Code Girls, page 22
Captain Stone wrote a polite letter thanking the lawyer and assuring him that he would endeavor “to end the unpleasant situation which you report.”
While their high spirits were tolerated—up to a point—the logical consequence was not. Pregnancy was forbidden in the U.S. Navy. And yet pregnancies did occur. When Jane Case was living in a barracks, an enlisted woman got larger and larger. What struck Jane, in retrospect, was “the quiet ignoring of her. I was one of them that just would walk by and just say hello and that was it. I was stunned more than anything.”
The penalty was discharge—and humiliation. Standing “captain’s mast” is the traditional naval hearing to consider a possible offense, and some pregnant women were subjected to it. Jaenn Coz remembered that “when we all lived in barracks, several girls got knocked up, and it was a sad thing because she had to stand a captain’s mast and watch as they ripped off her buttons and ripped off her chevrons and just humiliated her to death.… We all stood there and cried… because it was such a damned sad situation.”
Nor did marriage make it okay. In late 1943, Wellesley’s Bea Norton, now married, became pregnant and notified her superiors. “Horrified, they gave me three days to get out of uniform and told me I could consider it a discharge with honor.” Her boss, Frank Raven, was furious at the rule and begged her to come back as a civilian, but she was too tired and angry, and she resigned in December. The same thing happened to Frances Lynd from Bryn Mawr. She was working ciphers used by rice merchants and island weathermen and thought it was the most interesting work she could imagine. When she married her college boyfriend, she tried to avoid getting pregnant, but nobody had given her good information on birth control—her mother was dead—and she didn’t know how to use a diaphragm. She conceived on her honeymoon. One minute she was a respected naval officer doing work she loved and valued; the next minute she was an isolated housewife, living with her husband and several other adults. The only clothing that fit was her naval raincoat, which technically she was no longer entitled to wear. She struggled to keep house despite wartime rationing, when some days the only things she could buy were, say, bologna and canned pineapple. She tried to make a meal out of those two ingredients and was rebuked by her housemates. When her son was born, she enjoyed having an infant but later experienced profound postnatal depression.
“I felt like I had gone from being everything,” she wrote in a memoir called Saga of Myself, “to being nothing.”
The women tended to ignore the hallowed Navy rule that forbade fraternizing between officers and enlisted persons. At the boardinghouse where Suzanne Harpole was living, there was an enlisted woman named Roberta, who had attended Flora MacDonald College in North Carolina. Suzanne and Roberta worked in the same office doing the same thing, and it seemed to them ridiculous not to be friends. Also boarding at Mrs. Covington’s were two women employed at Arlington Hall, and the four would take trips to Williamsburg, Luray Caverns, and New York. The two Naval Annex women and the two Arlington Hall women could not talk about what they did, of course, so even as they admired Raleigh Tavern and the House of Burgesses, they remained unaware of something even more interesting: They were all breaking codes.
For the most part, the two large cohorts of Washington-based female code breakers—Navy, Army—did not interact, or not knowingly, though they did cross paths. WAVES Barracks D, as big as it was, became overcrowded, and some Navy women went to live at Arlington Farms. Apart from that, the women code breakers likely ran into one another at all sorts of places—restaurants, movie theaters, streetcars—without realizing they were working on the same project. How could they? The work was top secret, and they couldn’t talk about it.
Occasionally, though, a few did get wind of what was going on across the river. Dorothy Ramale, the would-be math teacher from Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, was initially hired by Arlington Hall, where she did such expert work as a “reader”—one of the most elite jobs—that she made a break into a Japanese code that led to the creation of a whole new unit. Her boss would not let her set foot in the new room, for fear he would lose her to whatever was going on in it, so she never knew what the break consisted of. After a year, she learned about the naval operation, applied to work there, and was eagerly accepted. The officer housing allowance was her incentive. She was able to live at McLean Gardens with her sister, who was a g-girl at the Pentagon, and so she didn’t have to spend her full allowance on housing. She used the stipend to buy a car: preparation for seeing the world, as she yearned to do.
Top officials at both code-breaking complexes did communicate, however. The Naval Annex had formal weekly liaison meetings with Arlington Hall, and it was a WAVES officer, Ensign Janet Burchell, who crossed the river to serve as Navy liaison for these meetings. The position required her to know about the code and cipher systems both operations were working. Ensign Burchell attended meetings where the two services discussed the forwarding of intercepts and captured materials; duplicate messages sent in different systems; reports of POW interrogations that might contain material useful to both; and other odds and ends. At one, Burchell brought a request from Frank Raven, who was trying to a break a message in Thai and knew that there was a professor at Arlington Hall who might be able to help.
The Navy women had just missed taking part in the code-breaking triumph at Midway, but ten months later they were fully embedded for, and actively engaged in, the other great code-breaking event of the Pacific naval war. On April 13, 1943, a message came through along the E-14 channel of JN-25, addressed to “Solomons Defense Force, Air Group 204, AirFlot 26, Commander Ballale Garrison Force.” The code breakers weren’t able to recover the whole message right away, but the fragments they did recover suggested that the commander in chief of the combined fleet—Admiral Yamamoto himself—was headed to Ballale Island (now Balalae) on April 18. Intelligence officers concluded that this was an inspection tour.
The initial break was made in the Pacific, but Washington also got busy, recovering additives and code groups so that blanks could be filled in. More messages were intercepted, and the fast-working, far-flung teams exchanged findings. Among those digging out code recoveries was Fran Steen from Goucher. The inter-island cipher JN-20 “carried further details” about Yamamoto’s upcoming trip, so Raven’s crew of women were busy as well, adding facts and insights. Together the code breakers were able to reconstruct Yamamoto’s precise itinerary, which called for a day of hops between Japanese bases in the Solomon Islands and New Britain. Their translation concluded that the commander would “depart RR (Rabaul) at 0600 in a medium attack plane escorted by six fighters; arrive RXZ (Ballale) at 0800”; depart at 1100 and land at RXP (Buin) at 1110; leave there at 1400 and return to Rabaul at 1540, traveling by plane and, at one point, minesweeper. He would be conducting an inspection tour and visiting the sick and wounded.
It was an extraordinary moment. The Americans knew exactly where the enemy’s most valuable—and irreplaceable—naval commander would be, and when. Yamamoto was known for punctuality. Far above the pay grade of those working additive recovery, Nimitz and other top war officials decided Yamamoto would be shot down. It was not a light decision, assassinating an enemy commander, but they made it. The itinerary, as one memo later put it, signed the admiral’s “death warrant.”
In what was known as Operation Vengeance, sixteen U.S. Army fighter planes, Lockheed P-38s, went into the air on April 18, taking off from a Guadalcanal airfield. They knew Yamamoto would be flying in a Japanese bomber the Americans called a Betty, escorted by Zero fighter planes. The Americans calculated their own flight plan to meet the route they anticipated Yamamoto would be taking, planning to encounter him over Bougainville. They flew for so long that the pilots were getting drowsy; the white coastline of Bougainville was racing beneath them when one of the pilots broke radio silence and shouted, “Bogeys! Eleven o’clock!” There they were, on the horizon: six Zeros, two Bettys. The Japanese did not see the Americans at first, but once they did, the escorting Zeros moved to block the U.S. fighter planes, firing so the bombers could escape. There was a hectic battle in which it never became clear who had shot down whom, but one Betty bomber plummeted into the trees, the other into the surf. Yamamoto’s body was found in the Bougainville jungle, his white-gloved hand clutching his sword.
Cheering broke out at the Naval Annex when they heard the news. The architect of the Pearl Harbor attack was dead. The payback felt complete.
“Let me tell you, the day his plane went down, there was a big hoop-de-doo,” recalled Myrtle Otto, the Boston-bred code breaker who had beat her own brothers in the race to enlist. “We really felt we had done something really fantastic, because that was—well, it was more than the beginning of the end. They knew it was coming down, but it was really—that was an exciting day.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Forlorn Shoe
Spring 1944
Arlington Hall, being more of a civilian operation, was a far cry from the Naval Annex when it came to attitude and culture. The Army’s suburban Virginia code-breaking operation was equally serious when it came to work, but far more tolerant and freewheeling when it came to life. One day Dot Braden got a glimpse of just how open-minded her workplace was. Feeling nauseous while she worked at her table, Dot visited the dispensary to get something to settle her stomach. “Are you sure you’re not pregnant?” the nurse asked.
“I don’t think so,” replied Dot, an answer that instantly struck her as preposterous. She didn’t think so? Of course she was not pregnant! There was no way she could be. Why would she even have said that? Probably because she was flustered and taken aback by the question. Looking around, though, she realized how many women at Arlington Hall were. The nurses treated them with kind consideration and nobody expected them to quit. Some might be married; some might not be. Nobody asked. Things happened. Washington was wide-open. Soldiers and sailors were everywhere, and anything went. Men might be shipped out without warning, and couples who were about to get married didn’t have a chance. Sometimes the wedding, if it happened, happened somewhat after the fact.
For her part, Dot kept her chastity intact. For her, life in Washington meant writing letters to men and having fun with other women. The same was true of her friend Crow, who was fun-loving but shy and didn’t date much. Neither of them had much time to: At Arlington Hall their schedule consisted of seven days of code-breaking work, followed by an eighth day off, followed by seven more days of work. On their one day off they’d be “dead dog tired,” as Dot put it, and would walk over to Columbia Pike to do errands and grocery shopping.
The adventures they enjoyed in their free time were tame and lighthearted. Once, Dot had a friend visiting from Lynchburg, and they decided to attend one of the hotel balls. As an icebreaker, the women were told to stand on one side of the dance floor and the men on the other. The women were instructed to take off a shoe and throw it onto the dance floor, and the men were to pick up a random shoe and dance with whoever owned it. But the problem with shoes was this: People didn’t have many, and they couldn’t get new ones often. Shoes were rationed, and they had to save up ration coupons to buy a new pair. In the interim, all anybody could do was get their existing shoes half-soled. With all the walking Dot did between her apartment and Arlington Hall—at least three miles each day—she was always wearing through the bottom of her shoes. She had purchased a pair of blue I. Miller shoes she cherished, but for the dance she had worn her other good pair, strappy white sandals, and there was a hole as big as a quarter in the sole.
Dot wasn’t aware of the hole, so she lobbed the sandal onto the floor, and it flipped upside down in such a way that all the lights in the room seemed to be shining on that hole. No man grabbed it, and the shoe lay there, sad-looking, while couples danced around it. Dot didn’t have a partner for that dance. Her friend was a giggly girl and they both thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, Dot’s forlorn shoe upturned with that awful hole in it, and no man willing to pick it up.
They did other small things that seemed daring. Dot sometimes would experiment with using carbon paper to color her hair. Hair dye was expensive, but you could sprinkle water on the carbon paper and smear it on your hair to darken it. Crow joked that she was going to tell people her roommate dyed her hair. Dot knew she wouldn’t. The carbon paper didn’t work all that well, but they did their best with what they had.
Not being military, Dot and Crow couldn’t take the long train journeys the Navy women did; or, if they wanted to, they would have to pay full fare and risk not getting a seat. The military enjoyed fare discounts and seating priority. Even so, the two friends managed to find plenty to occupy their rare free time. They went window-shopping downtown and perfected the art of looking dressy with very little money. Dot managed to acquire a silver fox stole. They toured the museums and monuments and visited the National Cathedral, which was still under construction, but awe-inspiring even so. They took the train up to Baltimore, which had nice stores, to buy hats. In downtown Washington, they bought lipstick at Woodward & Lothrop. Back at the apartment, Crow’s sister Louise—aka Sister—had a tendency toward melancholy, and Dot decided to cheer her up by throwing a party for everybody living in Fillmore Gardens, a gesture that resulted in the young women’s being invited to reciprocal soirees in the apartments of neighbors, who were mostly young couples.
On their day off, Dot and Crow sometimes took a succession of buses and streetcars to do a bit of sunbathing and swimming. A popular Chesapeake Bay day resort, Beverly Beach, offered the enticements of a sandy beach area as well as a dance floor, bandstand, and slot machines. Colonial Beach, in Virginia, had a bathing area along the Potomac. Getting to either place took so long that it would nearly be time to come home by the time the women arrived, but they went anyway. The two code breakers would manage to get burned in what little time they had. When they got back they always suspected that Sister, who was fair and who wouldn’t often risk going to the beach, was secretly glad to see them so red and sunburned. They thought her jealousy was funny. As they went about their travels, Dot would make tart observations about people, like, “She goes to church too much,” and Crow would laugh and say, “Dot, you are an original.” Dot was an entertainer and Crow was an appreciative audience. They were entirely unalike, and entirely bonded. At Christmas, on their modest salary, Crow gave Dot a tiny pair of gold earrings. Dot felt closer to Crow in some ways than to her own siblings.
Some adventures transpired closer to home. There was a rather odd woman in their neighborhood who sometimes gave Dot and Crow a ride to Arlington Hall. She wore what she called “dirt-colored clothes,” so she wouldn’t have to wash them often. Dot and Crow appreciated the ride, so they tried to overlook her eccentricity, but when she backed into another car—to punish the driver for honking at her—they decided they’d rather walk from then on.
From time to time Dot did take the train home to Lynchburg, and sometimes she glimpsed WAVES making the same journey. Loads of girl sailors would pile on. Sitting in her seat, if she was lucky enough to get one—once, she had to make the trip standing on an outside platform, along with Crow and Liz and Louise, getting covered with smoke—she reflected enviously that the Navy women were cute girls and their naval uniforms looked very smart. Unlike the WAVES, she and her Arlington Hall colleagues were largely unrecognized for their war service. They were not feted or celebrated, and nobody asked them to model in fashion shows. People in her family knew Dot was doing something for the war, but they assumed it was secretarial and low-level. She could not even tell her mother. But even as she admired the Navy women’s outfits, it never occurred to Dot that the WAVES might be engaged in the same war work that she was, endeavoring—just as she was—to beat back the fascist menace and break the codes that would bring the boys home. The very thought that so many young women were all working the same top secret job, Dot and Crow and those distant, glamorous-looking WAVES, never crossed her mind. Nor was she remotely aware that the long-simmering competition between the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army had come to a head as the Army struggled to match the Navy’s efforts in the Pacific Ocean.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Hell’s Half-Acre”
April 1943
Young Annie Caracristi washed her hair with laundry soap. Observing her, Wilma Berryman felt convinced of it. Fels-Naptha, most likely: the strong-smelling bar soap meant for treating stains. You weren’t supposed to use Fels-Naptha on your skin unless you had something dire like poison ivy—certainly not on your hair—but some people did, these days. Shampoo, like so many items, was not always easy to come by. The results were not ideal: Annie’s hair was thick and curly and flew everywhere. But a tendency to dishevelment only increased Wilma’s fondness for her.
Blue-eyed, blond, and good-natured, Ann Caracristi came to work at Arlington Hall each day wearing bobby socks, flat shoes, and a pleated skirt that billowed and swung. She looked like a bobby-soxer, the kind of carefree and heedless college girl who lived for boyfriends and swing dances. But appearances were deceiving. What hidden depths Ann Caracristi had. What capabilities. General Douglas MacArthur did not know it, but his secret weapon—or one of them—was this affable and somewhat cosseted twenty-three-year-old from the upper middle classes of exurban Bronxville, New York. Intellectually ferocious, Annie worked twelve-hour shifts, day after day. The only time she missed work for any time at all was when she came down with chicken pox. She phoned apologetically to say in a tiny, pitiful voice that she could not come in. Wilma Berryman took her some soup.
