The people working on the Enigma project were mathematicians and engineers. They were precise, conscientious people who liked to solve problems and build beautiful things, not kill people. The work was hard on the women as well, particularly those like Louise who knew the stakes. One of the women in charge of maintaining the commutators, Charlotte McLeod, from Buffalo, New York, would time her visits home to coincide with a big predicted snowstorm coming in off the lake, so that she would be snowed in and would get a few extra days to recover. A daily log on February 25, 1944, noted that a WAVES member named Olson had been sent to her barracks, “a general wreck of jitters—unable to work.” Another was reprimanded for coming in “slightly intoxicated,” according to the log book. “She wasn’t bad, but she obviously has been drinking.” Another log entry spoke of “terrific pressure.”
However they chose to relieve their stress, the women were loath to abandon their duties for long. Louise Pearsall was annoyed when, toward the end of 1943, she was told she could not remain in the ranks of the enlisted. Given her detailed knowledge of one of the war’s most top secret projects, the Navy insisted she become an officer. In January 1944 she was sent to Smith, where she reencountered some of the enlisted women she had met at boot camp, also now being promoted. They were old salts and teased the young college women just coming in, giving them “little side instructions” about how to comport themselves as naval officers. Occasionally they would tell the new women the wrong thing, for fun. Louise was antsy to get back to work. For something to do, she played the snare drum in the band, and when they paraded during their graduation as officers, it was raining and the drum she was holding sank lower and lower as it filled with rainwater.
A newly minted naval officer is rarely sent back to the same place where he or she worked as an enlisted person, but Louise Pearsall was a special case. After two months at Smith she returned to the Naval Annex during the week ending March 18, 1944, wearing her ensign bars, and found herself accorded more respect than the last time she had been processed through. A lieutenant working in personnel said John Howard had been driving them crazy, asking when Louise would get back. She was sitting in a routine orientation class when a lieutenant commander came in and told her to go on back to work. “Louise, would you get out of here right now?” he told her. “I’m tired of listening to your boss.”
Everybody became an old salt pretty quickly. After just six months in the Navy, the young women who had wired the commutators—and now were running the bombes in Washington—found themselves supervising women even younger and greener than they were, many of them eighteen-year-olds fresh out of boot camp at Hunter College. Jimmie Lee Hutchison, the switchboard operator from Oklahoma, was in charge of a four-person bombe bay. Jimmie Lee’s friend Beatrice worked a machine nearby. Their workplace took up the entire bottom floor of the laboratory building, which had been built in the old Mount Vernon Seminary compound near the Navy chapel. It was a hangar-like space with three rooms, each room divided into “bays” containing four machines. There were 120 bombe machines all told. The machines were noisy; on summer days the room got so hot that the women opened the windows to keep from passing out. When they did, the racket could be heard from outside on Nebraska Avenue.
As a bay supervisor, Jimmie Lee Hutchison had an assistant and four operators. When she came on duty, she signed a logbook that lay on top of a printer near the bombes. It was Jimmie Lee’s job to keep the log, supervise the bay, and set up one of the machines according to a menu she was given. Doing so entailed moving commutator wheels and rotating them to the starting position. The wheels were heavy—weighing nearly two pounds—and had to be carefully placed so they wouldn’t fly off and break somebody’s leg. She would set the wheels, sit on a stool, and wait to see if she got a hit. The machines ran so fast that they couldn’t stop immediately. They had a rudimentary memory, so the wheels would run for a few seconds, then stop, back up, and generate a printout recording the setting that produced the hit. Jimmie Lee would take the printout to a window where a gloved hand belonging to an unseen female officer would emerge and take it. It was tiring work that required energy and concentration. The women hated the long “hoppities,” when they were testing a possible wheel turnover and had to get up and down, up and down, changing the wheels several times on the same run.
Jimmie Lee by now had married her high school sweetheart, Bob Powers. By a lucky coincidence, Bob had been assigned to ferry planes into the airfields at Dayton, bringing planes up from North Carolina and from Bowman Field in Kentucky. They married at Bowman Field on June 18, 1943. Back in Dayton, Jimmie Lee’s WAVES friends threw them a party. After that, the newlyweds had spent time together whenever Bob Powers flew into Dayton. Sometimes he would get in before she finished her shift, so he’d wait in the hotel room until she got cleaned up, and they’d go out to dinner. One time Jimmie Lee lost her engagement ring down the sink in her cabin and was frantic until the custodian kindly removed the trap and fished it out. Neither Jimmie Lee nor Bob had ever heard of trick-or-treating, which was not something people did in Oklahoma, so their first Halloween, in October 1943, they felt like kids.
After Jimmie Lee was sent to Washington, though, their visits were few and far between.
As Jimmie Lee and the other women settled into their duties, they became part of an Enigma code-breaking chain that was virtually all female. When a message arrived at the Annex, it would first go to the cribbing station. The cribbers had one of the hardest jobs, sifting through intelligence from the war theater, including ship sinkings, U-boat sightings, weather messages, and battle outcomes. Scanning intercepts, they had to select a message that was not too long—a long message might involve more than one setting—and guess what it likely said. Juxtaposing crib and message, they had to devise a menu. Louise Pearsall did this; so did Fran Steen, the biology major from Goucher College. Fran had spent a year on the Japanese project, then moved to the German ciphers. Promoted to watch officer, Fran had access to a secure line that connected her to a counterpart in England. Her code name was “Pretty Weather,” and her British contact—male; she never met him—went by “Virgin Sturgeon.”
From there, the menu would be passed to Jimmie Lee or another bombe deck operator. If there was a hit, it would go to somebody like Margaret Gilman, from Bryn Mawr, who would run it through the M-9 to see if the “hit” produced coherent German. Once they got a key setting, subsequent messages for that day could be run through the M-9 and translated, without having to use the bombes.