Dot was put to work sorting messages, a common first assignment. A couple of days spent untangling intercepts showed that she was capable of recognizing the digits at the beginning of a message, which designated the station from which it had been sent and the system it was part of. She now was presented with a series of four-digit numbers and told to discern any pattern she might see. She had taken many tests in high school and college, had always done well, and faced the numbers before her with a reasonable degree of confidence. She was sitting at a big table with a group of newcomers, and a girl beside Dot started crying. Dot did not find the work easy; it felt like a complicated puzzle, but she must have done all right, as she presently was told that she was being moved on to the next level.
To say that Dot was “trained” would be an overstatement. Over the next few weeks she sat through lectures on the rudiments of code breaking and code making. She learned a bit about codes used by the Japanese Army, which controlled much of the Pacific Ocean, occupying captured islands and other territory. She absorbed the principles of how the Japanese Army was organized, and basics of the Japanese language as used in military communications: “enough so we could go at it,” as she would later say. She took a test on the Japanese language, which she did not mind, having had so much language instruction already. She watched movies directed by Frank Capra called Why We Fight that aimed to inspire patriotism and build morale. Most of all, she sat through still more talks on the importance of security, secrecy, and silence, the result of which was that she felt perpetually terrified she would accidentally bring a piece of paper home or let the wrong word slip. She entered a constant state of monitoring her own behavior, on high alert even when she was not working at the compound.
Dot also was called for a one-on-one interview. The interviewer, a woman, asked her what languages she knew; what science and math courses she had taken; when she had graduated from high school and when from college. She was asked whether she had worked with radios and whether she liked the physics classes she had taken in college. The interviewer wanted to know what her hobbies were. “Books and bridge,” Dot replied. The interviewer wrote that she was “attractive and well-dressed” as well as “intelligent” and “nice.”
Based on this, her assignment was made, and it consisted of one word: crypt.
Specifically, Dot Braden was assigned to Department K of Section B-II of Arlington Hall. If these terms seemed vague, that was the idea—to preserve secrecy around the intelligence work she was doing. Up to now, Dot’s life, like that of most Americans, had been circumscribed and upended by the war and the changes it wrought in every aspect of her life. Now she was in a position to impact the war’s outcome. She did not realize it herself, but she had been assigned to one of the most urgent missions that Arlington Hall had undertaken: breaking the codes that were being used to direct merchant ships moving around distant Pacific islands. The ships were bringing vital supplies to Japanese Army troops. Dot would be cracking the messages that controlled—and foretold—their movements. Severing the enemy’s lifeline of food, fuel, and other critical supplies would allow General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz to push back against Japanese primacy in the Pacific Ocean, where tens of thousands of American men’s lives were at stake and the balance of the war remained undecided.
Dot Braden would be sinking ships.
CHAPTER TWO
“This Is a Man’s Size Job, but I Seem to Be Getting Away with It”
June 1916
When the U.S. Navy wrote its female recruits from the Seven Sisters schools in the fall of 1941, telling them the wartime work they were embarking on had been done up to then by men, this was not true—not remotely.
To the extent that America had any code-breaking capability prior to World War II, it was thanks in considerable part to a small but brilliant group of women. These were women who were curious and resourceful; who needed to earn their own living; and who were on the lookout for work that satisfied them intellectually as well as, you could almost say, spiritually. They almost always were dissatisfied schoolteachers eager to find some other venue for their intellect and talent. They often were fortunate to be mentored by or partnered with—or both—men who supported their goals and respected their minds. In science, there is something called a “jackpot effect,” where a male scientist hires women in his lab early in the development of a certain field, and these women hire other talented women, and, as a result, the field ends up with an unusually high number of women. Something like this was at work in cryptanalysis. A few key women proved themselves gifted, early on; a few key men were willing to hire and encourage them; that early success led to more women being drawn in.
The other factor that led to women’s involvement was the advent of code breaking for serious wartime uses. Like medicine, code breaking often makes advances during times of violent conflict, when life-and-death necessity becomes the mother of invention, technology drives innovation, and government funds are freed up. Military cryptanalysis certainly had been around before World War II—in the United States it tended to be an occasional affair, used during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and then dismantled—and also was rather leisurely in the days when communications were too slow to affect combat in real time. Things picked up in World War I, when militaries started using radio to direct troops, ships, and—soon—aircraft. But despite its growing importance, cryptanalysis often was not a job that career military men wanted, at least not at the outset. Officers understood that it was better for their careers to spend a war in the theater, being shot at and commanding men, rather than sitting safely behind a desk. And so wartime, exactly when code breaking was most needed, was exactly when women were invited to pinch-hit.
It also helped that cryptanalysis in its formative stages was an occupation without fame or prestige, not yet a recognized or even a known field of endeavor. While it had existed in Europe for centuries, where furtive bureaus operated in the shadows to monitor diplomatic missives, cryptanalysis for quite some time—particularly in the United States—also tended to be an obscure and even slightly crackpot profession, more of a hobby or amateur calling. This lack of renown or regulation—the fact that it had not yet been established as a man’s field, or even a field—created a wide crack through which women could enter. To do so, it helped to have a high tolerance for the clandestine and irregular, a lack of squeamishness about reading words intended for other people, and a willingness to embrace the unknown. A little bit of desperation was also not a bad thing.