Rear Admiral (ret.) David Shimp met Fran Steen Suddeth Josephson at a different Charleston cocktail party and was astonished to encounter her in person. He had always heard her mentioned as one of the code breakers who labored over the messages that led to the shootdown of Yamamoto. He had met an old “cryppie” (the slang term for cryptanalyst) at a veterans’ gathering, and Fran’s name had come up. “She’s the one that got that son of a bitch Yamamoto,” the veteran recalled, saying that “only a damn woman could have figured out that blanking code,” implying that something about it was irrational. It was just an over-a-beer kind of story, and Dave Shimp dismissed it until he met Fran herself. He arranged for her to be given a surprise award at a dinner for cryptologic veterans. Her son Jed got her there without telling her what the meeting was for. As Fran was listening to the speech, she began to realize they were talking about her. Jed, also a naval officer, stood and said, “As an American citizen, with all the freedoms we have, I thank you; as a fellow naval officer, I salute you; and as a son, I love you.” Whenever Shimp tried to get her to share more details, though, she refused. When she did talk, she would dwell on the lives she hadn’t been able to save, rather than the ones she had. “Those regrets were always foremost in her mind.”
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.”