During the war the library unit had been a productive group of bright and active women, having meals prepared by Hot Shoppes and never having to think about what to fix for dinner. Now they were up to their elbows in domestic labor. So the former cryptanalytic librarians came up with a solution to their loneliness. The former enlisted women would write a round-robin letter.
Here is how the round-robin letter worked: One former code breaker would write a letter about what was going on in her life. She would send it to a second woman, who would write her own letter. That second woman would send both letters to a third woman, who would write her own and send all three to a fourth. The thickening sheaf would travel full circle until it came back to the first woman, who would remove her old letter, write a new one, insert it, and send the sheaf around the circle again.
The round-robin letter was a source of comfort to Betty Allen, who did find a job, and to the women shut up in tiny apartments with little babies. The round-robin kept going, all through the 1950s and the rearing of children; through the 1960s and the Vietnam War; through the 1970s and the feminist and civil rights movements; through the 1980s and the election of Ronald Reagan; through the terrible shock of the Twin Towers falling on September 11, 2001; through the Iraq War, and the election of Barack Obama, and the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, and the ascension of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency. The women of the code-breaking library unit kept the round-robin letter going, and it is going still, as of the writing of this book.
One by one, of course, most of the women died. When Georgia O’Connor Ludington died, it was a very hard effort for her son, Bill Ludington, to insert a letter of his own into the round-robin letter, telling Georgia’s wartime friends—whom he knew and loved—that his mother had died. But as of 2015, when I visited her, Ruth Schoen Mirsky was still writing to Lyn Ramsdell Stewart. They and one widowed husband were the only three left. When Lyn died, Ruth and the widower still kept in touch.
Ruth now lives in a second-floor apartment in the Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, New York. Harry Mirsky has died. Ruth was a tiny woman then and is a tiny woman now, still so proud of her service that her email address begins with “RuththeWAVE.” She has scrapbooks documenting her courtship with Harry; photos taken from the rooftops of Washington hotels; and photos of her wedding, which her code-breaking friends attended, slipping away even if they didn’t have leave.
She also has the ribbon commemorating the special unit citation that all the women at the Naval Annex received after the war. When I asked to see it, she reluctantly agreed. The women were instructed not to show it to anybody, and she still can’t bring herself to let it be photographed.
The Navy women treasured that unit citation, but most never displayed it. Some didn’t even purchase the naval ribbons to which they were entitled. “We hadn’t won any battles and didn’t feel it was appropriate,” said Edith Reynolds White, a WAVES officer recruited from Vassar. Edith was working at the Naval Annex when a recovered codebook was brought in, dripping wet, having been fished out of a sinking submarine by an alert American naval officer. After the war Edith stayed in the Navy for a while and was transferred to a hospital in New York where men with tuberculosis were being treated. One day, she was told that she was to receive her unit citation. She was to appear under the flag at nine a.m. “in full uniform with the ribbons to which I was entitled.” Since she had not purchased any, she had to find a male officer willing to lend her his. When she asked a young doctor, he said, “Only if I can come and look.”
After the ceremony, the young doctor told her he was taking her to dinner. “It’s traditional,” he assured her. “Whoever you lend your medals to, you have to take to dinner.” There was no such tradition, and, reader, she married him. Many years later, she was living in Norfolk and encountered the officer who fished out the codebook. She told him how valuable it had been. He was astonished. Nobody had told him. The officer later showed up on her doorstep in full gold braid with a box of chocolates, which was the first indication her son, Forrest, had that his mother had done something important during the war.
Fran Steen, the Goucher biology major who put aside her ambition to be a doctor, married a naval officer. She kept her pilot’s license until she got pregnant. Her husband was killed in 1960, struck by lightning playing golf. She got remarried to a naval submariner, and they settled in Charleston, South Carolina. She worked as a census taker, an artist, and a fashion model. She was always reluctant to talk about her wartime service. But eventually she did tell her son, Jed, about being a watch officer when they got the message that her brother’s ship was hit by a kamikaze, and about learning to shoot and bringing the bombes back from Dayton. They went to an air show of vintage planes and she mentioned offhandedly that one model was the one she had learned to fly at Washington National Airport.
Jed always sensed that his mother’s mind worked differently than many other people’s. Enigma cribbers had to start with the finished message and work backward to the likely key setting. Late in her life, she was a member of a women’s group that called itself the Low Country Cocktail Club. Her son was driving her to a club meeting and asked her for directions. “Wait a minute,” she said, thinking. To figure them out, she had to start with the address and work backward. “Her thought processes were highly analytic and different from what most people’s were.”