Code Girls, page 30
As the summer of 1943 approached, John Howard told Louise Pearsall she needed to learn how to shoot a pistol. Some members of the mathematical research unit were relocating to Dayton, and she was one of those picked to go. She began doing target practice with a.38. In early May she and four other women, with about the same number of men, got their guns, boarded the train, and headed west to Dayton. Soon they too found themselves billeted at Sugar Camp. Unlike their bunkmates, these women knew why they were there. They were going to help make the bombes work.
Joe Desch was working to perfect the first two experimental prototypes, called Adam and Eve. He was under terrible pressure. Commander Ralph Meader was a taskmaster who used guilt as a motivator, and he was always telling Desch to hurry up, hurry up, that he’d be responsible for the deaths of countless more boys, more sailors and merchant seamen, if he didn’t come through with a high-speed bombe—and soon. Meader would tell the bombe designers that the U.S. Navy would have lost the Battle of the Coral Sea if they’d been the ones on that code-breaking team.
It wasn’t just a matter of getting the math to work; it was a matter of getting the machinery to run. The bulky bombes, which stood seven feet tall and ten feet long and weighed more than two tons, had hundreds of moving parts, and even a bit of copper dust could foul the works. “The design of the Bombe eventually required material and components from some 12,000 different suppliers,” noted one memo. Some components did not exist on the commercial market and had to be designed and made. The designers needed diodes, miniature gas tubes, high-speed commutators, and the carbon brushes the wheels would come into contact with. As the women in Building 26 wired commutators, the staff in NCR’s Electrical Research unit swelled from seventeen in August 1942 to eight hundred in May 1943, building the machines and perfecting the design.
In the Navy, a newly launched and commissioned warship makes a “shakedown cruise” to work out the kinks and get ship and crew running smoothly. The bombe’s shakedown cruise commenced in May 1943, around the time Louise Pearsall arrived. It was her team’s job to troubleshoot, together with Desch and Howard and some of the men who built the bombe. “The first two experimental bombes were under preliminary tests,” noted a daily log for May 3, 1943, showing the many things that could—and did—go wrong: “Encountered some incorrect wiring and shorting of the wheel segments by small copper particles” was one of innumerable entries recording snafus.
It soon turned hot and humid in Dayton, a midwestern river town, but fortunately Building 26 was air-conditioned. Even so, the unit worked in a fever. Louise Pearsall’s team, which worked apart from the WAVES wiring the wheels, would make up a menu, set the commutators, then start the bombe going, the wheels spinning to see whether the menu produced a “hit,” meaning that the permutation they’d entered into the machine could plausibly represent that day’s key setting. They would test the hit on an M-9, a small machine that replicated an Enigma. The M-9 had four rotating wheels, just like Enigma. The team would feed a message in and see if it produced German. If so, they had hit the jackpot: Their permutation represented the key setting. “It was fun,” Louise later said. “Because I was working for all these engineers and mathematicians.”
Louise got one of the first jackpots. She came up with a menu that produced a hit, and when they sent the results to Washington, a colleague there called back and congratulated her. “You just cracked one,” they told her. Her break provided evidence that the bombes could do what they were supposed to.
By June, the bombes were working, but fitfully. More machines were brought online and had to be shaken down. The daily log shows the problems the team had to cope with. On June 29, both Adam and Eve needed repair. There was “one bad red commutator”; Adam needed oil; “a short was present at the end of the run but disappeared during the test.” On July 1, “Adam blew relay”; “Eve has become temperamental”; “now we are completely shut down while maintenance is finishing both machines.” An hour later Eve was back in operation. Two hours later “Adam finally fixed.” Forty-five minutes later “Eve is out again.” And so on. On July 13 Eve was “out due to broken brushes.” Two days later, brushes on the timers “had become so soaked with oil that they were continually causing shorts.” Diodes and relays gave problems. So did things called pigtails. Another day, “Eve’s troubles were conclusively found by Mr. Howard to be tied up with her rewinding trouble.” Meanwhile, the log noted, “Girls are getting tired and are making errors again, causing reruns.”
Louise worked herself into exhaustion. On July 6 she was able to take a weeklong leave and go home to Elgin, where her father “pumped the hell” out of her, as she put it, trying to get her to reveal what she was doing. She didn’t crack. He lived the rest of his life without knowing that Louise had put his two years of college tuition payments to better use than he ever could have imagined.
By September the team had put the finishing touches on the first generation of high-speed bombes. Over the summer the Navy had constructed a “laboratory building” in the Mount Vernon Seminary compound in Washington, a big multistory structure with sturdy floors of reinforced concrete. In Dayton, flatbed cars pulled up in the dark of night on the railroad spur behind Building 26, and crates were loaded aboard. Other bombes would follow, more than a hundred in all, in the weeks that followed. NCR also manufactured M-9s and shipped those as well. Louise Pearsall rode with one of the first shipments. The train was late leaving. Louise was sitting in her seat, wondering why they were delayed, when her boss, John Howard, sat down and confided that men had been detained who seemed to be suspicious and possibly were going to sabotage the train.
She and Howard were the only ones who knew the reason for the delay. Louise Pearsall spent the long overnight trip back to Washington sitting bolt upright in her seat.
When they arrived, the male officers went to the main Navy headquarters to check in. Louise and the other enlisted WAVES had to go to a central facility at the Navy Yard, however, where the women’s formal transfer back from Dayton was processed. The sailors at the processing station started making snide comments. “You’re from Dayton!” the men exclaimed, as if this fact was something to be ashamed of. The women were taken aback.
Louise, tired and impatient, told the sailors she and the other women needed to be processed through quickly. “We have an assignment to go back to.”
“That’s what they all said,” sneered the sailor.
Louise had no idea why she and her colleagues were being jeered. What the women could not know was that during the summer, Commander Meader had ejected a number of WAVES from Dayton, returning them to Washington for perceived misbehavior—in the Navy’s view—that identified them as security risks. (Some of the other women in Dayton, who knew what was going on, referred to this as “pruning the group.”) Records show that on August 20, 1943, an enlisted member of the WAVES had been transferred out of Dayton and sent back to central processing in D.C.; she had shown up at the dispensary in Dayton with heavy menstrual bleeding and an examination had shown an “incomplete abortion at six weeks before entering the navy.” That same day, another yeoman was sent down who had shown up for menstrual bleeding and abdominal cramps; her past medical history showed “induced abortion before entering the service.” Back in 1942, when the WAVES were formed and regulations drawn up, some officials worried that the no-pregnancy rule would prompt women to seek an abortion in order to join. It would appear they had been correct.
A few others had been sent down for violations that the memos coyly declined to spell out. On August 14, 1943, one WAVES enlistee was sent back from Dayton along with a memo saying “because of condition X she is considered unsuited for duty.” The memo didn’t say what “condition X” was, but it seems likely the WAVES enlistee was pregnant. On July 30, another Dayton WAVES member had been sent back. “Fails to meet qualification X,” her memo said. Another was sent back for “malingering,” another for being “undisciplined.” Precisely because security was so tight, WAVES were even more likely to be expelled from Dayton than from other postings.
In short, women from Dayton had acquired a bad reputation in the processing center—by the sexist standards of the day—and the men assumed that this new bunch had done something reprehensible. Louise had no idea about any of this. She protested the disrespectful treatment. “If you don’t believe me, call Lt. Howard,” she told them. “We came back with him.”
But the sailors wouldn’t call her boss. Smirking, they ordered the women to start washing windows.
Finally a female officer from Navy headquarters came looking for them. She could not believe what she saw: her best picked group of female mathematicians, pride of the bombe project, scrubbing windows.
“My God, they’re our top girls!” she told the men.
When the women made it to the Naval Annex to help get the first shipment of bombes installed, Louise learned that John Howard had been desperately trying to find them, asking, “What the heck’s happened to my girls?”
More bombes arrived from Dayton, and the crew in Washington worked overtime to get them up and running. The Annex created a crib watch, a decryption watch, a traffic preparation watch. Several hundred of the women at Sugar Camp made the return trip east from Dayton to Washington, to live in Barracks D and run the bombe machines, though they still did not know the machines’ true purpose.
Louise Pearsall, who did, continued troubleshooting, assigned to evaluate the printouts the machines produced. Though the D.C. bombe crew would soon consist of nearly seven hundred women, it was a smaller group at first, and she worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day. Everybody socialized together—men, women, enlisted, officers, liaison workers from MIT and IBM—and they socialized intensely. The lone male sailor on the bombe crew threw a party at which Louise was introduced to Southern Comfort. It took her a day to recover from her hangover, furiously drinking Coke, since she didn’t drink coffee.
Washington had always been a bibulous town, and wartime was no exception. The code breakers mastered the region’s alcohol-related regulations, learning that it was necessary to travel to Maryland or Virginia to buy alcohol by the bottle and that Virginia’s state-operated liquor stores closed early. Drinking was one way to relieve “the tension, the pressure, the trauma,” as Louise put it. It wasn’t just the code breakers who were stressed and overwhelmed. Everybody in Washington felt the pace of war. Louise knew a woman in charge of military train schedules, and she was tearing her hair out.
The bombe was a “high, high, high priority project,” as Louise later put it, and everybody on it was important. Once, when a sloppy (or tired) operator threw a printout into a burn bag, John Howard had to stand on a chair and impress upon them the life-and-death gravity of their work.
Just how important they were became clear when Louise’s brother Burt, a hotshot Marine pilot, tried to get into the Naval Annex compound to visit her. Both of Louise’s brothers were in the military, and both were big deals at home in Elgin. Not here. Here, Louise was the big deal. When Burt approached the first set of Marine guards at the Naval Annex, accompanied by a couple of pilot buddies, he informed the guards—fellow Marines—that they were going inside to see his sister. “No, you’re not,” the guards replied, barring their way. Louise had to come outside after her shift. They hired a cab and asked the driver to take them slowly down Constitution Avenue, and Louise showed her younger brother the Washington sights.
That visit was a rare respite from a workday that was all-consuming. The Enigma project took its toll on everybody connected with it. In the fall of 1943, Joseph Wenger, one of the top officials in the Annex, had a nervous breakdown so severe that he had to spend six months in Florida. Joe Desch broke down as well. In 1944, weighed down by Commander Ralph Meader’s tongue-lashings, Desch stormed out of NCR and spent several weeks on a friend’s farm outside Dayton, felling trees and chopping wood. The bombe design project completed, he’d been assigned to develop a machine for Japanese codes. Desch had four nephews serving in the Pacific, one of whom died during this time. “He had nightmares for years about men dying,” said his daughter, Deborah Anderson.
The people working on the Enigma project were mathematicians and engineers. They were precise, conscientious people who liked to solve problems and build beautiful things, not kill people. The work was hard on the women as well, particularly those like Louise who knew the stakes. One of the women in charge of maintaining the commutators, Charlotte McLeod, from Buffalo, New York, would time her visits home to coincide with a big predicted snowstorm coming in off the lake, so that she would be snowed in and would get a few extra days to recover. A daily log on February 25, 1944, noted that a WAVES member named Olson had been sent to her barracks, “a general wreck of jitters—unable to work.” Another was reprimanded for coming in “slightly intoxicated,” according to the log book. “She wasn’t bad, but she obviously has been drinking.” Another log entry spoke of “terrific pressure.”
However they chose to relieve their stress, the women were loath to abandon their duties for long. Louise Pearsall was annoyed when, toward the end of 1943, she was told she could not remain in the ranks of the enlisted. Given her detailed knowledge of one of the war’s most top secret projects, the Navy insisted she become an officer. In January 1944 she was sent to Smith, where she reencountered some of the enlisted women she had met at boot camp, also now being promoted. They were old salts and teased the young college women just coming in, giving them “little side instructions” about how to comport themselves as naval officers. Occasionally they would tell the new women the wrong thing, for fun. Louise was antsy to get back to work. For something to do, she played the snare drum in the band, and when they paraded during their graduation as officers, it was raining and the drum she was holding sank lower and lower as it filled with rainwater.
A newly minted naval officer is rarely sent back to the same place where he or she worked as an enlisted person, but Louise Pearsall was a special case. After two months at Smith she returned to the Naval Annex during the week ending March 18, 1944, wearing her ensign bars, and found herself accorded more respect than the last time she had been processed through. A lieutenant working in personnel said John Howard had been driving them crazy, asking when Louise would get back. She was sitting in a routine orientation class when a lieutenant commander came in and told her to go on back to work. “Louise, would you get out of here right now?” he told her. “I’m tired of listening to your boss.”
Everybody became an old salt pretty quickly. After just six months in the Navy, the young women who had wired the commutators—and now were running the bombes in Washington—found themselves supervising women even younger and greener than they were, many of them eighteen-year-olds fresh out of boot camp at Hunter College. Jimmie Lee Hutchison, the switchboard operator from Oklahoma, was in charge of a four-person bombe bay. Jimmie Lee’s friend Beatrice worked a machine nearby. Their workplace took up the entire bottom floor of the laboratory building, which had been built in the old Mount Vernon Seminary compound near the Navy chapel. It was a hangar-like space with three rooms, each room divided into “bays” containing four machines. There were 120 bombe machines all told. The machines were noisy; on summer days the room got so hot that the women opened the windows to keep from passing out. When they did, the racket could be heard from outside on Nebraska Avenue.
As a bay supervisor, Jimmie Lee Hutchison had an assistant and four operators. When she came on duty, she signed a logbook that lay on top of a printer near the bombes. It was Jimmie Lee’s job to keep the log, supervise the bay, and set up one of the machines according to a menu she was given. Doing so entailed moving commutator wheels and rotating them to the starting position. The wheels were heavy—weighing nearly two pounds—and had to be carefully placed so they wouldn’t fly off and break somebody’s leg. She would set the wheels, sit on a stool, and wait to see if she got a hit. The machines ran so fast that they couldn’t stop immediately. They had a rudimentary memory, so the wheels would run for a few seconds, then stop, back up, and generate a printout recording the setting that produced the hit. Jimmie Lee would take the printout to a window where a gloved hand belonging to an unseen female officer would emerge and take it. It was tiring work that required energy and concentration. The women hated the long “hoppities,” when they were testing a possible wheel turnover and had to get up and down, up and down, changing the wheels several times on the same run.
Jimmie Lee by now had married her high school sweetheart, Bob Powers. By a lucky coincidence, Bob had been assigned to ferry planes into the airfields at Dayton, bringing planes up from North Carolina and from Bowman Field in Kentucky. They married at Bowman Field on June 18, 1943. Back in Dayton, Jimmie Lee’s WAVES friends threw them a party. After that, the newlyweds had spent time together whenever Bob Powers flew into Dayton. Sometimes he would get in before she finished her shift, so he’d wait in the hotel room until she got cleaned up, and they’d go out to dinner. One time Jimmie Lee lost her engagement ring down the sink in her cabin and was frantic until the custodian kindly removed the trap and fished it out. Neither Jimmie Lee nor Bob had ever heard of trick-or-treating, which was not something people did in Oklahoma, so their first Halloween, in October 1943, they felt like kids.
After Jimmie Lee was sent to Washington, though, their visits were few and far between.
As Jimmie Lee and the other women settled into their duties, they became part of an Enigma code-breaking chain that was virtually all female. When a message arrived at the Annex, it would first go to the cribbing station. The cribbers had one of the hardest jobs, sifting through intelligence from the war theater, including ship sinkings, U-boat sightings, weather messages, and battle outcomes. Scanning intercepts, they had to select a message that was not too long—a long message might involve more than one setting—and guess what it likely said. Juxtaposing crib and message, they had to devise a menu. Louise Pearsall did this; so did Fran Steen, the biology major from Goucher College. Fran had spent a year on the Japanese project, then moved to the German ciphers. Promoted to watch officer, Fran had access to a secure line that connected her to a counterpart in England. Her code name was “Pretty Weather,” and her British contact—male; she never met him—went by “Virgin Sturgeon.”
