Among these were Bea Norton and Bets Colby, both members of the first Wellesley cohort. Fortunately, Raven was not as unpleasant toward them as he had been toward Agnes Driscoll; he later described his new crew as “damn good gals,” though he did also see fit to point out that they were “damn pretty gals.” The unit’s main ongoing task was deciphering something the women called the “inter-island cipher,” which was known in most official documents as JN-20, and, like many minor systems, was far more important than it ever got credit for. “The Navy never mentions the inter-island cipher,” wrote Bea Norton many years later, saying that it was in fact the inter-island cipher that had carried the no-water-at-Midway message. “The plain text of the water shortage was picked up by a Japanese island operator, wired in the inter-island cipher to fleet headquarters and thence to the main Japanese fleet,” she asserted, saying that the reason Raven’s team never got credit was because the Navy was “traditionally of the view that all meaningful accomplishment was strictly by Regular Naval personnel, and along with this, distrusted any civilian, even Naval Reserve, results.”
Her assertion is plausible, and at any rate, there is no doubt about this: During the many times when the big fleet code went dark—meaning the JN-25 books changed and the code breakers could not read it—the island cipher proved a rich alternative source of intelligence. “Whenever the main code was not being read, a feeling of frustration and exasperation permeated the radio intelligence organization and spurred them on to each new success,” noted one internal history. “Even during these periods the darkness was not complete. Minor ciphers were usually being read. Frequently the information gained from the minor ciphers rivaled in importance that gained from the main naval code.”
For the women working in Raven’s unit, the inter-island ciphers gave vivid glimpses of the warfare unfolding on volcanic beaches and in thick island jungles thousands of miles away, as the Navy commenced its post-Midway Pacific pushback. When U.S. Marines hit the beaches of Guadalcanal in August 1942, Raven’s crew began to work a cipher set up by the Japanese as an emergency form of communication between the island occupiers and the fleet at sea. As the U.S. Marines pursued them, a small band of Japanese retreated into the jungle, sending twenty or thirty messages a day in the tiny makeshift cipher. It gave the women a plaintive image of what it felt like to face certain death. “I have not seen the sea for two weeks,” said one message. “I have not seen the sky for three weeks. It is time for me to die for the Emperor.” This band of Japanese resisters eventually shifted to the inter-island cipher; their numbers dwindled until, as Raven put it, the “three or four men who were left got into a motor-boat; we followed them daily in JN-20 as they described the bad conditions, etc. We sank the boat.”
When she started working on Raven’s team, Bea Norton was assigned the tedious job of taking frequency counts of individual letters. The messages arrived on Western Union tapes. Armed Marine guards stood outside her door, and she was forbidden to keep photos or anything personal on her desk. Her college training course did come in handy, as this cipher was a “substitution transposition” cipher, which involved changing letters to new ones by using a table, then switching some of the new ones to further scramble the cipher. Once Raven’s team constructed the table—that is, once they figured out how the alphabets were stacked—the table didn’t change. The only thing that did change was the monthly key telling how some of the letters were mixed up.
The changing of the key imbued the minor-cipher unit with a curious work rhythm. The women would race to break a new key and got so expert (“JN-20 ciphers were broken with increasing speed and exploited with increasing efficiency,” noted one memo) that they could then enjoy lulls of inactivity. They took advantage of the downtime: Bets Colby, a math major from Wellesley, was a favorite of Raven, who described her as a “real brilliant gal” and fondly remembered that she liked to throw epic parties, which stopped just short of being orgies. “One of the standing orders on the boards was that she had to get approval from me before she had a party because she’d take the crew out of action for ten days. She’d come and say she wanted to throw a party, what dates were available?” Raven later remembered.
There was a wall calendar in Raven’s office, pinpointing when the island cipher would change its key. He would select a date ten days before the key change. “You can have your party in there,” he would tell Bets Colby. That way, the women would have ten days to recover from their hangovers before they had to apply their minds to a new key.
Despite the bureaucratic wars raging all around them, the women loved their work. “I felt so lucky to be in this small interesting unit,” said Bea Norton later, “and to feel my work had some value.” Many felt they had been preparing for this all their lives. “Never in my life since have I felt as challenged as during that period,” reflected Ann White. “Like Hegel’s idea about when the needs of society and the needs of an individual come together, we were fulfilled.”
The only hitch was the heat. From time to time the minor-cipher unit would get instructions to cover their desks because workmen were coming to install air-conditioning. Their hopes would be dashed when Frank Raven would tell them the air-conditioning was for the top officers’ private offices, not for them.
They were doing such valuable work that Donald Menzel—the Harvard astronomy professor who helped recruit them—wrote Ada Comstock about the good things he was hearing from their bosses. “The women are arriving in great numbers and… they are proving very successful. Those who have written me are delighted with the work and find it interesting and exciting beyond all expectation.” Preparations were made for the next cohort of female trainees, from the same schools plus Vassar and Wheaton. There was less attrition as instructors began to master the material and everybody settled in. Of the 247 seniors in the class of 1943 who took the course, 222 would finish. The Radcliffe women of ’43 had been meeting on Friday afternoons on the fourth floor in a Harvard building, and toward the end, a dramatic show was made of burning their training materials, to impress the women. Even given this new influx, the Navy began to perceive that ever more girls would be needed to get the job done.
CHAPTER SIX
“Q for Communications”
July 1942
Women were proving so useful to the war effort that a new field opened to them: military service. By 1942, allies such as England and Canada had admitted women into their military, and key U.S. women’s groups began pushing for America to do the same. There were only a few women in the U.S. Congress, but one—Massachusetts Republican Edith Nourse Rogers—made women in the military her passion project. As early as 1941, Nourse Rogers met with General George Marshall, informing him that she was introducing a bill creating a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Nobody took her seriously, at least not until Pearl Harbor.