War had been coming to America for more than a year. Even so, once it arrived the fact of total war was astonishing, unthinkable, as were the events that caused it. The first unthinkable thing was that Japan—seeking a decisive blow that would destroy the American fleet and end the Pacific War almost before it started—would attack unprovoked and without warning. But it was equally unthinkable that America’s own planners had been caught so unawares. Despite years of tensions with Japan over its aggression in China and around the Pacific, despite the fact that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had frozen Japan’s assets, despite awareness in much of the Navy that something was going to happen somewhere in the Pacific, America’s leaders had not seen Pearl Harbor coming.
The attack set in motion a lasting controversy. How could the United States have been taken by surprise? Congressional hearings would be held, fingers pointed, scapegoats identified. Conspiracy theories would be floated. Careers would be ended and reputations ruined. Chaos prevailed as the war establishment suffered upheaval along with instant expansion—what would be called, today, scaling up.
America could no longer be blind and deaf to enemy intentions. A failure on the scale of Pearl Harbor must not happen again. The country was fighting a global war against adversaries who had been preparing for years, if not decades. Intelligence was more important than ever, yet intelligence was hard to come by. Emerging from two decades of disarmament and isolationism, America had a clubby Navy with a disorganized intelligence apparatus; a small skeleton Army; no freestanding Air Force; and—as hard as this may be to believe, in this era of proliferating and overlapping spy agencies—barely any spies abroad. Building an overseas spy network would take time.
In the present—and for the foreseeable future—a first-rate code-breaking operation was needed to crack enemy message systems. Foreign diplomats; political leaders; German submarine captains; Pacific island lookouts; weathermen; skippers of rice ships; airmen in the heat of combat; even companies and banks—if anybody was saying anything, anywhere in the world, America wanted to know about it.
And so the secret letters began going out.
Some had already been issued. Months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy was beginning to realize that unprecedented action would be needed to address the nation’s intelligence deficit. Thus, a handful of letters materialized in college mailboxes as early as November 1941. Ann White, a senior at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, received hers on a fall afternoon not long after leaving an exiled poet’s lecture on Spanish romanticism.
The letter was waiting when she returned to her dormitory for lunch. Opening it, she was astonished to see that it had been sent by Helen Dodson, a professor in Wellesley’s Astronomy Department. Miss Dodson was inviting her to a private interview in the observatory. Ann, a German major, had the sinking feeling she might be required to take an astronomy course in order to graduate. But a few days later, when Ann made her way along Wellesley’s Meadow Path and entered the observatory, a low domed building secluded on a hill far from the center of campus, she found that Helen Dodson had only two questions to ask her.
Did Ann White like crossword puzzles, and was she engaged to be married?
Elizabeth Colby, a Wellesley math major, received the same unexpected summons. So did Nan Westcott, a botany major; Edith Uhe (psychology); Gloria Bosetti (Italian); Blanche DePuy (Spanish); Bea Norton (history); and Ann White’s good friend Louise Wilde, an English major. In all, more than twenty Wellesley seniors received a secret invitation and gave the same replies. Yes, they liked crossword puzzles, and no, they were not on the brink of marriage.
Anne Barus received her own letter during the fall of her senior year at Smith College. A history major, she was head of the International Relations Club, and had been accepted into a prestigious internship in Washington, D.C. It was a rare opportunity for a woman—for anybody—and she was looking forward to exposure to a range of government work. But when she found herself invited to a clandestine meeting in Smith’s science building, together with a group of mystified classmates, she quickly put her own plans aside.
At Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Barnard, Radcliffe, the letters went out, throughout the fall and into the terrible winter of early 1942, as undergraduates began rolling bandages and sewing blackout curtains, taking first aid courses, learning to do plane spotting, sending bundles to Britain. Meat became scarce and dorm rooms grew cold from lack of fuel. The schools were members of the Seven Sisters, and had been founded in the nineteenth century to educate women at a time when many leading colleges—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth—would not admit them. On many of these campuses, the wartime menace felt particularly close. In the cold waters of the North Atlantic, Navy men and merchant seamen were running the gauntlet of German U-boats—enemy submarines, which often traveled in groups called wolf packs, preying on convoys transporting food and supplies to beleaguered England. At Wellesley, twenty miles from Boston, lights were doused to hide the ships in Boston Harbor, and the students learned to find their way around by flashlight.
At the time these schools were founded, many considered higher education to be poorly suited for girls. Now the views had changed. Educated women were wanted. Urgently.
The students were called to secret meetings where they learned that the U.S. Navy was inviting them to embark on a field called “cryptanalysis,” a word, it was soon made clear to them, they were never to utter outside the confines of the gatherings. They were being offered a training course in code breaking and, if they passed, would proceed to Washington after graduation, to take jobs with the Navy as civilians. Sworn to secrecy, the women were forbidden from telling anybody what they were doing: not their friends, not their parents, not their family, not their roommates. They were not to let news of their training leak into campus newspapers or disclose it in a letter, not even to their enlisted brother or boyfriend. If pressed, they could say they were studying communications: the routing of ordinary naval messages.