Code Girls, page 38
Over time public views changed about the war. One was not always well advised to mention what one had done. Jeuel Bannister Esmacher, the band director who worked at Arlington Hall, knew that a message she broke helped sink a convoy. She saw certain code words, hurried the message to the “big boys,” and later heard over the radio that the ship had been sunk. At the time she felt proud. But when she started a family with the linguist she met during the V-J Day celebration, Harry Esmacher, she came to reflect on all the Japanese families who lost sons, and her feelings became more layered and complex. She felt more sorrow. “There were Japanese that went down with that ship that had mothers and sisters and wives,” she reflected when I spoke with her. “You think about that also, at this point. I did not think of that back then.”
When Elizabeth Bigelow Stewart mentioned to her own children the convoy she had helped sink, her daughter replied, “Mother, how dreadful! You killed all those Japanese sailors, and you were pleased about it!” Elizabeth was dumbfounded. America quickly forgot what the war had felt like—how real the menace had been.
Jane Case Tuttle, the wealthy physicist’s daughter, also got married after the war, and it was a disaster. Her husband had written her funny letters during a time when she was feeling lonely. She wanted a sense of normalcy and to have a family, and “I had always done everything I was told to do.” She managed to extricate herself from the marriage and found that the memory of working during the war helped her retain her self-worth. Late in life she married a man who had been madly in love with her during the war. When I visited her, she was living at an assisted-living facility in Maine, an ardent supporter of the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Because she could no longer walk easily, she would sit in a recliner and throw clean, balled-up socks at the television when a politician she hated came on.
Ann White Kurtz also married during the war. In November 1944 she had to seek a discharge because her husband came back in bad shape—he was disoriented and had a tropical disease—and needed care. “Oh golly, did I miss it,” she said. “I made the wrong decision.” Some of her Wellesley classmates described their postwar lives as “disappearing into marriage.” Her husband, she later put it, “needed a ‘wife’” and “could not understand why I was so unruly.” She got her PhD on the GI Bill, got a divorce, and became a professor. Late in life she joined the Peace Corps.
Anne Barus Seeley also married; she never pursued a career in international relations, but she did work in other capacities including running a weaving business and teaching. In her mid-nineties, she was still sailing and kayaking near her home on Cape Cod.
Many of the code-breaking women helped advance the feminist movement—through their postwar employment, but also, sometimes, their postwar dissatisfaction. One woman I interviewed, whose mother worked at Arlington Hall, always sensed something was missing in her mother’s life, something she had had, once, and lost. This awareness, she said, “seeded feminism in our house.” But other women felt left out by the feminist movement. Erma Hughes Kirkpatrick, the bricklayer’s daughter, became a mother, housewife, and volunteer, and enjoyed it. She always felt feminism disrespected her contributions, even as her husband respected them. She started the first soup kitchen in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “He and I were equals,” she said.
Well, rather more than equals. Erma was a full naval lieutenant by the time she was discharged, and she stayed in the naval reserves. Her husband had been a Marine. Once, when they wanted to show their children Quantico Marine base, her husband couldn’t produce an ID that would get them in, but Erma had her naval reservist identification. She showed it and they were waved through. The Marine guard saluted her. There was silence in the car for some time. “You don’t do that to a Marine,” she joked, later.
The assisted-living facility on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, is a nice one. There is a dining hall that serves good butternut squash soup and ham biscuits, and the place has lots of parties to keep residents busy. Dot Braden Bruce had to move here after she slipped in her garage and fell and hit her head. But in 2017 she is alive and recovered. At ninety-seven, she keeps her French skills sharp by chatting with caregivers from French-speaking West Africa. “A lot of people don’t bother to learn their names, but I do,” she says. Once a schoolteacher, always a schoolteacher.
Her life has come full circle, and once again she is living in a one-bedroom apartment. Crow died in 2012, Jim Bruce in 2007. Dot herself is still lively, still literate, still prone to reciting snatches of doggerel such as “Why does the lamb love Mary so? Because Mary loves the lamb, you know.”
Photos of her family cover every piece of furniture. Jim Bruce in his later years was a dead ringer for James Stewart, tall and steady and agreeable-looking, and Dot jokes that she herself was a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor.
Toward the end of his life, Jim’s memory started to fade, and he would ask Dot if they had a good marriage. “Did we get along?” he would ask. She would assure him that they did. It was true. He was a good husband. “Long-suffering,” Dot says with a laugh. He understood her lively independence. When she took work as a substitute teacher, he would watch their three children on weekends and give her time to grade papers. On Saturdays he liked making hot dogs for neighborhood kids, and real French fries from scratch. When she embarked on a real estate career, he would drive her to open houses. Whatever Dot wanted to do, it was okay with Jim. They never fought. Dot wouldn’t have minded a bracing argument now and then, but Jim was peace-loving. “My husband was a very laid-back person,” she says. “He had to live for sixty-three years with me. Not me with him.”
The only gender-related dispute they had was when she tried to drag the trash cans out to the curb. He felt pulling the cans to the curb was a man’s job.
The Bruce family did well. Jim had an excellent career in the postwar industrial economy, and so did Dot’s brothers. Teedy, once declared missing in action, is still alive. In Dot’s family, there are so many Jims and Jamies and Jameses, sons and grandsons and great-grandsons, named after her husband, that I found it hard to keep them straight. There are Virginias as well, and a little boy named Braden. Every year, Dot treats the whole family—some twenty people—to a big holiday meal at Richmond’s posh Jefferson Hotel. Every year they come, flying in from New Orleans, New York, California, bringing babies in snugglies, dressing little cousins in matching outfits. Many photos are taken. It is the happy family tableau she longed for as a girl. She complains about the cost, but she is not really complaining. During some of our many interviews, she had a file case containing her stock holdings under her chair. Her broker had died and she was shopping for a new one. She let several candidates take her to lunch.
Looking back, Dot wonders sometimes why she decided to marry Jim Bruce rather than George Rush. “My life could have turned out very differently,” she reflects. Make no mistake; she felt she made the right choice. George Rush was a perfectly nice man. But she didn’t want to move to California. She is so glad she took the train to Washington and embarked on her code-breaking service, together with her friend Crow Weston Cable. “I wouldn’t take anything for it,” she says. She thinks what tipped the balance in favor of Jim Bruce was the fact that he was steady and kind. And persistent. And he had a good sense of humor. Dot’s favorite song has always been “Somewhere, My Love,” and after they married Jim used to tease her when she played it. “Haven’t you found your love yet?” he would say.
And, she reflects, “he wrote me all those darling letters.”
After the war, Dot told nobody what she did. At some point, maybe fifty years after the war ended, she started giving hints. They did not believe her—her brother Bubba said it was “just a little job and I was trying to make it a big deal,” she remembers now. But then they started to believe her, or sort of. It became a tenet among her grandchildren that Dot single-handedly broke the Japanese codes. And yet, nobody really took it seriously.
Memories come at odd times. Dot was reading aloud to one of her great-grandchildren a children’s book called The Mitten, in which forest animals take refuge from a snowstorm by climbing, one by one, into a cast-off woolen mitten. So many animals climb in that one sneeze is enough to eject all of them. Reading it, she could not help but think of the Arlington apartment and all the girls who stayed in that one-bedroom place.
Her son Jim has always been intrigued by her wartime code-breaking service. As kids, he and his sisters used to go up in the attic and read the letters their dad wrote to their mother. His sentimental side was a revelation. But they never could get their mother to tell details about what she did. Now she has gotten the okay from none other than the NSA and has been assured that it’s fine to tell her story: The long-ago ban was lifted several decades ago. The government would like her to tell her story. But she still has her doubts. She cannot quite believe it. Then again, what would they do to her? At her age? Put her in prison?
On a Wednesday afternoon in 2014, during the first interview for this book, Jim, her son, is sitting in an upholstered wing chair in her one-bedroom apartment. “Let it rip, Mom!” he urges. By now so many male code breakers have written their memoirs: Edwin Layton and Frank Rowlett and others, with book titles like And I Was There and The Story of Magic. Dot relaxes, a bit, about telling the part she played in this dramatic story, and Jim listens as his mother begins to talk. She mentions Miriam the overlapper—awful Miriam! with her yellow diamond!—and claps her hand to her mouth. Never has she uttered the word “overlap” outside the confines of Arlington Hall.
Even now, it has the feeling to her of something illicit, something forbidden, something dangerous and important, no matter how long ago this all occurred. It feels as if an enemy might still be at the window, listening in.
Agnes Meyer Driscoll, a former Texas high school math teacher, became one of the great cryptanalysts of all time, cracking Japanese Navy fleet codes during the 1920s and ’30s. Courtesy of National Security Agency
Elizebeth Smith Friedman, another ex-schoolteacher, took a job in 1916 at an eccentric Illinois estate called Riverbank, where she helped found the U.S. government’s first code-breaking bureau. She later broke the codes of rumrunners during Prohibition. Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia
Genevieve Grotjan aspired to be a math professor but couldn’t find a university willing to hire a woman. In September 1940, after less than a year as a civilian Army code breaker, she made a key break that enabled the Allies to eavesdrop on Japanese diplomatic communications for the entirety of World War II. Courtesy of National Security Agency
Japan’s ambassador to Nazi Germany, Hiroshi Oshima, was a confidant of Adolf Hitler. Oshima communicated with Tokyo
using an enciphering machine the Allies called “Purple.” Grotjan’s break enabled the United States to monitor these missives, yielding some of the best wartime intelligence out of Europe. The Allies called it “Magic.” Courtesy of National Security Agency
The German military forces used their own enciphering machine, the portable Enigma. Courtesy of National Security Agency
America in the Depression was still a rural country. By 1940 only about 4 percent of women had completed four years of college, in part because many colleges would not admit them. Dot Braden, shown here as a girl with her nanny and brothers, was steered to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College by her spirited and determined mother. Courtesy
of Dorothy Braden Bruce
Dorothy Ramale, shown here in her 1943 yearbook photo, grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania and wanted to be a math teacher. But the dean of women at Indiana State Teachers College called her in and told her the U.S. Army had another idea for her. Courtesy of Indiana University of Pennsylvania Special Collections
Women’s colleges in the 1940s were a mix of cerebral inquiry, marital ambition, and hallowed rituals. The 1942 May Court at Goucher College included Jacqueline Jenkins (fourth from left) and Gwynneth Gminder (second from right). Their lives changed when they received a secret summons from the U.S. Navy, as did Fran Steen, shown in the headshot. Courtesy of Goucher College Archives
Unbeknownst to these young women, the Army and Navy were hotly competing for their talents. The competition began when Ada Comstock, president of Radcliffe, was asked to suggest undergraduates who could be trained by the Navy in cryptanalysis. The surprise attack at Pearl Harbor had exposed the country’s intelligence deficit and created a new demand for educated women. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
As war progressed, the demand grew. In 1942 the United States grudgingly decided to admit women into military service, a wildly controversial measure. “Only bad women join the service,” one code breaker’s mother told her, but soon recruiting was in full swing and the mother was proudly snapping photos of her daughter in uniform.
Women rushed to enlist; one reporter described a WAAC recruiting station as a “tidal wave of patriotic pulchritude.” Women who tested high for intelligence and aptitude—and passed background checks—were routed into code-breaking service. Courtesy of U.S. Army INSCOM
The U.S. Army recruited schoolteachers in the South. Handsome young officers were dispatched to lure them. When Dot Braden approached recruiters at the Virginian Hotel in Lynchburg, they did not tell her the nature of the work, and probably did not know themselves. Copyright: Nancy B. Marion;
Credit: Courtesy of Lynchburg History
Women began to pour into D.C.’s Union Station, which now offered a servicemen’s canteen, an information desk for new government workers, and posters and flags attesting to the country’s determination to win. This photo is by Gordon Parks, a government photographer at the time. Courtesy of Library of Congress
Many rented tiny rooms at Arlington Farms, a Virginia dormitory built to house seven thousand women workers, known as government girls or g-girls, for the war’s duration. Locals dubbed it “Twenty-Eight Acres of Girls.” Government photographer Esther Bubley documented their lives. Courtesy of Library of Congress
Dot Braden worked at Arlington Hall, which before the war had been a girls’ finishing school complete with teahouse and lily ponds. It had been converted to a massive code-breaking facility that attacked the codes of Japan and many other nations, with more than seven thousand workers, most of them female. Courtesy of National
Security Agency
The U.S. Navy, not to be outdone, took possession of Mount Vernon Seminary, a girls’ school in tony upper northwest Washington, D.C., adding hastily erected barracks to house four thousand female code breakers. Courtesy of D.C. Department of Transportation
At Arlington Hall, Ann Caracristi (far right), an English major from Russell Sage College, matched wits against Japanese code makers, solving message addresses and enabling military intelligence to develop “order of battle” showing the location of Japanese troops. The messages would then be passed along to Dot Braden and other women whose efforts led to the sinking
of Japanese ships. Courtesy of National Security Agency
Also at Arlington Hall, a secret African American unit—mostly female, and unknown to many white workers—tackled commercial codes, keeping tabs on which companies were doing business with Hitler or Mitsubishi. Courtesy of National Security Agency
The Navy women broke enemy naval codes used across the world’s major oceans. Women formed the cryptanalytic assembly line that exploited the Japanese fleet code known as JN-25. They helped in the effort to shoot down the plane of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the attack at Pearl Harbor. “We really felt we had done something really fantastic,” said one, Myrtle Otto. “That was an exciting day.” Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration
Women also ran the machines that attacked the German Enigma ciphers, maintained wall maps that kept track of U-boat locations and Allied convoys, and wrote intelligence reports that would be used by naval commanders. Courtesy of
National Security Agency
During their off hours, the women wrote letters incessantly, sending the missives—often with an enclosed snapshot—to soldiers and sailors. One g-girl was writing twelve different men. Courtesy of Library of Congress
The women worked around the clock and often didn’t know whether to eat breakfast or dinner when they finished a shift. Navy code breaker Edith Reynolds (center), recruited from Vassar, relaxes with colleagues. Courtesy of Edith Reynolds White
The women enjoyed their freedom. Dot Braden (right) and her best friend, code breaker Ruth “Crow” Weston from Mississippi (left), were glad to get away from crowded Arlington Farms and rent an apartment on their own. Courtesy of family of Ruth “Crow” Weston
On their rare days off, the women would ride buses and streetcars to the beaches of Virginia and Maryland. This group of Arlington Hall code breakers includes Crow (far left), and Dot (peeking out from behind the pole). Courtesy of Dorothy Braden Bruce
