who now were drowned or captive. Once, Ann’s team broke a message from a Nazi commander announcing the birth of his son. One code breaker composed a snatch of doggerel as a translation: “From here to Capetown / be it known / A little Leuth / has now been bo’n,” which of course rhymed only if you had a southern accent.
But mostly, the work was frustrating, and it imbued the women with sadness and a sense of failure. Ann White’s job was to translate German messages into English, so she knew what the contents said. During the winter of 1942–1943, her unit partially cracked a message from Dönitz, alerting a wolf pack to a convoy of Allied ships passing the southern tip of Greenland. The code breakers, American and British, desperately tried to determine the location of the U-boats that lay in wait but could not. Later, they learned that most of the ships had been lost. “We worked on the Enigma desperately,” Ann White would later say. “Blindly.” It was a relief to be doing something: “Everyone we knew and loved was in this war. It was a Godsend for a woman to be so busy she couldn’t worry,” she reflected. But “we knew men were dying.”
