Jane had always had a visual mind and could see, in her mind’s eye, the country from sea to shining sea, the United States and its citizenry rolling out before her from east to west: mountains, wheat fields, rivers, Americans of all creeds and races. She found the vision of teeming diversity to be thrilling. As soon as the WAVES were created, Jane took the subway to Lower Manhattan to enlist. She memorized the eye chart and managed to make it through the eye examination without revealing that she wore glasses. Her strategy hit a snag, however, when the enlistees were told to strip.
In the Navy, men were subjected to naked group examinations, and now, so were the women. Jane was ordered to go into a little booth and remove her blouse and bra. After she emerged, a female officer took a red marker, drew the number 10 between her breasts, and told her to stand between numbers 9 and 11. Jane had never seen another woman naked. At the Chapin School, the word “breast” had not been uttered. Now, nearsighted without her glasses, she was obliged to go around peering closely at other women’s bare bosoms.
Jane had expected to be made an officer, but the Navy did not consider her tenure at the Longy School of Music to be the equivalent of two years of college. Jane did not object. It suited her fine to be an ordinary seaman. Families with a son in the service put stars in their windows to show their sacrifice and contribution. Jane obtained a star, slapped it down in front of her mother, and said, “There. There’s nothing you can do about it.” She joined the singing platoon at Hunter and loved it. In Washington, she bunked with a mortician’s daughter who was very proud of a music box her father had given her, in the shape of a casket.
“I would have to look at it every day, and say, ‘Dottie, that’s so beautiful!’”
By late 1942, the Navy’s Washington, D.C., code-breaking operation—like that of the Army—had grown so large that it had to be relocated. In just under six months, the office had swelled from a few hundred to more than a thousand people. The Navy began to cast around for a bigger facility, and in true elite Navy fashion found a women’s junior college in the most prestigious part of northwest Washington, a leafy neighborhood, Tenleytown, that boasted mansions as well as nearby landmarks such as American University, the Washington National Cathedral, and a number of foreign embassies. The school was called Mount Vernon Seminary. More rigorous than the junior college that formerly occupied Arlington Hall, and better connected, Mount Vernon educated daughters of diplomats, politicians, cabinet members, and other eminent Washingtonians, including Alexander Graham Bell. In a kind of circular irony, Ada Comstock, the Radcliffe president who helped launch the naval code-breaking program, had studied at Mount Vernon. The school occupied some thirty-eight acres on an elevated point from which it was possible to see the Pentagon in Virginia—even the Blue Ridge Mountains, beyond it—and Fort Meade in Maryland. The main building was a refectory of Georgian red brick, with cloisters closed in that “permit the girls freedom for exercise and are secluded from public view,” as a school publication put it. Of course, a facility that shielded its girls from public view would be perfect for shielding code breakers.
Mount Vernon had been built early in the twentieth century and expanded. Students’ rooms were located so that every bedroom at some point of the day enjoyed sunlight. There were dorm rooms with en suite bathrooms, music rooms, an art studio, a gym and an indoor swimming pool, and a great hall with a portrait of the founder, Elizabeth Somers. On walls were chiseled inscriptions of the school motto, Vincit qui se vincit, or “She who conquers self conquers all.” One building had a “mathematical door” that was numerically perfect in its dimensions. There was a study hall with a cork floor to deaden noise; boxwood borders based on a colonial design; and a beautiful white-fronted Georgian chapel designed to reflect the look of a Methodist meetinghouse. Funding had been raised for all this from moneyed Washingtonians who believed it was worthwhile to educate women.
Mount Vernon’s trustees had been watching with alarm the military’s rush to take over schools in the area, including not only Arlington Hall but also National Park College in Maryland, now occupied by the Army Medical Corps. They hoped Mount Vernon would prove too small. They hoped in vain. On December 15, 1942, the Navy seized possession of its campus and nine buildings. There was talk of gutting the chapel and turning it into a two-story naval office building. This was widely seen as an offense against architectural history, and the American Institute of Architects filed a complaint. The chapel was spared. Before relinquishing it—students would attend classes in Garfinckel’s department store while the school sought a new location—the Mount Vernon president, George Lloyd, snuck in after midnight and removed the altar materials, the founder’s Bible, and the altar cross and candlesticks: “all the things we felt the Navy could do quite well without, and we knew we couldn’t.”
This was the same chapel where the WAVES would be sat down and told they’d be shot if they blabbed.
The Navy’s new top secret code-breaking operation was located at 3801 Nebraska Avenue, a deceptively peaceful patch of land graced by trees and birdsong. Prior to the move, Navy leaders met to find a “harmless” name to call the facility. Cover names were proposed, such as “Naval Research Station” and “Naval Training School.” In the end it was dubbed the Naval Communications Annex, but most people called it the Annex; the USS Mount Vernon; or WAVES Barracks D. It was located near where Massachusetts and Nebraska Avenues converge at Ward Circle—named after the Revolutionary War general Artemas Ward—which taxi drivers started calling WAVES Circle. In an unofficial Navy Annex newsletter, cartoons showed Ward’s statue grinning and leering and trying to peep into the windows of the vast WAVES barracks, which in a matter of months was constructed across the street from the code-breaking compound: rows of glorified Quonset huts insinuated among lawns and mansions.
When Elizabeth Bigelow showed up for duty in 1944, the whole code-breaking compound “appeared to be a huge encampment of ugly temporary buildings surrounded by a high fence and secured by Marine guards.”