The translators also followed the movements of Ambassador Oshima, that stalwart Nazi sympathizer, as he left Berlin for Bad Gastein and was captured in May. And they could sense the endgame approaching. “In May began the bombardment, by Sato in Moscow, Kase in Bern, and Okamoto in Stockholm, of the Japanese foreign office: message after message contained the advice that Japan had best think about getting out of the struggle. Air raids on Japan became intense, reducing the diplomats abroad to misery when they thought of their homeland,” the history related.
So destructive were the air raids that the Tokyo foreign office lost power on May 24 and could not use its Angooki Taipu B, though it soon was back up and running. By midsummer events began to move very fast. Sato was having global conversations about ending the conflict; in Bern, Switzerland, a Japanese banking official was engaged in undercover conversations with Allen Dulles of the OSS. “Traffic came into the Diplomatic section and went out of it on greased skids,” the history noted. When one message revealed Japanese efforts to cut a deal with the Soviets, the message was flown to President Harry Truman at Potsdam. The diplomatic messages helped the United States monitor side conversations the Soviets were having with the Japanese. When Truman was informed about one of these by Churchill, he already knew about it, thanks to the quick work of Arlington Hall.
In early August, Arlington Hall translators started seeing traffic suggesting that the Japanese—who could not communicate with the United States directly, because lines were literally cut and there was no real way to do so—were planning to send a message via the neutral Swiss, who often acted as go-betweens, announcing their intent to surrender. The translators—and U.S. military intelligence—awaited the all-important message. It would be sent from Tokyo to the Japanese ambassador in Bern, whose job it was to take it to the Swiss foreign office. The U.S. military set up a special intercept net to snatch it. They knew from prior messages that it was going to arrive not in Purple, but in lowly, overworked, undervalued JAH.
On August 14, the whole translating unit was on pins and needles. People were afraid to go to lunch. Finally a garbled message came through in JAH, announcing the impending arrival of more messages. All these premessage messages were driving the translators crazy. “Shortly thereafter, the two texts arrived—the Japanese text first, the English text immediately thereafter,” the history recounts. “Excitement mounted as the messages were being decoded, shot sky-high when it became clear that this was it.”
Virginia Aderholdt worked as fast as lightning to get that surrender message decoded. She “had worked on that code and loved to work on it and she had memorized the code and we put her at a table right next to the teletype and when the message came in this young lady looked at it and wrote down the plaintext just as almost in the real time it was being typed out,” Frank Rowlett later remembered, with a kind of awe. (He does not name her, but does describe her as being from West Virginia, and it’s hard to see who else it could have been.) They telephoned the translation to military intelligence, where a stenographer rapidly typed it up.
According to Rowlett, who was a bit of a raconteur, he had to save Virginia Aderholdt from being trampled by the translators wanting to crowd around the message and behold it. “Well now every God damn translator in B4 began hunkering and hovering over that little girl who was doing the best she could to decode this message and I walked down… when I saw this gang coming down there I just put on my Colonel’s bars or whatever you wear when you’re a Colonel and I told them to get the hell out of there, they were going to break the floor through and leave her alone.”
The message had to pass through two transmitting stations to get to Switzerland. The Americans snatched it from the first and worked so fast that Arlington Hall had it decoded before the Japanese received it on the other end. Word got to the president as soon as they could get him a clean copy. Arlington Hall was also reading the neutral Swiss, so they were able to double-check for garbles when the Swiss sent their own message through.
At Arlington Hall, the rule was that translators must keep the contents of all messages to themselves, and up to then, they had. But this time, staying quiet was not humanly possible, not with a message of this magnitude. The Second World War was over. Or imminently would be. The hubbub was what Ann Caracristi sensed when she stepped into the building to start her shift.
At first, Frank Rowlett, Solomon Kullback, and a few others went around telling people to put a lid on it. Soon, though, the news had spread, and everyone in Arlington Hall was gathered and asked to raise their right hands and take a vow of silence. Dot Braden was among these. She was working her shift, sitting at the big wooden table. Like everybody else, Dot eagerly left her workstation, assembled with the others, and raised her right hand. The code breakers were told that Japan had surrendered and that they were not to divulge this news until the president announced it later that day. Dot felt excited and glad, but not surprised. The gravity of the knowledge scared her—World War II was over and she was among the few in the world who knew. The giddy truth surged inside the place, bubbling to come out. But they kept it in.
At seven p.m., President Truman announced the Japanese surrender to a weary but euphoric nation. Dot Braden, Ann Caracristi, Virginia Aderholdt, and the rest of the code breakers poured out of Arlington Hall. So did the women working at the Naval Annex. “The city exploded,” recalled Elizabeth Bigelow. Lyn Ramsdell, one of the friends from the Navy’s library unit, was sitting in a movie theater when a bulletin flashed across the screen. “Everybody just got up and left the movie, they were so excited, and the streets were just mobbed,” she remembered. Outside, traffic was terrible: Cars were gridlocked, the buses were all full, people were shouting and dancing and singing. Trying to make her way back to the Naval Annex, Lyn Ramsdell ended up riding on the top of somebody’s car. Other people perched atop trolleys, while above them, hotel residents flung toilet tissue out the windows. Groups ran arm in arm singing “Happy Days Are Here Again!” A crowd tried to break into the White House grounds, crying, “Give us Harry!”
From Arlington Hall, thousands of people crossed the river from Virginia into Washington. One of the Arlington code breakers, Jeuel Bannister, met one of the j-boys as they were all linking their arms and singing. She had never seen him before but sensed—correctly—that she had met her future husband. After that, she always referred to V-J Day as “Victory for Jeuel” Day. The next day, August 15, Truman declared a two-day holiday to celebrate the surrender of Japan. They had done it. The Allies had won. The world war was over.