Scores of enlisted women worked in the library unit—OP-20-G-L—where about a dozen formed a tight friendship. The library unit typed incoming messages, fresh from the teletype, on file cards, categorizing them and making careful note of coincidences and recurrences. Like the women in additive recovery, they responded to action in the war theater. When Betty Allen, a librarian from a small Illinois town, arrived in the unit, a group of women were busily indexing geographic place names from maps of Alaska, in anticipation of a possible Japanese invasion there. Betty Allen became a staunch member of the friendship group, as did Georgia O’Connor, a farm girl from Missouri; Lyn Ramsdell, who had worked in the office of a Boston wool merchant; and Ruth Schoen, a legal secretary and the yeoman who had put the “bedroom eyes” officer in his place.
Ruth Schoen was the only Jewish member of the group. Her grandparents on both sides had emigrated from Hungary. Like most Americans, she was not yet aware of the Nazi death camps, but she was patriotic and wanted to do her part so badly that she enlisted despite being underweight and underage. She had grown up on Long Island, in a religiously mixed community that was reasonably tolerant, though as a girl she did have one close friend whose father turned out to be a member of the Bund, a pro-Nazi group. An excellent student, she skipped a grade and graduated from high school at seventeen. She wanted to go to college, but her parents told her she needed to augment the family income. So Ruth went to work for a Manhattan lawyer and taught herself to execute depositions, summonses, complaints, and other legal forms. Part of her earnings went to pay her brother’s college tuition. She herself enrolled in night classes at Brooklyn College. Enlisting in June 1943, she picked the Navy because her father had served in it in World War I. Being underage, she needed a parent’s consent. Her father would not give it, but her mother did; she felt Ruth had lived a sheltered life, and getting out into the world would do her good. A pound too light, she ate as much as she could and managed to pass. The lawyer she worked for wept when she left.
Of all the women in the library group, Ruth was the one whose family lived the closest, and she would invite her new friends to travel home with her for visits. “My parents were so happy” to host the women, she said. They loved them all and made sure to find the churches they wanted to attend on Sunday. “They treated us like a nest of chicks,” Lyn Ramsdell remembered.
In Washington, there was a synagogue that had weekly Friday night parties, and toward the end of 1943 Ruth met a soldier there named Dave Mirsky, who asked her out. They dated a bit, and at some point Dave’s brother Harry came to visit him. When Dave was sent overseas with a unit of tank destroyers, Harry Mirsky stepped in and took his brother’s place courting Ruth. All the women in the library unit loved Harry Mirsky, who was gregarious and funny. He had been injured when thrown from a jeep and so was still stateside, recovering. “Guess who’s waiting for you downstairs!” they would tease Ruth, coming in as she was finishing her shift. On their dates he would sometimes ask her what she did, and she would change the subject. After two months Harry took Ruth to dinner and told her, abruptly, “I want you to be my wife.”
“I hardly know you,” she protested.
“I’ve made up my mind,” he replied winningly. They met in December 1944 and married in May. Her friends threw her a shower in a French restaurant. Ruth applied for permission to wear a wedding gown, which was considered civilian clothing. She had six days of leave in which to find a dress, arrange the ceremony, marry, and take a Catskills honeymoon. All of her Specialist Q librarian friends managed to get to Queens for the wedding. Some were granted leave; some took a chance and went briefly AWOL.
Georgia O’Connor was next in the group to marry. Despite having grown up poor, she married a wealthy heir to a publishing fortune, a man whose wartime job was tracking Nazi spies in Chicago and whose family owned a villa near Cannes that was now occupied by Germans. When her high-society mother-in-law asked what her own father did for a living, Georgia O’Connor replied, honestly, “He slops pigs.”
This kind of thing happened all the time. Amid the wartime upheaval, the wildest pairings became normal.
The women were living life in the moment, with little idea what the future held. If a woman went out on four dates with a soldier and he didn’t ask her to marry him, she figured she had bombed. Romances, naturally, blossomed on site. Marge Boynton, from Wellesley, married Willard Van Orman Quine, from Harvard, a few years after the war. Their love was born in the Booby Hatch.
Together this group of Navy women broke and rebroke the fleet code that Agnes Driscoll had laid the groundwork for, and they broke the inter-island ciphers, and they helped keep track of the movements of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Men in the Pacific, such as Joe Rochefort, Thomas Dyer, and Edwin Layton, would get credit—well deserved—for famous victories like Midway, but most Pacific achievements were group ones. “The history of the Navy in the Pacific is the history of a system, and must be written up as a system,” said Frank Raven later. “While there were a number of prominent individuals, you can’t credit any individual with winning the Battle of Midway or of breaking any major cipher system. These were crew jobs.”
And the women were the crews. They outnumbered men in virtually every unit of the Naval Annex. By 1945, Pacific decryption there consisted of 254 military men and 1,252 military women, plus 33 civilians. Though they did not receive public credit, some did become legendary in the small sealed rooms where they were working. One enlisted member of the WAVES “had such a knack for running additives across unplaced messages and recognizing valid hits that for over a year she was allowed to do almost nothing else,” one internal memo admiringly noted.
The mostly female makeup of the Annex became a logistical problem—or rather, the fact that the women could not be sent overseas created a problem. Some men would have liked a break from overseas work, and many women dearly wanted to replace them. But neither could happen. Every year, Suzanne Harpole got a standard form asking if she wanted a transfer, and every year, she asked to be sent abroad. “Every year I’d get a response saying we received your request but we are only sending men overseas. That happened all the time. I kept thinking: If they can send nurses overseas, why can’t they send us?”