It was a good course, and they had worked hard at mastering it, but the problems often didn’t dovetail with the actual work they found themselves doing; lots of the tasks they were facing had not been covered. And all of this was no longer an academic exercise. They were responsible for men’s lives, and the responsibility felt awful and real. Most of the women started out on the Japanese desk, but those few who knew German soon found themselves helping fight the Battle of the Atlantic. The British still had lead responsibility, but the Americans—who also had a stake in the outcome—were doing what they could to help crack Shark, the four-rotor Enigma cipher. Without the aid of bombe machines, the women used hand solutions to try to guess the day’s key setting. They were in constant communication with the British, trading notes and cribs.
Margaret Gilman, who had majored in biochemistry at Bryn Mawr but studied German in high school, was given a proficiency exam in German and put to work in a small sealed room attacking Shark. Her unit consisted of all women, with a lone male officer supervising. In a room guarded by Marines, Gilman labored over Nazi messages transmitted in the Bay of Biscay, the body of water off the coast of occupied France, where huge U-boat bases now were located. The U-boats had to cross the Bay of Biscay to reach the Atlantic convoy lanes. Before the subs left base, the Nazis would send out weather vessels to report back on conditions, using Enigma machines. There are a limited number of weather-related words—wind, rain, clouds—so it was sometimes feasible to come up with cribs. “BISKAYAWETTER” was a crib the women often would try as they made charts and graphs of common cribs and the places in messages where Germans were most likely to nestle certain words.
The urgency of the work was harrowing. American men, they knew, were trying to cross the ocean where the U-boats waited. “German submarines were literally controlling the Atlantic Ocean,” Margaret Gilman recalled later. “Can you imagine sending out American troop ships loaded with soldiers through an Atlantic ocean riddled with submarines? It was heart-rending, oh my God.” In the unit’s workroom, a detailed wall map displayed the Atlantic Ocean, with pins for every U-boat whose position they could locate. Margaret couldn’t stand to look at the map and would position her head to keep it out of her peripheral vision. The morale of the whole country would suffer when a troop ship was lost, and the women felt the burden of responsibility. “If we had any doubts about whether what we were doing was important,” she recalled, just let a few days go by with no progress, “and the brass were down there yelling at us—what are we doing, neglecting our duty.”
Ann White also was assigned to the Enigma unit, having majored in German at Wellesley. The work brought her into uncomfortable contact with the humanity of the enemy. The British were sending over items to help develop cribs based on things like lengths of transmissions, the locations of the boats they were addressed to, and instructions for returning to port. From time to time, the British would send documents found in a sinking or captured U-boat. These included personal effects, such as family photos, belonging to German sailors who now were drowned or captive. Once, Ann’s team broke a message from a Nazi commander announcing the birth of his son. One code breaker composed a snatch of doggerel as a translation: “From here to Capetown be it known A little Leuth / has now been bo’n,” which of course rhymed only if you had a southern accent.
But mostly, the work was frustrating, and it imbued the women with sadness and a sense of failure. Ann White’s job was to translate German messages into English, so she knew what the contents said. During the winter of 1942–1943, her unit partially cracked a message from D?nitz, alerting a wolf pack to a convoy of Allied ships passing the southern tip of Greenland. The code breakers, American and British, desperately tried to determine the location of the U-boats that lay in wait but could not. Later, they learned that most of the ships had been lost. “We worked on the Enigma desperately,” Ann White would later say. “Blindly.” It was a relief to be doing something: “Everyone we knew and loved was in this war. It was a Godsend for a woman to be so busy she couldn’t worry,” she reflected. But “we knew men were dying.”
The mood in the Japanese code rooms was equally grim, as women struggled to learn their work and to master the newest iteration of JN-25, the Japanese fleet code. It was such a daunting effort that, in the unit Vi Moore was assigned to, more than one commanding officer expressed the view that America might lose. Another liked to say that even if the Allies did prevail, “every war was a preparation for the next one.” Fran Steen lost a fiancé, shot down in the Pacific, early on. Many American men who had been stationed on Pacific islands before the attack on Pearl Harbor were now prisoners of war. Erma Hughes, a psychology major recruited out of the University of Maryland—her father, a bricklayer, sold land to finance her tuition—was sending care packages to classmates in POW camps. The ROTC students in her class had mostly become paratroopers. For graduates of the class of 1942, the attrition of friends and classmates was stark and acute. Erma could never be certain her care packages arrived and did not even know whether the intended recipients were alive, but she kept sending them just in case.
At this point, naval code breaking was still laboring under a very dark cloud. The disaster of Pearl Harbor had called into question the value of cryptanalysis, and many top naval officials felt that even when it did work, code breaking took too long to be of use in the heat of an ongoing battle. There were other disadvantages beyond their cramped and cockroach-ridden conditions. As the women streamed into the D.C. headquarters, male officers were sent to the Pacific to work on smaller teams set up near intercept stations. The Pacific field units could begin tackling messages as soon as they were plucked out of the air. These field teams sometimes deciphered more quickly, but Washington—with more machines and a bigger staff—would eventually produce more solutions. Often, though, Washington had to wait a long time for intercepts to arrive. The Navy headquarters had some teletype lines, but not enough. Some messages were sent by air, stowed aboard the luxurious Pacific Clippers operated by Pan-American Airways, but many more were sent by boat and took weeks, sometimes even a month, to make the journey. The teams—D.C. headquarters and field units—were cooperative but also competitive, solving JN-25 by agonizing bits and pieces, sharing recoveries of code groups, additives, or pieces of intelligence.