The number of women at the Annex steadily increased, and soon they outnumbered the men. In July 1943, there were 269 male officers, 641 enlisted men, 96 female officers, and 1,534 enlisted women. By the following February the number of women had nearly doubled and the number of men had shrunk: There were 374 male officers, 447 enlisted men, 406 female officers, and a whopping 2,407 enlisted women. Women’s ranks would grow until there were 4,000 women breaking enemy naval codes at the USS Mount Vernon Seminary, comprising 80 percent of the total force there.
For the women, being privy to the message content was eye-opening, and not in a good way. By early 1943 many U.S. citizens were led to believe America was winning the war, or starting to. This was not wrong, necessarily, but the code breakers got a more sobering perspective in the sense that they understood the full cost. At the Annex, in addition to code-breaking units, certain code rooms received encrypted internal U.S. Navy messages coming from the theater of war. When Ensign Marjorie Faeder reported for duty, she found herself assigned to work the electric cipher machine, or ECM, a noisy, rugged piece of equipment used for transmitting and receiving American messages. The “incoming messages were telling us very clearly that we were losing the war in the Pacific,” she later remembered. She had a vivid picture of what was going on. “Casualties were high, ships were going down, subs were lost.” Faeder found the disparity between the public news and the private truth shocking. “When I would go off watch, the newspaper headlines were of how many Japs we had killed, how we were winning the war.… Growing up with the idea that our newspapers always told the truth, I quickly learned about propaganda.”
Some of the male commanders did not see the women as proper sailors. Yeoman Ruth Schoen was put to work in a unit where one officer told her she had “bedroom eyes” and kept making passes at her. He ordered her to get him coffee, and Ruth nipped that idea in the bud by refusing. “I didn’t want to start serving coffee to anybody,” she said. He was taken aback. She was young but self-possessed and learned to steer clear of him.
But other women had commanders who cherished them as the precious resource they were. Jaenn Coz one day was whistling, and a new ensign—male—told her “no whistling aboard the ship.” The officer told her he’d put her “on report,” which meant he’d report her for disciplinary action. Her own commanding officer, whom she later recalled as a Texan named Hanson, went over the ensign’s head and complained, and—this is how she heard it—the ensign got shipped out to sea. For security reasons, code breakers had to clean the rooms they worked in, a duty that included “swabbing the decks,” or mopping the floors. Rather than make the women in his unit do it, Hanson would order his officers to mop them.
Another time, Jaenn Coz’s family in California sent her a crate of oranges, and she went into the hall during a break to eat one. She was standing there when along came Admiral Ernest King and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, the two top men in the entire U.S. Navy. The hallway smelled of orange and there was juice running down her arms. She was mortified.
“Well, sailor, you look like you are having a good time,” said Secretary Forrestal, stopping to observe her. Coz stood there wishing the floor would open up and swallow her. “Sir, I am a little California girl and my folks just sent me a box of oranges and let’s face it, the oranges out here are lousy,” she blurted. Forrestal laughed, asked her name, and began chatting with her. About then, Commander Hanson came along.
“Mr. Secretary, this is one of my girls,” Hanson told the naval secretary.
“Commander, does she give you much trouble?” Forrestal asked.
“All the time!” said Commander Hanson, and they both laughed.
With that, Forrestal said, “Carry on, sailor,” and Forrestal and King walked on. After that, Coz sometimes had to deliver secret dispatches to Forrestal, and whenever she did, the U.S. Navy secretary would greet her with the word “oranges.”
One of the other commanders was Wyman Packard, who headed a unit of women working the mid-, or midnight, watch. Packard, fresh from active service in the Pacific, had been surprised when he learned he would be supervising women, but it didn’t faze him. He liked to publish a little mimeographed broadsheet called Midwatch Murmurs, in which he kept the women apprised of softball games, cigarette shortages, the number of people in the hospital for sickness or stress, or name changes due to marriage. He asked them to send him news items and “spicy bits of gossip.”
Commander Packard also reminded the women that it was his awkward duty to monitor their appearance. “When one is in charge of all men this task is not too difficult,” he wrote, but “under present conditions, I think you’ll all agree, I’m in a difficult spot” because he didn’t know anything about female clothing or hairstyles. He begged them to “save me unnecessary embarrassment by abiding by the prescribed uniform regulations.”
He also praised them, pointing out that communications had the reputation of “being the most strenuous but the most thankless job in the Navy” and that theirs was “the hardest working, least glamorous, most exacting, yet one of the most important organizations in the Navy Department.” He wrote, “Your work has continually strengthened my admiration for your unquenchable spirit, your sincere devotion to duty and your unquestionable loyalty.”