Code Girls, page 21
Scores of enlisted women worked in the library unit—OP-20-G-L—where about a dozen formed a tight friendship. The library unit typed incoming messages, fresh from the teletype, on file cards, categorizing them and making careful note of coincidences and recurrences. Like the women in additive recovery, they responded to action in the war theater. When Betty Allen, a librarian from a small Illinois town, arrived in the unit, a group of women were busily indexing geographic place names from maps of Alaska, in anticipation of a possible Japanese invasion there. Betty Allen became a staunch member of the friendship group, as did Georgia O’Connor, a farm girl from Missouri; Lyn Ramsdell, who had worked in the office of a Boston wool merchant; and Ruth Schoen, a legal secretary and the yeoman who had put the “bedroom eyes” officer in his place.
Ruth Schoen was the only Jewish member of the group. Her grandparents on both sides had emigrated from Hungary. Like most Americans, she was not yet aware of the Nazi death camps, but she was patriotic and wanted to do her part so badly that she enlisted despite being underweight and underage. She had grown up on Long Island, in a religiously mixed community that was reasonably tolerant, though as a girl she did have one close friend whose father turned out to be a member of the Bund, a pro-Nazi group. An excellent student, she skipped a grade and graduated from high school at seventeen. She wanted to go to college, but her parents told her she needed to augment the family income. So Ruth went to work for a Manhattan lawyer and taught herself to execute depositions, summonses, complaints, and other legal forms. Part of her earnings went to pay her brother’s college tuition. She herself enrolled in night classes at Brooklyn College. Enlisting in June 1943, she picked the Navy because her father had served in it in World War I. Being underage, she needed a parent’s consent. Her father would not give it, but her mother did; she felt Ruth had lived a sheltered life, and getting out into the world would do her good. A pound too light, she ate as much as she could and managed to pass. The lawyer she worked for wept when she left.
Of all the women in the library group, Ruth was the one whose family lived the closest, and she would invite her new friends to travel home with her for visits. “My parents were so happy” to host the women, she said. They loved them all and made sure to find the churches they wanted to attend on Sunday. “They treated us like a nest of chicks,” Lyn Ramsdell remembered.
In Washington, there was a synagogue that had weekly Friday night parties, and toward the end of 1943 Ruth met a soldier there named Dave Mirsky, who asked her out. They dated a bit, and at some point Dave’s brother Harry came to visit him. When Dave was sent overseas with a unit of tank destroyers, Harry Mirsky stepped in and took his brother’s place courting Ruth. All the women in the library unit loved Harry Mirsky, who was gregarious and funny. He had been injured when thrown from a jeep and so was still stateside, recovering. “Guess who’s waiting for you downstairs!” they would tease Ruth, coming in as she was finishing her shift. On their dates he would sometimes ask her what she did, and she would change the subject. After two months Harry took Ruth to dinner and told her, abruptly, “I want you to be my wife.”
“I hardly know you,” she protested.
“I’ve made up my mind,” he replied winningly. They met in December 1944 and married in May. Her friends threw her a shower in a French restaurant. Ruth applied for permission to wear a wedding gown, which was considered civilian clothing. She had six days of leave in which to find a dress, arrange the ceremony, marry, and take a Catskills honeymoon. All of her Specialist Q librarian friends managed to get to Queens for the wedding. Some were granted leave; some took a chance and went briefly AWOL.
Georgia O’Connor was next in the group to marry. Despite having grown up poor, she married a wealthy heir to a publishing fortune, a man whose wartime job was tracking Nazi spies in Chicago and whose family owned a villa near Cannes that was now occupied by Germans. When her high-society mother-in-law asked what her own father did for a living, Georgia O’Connor replied, honestly, “He slops pigs.”
This kind of thing happened all the time. Amid the wartime upheaval, the wildest pairings became normal.
The women were living life in the moment, with little idea what the future held. If a woman went out on four dates with a soldier and he didn’t ask her to marry him, she figured she had bombed. Romances, naturally, blossomed on site. Marge Boynton, from Wellesley, married Willard Van Orman Quine, from Harvard, a few years after the war. Their love was born in the Booby Hatch.
Together this group of Navy women broke and rebroke the fleet code that Agnes Driscoll had laid the groundwork for, and they broke the inter-island ciphers, and they helped keep track of the movements of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Men in the Pacific, such as Joe Rochefort, Thomas Dyer, and Edwin Layton, would get credit—well deserved—for famous victories like Midway, but most Pacific achievements were group ones. “The history of the Navy in the Pacific is the history of a system, and must be written up as a system,” said Frank Raven later. “While there were a number of prominent individuals, you can’t credit any individual with winning the Battle of Midway or of breaking any major cipher system. These were crew jobs.”
And the women were the crews. They outnumbered men in virtually every unit of the Naval Annex. By 1945, Pacific decryption there consisted of 254 military men and 1,252 military women, plus 33 civilians. Though they did not receive public credit, some did become legendary in the small sealed rooms where they were working. One enlisted member of the WAVES “had such a knack for running additives across unplaced messages and recognizing valid hits that for over a year she was allowed to do almost nothing else,” one internal memo admiringly noted.
The mostly female makeup of the Annex became a logistical problem—or rather, the fact that the women could not be sent overseas created a problem. Some men would have liked a break from overseas work, and many women dearly wanted to replace them. But neither could happen. Every year, Suzanne Harpole got a standard form asking if she wanted a transfer, and every year, she asked to be sent abroad. “Every year I’d get a response saying we received your request but we are only sending men overseas. That happened all the time. I kept thinking: If they can send nurses overseas, why can’t they send us?”
Fran Steen, from Goucher, wanted to fly airplanes. She asked the Navy to send her to flight school, but her request was denied. So she took her ground exam at Washington National Airport in Virginia and learned to fly planes on her own.
As the women proved their capabilities, the few remaining male officers at the Annex were obliged to figure out, by improvising, what the women could and could not do. For example: Might women officers be taught to shoot? One male officer asked this at a staff meeting. Many code rooms at the Annex had pistols ready in the event of unwanted visitors, and pistols were worn by officers escorting “burn bags”—sacks in which all discarded papers were put—to the incinerator. When this question was raised, the men running the Annex realized that “there is no well-defined policy on teaching WAVES to shoot.” Someone pointed out that some other bureau was letting its women shoot, so an on-the-spot decision was made: yes. Fran Steen learned to shoot on the pistol range, as did Suzanne Harpole and Ann White. Their commanding officers joked that they needed smaller pistols, since the big ones spoiled the lines of their uniforms. A September 1943 memo noted that “pistol practice was progressing satisfactorily.”
The male officers also confronted the vexing question of how much authority the WAVES officers—many had risen to become watch officers—had over men working for the shifts they supervised. This was a controversial topic. Regulations were reviewed showing that the relationship of WAVES officers to enlisted men was like that of a civilian instructor. The WAVES officer had authority within her unit, as a teacher might, but did not have disciplinary power over the men. The minutes from the meeting did note that WAVES officers were entitled to salutes from enlisted men, “although it seems to be the exception rather than the rule when they are given.”
It was hard, harrowing work—all of it—and the women took it seriously. Many got sick from the crowding and the pace. Jane Case contracted mononucleosis and spent a month at Bethesda Naval Hospital. The doctor treating her ventured that she “came into the service so you could get to a higher social level,” an idea that struck Jane, given the debutante background she had fled, as hilarious.
Local institutions did what they could to honor the Navy women. There were ten thousand WAVES all told working in the Washington area, serving in varied capacities, including at the downtown Navy headquarters. Jelleff’s department store had a fashion show in which WAVES served as models, and Hecht’s had a day to honor them. They enjoyed free entry almost everywhere. Despite wartime rationing, they could buy things like jewelry, cigarettes, and nylons at the ship’s store. In their downtime they could visit the National Zoo and the Washington Monument. The Capitol Theatre had piano playing and singalongs. The National Gallery had musicians playing in its rotunda. Vi Moore heard the Budapest String Quartet perform at the Library of Congress. Tickets were 25 cents and the women would line up at eight a.m. after working the night watch. The Washington Opera—a struggling outfit—gave free performances on a barge near what is now the Watergate. The women sat on the steps or rented canoes and paddled over, resting their oars in the mud while they listened. The Marine Band played behind the U.S. Capitol; the National Symphony played in Constitution Hall. The women visited a roadside joint called River Bend in Virginia, which was a daring place to go. They jitterbugged.
Jaenn Coz, whose mother had been a flapper, would sometimes put on civilian clothes, surreptitiously, and go to the “black part of town,” as she put it, to hear Eartha Kitt. Frank Sinatra would sing at Club 400, where she went on Fridays. You could buy a pitcher of beer for a few cents. You could get good fish down at the wharf. She also learned to play bridge and to gamble.
There were splendid hotels in Washington: the Willard, the Carlton, the Statler, the Mayflower. Most held frequent dances in their ballrooms, often sponsored by individual U.S. states, with big bands and lots of swing dancing. The women would go to American University and watch the Navy men playing baseball. They would sail on Chesapeake Bay. Theaters were open all night. You could go to a movie anytime. You never knew whom you would see. One WAVES member went to dinner with a lieutenant and found herself chatting with the Eisenhowers. Another met President Roosevelt himself at a party for disabled veterans.
Many of the women had never had to fend for themselves, and now the ones living out of barracks had to figure out where to obtain pea coal or cook a big piece of meat that some Marines had brought to a party. A group of WAVES officers lived in a house where there were seven women and six beds. The women hot-bedded it, taking whatever bed was open. They would leave notes for one another on the pillows, sharing tips about hotels and restaurants that were giving away things free or had good discounts.
And they traveled. They could go anywhere on a train for a discounted fare. Trains around the country had romantic names like the Rocky Mountain Rocket and nicknames like the Grunt and Crawl. If they had a thirty-six-hour leave, the women would go to New York City. If they had seventy-two hours, they’d go farther. Ida Mae Olson invited her friend Mary Lou to visit her family in Colorado. Mary Lou had joined the WAVES because her parents had been killed in a car accident and her wealthy uncle had not known what to do with her. Mary Lou was terrified when she saw a group of Native Americans and asked Ida Mae if they would attack. When she saw the dryland farm, she asked if it was okay if she took off her shoes and ran in the soft fresh dirt, something she had not been able to do, growing up in a city.
The women hitched rides on military planes. When Jane Case learned that her father was dying, her commanding officer gave her emergency leave and got her on a plane to New York. Her father was too far gone to recognize her. Jane always thought that if she had just been able to tell him she worked in “communications,” he—having done work for the Navy—would have known what that one word meant. It would have been a chance to make him proud of her, but she never got it.
Even just in the rooming houses, there was a lot of mixing and mingling. Suzanne Harpole settled into a boardinghouse run by a Mrs. Covington, from an eminent Washington family, and found herself eating alongside Canadians and White Russians. The conversation was endlessly stimulating. People of all backgrounds were thrown together. The war, for her, was “this period of very creative thinking and concern about what life was all about, and what societies were all about.” At the Annex, a weekly current events presentation gave the latest war news. Suzanne’s brother was a Marine who led a dog platoon—dogs were used to sniff out enemy ambushers—and when the presenters announced the landing on Bougainville of the first dog platoon, Suzanne felt like shouting, “That’s my brother!”
The women’s freedom brought other revelations, though, about the uglier side of their own country. Washington was in many ways a southern city, with a segregated public school system and black residents often consigned to the poorest and least well-served parts of the city. Nearby Virginia was worse. Northerners were shocked to encounter such strict racial divisions. When Marjorie Faeder boarded a train to Virginia Beach to take a quick honeymoon with her new husband, the couple sat down in a deserted car with plenty of seats. To their dismay they were told they were in the “colored” car—they had not known such a thing existed—and shooed into the whites-only car. Nancy Dobson was horrified every time she took a bus from Washington into Virginia. When the bus arrived in the middle of the bridge, all African American passengers had to get up and move to the back, and there was “just this deadly hush.” Frances Lynd, from Bryn Mawr, needed to buy some furniture, so she engaged two African American men with a pickup truck to take her downtown to get it. When she jumped in the cab with them—being from Philadelphia, she thought nothing of it—the men were appalled and fearful to be seen with a white woman sitting next to them.
There was periodic unrest in the city, and in the country, as civil rights advocates pushed to advance social changes that were taking place as a result of the war. In 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt and WAVES director Mildred McAfee managed to gain entry for African American women into the WAVES. But there would be no racial experimenting at the stodgy and sometimes paranoid Naval Annex, where top officers considered any newcomer—anybody with an unorthodox background—to be a security risk. In a June 1945 memo, Commander J. N. Wenger wrote that he had explored the “question of employment of colored WAVES at Naval Communications Annex” and felt integrating the code-breaking unit would be too risky. He concluded that it would be “unwise to conduct an experiment of such serious implications” in a unit where security was so important, and ventured that “there are many other activities in the Navy where experiments of this sort can be carried on without so much danger in the event that difficulties arise.” Black WAVES would have to take their patriotism, their intellect, and their talent elsewhere, alas.
As hard as the women worked, there were lighthearted moments even in the code rooms. One night Jane Case’s unit got word that an admiral was coming to visit, and they needed to have their unit spotless by the next day. It was Jane’s job to operate the buffing machine, which seemed nearly as big as a baby elephant, and harder to handle. She flipped the “on” switch and nothing happened; peering underneath a table, she saw the cord wasn’t plugged in and crawled underneath to plug it. Pleased that she had solved her own problem, she backed out to see the machine flying all over the office. By the time she wrestled it into submission, the place was a disaster and they had to spend the whole night picking up messages before they could get it painted and cleaned and buffed.
Also in her office were two enlisted women whose behavior Jane observed with fascination. They sat together against a wall and did a lot of the typing. Jane liked to think of them as Myrt and Gert. One was married and one was engaged, but their husband and fiancé were away, and they used the war as an opportunity for avid extracurricular dating. “They wouldn’t date anybody under a captain,” she remembered. “They were very fussy about who they would date.” People in the unit were pretty sure Myrt and Gert were having sex during their assignations. Jane had always been taught at the Chapin School that a woman must be properly introduced to a man before going out with him, so for the entirety of the war she did not date. “When I think of it—I could have gone out with a lot of people,” she said, regretfully, later. “The rules were so set, all my life.”
For many other women, their social lives were as exhausting as the code-breaking work itself. Edith Reynolds, from Vassar, found herself courted by an ardent Irish major who at one point had been in charge of mules—a bona fide muleteer—for the British Army. There was another suitor she wasn’t wild about who flew his mother from Seattle to meet her. “He wanted me to know you first,” the woman told her. “First what?” Edith wondered. Then she realized, with shock, that he thought they were going to get married. She broke up with him and he married her roommate.
One code breaker was standing in a movie line and realized there was a naval officer behind her. She turned to salute him, and he was so captivated by how flustered she was that they exchanged addresses and later married. At the group house where Edith Reynolds was living, they had a party and she noticed a man expertly cracking eggs into the eggnog. He was the plumber. “I came to fix a pipe, but this looked like so much fun, I stayed,” he told her.
The women were working so hard that it was hardly a surprise they would blow off steam, but it did irritate some inhabitants of the neighborhood where they worked. On June 16, 1943, a Washington lawyer, James Mann, wrote a letter of complaint to Captain E. E. Stone at the Naval Annex. “I hesitate to write this letter and I sincerely hope my purpose will not be misconstrued,” the lawyer began. “For some time it has been impossible for the people living on the north side of Van Ness Street, between Nebraska and Wisconsin Avenues, to sleep between eleven p.m. and 2:30 a.m. This is due to the unusual amount of noise made by the young men and women stationed at the Communications Annex.” He reported that “one morning this week about eight Waves walked up the middle of Van Ness Street at 1:30 in the morning singing. In about five or ten minutes two marines came along singing at the top of their voices.” The upset lawyer noted that “as the Waves and the seamen become better acquainted they are following their natural inclinations and now the street is quite a necking place.”
