Even just in the rooming houses, there was a lot of mixing and mingling. Suzanne Harpole settled into a boardinghouse run by a Mrs. Covington, from an eminent Washington family, and found herself eating alongside Canadians and White Russians. The conversation was endlessly stimulating. People of all backgrounds were thrown together. The war, for her, was “this period of very creative thinking and concern about what life was all about, and what societies were all about.” At the Annex, a weekly current events presentation gave the latest war news. Suzanne’s brother was a Marine who led a dog platoon—dogs were used to sniff out enemy ambushers—and when the presenters announced the landing on Bougainville of the first dog platoon, Suzanne felt like shouting, “That’s my brother!”
The women’s freedom brought other revelations, though, about the uglier side of their own country. Washington was in many ways a southern city, with a segregated public school system and black residents often consigned to the poorest and least well-served parts of the city. Nearby Virginia was worse. Northerners were shocked to encounter such strict racial divisions. When Marjorie Faeder boarded a train to Virginia Beach to take a quick honeymoon with her new husband, the couple sat down in a deserted car with plenty of seats. To their dismay they were told they were in the “colored” car—they had not known such a thing existed—and shooed into the whites-only car. Nancy Dobson was horrified every time she took a bus from Washington into Virginia. When the bus arrived in the middle of the bridge, all African American passengers had to get up and move to the back, and there was “just this deadly hush.” Frances Lynd, from Bryn Mawr, needed to buy some furniture, so she engaged two African American men with a pickup truck to take her downtown to get it. When she jumped in the cab with them—being from Philadelphia, she thought nothing of it—the men were appalled and fearful to be seen with a white woman sitting next to them.
There was periodic unrest in the city, and in the country, as civil rights advocates pushed to advance social changes that were taking place as a result of the war. In 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt and WAVES director Mildred McAfee managed to gain entry for African American women into the WAVES. But there would be no racial experimenting at the stodgy and sometimes paranoid Naval Annex, where top officers considered any newcomer—anybody with an unorthodox background—to be a security risk. In a June 1945 memo, Commander J. N. Wenger wrote that he had explored the “question of employment of colored WAVES at Naval Communications Annex” and felt integrating the code-breaking unit would be too risky. He concluded that it would be “unwise to conduct an experiment of such serious implications” in a unit where security was so important, and ventured that “there are many other activities in the Navy where experiments of this sort can be carried on without so much danger in the event that difficulties arise.” Black WAVES would have to take their patriotism, their intellect, and their talent elsewhere, alas.
As hard as the women worked, there were lighthearted moments even in the code rooms. One night Jane Case’s unit got word that an admiral was coming to visit, and they needed to have their unit spotless by the next day. It was Jane’s job to operate the buffing machine, which seemed nearly as big as a baby elephant, and harder to handle. She flipped the “on” switch and nothing happened; peering underneath a table, she saw the cord wasn’t plugged in and crawled underneath to plug it. Pleased that she had solved her own problem, she backed out to see the machine flying all over the office. By the time she wrestled it into submission, the place was a disaster and they had to spend the whole night picking up messages before they could get it painted and cleaned and buffed.
Also in her office were two enlisted women whose behavior Jane observed with fascination. They sat together against a wall and did a lot of the typing. Jane liked to think of them as Myrt and Gert. One was married and one was engaged, but their husband and fiancé were away, and they used the war as an opportunity for avid extracurricular dating. “They wouldn’t date anybody under a captain,” she remembered. “They were very fussy about who they would date.” People in the unit were pretty sure Myrt and Gert were having sex during their assignations. Jane had always been taught at the Chapin School that a woman must be properly introduced to a man before going out with him, so for the entirety of the war she did not date. “When I think of it—I could have gone out with a lot of people,” she said, regretfully, later. “The rules were so set, all my life.”
For many other women, their social lives were as exhausting as the code-breaking work itself. Edith Reynolds, from Vassar, found herself courted by an ardent Irish major who at one point had been in charge of mules—a bona fide muleteer—for the British Army. There was another suitor she wasn’t wild about who flew his mother from Seattle to meet her. “He wanted me to know you first,” the woman told her. “First what?” Edith wondered. Then she realized, with shock, that he thought they were going to get married. She broke up with him and he married her roommate.
One code breaker was standing in a movie line and realized there was a naval officer behind her. She turned to salute him, and he was so captivated by how flustered she was that they exchanged addresses and later married. At the group house where Edith Reynolds was living, they had a party and she noticed a man expertly cracking eggs into the eggnog. He was the plumber. “I came to fix a pipe, but this looked like so much fun, I stayed,” he told her.
The women were working so hard that it was hardly a surprise they would blow off steam, but it did irritate some inhabitants of the neighborhood where they worked. On June 16, 1943, a Washington lawyer, James Mann, wrote a letter of complaint to Captain E. E. Stone at the Naval Annex. “I hesitate to write this letter and I sincerely hope my purpose will not be misconstrued,” the lawyer began. “For some time it has been impossible for the people living on the north side of Van Ness Street, between Nebraska and Wisconsin Avenues, to sleep between eleven p.m. and 2:30 a.m. This is due to the unusual amount of noise made by the young men and women stationed at the Communications Annex.” He reported that “one morning this week about eight Waves walked up the middle of Van Ness Street at 1:30 in the morning singing. In about five or ten minutes two marines came along singing at the top of their voices.” The upset lawyer noted that “as the Waves and the seamen become better acquainted they are following their natural inclinations and now the street is quite a necking place.”
Captain Stone wrote a polite letter thanking the lawyer and assuring him that he would endeavor “to end the unpleasant situation which you report.”