“That’s what they all said,” sneered the sailor.
Louise had no idea why she and her colleagues were being jeered. What the women could not know was that during the summer, Commander Meader had ejected a number of WAVES from Dayton, returning them to Washington for perceived misbehavior—in the Navy’s view—that identified them as security risks. (Some of the other women in Dayton, who knew what was going on, referred to this as “pruning the group.”) Records show that on August 20, 1943, an enlisted member of the WAVES had been transferred out of Dayton and sent back to central processing in D.C.; she had shown up at the dispensary in Dayton with heavy menstrual bleeding and an examination had shown an “incomplete abortion at six weeks before entering the navy.” That same day, another yeoman was sent down who had shown up for menstrual bleeding and abdominal cramps; her past medical history showed “induced abortion before entering the service.” Back in 1942, when the WAVES were formed and regulations drawn up, some officials worried that the no-pregnancy rule would prompt women to seek an abortion in order to join. It would appear they had been correct.
A few others had been sent down for violations that the memos coyly declined to spell out. On August 14, 1943, one WAVES enlistee was sent back from Dayton along with a memo saying “because of condition X she is considered unsuited for duty.” The memo didn’t say what “condition X” was, but it seems likely the WAVES enlistee was pregnant. On July 30, another Dayton WAVES member had been sent back. “Fails to meet qualification X,” her memo said. Another was sent back for “malingering,” another for being “undisciplined.” Precisely because security was so tight, WAVES were even more likely to be expelled from Dayton than from other postings.
In short, women from Dayton had acquired a bad reputation in the processing center—by the sexist standards of the day—and the men assumed that this new bunch had done something reprehensible. Louise had no idea about any of this. She protested the disrespectful treatment. “If you don’t believe me, call Lt. Howard,” she told them. “We came back with him.”
But the sailors wouldn’t call her boss. Smirking, they ordered the women to start washing windows.
Finally a female officer from Navy headquarters came looking for them. She could not believe what she saw: her best picked group of female mathematicians, pride of the bombe project, scrubbing windows.
“My God, they’re our top girls!” she told the men.
When the women made it to the Naval Annex to help get the first shipment of bombes installed, Louise learned that John Howard had been desperately trying to find them, asking, “What the heck’s happened to my girls?”
More bombes arrived from Dayton, and the crew in Washington worked overtime to get them up and running. The Annex created a crib watch, a decryption watch, a traffic preparation watch. Several hundred of the women at Sugar Camp made the return trip east from Dayton to Washington, to live in Barracks D and run the bombe machines, though they still did not know the machines’ true purpose.
Louise Pearsall, who did, continued troubleshooting, assigned to evaluate the printouts the machines produced. Though the D.C. bombe crew would soon consist of nearly seven hundred women, it was a smaller group at first, and she worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day. Everybody socialized together—men, women, enlisted, officers, liaison workers from MIT and IBM—and they socialized intensely. The lone male sailor on the bombe crew threw a party at which Louise was introduced to Southern Comfort. It took her a day to recover from her hangover, furiously drinking Coke, since she didn’t drink coffee.
Washington had always been a bibulous town, and wartime was no exception. The code breakers mastered the region’s alcohol-related regulations, learning that it was necessary to travel to Maryland or Virginia to buy alcohol by the bottle and that Virginia’s state-operated liquor stores closed early. Drinking was one way to relieve “the tension, the pressure, the trauma,” as Louise put it. It wasn’t just the code breakers who were stressed and overwhelmed. Everybody in Washington felt the pace of war. Louise knew a woman in charge of military train schedules, and she was tearing her hair out.
The bombe was a “high, high, high priority project,” as Louise later put it, and everybody on it was important. Once, when a sloppy (or tired) operator threw a printout into a burn bag, John Howard had to stand on a chair and impress upon them the life-and-death gravity of their work.
Just how important they were became clear when Louise’s brother Burt, a hotshot Marine pilot, tried to get into the Naval Annex compound to visit her. Both of Louise’s brothers were in the military, and both were big deals at home in Elgin. Not here. Here, Louise was the big deal. When Burt approached the first set of Marine guards at the Naval Annex, accompanied by a couple of pilot buddies, he informed the guards—fellow Marines—that they were going inside to see his sister. “No, you’re not,” the guards replied, barring their way. Louise had to come outside after her shift. They hired a cab and asked the driver to take them slowly down Constitution Avenue, and Louise showed her younger brother the Washington sights.
That visit was a rare respite from a workday that was all-consuming. The Enigma project took its toll on everybody connected with it. In the fall of 1943, Joseph Wenger, one of the top officials in the Annex, had a nervous breakdown so severe that he had to spend six months in Florida. Joe Desch broke down as well. In 1944, weighed down by Commander Ralph Meader’s tongue-lashings, Desch stormed out of NCR and spent several weeks on a friend’s farm outside Dayton, felling trees and chopping wood. The bombe design project completed, he’d been assigned to develop a machine for Japanese codes. Desch had four nephews serving in the Pacific, one of whom died during this time. “He had nightmares for years about men dying,” said his daughter, Deborah Anderson.