Barracks D was the largest WAVES barracks in the world, and virtually all the women who lived there were code breakers. It soon had a beauty shop and a bowling alley. The women were assigned bunks and tall lockers. There was a mess hall catered by Hot Shoppes, the renowned local cafeteria chain known for its milk shakes and hot fudge sundaes. The women worked round-the-clock shifts, which made it hard to sleep. There were always people coming and going, always noise in the barracks. The women had never lived in proximity to so many other women. Jaenn Coz made sure to use the last toilet stall, fearful she would get “the clap” from a shipmate.
The Annex was perched on an incline slightly above the barracks. On rainy days, the women code breakers took off their shoes and walked barefoot to work, upward through streaming water. Women officers were given a weekly stipend and allowed to live off campus. One officer lived in a boardinghouse with a roommate who tried to stay up and listen to see if she talked in her sleep about what she was doing. There was a lot of curiosity in Washington about what went on at the Naval Communications Annex. Armed Marines inspected the women’s badges and bags. Many of the Marines had seen traumatic duty at places like Guadalcanal and were given the guard job as a recuperative assignment. When she went in and out, Anne Barus made a point of looking the men in the eye as they saluted her. She had a brother in the Pacific and she knew the Marines had been through hell.
The enlisted women were given a naval rating, Specialist Q, which was inscribed on a patch. The Q did not stand for anything, but it did arouse a lot of curiosity. One day, Jane Case, the former debutante, was walking up Wisconsin Avenue when a car stopped and offered her a ride. The wartime rule was that cars should pick up members of the military. It was pouring rain and Jane accepted, gratefully, and clambered into the back. The driver was a man wearing a raincoat, and his wife was sitting beside him. During the ride up Wisconsin, he grilled Jane, asking her what went on in the communications annex and what she was doing for the Navy.
She replied with the answer she always had ready. “I fill inkwells and sharpen pencils and give people what they need,” she told him.
“What does the Q in Specialist Q stand for?” he asked her.
Jane laughed it off. “It’s Q for communications; you know, the Navy can’t spell,” she said flippantly.
When they got to the barracks and the driver reached across and opened the back door to let her out, the sleeve of his raincoat hiked up slightly. She saw one gold stripe, and then several more. She realized that the driver was a Navy admiral. He gave her a faint, knowing smile. He had been testing her. She had passed.
She wasn’t the only one to whom this sort of encounter happened. After arriving in Washington, Ruth Rather and some other WAVES were processed and told they had a few days off before they began work. They were advised to see the sights. As they did so, they were struck by the number of male strangers who tried to pick them up, ply them with alcohol, even seduce them. When they showed up for their first day at the Annex, they were introduced to the same men—naval officers who had been testing their character and discretion.
At Mount Vernon the work remained the same but the surroundings were more capacious. Women were situated in old classrooms and in new temporary buildings. The gym was converted to a cafeteria. On the compound, an incinerator was constructed for burning papers, and a pistol range built. A path was cut in the rear of the compound, leading to an apartment building called McLean Gardens—built on the former estate of the wealthy McLean family, whose members included the publisher who stiffed William and Elizebeth Friedman when they were developing his private code—that housed officers and other war workers. As it happened, Elizebeth Friedman also moved into the Naval Annex, working in Coast Guard offices that were technically under the oversight of OP-20-G. In the run-up to war, the Coast Guard’s assignment to monitor neutral shipping led to the receipt of a mass of intercepts from around the Atlantic; that, in turn, led to a full-blown mission to monitor spy communications between Germany and secret agents in the Western Hemisphere. Elizebeth belonged to a team endeavoring to break a version of Enigma used by a clandestine station in Argentina. Like Agnes Driscoll, despite her long years of public service, she was at a disadvantage due to her civilian status in wartime. A male officer replaced her as head of her unit. She often clashed with her military supervisor, whom she considered careerist and self-centered. The two of them, she later said, “frequently debated the proper mission of the unit,” and she felt they could have been doing work that was more important. Her unit was highly secret, as it involved counterespionage, and did not intersect with the work of the Navy women, who remained unaware of it.
The Navy women now worked in every unit—breaking codes, drafting intelligence summaries. Some were put to work as a “collateral” desk, making trips to the Library of Congress and elsewhere, looking up names of ships and cities and public figures and whatever might provide cribs and shed light on the message content. The place had a pleasant, university feel; many male officers were reservists from academic peacetime occupations, including Fredson Bowers, a florid, hardworking Shakespeare bibliographer from the University of Virginia; Oswald Jacoby, the renowned bridge player; and Willard Van Orman Quine, a philosopher and mathematician from Harvard. There also was Richmond Lattimore, who taught classics at Bryn Mawr and later did a translation of the Iliad. The publishing world was represented by Charles Scribner Jr. and Pike Johnson of Doubleday, and there was a woman named Elizabeth Sherman “Bibba” Arnold, a Vassar-educated mathematician who struck Elizabeth Bigelow as “brighter than anyone.” The presence of so many learned men prompted the Navy to refer to one unit as the Office of College Professors. The women called it the Booby Hatch.
They meant it affectionately. Many of the professors treated the women like undergraduates. Suzanne Harpole, recruited from Wellesley, was assigned to work for Fredson Bowers. Bowers was married to Nancy Hale, a writer who published fiction in The New Yorker. They seemed to Suzanne a glamorous literary couple and she was excited to be in proximity to such luminaries. Bowers worked interminable hours, and one Sunday he came over to Suzanne’s desk, perched on the edge, took a cigarette out of a cigarette holder, and thoughtfully tamped it on the desk. “Miss Harpole,” he said, “I am going to give you the kiss of death.”
“What have I done wrong?” she wondered anxiously.
“I am going to make you a watch officer,” he said with dramatic relish. He was promoting her. A watch officer was in charge of a shift. Bowers was kind to her in other ways. When he learned of her love for opera and music, he would give her 78 rpm records of her favorite singers. He made her promise that after the war she would go to Glyndebourne, in England, to hear the famous opera there.