As they went about their assignments, women found competencies within themselves they had not known existed. Jane Case—told, growing up, that she was bad at math—turned out to have a ready facility with numbers. She sat at a desk in a large room where a conveyer belt brought messages to her; it was her job to use her math skills to evaluate a few enciphered numbers at the beginning and decide which JN-25 messages were important enough to pass on. She was very careful in making decisions, aware that an error in judgment—if, say, she failed to pass on a vital message—could be catastrophic. The work was repetitive, but it demanded hard, intense, constant focus. That was stressful. There were far too many messages to break every one. “God, the Japanese sent out messages. There was no such thing as a moment when you didn’t have a stack,” she recalled later. Working in landlocked northwest Washington, D.C., Jane could tell if a major Pacific Fleet action was under way, because the stack would grow even higher. “Because of the traffic you knew something big was happening.”
She wasn’t the only worker who could feel the accelerating rhythm of the war via the size and pace of her workload, which—as the Allies began to take the offensive in earnest in the Pacific—responded like a tuning fork to the action overseas. After a long slog through sand and jungle, the United States secured Guadalcanal in February 1943, and, over the course of many months, it was on to the Gilbert Islands, the Marshalls, and the Marianas: Saipan, Guam, Tinian.
As the men in the war theater did their brave and grisly work, the women at the Annex did their best to support them. In advance of every push, every landing, the tempo in the code-breaking rooms would accelerate, as if a string had been tugged, far away, and the women were feeling the pull. Furloughs would be canceled, memos sent. On May 25, 1943, the Naval Annex additive recovery room received a memo saying, “As all of you are doubtless aware, we are approaching what promises to be a period of intense activity.” Anne Barus and the others were told to give no hint, outside the office, of the quickened pace within it—not even in other parts of the Annex. “Exactly when the period of maximum activity will hit, it is impossible to say,” the memo noted. “Certainly within the next three or four days batches of traffic will be sent down which must be handled with the greatest possible rapidity.”
The author, Lieutenant W. S. Weedon, noted that the unit had received a commendation for its work during Guadalcanal. “It would be very pleasant indeed if this sort of thing were to happen again.” He also noted in a separate memo that their top boss, Commander Charles Ford, who was overseeing the JN-25 effort, was “anxious to push the 24-hour total once again over the 2500 mark.” That is to say, Ford wanted more than 2,500 additives recovered in the course of a day.
“This is not a cracking of the whip,” the memo stated, “but a request which, correctly interpreted, means that the workers on June 8 should choose the best traffic and give some extra effort to piling up the best score possible.”
The women obliged, and then some. Writing them soon after, Weedon noted “the truly splendid effort made yesterday by all hands in the Additive Recovery Rooms.” They had not only exceeded 2,500; they had broken their own record, with 2,563 additives recovered. Commander Ford wrote Weedon: “Please convey to all hands my congratulations for their performance.… The day by day individual and group records are truly amazing to me. New records have been established and then improved.” This was more gratifying than some other memos the women received. “Pick up scraps!” Ford wrote in another. “Use ash trays! Dispose of empty bottles and cans! Keep your personal gear neat and clean.”
The women quickly rose to trusted positions. Many female officers who started out as ensigns became “lieutenant junior grades,” which was the next rank up, and then full lieutenants, and sometimes lieutenant commanders. When Betty Hyatt started out as a yeoman, she was assigned the tedious job of making frequency counts of five-digit numbers. Before long, she had clearance to go in almost any room. As American forces assaulted enemy-held islands in the Pacific, the U.S. men were sometimes able to capture codebooks left by retreating forces. Betty Hyatt was on duty in 1944 when a naval officer brought in a Japanese codebook, having traveled as a businessman to escape notice. It was up-to-date, intact but for some slightly burned pages. It identified code groups in the latest version of JN-25 and enabled the code breakers to read every message on file in that system. Betty volunteered to help, an exhausting job that took two days and two sleepless nights. The code, she later recalled, “gave them the location of Japanese ships, what was on each, who was on each, and the station.”
During this effort Betty was assigned to take some code recoveries to a high-priority room, where she opened a door and was shocked to see a man waiting to receive it who was Japanese. She stood in the doorway, paralyzed and uncertain what to do. Every American citizen by then had been subjected to the most intense and cruel propaganda against Japanese people. “We had been taught that anything Oriental is your enemy and you cannot trust them,” as she later put it. Clearly the worst had happened, Betty thought, and the enemy had seized the Naval Annex. The women had been warned that “this place could be invaded at any moment.” Determined to hold out to the last, Betty refused to surrender the material she was holding. The man laughed graciously.
“I’m an American,” he assured her. He was a Nisei, an American citizen of Japanese heritage, working as a translator.
“You don’t look like one,” she blurted in her exhaustion, and felt sorry about that remark for the rest of her life.
Many women ended up in units that were almost wholly female, to the disappointment of those looking forward to working among men. Fearing that so many women could not resist gossiping about their work, the Navy developed strategies—such as moving women from barracks to barracks—to prevent them from forming close friendships. The tactic failed. Completely. The enlisted women had undergone the ancient military ritual of being stripped of their old identities. “You were not your old self any more,” as one put it. The women had been made anew by their wintry marching, their boot-camp training, their gynecological examinations, their vaccination daisy chains, their naked physicals, and now they were in it together.