Code Girls, page 33
It was crucial that the Germans not only believe in Patton’s fictional First Army Group, but also continue to believe in it even after the D-Day landing. They must continue to think that the Normandy invasion was a diversionary attack to distract attention from the big one coming in the Pas de Calais. Believing that, the Germans would keep the bulk of their defensive forces in the Pas de Calais, giving the Allies time to establish a Normandy beachhead and begin the liberation march to Paris.
For a fictitious army to be believed, it had to send the exact sort of radio traffic that a real army would send. The radio traffic had to come into existence well before the attack was launched, and it had to stay in place for weeks after, even as the same transmitting stations were being used for real military communications. Creating and directing this traffic was a complex and highly important job; there could be no mistakes, nothing strange or untoward to attract notice. Much of it would be done at Arlington Hall by the women who had fallen for that inviting pamphlet and joined the WACs.
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way. The ploughman plods homeward his weary way. The ploughman plods his weary way homeward. The ploughman his weary way homeward plods. The ploughman his weary way plods homeward. His weary way the ploughman homeward plods. His weary way homeward the ploughman plods. His weary way the ploughman plods homeward. Homeward the ploughman plods his weary way. Homeward his weary way the ploughman plods.
Everywhere in the cryptographic unit of Arlington Hall, posters on the walls reminded staffers sending out coded messages to vary the order of the texts. “There’s always another way to say it,” exhorted one poster, demonstrating how lines from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” could be rearranged. At Arlington, the staff of eight thousand did more than break enemy messages. They encoded American traffic and monitored that traffic to make sure it was secure. They were obsessively reminded to avoid the sorts of stereotypes and predictable repetitions that had given Americans an entering wedge into Japanese and German codes. “Parallel texts lost a battle,” the posters pointed out, reminding the encoders that in World War I, a battle had been lost because a single message was sent both in cipher and in the clear. “Shifting position of words and substituting synonyms and using passive voice of verb” are all ways to vary the order of a sentence, the posters reminded them.
A whole section of Arlington Hall was devoted to “protective security”—and this section, like others, was staffed mostly by women, many of them WACs. The women operated the SIGABA machines, which were America’s version of the Enigma. The SIGABA was initially conceived by William Friedman to encipher U.S. Army traffic, its design then improved by Frank Rowlett; the reason it was never as famous as the German Enigma was because unlike the German Enigma, it was never cracked. The simple reason it was never cracked was because Rowlett designed it so well (also it was heavier than Enigma, not quite so portable, and did not get overused as Enigma did). But it was also thanks to the care and competence of the people who used it. The WACs at Arlington Hall produced manuals instructing field soldiers how to use the machine; they maintained the Arlington Hall SIGABAs and tested them to make recommendations for operational and mechanical changes. They monitored their use to see if operators in the field were violating security. (The United States was rather notorious for poor radio security, from which the Germans learned a lot, so it was a ceaseless job.) They closely studied American message traffic, looking for “cryptographic error.” They cryptanalyzed American traffic, to see how easy or hard it was to break. They looked for code-room errors and insecure practices.
Today all of this would be known as “communications security,” and it went far beyond sending encrypted messages. One unit of women bird-dogged the American military units to make sure their radio traffic did not reveal too much about their whereabouts. The women intently studied the flow of U.S. military traffic to make sure that the Allies were not revealing the kinds of things that the enemy was revealing to them. They made charts and graphs to study American communications in specific regions, at specific times, during specific conflicts and events, to see what—if anything—might have been disclosed to the enemy. And they studied the characteristics of certain circuits.
These same skills enabled the WACs to create dummy traffic: fake radio traffic that so exactly resembled real American traffic that it persuaded the enemy that the fictitious units existed and were on the move. Such transmissions were useful for concealing military as well as political movements, and not just during the Normandy invasion. Exactly as Churchill described, the effect was to create a bodyguard, or protective area, around troops or leaders. In the Pacific theater, when a real attack was planned against Guam and Saipan, Arlington Hall created fake traffic to divert Japanese attention to Alaska. They created fake traffic to enable the deployment of the Fifth Infantry Division from the Iceland Base Command to the United Kingdom. They used fake traffic to disguise movements to and from the Yalta Conference.
The women analyzed Allied traffic, so as to be able to convincingly re-create a fake version of it. The calculations unit worked to determine “the various circuit characteristics, such as group-count frequency distribution, percentage in each precedence and security classification, filing time distributions, address combination, and cryptonets employed for each station of which the traffic is to be manipulated,” as one report put it.
In order to create fake traffic, the women had to understand every last thing about the real traffic that went out, and the circuits and stations it traveled through. Once created, fake traffic had to be routed. The women had to create a plausible schedule; release prearranged dummy traffic to be transmitted during times when such traffic might be expected; maintain circuit flow; and monitor what went out. They had to understand the circuits, the call signs, the frequency, the peak volume times: everything.
Meanwhile, the women also were conducting analysis of German radio traffic. “They were really pushing things very hard at that time, all the way around,” recalled Ann Brown, a WAC working in traffic analysis at Arlington during the Normandy invasion.
The bogus force included a dummy landing-craft tank, a fake headquarters, and two assault forces with associated ships and craft. The Allies began sending out dummy traffic months before the D-Day landing, as Patton’s fictitious Army traveled around England and began to gather. Meanwhile, the double agents were hard at work communicating with Germany, ably encouraging the notion that FUSAG was poised to assault the Pas de Calais.
The Purple machine delivered the happy news that the deception plan had worked. On June 1, 1944, the tireless and always obliging Baron Oshima crafted a message to Tokyo and sent it over the Purple circuit. The encrypted message revealed that Hitler, anticipating an Allied invasion, expected that diversionary landings would take place in Norway and Denmark and on the French Mediterranean coast.
Oshima added—and this was crucial; this was exactly what the Allies had hoped—that the Führer expected the real Allied attack, when it came, to come sailing through the Strait of Dover, toward the Pas de Calais.
“No invasion tonight,” thought Wellesley’s Ann White as she walked along the peaceful streets of northwest Washington late in the evening of June 5, 1944. It was warm in the capital by this time of year, and rosebuds were nearing bloom in the manicured neighborhood where the code-breaking facility was located. It was nearing midnight as Ann, wearing her uniform, turned off Nebraska Avenue and entered the Naval Communications Annex compound. She passed the now familiar double line of Marine guards, showed her badge, saluted the men as she went past, and made her way into the rooms that held the German Enigma section, where she relieved the officer heading the evening watch. Ann was a watch officer, now—a lieutenant—and supervised the midnight watch of women reading Enigma traffic. She had trained on the pistol range and knew how to shoot the gun that was always kept lying on the watch officer’s desk. The room was so secure that buzzers controlled the entry, and people wore badges displaying the level of confidential material they could access.
The women working in the Enigma unit knew an invasion of France was in the offing, though those elsewhere in the Annex did not. The Enigma team had known this for several days and had been told to keep their mouths shut. The bombes were pounding full force to break the German traffic, and an air of suspense and tension hung heavy as the women waited, wondering when the landing would occur. It could happen anytime. Tonight, however, Ann had looked up and taken note of the gorgeous full moon as she walked into the unit, which was known as OP-20-GY-A-1.
Surely, she thought, the night would be too bright for a surprise landing across the English Channel.
But then, not quite two hours into her shift, her team received an intercepted message that suggested differently. “At 0130, messages on coastal circuits were translated which gave news to those U-boats of the invasion of France,” noted the log for the unit. There was a flurry of rapt activity as the women ran the message through the M-9, to get the text. Ann, knowing German, was able to read the words even before the Enigma message was taken upstairs and translated into English. It was a terse message, sent by central command to all U-boats on the circuit. “Enemy landing at the mouth of the Seine.” All up and down the coast of France, the Enigma machines were chattering, spitting out the same warning. “Enemy landing at the mouth of the Seine.” And here in northwest Washington, the women read the words as quickly as the U-boat crews themselves.
D-Day was under way. After a weather-driven delay of more than a day, the night of June 6 had cleared enough to enable—barely—a nighttime crossing of the English Channel. The full moon gave the Allies the tide they wanted, and the storm that had been whipping up the channel abated for just long enough to launch ships that had been poised for days. During the night, nearly twenty-five thousand airborne troops dropped by parachute and glider into the fields above the beaches. The Normandy beach landings—the largest seaborne invasion in human history—were commencing. It was finally happening. The Allies were invading France.
Now the traffic really started coming. The next message described thousands of Allied ships—nearly seven thousand warships, minesweepers, landing craft, and support vessels—filling the English Channel off the coast of Normandy. The message enumerated the destroyers, the cruisers, the tankers, the supply ships. More bulletins followed. Far away—thousands of miles from where the women were frantically working, full of hope and dread and curiosity—the ships’ hulking silhouettes loomed against the morning sky, bringing more than 160,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers and the weapons and supplies they needed to assault the shores of occupied France.
And now the Americans were taking Utah Beach, the amphibious tanks making their way through the waves exactly as they had been designed to do, powered through the water by little propellers on their bottoms. The Army Rangers were scaling Pointe du Hoc under terrible fire; the frogmen were swimming in; the sappers were blowing paths that would enable the soldiers to leave the beaches and continue on toward the hedgerows and into northern France. The Royal Winnipeg Rifles and the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada were emerging onto Juno, taking very heavy casualties. The tanks at windswept Omaha were sinking, terribly, in the wind and the unforgiving swells, as Germans rained devastation from the cliffs above. Seasick, undaunted, the Allied soldiers kept coming, wading ashore, facing mortars, flamethrowers, machine guns, long-range artillery fire.
The women at the Naval Annex followed the D-Day message traffic all night, reading the invasion from the vantage point of the opposing Germans. The Allied soldiers were braving the beach, scaling the cliffs. The women read it all, into the morning and through the rest of that day. At 1:40 in the morning they were warned to “make no reference of any kind to the fact that we know about the invasion, even after the news comes out officially,” according to the watch officer log. All night the women bolted up and down the stairs of the laboratory building, taking the messages to the translators one floor above—even though Ann could read them herself. They felt excitement, relief, horror. They well knew how momentous the event was. But how was it evolving? They could not be sure. The messages told them some things, but there was so much more they wanted to know. The women wondered how many men were dying; whether the Nazis were counterattacking; how the assault was unfolding.
The women worked as hard as they could. In the twelve-hour period between 0730 and 1930 on June 6, the crews scored eleven jackpots on the bombe machines, eight of those coming in one watch, as the Germans shared news about the invasion, beyond what was taking place on the beaches. The women learned that the French Resistance had acted swiftly to cut German communications. So much resistance, so many brave men working to defend the free world, had come together. “Even seated at our desks,” Ann White would later write, “we felt the power of our country.”
The Normandy landings came as a complete surprise to the Germans—a surprise that saved an estimated 16,500 Allied lives. The Allies over the next weeks were able to establish a true beachhead, linking Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold, and Sword, and then to break out past the hedgerows and begin the liberation drive toward Paris.
At 0800 on the day of the invasion—afternoon now, in France—Ann White finished her all-night shift and walked out of the Naval Annex, feeling bleary and spiritually unsettled. There was a bus line that ran from nearby Ward Circle to a stop near National Cathedral, the neo-Gothic landmark on Wisconsin Avenue just north of Georgetown. Beside the cathedral was St. Alban’s Church, which was smaller but exquisitely beautiful, and open around the clock. During the war St. Alban’s had never once been empty. At least, it had never been empty while Ann had been there. She and some of the other women code breakers slipped inside and found places in the pews.
D-Day was a great achievement. They knew that. But somehow it did not seem cause for celebration, or not exactly, or not yet. Going to church was the only way they could think of to honor the tragedy and loss, which they sensed though they did not yet know the full extent: the Allied soldiers bobbing facedown in the water, drowned under their packs; the Rangers shot down as they dug handholds with their knives to scramble up the cliffs; the bodies on the beaches; the pilots who crashed in the fog and the smoke; the parachutists who drowned in marshes. It was the only way they could think of to honor the men who had made this sacrifice.
Ann would remember the Normandy invasion as one of the great moments of the war, and she would remember her wartime code-breaking service as the great moment of her life.
But for now, all she could do was pray for the souls of the dead.
Up and down, up and down. Set the wheels on the spindles, program the machine, sit down, wait. Then up again. Set the wheels on the spindles. Program the machine. Sit down, wait. Days after the Normandy invasion, the WAVES worked the bombe machines as the messages kept pouring in. “The invasion has caused a great increase in the amount of our traffic,” read the daily log for OP-20-GY-A-1. “A great quantity of administrative traffic, representing several circuits, has appeared.” Jimmie Lee Hutchison Powers worked her bombe bay all during the Normandy landing and its aftermath, and so did her hometown friend Bea Hughart. The two former Oklahoma switchboard operators jumped up and down, changing wheels, inputting menus, day after day, as the Allied soldiers began to fight their way toward Paris. These women’s experience of the glorious liberation of France was the heat and noise and urgency of the bombes—and the dread knowledge that the men they loved were taking part in the action overseas.
Jimmie Lee’s husband, Bob Powers, had piloted one of the gliders supporting the Normandy landing. Bob had gone in on the first wave of aircraft, taking off from England. Gliders were engineless aircraft towed by planes, then released over fields and forests, sailing through the skies carrying troops as well as weapons and even vehicles such as jeeps, which would be waiting for the paratroopers and the men coming up from the beaches. The gliders were known as “flying coffins” because of their flimsy structure and the danger of the work. The pilots, going in, knew the odds.
By now, every American knew that there was a particular look to a telegram that arrived announcing a military death. It would come on a Sunday morning. Telegrams had little clear window boxes bearing the address, and if the soldier in question was dead, there would be blue stars around the address. A few days after the invasion, Jimmie Lee got something that was not quite that. Her high school sweetheart and husband of one year, Bob Powers, had been downed over Sainte-Mère-Église, a French town near one of the glider landing areas. The fog and smoke had been terrible, as had the antiaircraft fire. Her telegram said he was missing in action. There was a period of terrible uncertainty and then in September, she got the worst news: Her young husband was indeed dead. Bea Hughart’s fiancé had been killed at D-Day as well. The two women had joined the Navy to try to save the lives of American men, especially the ones they knew and loved. Even while succeeding at the larger mission, they had failed at the intimate and personal one.
It was only now that Jimmie Lee understood the import of the work she was doing. When she asked for leave to attend her husband’s funeral in Oklahoma, her request was denied. There were other bombe operators getting the same telegrams, and they could not all be allowed to leave. Jimmie Lee stayed at her post. Her father died not long after. She was never able to go home and unburden herself, never able to talk to her father about how much she missed her husband. Nor had she been able to tell her own father good-bye.
There was so much loss even amid the victories. Ten months after D-Day, in April 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt died. The women cried like babies. There was a funeral procession when the president’s body was brought to Washington from Warm Springs, Georgia, and much public mourning, and the WAVES marched in a parade to honor him. People wondered whether the new president, Harry Truman, would be up to the job. Some of the women made individual trips to the White House, standing at night in the eerie quiet of Lafayette Square, where the sound of water dripping from the trees was the only noise, along with the changing of the guard.
