Arlington Hall soon found itself working the codes of some twenty-five nations, enemy and neutral: Finnish, Portuguese, Argentinian, Turkish, Vichy French, Free French, Chinese, Thai, Belgian, Haitian, Irish, Hungarian, Liberian, Mexican, Chilean, Brazilian, and those of many Middle Eastern countries. Some were codes; some were ciphers; some were both. There was a French code they called Jellyfish, a Chinese enciphered code they called Jabberwocky, another they called Gryphon. Some were important; some were merely interesting. Each week, top secret reports detailed breakthroughs, and it’s striking how often they were made by women. “The outstanding solution of the week was that of the SAUDI cipher, accomplished as a result of the ‘golden guess’ of Mrs. Flobeth Ehninger,” read one report in September 1943. “The system appeared to be a two digit substitution with multiple variants. Mrs. Ehninger guessed that a certain repeat might mean ‘the Arabian land.’ This assumption proved correct, and within two hours all but 4 letters of the Arabic alphabet had been determined.”
The tenor of the operation was changing. Top men like Sinkov, Rowlett, and Kullback received Army commissions and went into uniform. Military men took charge of some units, usually with a civilian “assistant,” inevitably female. William Friedman was gently pushed aside: When he returned from convalescence he was given an office at Arlington Hall, working in an advisory capacity, but no longer ran the place. “He never really came back,” as Wilma Berryman put it. But the majority of incoming workers remained civilians, following what had always been the hiring strategy in the Army’s code-breaking unit. The hardy band of brothers and sisters from the old Munitions Building would retain their informal camaraderie, but they—including women like Wilma Berryman and Delia Taylor—would quickly find themselves in positions of enormous authority.
Sometimes, when she was riding the bus between her boardinghouse and the new Arlington offices, Genevieve Grotjan would look back on her moment of insight and remember it with “satisfaction and pleasure.” Not often, though. She was too modest about her own contribution, and too busy.
CHAPTER FOUR
“So Many Girls in One Place”
December 1943
Dot Braden hated living at Arlington Farms. The dormitories, thrown together so quickly by a federal government eager to house its overwhelming influx of women workers, were flimsy and shoddy. The walls were so thin that they shook when a person walked down the hall, and the spiritual effect of living in makeshift quarters constructed out of a substance called “cemesto” was depressing, WPA paintings or no paintings. The women in the dorms were always having to stand in line for something—the mailboxes, the showers, the cafeteria food, the phone, the bus. The county of Arlington had been transformed by the numbers of government girls. As Arlington Hall was getting up and running, top code-breaking officials had gone from door to door begging local residents to offer a basement, a bedroom, a cubbyhole, an attic, anything, to house a hardworking g-girl, despite the fact that she would be doing top secret work at all hours. Residents opened their homes; Arlington Farms was constructed; even so, it wasn’t enough.
Sensing an opportunity, developers began building garden apartment buildings around Arlington Hall and advertising them in local newspapers. One day Dot’s friend Liz, from Durham, pointed out an ad for a new complex called Fillmore Gardens, built nearby along Walter Reed Drive. Liz proposed that they move in together and set up house. They approached a colleague, Ruth Weston, to see if she wanted to go in with them. Ruth had been hired one week before Dot—October 4, to be exact—and went through the same orientation classes, attending the same big Christmas party at which William Friedman and other code-breaking bigwigs made appearances, to spread cheer and celebrate the newly recruited girls upon their arrival. The two young women chatted on the bus back and forth to work and began to socialize in their free time. Ruth also lived in Idaho Hall. Parts of Arlington Farms were still unfinished, and the women would creep through an interior shortcut, a kind of utility tunnel, to meet in Dot’s room.
Ruth Weston agreed that it would be nice to get away from the crowded dorm conditions. The Fillmore Gardens apartment was on the second floor of the building, a walk-up tucked away in a discreet corner just off of a dark stairwell, and boasted a single bedroom, a single bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. As of yet the apartment complex, which was not finished, consisted of little more than a building in the middle of a field, but the place seemed palatial—and well constructed—compared to Arlington Farms. The women could cook and eat when and where they wanted to and would have to share their bathroom only with one another. Their new place was situated a mile and a half from Arlington Hall, so they could walk to work rather than waiting for the bus. “We’ll pool our money,” said Liz. They filled out an application, and they were accepted.
Finding furniture was not easy. Materials were scarce, as were funds. Dot’s mother sent a bedframe on the train from Lynchburg. The women decided that Liz would sleep on a cot and Dot and Ruth would sleep in the bed together. The problem was that the bed lacked a mattress. So Dot and Ruth looked in the paper and found a department store that sold mattresses. They called up and confirmed that they were available—not a guarantee in wartime—and took the bus and streetcar downtown after work. They paid for the mattress and were told it would be waiting at the back door. When they went around back to receive it, however, they realized their predicament: The store didn’t deliver. There was no way the two women could hand-carry a mattress on public transportation and get it all the way back to Arlington, some five miles away. By now it was getting late. There they were, two lost souls, struggling to hold a mattress between them. So Dot went inside, leaving Ruth, who was just five feet tall, to hold the thing upright, and found a salesman who looked as though he might be closing up for the day.
“We’ve got this mattress and we don’t have any way to get it home,” Dot told the man. “We live in Arlington. You all didn’t deliver it.”
“We weren’t supposed to deliver it,” the salesman told her. Then he relented. “Well, I’ll tell you what—I live in Arlington and I’m going home. I can put the mattress on the top of my car. If you, where you live, have got some eggs, I’ve got a pound of butter with me. You all can cook me some eggs and use my pound of butter and I’ll take your mattress for you.”
So that’s what the women did. They bartered a plate of scrambled eggs for the delivery of a bed mattress, and the salesman strapped the mattress to his car and drove them home. The women weren’t worried about having a strange salesman sitting in their small apartment eating eggs at their table; with three women in the place they figured they could take care of themselves.
The mattress escapade—their first experience fending for themselves in the big city—was the beginning of Dot Braden’s great friendship with Ruth Weston.