Delia Taylor Sinkov overheard them. She pointed out that 9939 was the most frequent group in the 5678 system. It was this chance conversation—the men’s casual hypothesizing and Delia Sinkov’s steel-trap recall—that broke the administrative code, yielding intelligence including the numbers of Japanese soldiers killed and wounded, and, at least once, tactical information about a major planned attack.
Arlington Hall broke everything. “There wasn’t a damn thing that the Japanese transmitted that we weren’t able to read,” said Solomon Kullback. They read messages before the intended Japanese recipients did. They also were privy to the unintended consequences of Japan’s strict attitude toward code security. In the Japanese Army, punishment for a lost or captured codebook was so severe that soldiers often would not admit a codebook had gone missing. In January 1944, Australian soldiers captured the entire cryptographic library of the Twentieth Division in New Guinea, which was found in a deep, water-filled pit. The codebooks were passed to Arlington Hall, where the code breakers used the materials to read messages a soldier sent to his superiors, assuring them of just how thoroughly he had destroyed the very books they were holding. The books provided intelligence that played a major role in MacArthur’s campaigns in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
The address codes—whose solution had kicked everything off—continued to be integral. All intercepts would start out in Wilma Berryman’s unit, where the address would be solved and appended to the intercept. Often, a single Japanese Army message was sent in eight or ten sections. The serial numbers, which were part of the address preamble, helped the staff members who were doing the message sorting to reassemble the pieces. Then it was on to the code-breaking unit. “Our job was to get the address solved so that it could be passed to the next wing, then people could line it up and actually tackle the text,” said Ann Caracristi.
But it was still a small group of people tasked with reading the mail of the entire Japanese Army. What Arlington Hall had by mid-1943 was a select group of Munitions Building veterans, some promising civilians including Ann Caracristi, and a handful of military men. To assist the U.S. military in its hard-fought and arduous Pacific campaign, they had to “build an organization that would produce results as rapidly as possible,” as one memo put it. That meant breaking down the work into smaller elements, developing a well-oiled assembly line—and hiring many more Jewels. It was the 2468 breakthrough and the floodgates it opened that led to the recruitment of Dot Braden and Ruth Weston.
CHAPTER NINE
“It Was Only Human to Complain”
August 1943
Arlington Hall in the summer of 1943 was like a start-up that had received a big dose of venture capital funding and needed to scale up overnight. The breaking of 2468—the all-important water-transport code—created a need for thousands more workers to decode the stream of maru-related messages. By this point in the war there were major recruiting challenges. The Navy was picking off women right and left, as were federal agencies, including the OSS and the FBI, as well as factories, defense companies, and other private firms. The Army did not pay as well as private industry, but it could appeal to the patriotism of workers—and it paid more than teaching school.
That’s when Arlington Hall decided to lure schoolteachers, concentrating its efforts in the South. Targeting the southern states was not exactly a preferred strategy: In recruiting a civilian workforce, the Army had to abide by the mind-boggling bureaucratic rules of the Civil Service Commission, which required that for its Washington workers the Signal Corps had to recruit from something called the Fourth Civil Service District, a region that included Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. Owing to the obsession with secrecy, recruiters were not told what job they were recruiting for. This—plus quota pressures—created fertile ground for exaggeration. The void of information led recruiting officers “on occasion to make invalid assumptions and inaccurate and misleading statements to candidates for positions,” one wartime report acknowledged. They issued “tempting promises.”
In other words: They lied.
And because they were going after southerners, the Army devised tactics based on stereotypes about southern women—namely, that they were more man crazy, more sentimental, more emotionally gullible, and more hell-bent on marriage than women from elsewhere. It did not seem to occur to them that some of the women, like Dot Braden, might be seeking to disentangle themselves from marital engagements rather than enter into them. Arlington Hall selected good-looking officers to do the recruiting. One officer of Finnish extraction, Paavo Carlson, was considered particularly handsome. Responsible for Richmond, Virginia, and its vicinity, he may well have been the officer at the Virginian Hotel who recruited Dot Braden.
“Young Army boys we used because then the girls that we recruited would come back to Washington and think they were all going to get husbands that way,” said Solomon Kullback years later, still proud of this ruse. “Literally in a lot of cases these barefooted girls from the hills of West Virginia were brought in and given some training.… We would get these new people in and teach them about the Japanese system and a little bit about some of the basic words, the common words, and turn them loose on the overlaps.” There was a bit of condescension exhibited by more experienced workers: As the new women came in, Ann Caracristi admitted, “I think the northern members of our community were not as generous about their southern recruits as they might have been.”
Arlington Hall added hundreds of civilian women a month. There was a major recruiting wave in the summer of 1943—the one that brought in Dot Braden, from Lynchburg, Virginia, and Ruth “Crow” Weston, from Bourbon, Mississippi—and another in February 1944. Every time there was a new break, or a big military assault in the Pacific, the Signal Corps went out and scooped up more women. By 1944, recruiters were allowed to expand into the Midwest and Northeast: Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and others. The Army decided to pay the women’s way to Washington as an added inducement. Eventually recruiters were told what they were recruiting for, but because of the changing nature of the work—new codes were always being broken, new techniques developed—they had little idea what skills were needed.
So they just vacuumed up women.
“All the branches needed so many new employees that no attempt was made to designate what kind or quality of employee a branch desired,” a memo noted. “Branches were constantly requesting personnel in large numbers. It was not unusual to receive a request for 200 clerks with no stipulation as to classification, age, education or experience.”