Goucher graduates Constance McCready: RG 38, Box 1, “CNSG, General Personnel, 4 Dec 1941–31 Jan 1944 (3 of 3).”
Fearful the women might quit if they couldn’t find housing: Radcliffe, Schlesinger Library, “Office of the President Correspondence and Papers: 1941–42, Harvard-NA, II, Sec. 2,” Box 57: 520–529, “National Broadcasting—Naval Communications.”
The women would start each day: Ann Ellicott Madeira, interview, undated, Library of Congress Veterans History Project, https://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp-stories/loc.natlib.afc2001001.07563/transcript?ID=sr0001.
Vi Moore, a French major from Bryn Mawr: Viola Moore Blount, email correspondence between April 22 and April 30, 2016.
Margaret Gilman, who had majored in biochemistry: Margaret Gilman McKenna, Skype interview on April 18, 2016.
“German submarines were literally controlling”: Ibid. The work of the cribbing group can be found in RG 38, Box 63, “Crib Study of Message Beginnings, Signature, etc-German Weather Msgs (1941–1943).”
Ann White also was assigned to the Enigma unit: Ann White Kurtz, “An Alumna Remembers,” Wellesley Wegweiser, no. 10 (Spring 2003), https://www.wellesley.edu/sites/default/files/assets/departments/german/files/weg03.pdf; Mary Carpenter, underlying notes for Mary Carpenter and Betty Paul Dowse, “The Code Breakers of 1942,” Wellesley (Winter 2000): 26–30.
Everyone we knew and loved: Ibid.
Erma Hughes, a psychology major: Erma Hughes Kirkpatrick, oral history interview on May 12, 2001, WV0213.
The disaster of Pearl Harbor had called into question: A good analysis of the state of affairs is in Schorreck, “Role of COMINT.”
Often, though, Washington had to wait: RG 38, Box 116, “CNSG-OP20-GYP History for WWII Era (3 of 3).”
Things had begun looking up for the code breakers: Frederick Parker, A Priceless Advantage: U.S. Navy Communications Intelligence and the Battles of Coral Sea, Midway, and the Aleutians (Washington, DC: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 1993).
So Rochefort and Edwin Layton: Edwin T. Layton, Roger Pineau, and John Costello, And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway—Breaking the Secrets (New York: Morrow, 1985), 421.
“He knew the targets; the dates; the debarkation points”: Schorreck, “Role of COMINT.”
The Japanese duly showed up on June 4: Laurance E. Safford, “The Inside Story of the Battle of Midway and the Ousting of Commander Rochefort,” 1944, in Naval Cryptologic Veterans Association, Echoes of Our Past (Pace, FL: Patmos Publishing, 2008), 26.
Even so, “the Battle of Midway gave the Navy confidence”: RG 38, Box 116, “CNSG-OP20-GYP History for WWII Era (3 of 3).”
The Midway victory also set in motion: Safford, “Inside Story,” 27; Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (New York: Free Press, 2000), 23; John Prados, Combined Fleet Decoded (New York: Random House, 1995), 410–411.
“I never felt that I should go tell her that the world had fallen”: Captain (ret.) Prescott Currier, oral history interview on November 14, 1988, NSA-OH-38-80, 44.
“She became fearful that she wouldn’t:” Campaigne, oral history, 33–34.
Before her accident, “she was a very strikingly beautiful woman”: Francis Raven, oral history interview on January 24, 1983, NSA-OH-1980-03, 11.
“You can’t visualize the climate around Aggie”: Ibid., 86.
“There wasn’t a regular Navy officer except Safford”: Ibid., 18.
So Raven decided to pillage Agnes Driscoll’s safe: Ibid., 13–25.
Driscoll was the “curse of the Enigma effort”: Ibid., 34.
One of the officers had a hair-raising collection: Ibid., 42–43.
As the war went on, Agnes tended to be given projects: Campaigne, oral history, “And so there was a period there when she was given assignments which were very difficult assignments, and everybody else had given up on them. And they were given to her more or less to keep her busy. They figured they were hopeless anyhow and there wasn’t anything bad she could do,” 34.
During a lull in his own work, Raven returned: Francis Raven, oral history, NSA-OH-1980-03, 56–63.
“In retrospect I am convinced that Aggie Driscoll”: Ibid., 37–38.
Room assignments were made and remade: RG 38, Box 1, “CNSG-General Personnel, 5 Dec 1940–31 Jan 1944”; RG 38, Box 2, “CNSG-Civilian Personnel, 18 Feb 1942–31 Dec 1943 (3 of 3)”; RG 38, Box 116, “CNSG History of OP-20-GYP-1 WWII Era (3 of 3).”
Vi Moore found herself doing additive: July 1942 room assignments are in RG 38, Box 117, “CNSG-OP-20-GY-A/GY-A-1.”
The volume of messages grew: RG 38, Box 115, “CNSG OP-20-GY History.”
The women rose to the challenge: Ann Barus Seeley described her additive work, in detail, in interviews with the author. Her memories are supported by many archival files that confirm “tailing,” additives, and shoo-goichi messages, including in RG 38, Box 116, “CNSG-OP20-GYP History for WWII Era (3 of 3).”
Looking at her work sheet: Anne Barus Seeley, interview. Also, Elizabeth Corrin, from Smith College, recalled: “They lined up the messages horizontally. So, what you tried to do was to get the additive that would work with the whole column.… The code had to be divisible by three. So, if you added up all the digits—the five digits—it had to be divisible by three… the people who worked in the priority rooms saw the more interesting things.… If we broke a message, we’d pass it to the priority room and they had the codebook.” Elizabeth Corrin, oral history interview on February 8, 2002, NSA-OH-2002-06.
Elizabeth Bigelow, an aspiring architect: Elizabeth Bigelow Stewart, essay of reminiscence, shared with the author by her daughter Cam Weber.
The operation developed the swiftness: RG 38, Box 116, “CNSG-OP20-GYP History for WWII Era (3 of 3)” and “CNSG History of OP-20-GYP-1 WWII Era (1 of 2).”
By the fourth quarter of 1943: RG 38, Box 115, “CNSG OP-20-GY History.”
And they shared the outrage: The chain of events around the news stories is detailed in Safford, “Inside Story,” 27–30.
The Japanese periodically changed JN-25 books: Parker, in Priceless Advantage, 66, notes, “Whether the Japanese ever discovered that U.S. cryptologists had successfully penetrated their most secret operational code… remains a matter of conjecture to this day,” but at the time, officials within OP-20-G were convinced of it.
During the battle, U.S. Marines came: RG 38, Box 116, “CNSG History of OP-20-GYP-1 WWII (1 of 2).”
Among these were Bea Norton and Bets Colby: The decision to implement a minor-cipher unit, and the fact that JN-20 was a substitution-transposition cipher, is in RG 38, Box 116, “CNSG-OP20-GYP History for WWII Era (3 of 3).” The makeup of the minor-cipher unit is in RG 38, Box 117, “CNSG-Op-20-GY-A/GY-A-1,” and RG 38, Box 115, “CNSG OP-20-GY History (1,2,3,4,5).” Bea Norton Binns described the minor ciphers in Carpenter and Dowse, “Code Breakers of 1942,” and Carpenter, underlying notes.