While their high spirits were tolerated—up to a point—the logical consequence was not. Pregnancy was forbidden in the U.S. Navy. And yet pregnancies did occur. When Jane Case was living in a barracks, an enlisted woman got larger and larger. What struck Jane, in retrospect, was “the quiet ignoring of her. I was one of them that just would walk by and just say hello and that was it. I was stunned more than anything.”
The penalty was discharge—and humiliation. Standing “captain’s mast” is the traditional naval hearing to consider a possible offense, and some pregnant women were subjected to it. Jaenn Coz remembered that “when we all lived in barracks, several girls got knocked up, and it was a sad thing because she had to stand a captain’s mast and watch as they ripped off her buttons and ripped off her chevrons and just humiliated her to death.… We all stood there and cried… because it was such a damned sad situation.”
Nor did marriage make it okay. In late 1943, Wellesley’s Bea Norton, now married, became pregnant and notified her superiors. “Horrified, they gave me three days to get out of uniform and told me I could consider it a discharge with honor.” Her boss, Frank Raven, was furious at the rule and begged her to come back as a civilian, but she was too tired and angry, and she resigned in December. The same thing happened to Frances Lynd from Bryn Mawr. She was working ciphers used by rice merchants and island weathermen and thought it was the most interesting work she could imagine. When she married her college boyfriend, she tried to avoid getting pregnant, but nobody had given her good information on birth control—her mother was dead—and she didn’t know how to use a diaphragm. She conceived on her honeymoon. One minute she was a respected naval officer doing work she loved and valued; the next minute she was an isolated housewife, living with her husband and several other adults. The only clothing that fit was her naval raincoat, which technically she was no longer entitled to wear. She struggled to keep house despite wartime rationing, when some days the only things she could buy were, say, bologna and canned pineapple. She tried to make a meal out of those two ingredients and was rebuked by her housemates. When her son was born, she enjoyed having an infant but later experienced profound postnatal depression.
“I felt like I had gone from being everything,” she wrote in a memoir called Saga of Myself, “to being nothing.”
The women tended to ignore the hallowed Navy rule that forbade fraternizing between officers and enlisted persons. At the boardinghouse where Suzanne Harpole was living, there was an enlisted woman named Roberta, who had attended Flora MacDonald College in North Carolina. Suzanne and Roberta worked in the same office doing the same thing, and it seemed to them ridiculous not to be friends. Also boarding at Mrs. Covington’s were two women employed at Arlington Hall, and the four would take trips to Williamsburg, Luray Caverns, and New York. The two Naval Annex women and the two Arlington Hall women could not talk about what they did, of course, so even as they admired Raleigh Tavern and the House of Burgesses, they remained unaware of something even more interesting: They were all breaking codes.
For the most part, the two large cohorts of Washington-based female code breakers—Navy, Army—did not interact, or not knowingly, though they did cross paths. WAVES Barracks D, as big as it was, became overcrowded, and some Navy women went to live at Arlington Farms. Apart from that, the women code breakers likely ran into one another at all sorts of places—restaurants, movie theaters, streetcars—without realizing they were working on the same project. How could they? The work was top secret, and they couldn’t talk about it.
Occasionally, though, a few did get wind of what was going on across the river. Dorothy Ramale, the would-be math teacher from Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, was initially hired by Arlington Hall, where she did such expert work as a “reader”—one of the most elite jobs—that she made a break into a Japanese code that led to the creation of a whole new unit. Her boss would not let her set foot in the new room, for fear he would lose her to whatever was going on in it, so she never knew what the break consisted of. After a year, she learned about the naval operation, applied to work there, and was eagerly accepted. The officer housing allowance was her incentive. She was able to live at McLean Gardens with her sister, who was a g-girl at the Pentagon, and so she didn’t have to spend her full allowance on housing. She used the stipend to buy a car: preparation for seeing the world, as she yearned to do.
Top officials at both code-breaking complexes did communicate, however. The Naval Annex had formal weekly liaison meetings with Arlington Hall, and it was a WAVES officer, Ensign Janet Burchell, who crossed the river to serve as Navy liaison for these meetings. The position required her to know about the code and cipher systems both operations were working. Ensign Burchell attended meetings where the two services discussed the forwarding of intercepts and captured materials; duplicate messages sent in different systems; reports of POW interrogations that might contain material useful to both; and other odds and ends. At one, Burchell brought a request from Frank Raven, who was trying to a break a message in Thai and knew that there was a professor at Arlington Hall who might be able to help.
The Navy women had just missed taking part in the code-breaking triumph at Midway, but ten months later they were fully embedded for, and actively engaged in, the other great code-breaking event of the Pacific naval war. On April 13, 1943, a message came through along the E-14 channel of JN-25, addressed to “Solomons Defense Force, Air Group 204, AirFlot 26, Commander Ballale Garrison Force.” The code breakers weren’t able to recover the whole message right away, but the fragments they did recover suggested that the commander in chief of the combined fleet—Admiral Yamamoto himself—was headed to Ballale Island (now Balalae) on April 18. Intelligence officers concluded that this was an inspection tour.