Code Girls, page 34
In many ways the waning days of the war were the bloodiest and worst. In both war theaters, Axis leaders resolved to make any Allied victory as costly as possible in terms of lives lost. Japan hoped that if it could create sufficiently terrible casualties among the sailors, Marines, airmen, and soldiers launching attacks on the occupied islands, the United States might seek an early termination and Japan might gain a negotiated peace. The kamikaze air attacks began in the Pacific, and attacks by suicide boats as well. “There were many signs the enemy was disintegrating,” recalled Elizabeth Bigelow, who was breaking Japanese codes in the Naval Annex, working in a unit called “keys.” Even as they could see the Allies were winning, the women lived in fear of messages bearing the worst possible news.
The code breakers did what they could to monitor the well-being of loved ones, and sometimes succeeded. At the Naval Annex, Georgia O’Connor was working in the library unit with her friends. Thanks to the U.S. Navy messages coming in over the ECM—the machine that transmitted internal American messages—she was able to follow the USS Marcus Island, the escort carrier on which her brother was serving. She tracked the carrier through all of the war’s final Pacific battles: the invasion of the Philippines, the Battle of Okinawa, the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The Marcus Island suffered kamikazes and near misses as it passed through the Surigao Strait and Lingayen Gulf and along the Luzon coast. Georgia’s brother was in the radio room of the ship. She did not communicate with him personally, but she was able to tell her family he was safe, though she could not tell them how she knew this. “We always knew what was going on in the South Pacific,” she said later.
Others were not so lucky. Elizabeth Bigelow, recruited out of Vassar, had two brothers serving in the Pacific. One was in the Marines. Her other brother, Jack, a Princeton graduate, was serving on the Suwannee, an escort carrier that belonged to the carrier group known as Taffy 1. Jack was the oldest son in the family, a golden boy whom everybody, Elizabeth most especially, adored. He was small but well-built and had been a gymnast at Princeton. Early photos of him in a Navy uniform showed him to be “a young man with a hat that looked too big for his slight form,” she later remembered. Quiet and good-natured, he had started at Princeton in 1938 and studied electrical engineering. After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the naval reserve, and that Christmas he gathered with friends who were also newly enlisted, and Elizabeth was struck by “the excitement and hope in their voices.” In 1942 he was inducted into the Navy, where he became a radar officer. The Suwannee saw action in the Gilbert Islands, Kwajalein, and Palau, and by early 1944 a shipmate had sent her a photo that showed “Jack totally exhausted and looking decades older.”
In late October 1944, the campaign to retake the Philippines began. The Taffy 1 group participated in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the decisive battle to win back the Philippines. Leyte Gulf was the largest naval battle of the war, possibly the largest naval battle in history. The battle itself involved successful code breaking but at one point it also was nearly disastrous for the United States. It was the first battle that saw organized attacks by kamikaze airmen. During the days-long engagement, Admiral William Halsey and his Third Fleet were lured out to sea; the Japanese attacked the Seventh Fleet, which the Suwannee was part of, and the escort carriers found themselves the first line of defense. A kamikaze tore a hole in the flight deck of the Suwannee. The plane’s bomb pierced the deck and exploded between the flight and hangar decks, setting off a terrible fire fed by aviation fuel dripping down from burning planes on the deck above. Many men in that part of the ship were incinerated. They jumped overboard if they could.
Elizabeth’s family got the awful telegram. She was given leave to go home for two days. Her father’s hair turned gray, it seemed to her, overnight. None of them ever recovered from the loss. The same shipmate who sent the photo told her that Jack’s body was unharmed, but later she was able to see his Navy file and learned the full truth. Her big brother Jack had been one of the men who burned to death.
Some of the women broke messages warning about attacks before they happened but were helpless to avert them. Goucher’s Fran Steen—a lieutenant now—was working her shift as watch officer when a message came in saying that the destroyer captained by her brother, Egil, now serving in the Pacific, was targeted for a kamikaze raid. Her team alerted the Navy, but there was no way to prevent the attack. Fran kept working, knowing that the only thing she could do was her job. The kamikaze struck and her brother’s ship was sunk. At the time she thought Egil Steen was dead. It later emerged that he was one of only a few to survive, thanks to the spot in the ward room where he had been standing.
Donna Doe Southall was one of two hundred WAVES officers staffing the code room where the Annex received U.S. Navy dispatches with news about ship sinkings. Though she was responsible for Pacific messages, she was looking through the Atlantic ship-sinking traffic when she saw one saying that her brother’s ship had been sunk. She didn’t know it at the time, but a third of the crew survived, and the British destroyer Zanzibar picked her brother out of the ocean. He was taken to England, where he was treated for pneumonia and given clothing by the Red Cross.
For years, Donna’s mother sent packages to the woman who donated those clothes. One of the packages contained a blue dress Donna had worn as a bridesmaid, which any number of English girls got married in. But her brother was never the same. When he came home he developed schizophrenia, was made a ward of the Veterans Administration, and died suddenly at age fifty-nine. For her part, Donna married a naval officer who was on a ship off the coast of Okinawa that was hit by a kamikaze. He was blown out of his shoes, put in a pile with the dead, regained consciousness before he was disposed of, and lived to have a family with her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Teedy
December 1944
Teedy Braden was five years younger than Dot. The Braden siblings were close, and Teedy and Dot both had an excellent sense of humor. They loved to needle each other. When the siblings were growing up, Teedy and Dot’s other brother, Bubba, liked to size up Dot’s boyfriends. The two brothers would hang around the front yard of 511 Federal Street, passing judgment on whoever was going in and out visiting their older sister. The brothers also liked to clamber onto a crowded streetcar, at the other end from where Dot was standing, and loudly say things like, “Who would ever want to go out with that little girl with the permanent wave in her hair?” Dot likewise enjoyed teasing her brothers about their romantic lives. One summer a photo was taken of their family during a swimming outing, and Teedy was the only person looking off to the side while everybody else looked at the camera.
“What do you think is holding Teedy’s gaze so intently?” Dot wrote teasingly on the back of the photo. “Could it be the lady lifeguard?”
Teedy Braden finished high school on a Friday in June 1943 and by Monday he was in the U.S. Army. He started basic training at Camp Fannin in Texas. Within a year Eisenhower needed men to reinforce the troops who landed at Normandy and were now fighting their way through the fields and forests of France and Belgium. So the Army sent Teedy to Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, for training. At first it wasn’t clear what they were going to do with him. In July 1944, a month after D-Day, Teedy was still at Camp Breckinridge and was able to get a two-week furlough to go home to Lynchburg, leaving July 3, 1944, and returning to camp on July 16.
“I sure do hope that you won’t [be] too busy to run down as I sho would like to see you,” he wrote to Dot, but Dot was unable to get time off. He wrote her again after he got back to training camp. “How’s everything, gal?… I sure would’ve like to have come up and stayed with you for a while but I reckon it would’ve upset my schedule a little.” He said it was tough readjusting after leave. “Man, man, it sure is hard to get back into harness after being out of it a little while. By gum, they had all sorts of details waiting for me. Everything from KP to latrine orderly. That latrine orderly is a pip!… whew.”
Back at camp, he sensed something was up. “There’s a lot of rumors going around since we’re having ‘shakedown’ inspections and equipment check-ups.”
On July 31 Teedy wrote Dot to say that he might be coming to Fort Meade, Maryland, in about two weeks. “If I do go it’ll mean that it’s the first step toward taking a boat ride which we’ve all been expecting soon.” “Boat ride” was a euphemism for sailing on a troop ship across the Atlantic and into the heavy European fighting. “We’ll all go as riflemen,” he told her. His unit was practicing nighttime river crossings. He had sent a photo of Dot to “Gus and Johnny,” some mutual friends, but had not heard from either. “There’s a chance that they’ve gone on a boat ride as they were expecting it.”
Teedy did make the trip to Fort Meade. He would soon be part of the 112th Infantry Regiment of the Twenty-Eighth Infantry Division, a Pennsylvania unit nicknamed the “Bloody Bucket” because of its bucket-shaped insignia and its eventful battle history. He was one of thousands of very young men shipped over to replace the men lost in the fighting during and after Normandy. These new men were at a disadvantage in every way: Not only were they hastily trained and not hardened to battle, but some veterans resented them for replacing fallen comrades and shunned them as green and inexperienced. They tended to “become casualties very fast,” as one officer put it. This was the situation Teedy Braden was thrust into. Dot’s mother came up before he left, and she and Dot both went to see him off. With the Atlantic Ocean swept clear of U-boats, Teedy Braden made the ten-day Atlantic crossing to England, not yet twenty years old, sleeping in the bottom of the ship in a hammock slung from pipes, eating a diet abundant in canned apricots.
When he alighted, Teedy entered some of the worst fighting American troops would endure in the European war theater. The Western Allies were pursuing the German Army, but the Nazi soldiers were putting up fierce resistance, and Allied units and supply lines were getting strung out in the rush to push through France. Hitler was seeking one last, smashing win, a victory that would thwart the Allied offensive and deplete their resources. At the beginning of November Teedy’s unit found itself caught in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, a terrible engagement along the border between Belgium and Germany, where Nazi troops laid mines and booby traps, strung barbed wire, and built bunkers amid the trees. Hürtgen was a dense and dark pine forest with steep slopes pillowed by deep ravines. Teedy’s unit, the 112th Infantry, suffered extremely high casualties; at one point they were down to three hundred men from more than two thousand. Even the Germans later said that the fighting in Hürtgen Forest was worse than that of the First World War; one officer called it a “death mill.”
And it was just a warm-up. Barely two weeks later, the Germans attacked in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. It was Hitler’s last big roll of the dice, the biggest, bloodiest battle the United States fought in Europe. And it was one of the war’s worst intelligence failures. Allied code breakers had noticed a radio silence suggesting the Germans were planning an attack, but the military did not pay sufficient attention and the soldiers were taken by surprise.
The Americans by now had become strung out in a ragged line, and the Germans decided to try to push through with the hope of breaking out and reaching Antwerp. The exhausted Twenty-Eighth, sent for a rest in the southern Ardennes—a quiet paradise resembling Switzerland—was surprised at a time when it was short of both men and weapons. What was left of Teedy’s unit sustained enormous casualties in several days of pitched fighting as the Germans attempted to break through Allied lines. Shattered, the Twenty-Eighth fought and fought. As Dot heard it later, her mother, Virginia, was visiting with friends in Lynchburg when she received the terrible message saying Teedy was missing in action. People in Lynchburg visited her to express their condolences.
Anguished and distraught in her grief, Virginia Braden did not tell Dot, who remained blissfully unaware. At Arlington Hall, the code breakers worked hard throughout the battle, even though the cafeteria had served tainted ham and there was an epidemic of vomiting and sickness. Over at the Navy facility the bombes whirred away, and the women at Sugar Camp also knew the Battle of the Bulge was unfolding. “I used to feel guilty because of enjoying the war years in such a beautiful, comfortable station while the slaughter was going on in Europe and the high seas,” Lieutenant Esther Hottenstein would later write. “I remember especially the winter of 1944 (December) the Battle of the Bulge where we worked overtime.”
When the fog of war cleared, however, it emerged that Teedy Braden had survived. Speaking years later, from the vantage point of decades, Teedy was able to relate how he managed to do that. He recalled how the battle lines were jagged and shifting, and at one point he and some other GIs found themselves behind enemy lines. “I was on an armored car, holding on to it for dear life,” Teedy said. “As we come out the other side I see this German come out of the ditch carrying a Panzerfaust,” which was a handheld rocket launcher. The German pumped it into the side of the armored car; Teedy was blown across the road and into a tree, where he was knocked out. When he came to, he saw burning tanks, burning ambulances, green flares as German tanks fired into the sides of Allied vehicles. Nazi soldiers were running up and down shooting American men. Somehow, his rural instincts saved him. Unarmed, he managed to nip around a tree and spotted some fellow GIs moving cautiously through the forest. He joined them and they made their way through the woods, hitting the ground whenever the Germans opened fire, then standing up and scampering forward.
“Then all of a sudden a.50-caliber machine gun in front of us opened up and we knew we had hit the Eighty-Second Airborne,” Teedy Braden remembered. They had made it to safety. The Eighty-Second Airborne told the exhausted Americans to head down the road until they saw a palace. Teedy started off in the direction they indicated, but he must have been concussed, and he passed out again. An American tank scooped him out of the road and carried him to a château packed with weary men. He found a spot to sleep on the floor of a tiled bathroom, wedged between a toilet and a wall. In the morning he got coffee and stood on the once-manicured château lawn, watching American bombers flying into Germany. It took a long time for survivors to get sorted and reequipped, having straggled in from many devastated units.
Teedy did not attempt to convey any of this to the people back home. “I suppose that you’ve been kinda worried since I haven’t had a chance to write you for some time,” Teedy wrote Dot in January 1945. He apologized that the letter was written in red ink and said it was the only pen he’d been able to find. “I’ve only been able to write mom a couple of times,” he told Dot. In understated fashion, he explained that Christmas, for him, was a “kinda hectic one.”
Being Teedy, he was still able to joke. He had taken French in high school because his big sister Dot had, and it was proving useful in Europe. He’d been able to eat a meal in a fine Belgian restaurant. “I can now snap my fingers and yell ‘garcon’ with the best of them,” he told her. He reported that the Belgian women were “quite an eyeful but of course I was too interested in the old architecture and the city’s history to pay much attention.”
“Well, Dot, I just wanted to let you know that I am still percolating,” he finished. He enclosed five Belgian francs as a souvenir and told her it was worth about twelve cents. “It sure is fancy money for.12, isn’t it?” he said. “Well, I hope that all of you have a pretty fruity list of New Year’s resolutions now. So long! Love, Teedy.”
When he arrived safely home from Europe, Dot called their mother, and Virginia Braden got on a bus and raced up to Washington so that she could see for herself that Teedy was alive.
By the spring of 1945, with tens of thousands of American men sacrificed to the final war effort—the Battle of the Bulge alone cost nearly twenty thousand American lives—the Allies had managed to regain momentum. They fought off the German counterpush and crossed the Rhine and into Germany, which was being subjected to a heavy bombing campaign that destroyed factories and munitions and, infamously, the city of Dresden. On the eastern front, Russian soldiers routed the German invaders and pushed toward Berlin, taking massive casualties. As the Russians drew nearer, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on April 30. It was now a matter of time. In Italy—one of the toughest, longest campaigns for the Western Allies—German soldiers who might have reinforced their comrades were pinned down and the fascists overthrown. Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were killed on April 28 and then strung up by partisans. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered. The Third Reich was no more.
The Allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic—and the European war. Admiral Dönitz—the new head of state in Germany—ordered his U-boats to stand down. The Enigma unit at the Naval Annex read a message from Dönitz to his surviving captains, which told them, “You have fought like lions… unbroken and unashamed you are laying down your arms after a heroic battle.” As GIs liberated concentration camps, the world would learn the full horror that had unfolded in Dachau and Buchenwald, a permanent stain on human history. Many of the women, and their families, also would never recover from the losses of sons and brothers and loved ones. But the boys in Europe—those who were left—were coming home. In Washington, conga lines pranced along the streets. Some of the WAVES went to the roofs of hotels to watch the celebrations. One WAVES member played a celebratory game of Ping-Pong at an officers’ club and later married her opponent. A number of code breakers would recall the magical experience of watching the nighttime lights, long dimmed for the war, come back on in the nation’s capital. Dot, Crow, and Louise absorbed the happy news at the apartment on Walter Reed Drive, though their workload did not abate.
