Dot always experienced a little skip of her heart when she came home to find a Jim Bruce letter. After he went overseas toward the end of 1943, he initiated their correspondence by sending her an affectionate letter, whose tone was in keeping with the serious interest he’d shown before he left, including that harebrained, last-minute trip up to Arlington to see her. The interesting thing about Jim was that he was laconic, almost taciturn, in person, but chatty and sentimental in his letters. He used her first name a lot, which conveyed that he was really thinking about her.
Both Jim and Dot had to be careful not to reveal war-related details—government censors read each overseas letter—so their writing tended to swing from the emotional to the flatly day-to-day, without much in between. In the spring of 1944, Jim mentioned that his unit was forbidden to go in to the nearest town, Accra, because of an epidemic of trench mouth, or gum disease, on the base. “I don’t have anything exciting to write you, Dot,” he continued.
I went to the beach a while this morning. Last night we had the premier or first showing of “Going My Way.” Bing Crosby played the part of a Catholic Priest. Can you picture that. It was a very good movie. It opens in New York next week so maybe you will get to see it before long. I am glad I don’t have to wait until all the movies get old before I see them like you have to do in Washington.
For his part, Jim was always eager to hear from Dot and loved getting her witty, literate letters. “Dot, you be good and write to me real often. Your letters are good for my moral[e],” he told her. She had sent him a photo. “How about sending me some more recent shots,” he wrote her. “I know that one can’t be beat but I want some more anyway.”
Sometimes—often—Jim complained when he didn’t hear from Dot for any length of time. Letters to soldiers overseas tended to get held up in transit, and the upshot was that letters sometimes arrived in jumbled bunches. During the long waiting period, Jim’s letters would get somewhat pitiful and Dot would smile when she read them. “I get treated worse than anyone I know,” he wrote her on April 30. “It has been fifteen days now since I got a letter from you.” He added, “Dot, if you wait as long to write as you did before, well, you can guess what I am thinking.”
But he was an even-tempered person and didn’t hold it against her. In the next paragraph, he said he had gone to a dance in Accra given by some British officers and civilians. “It was a very wet party,” he confided. “First it rained and then there was lots of whiskey. I didn’t get intoxicated, Dot, but just had a few drinks to be sociable.” He said that the “girls” at the dance were mostly nurses, and wives and daughters of the British “gents in town.” “I had a very interesting time talking to this old maid who was in her forties I would say.”
The next month, after receiving a batch of letters from Dot, Jim was in a much-improved mood. “Dearest Dot,” he now was greeting her. He wrote with exhilaration to say that he had been invited onto a military plane to Brazil, to provide midflight forecasting. It was a fourteen-hour trip each way, and he had just gotten back. He couldn’t name the places they visited but said the “most exciting part” was when they flew in a small plane from one town to another and he was able to act as copilot. At one point the pilot handed over the controls and told him to take over. Jim had never flown a plane. “The plane went every way but the right way at first but soon I was able to keep it on the right course. It was very easy to handle once I knew what each gadget was used for,” he wrote her.
I don’t think I have ever seen anything in nature as pretty as low clouds when viewed from 10,000 ft over the ocean. The tops of them are all shapes and sizes and look a lot like snow-capped mountain peaks. I wish I had some pictures of them to send you, Dot. Better than that though when this war is over and I get my airplane I will take you out over the ocean and show them to you.
It was a rather fanciful explosion of sentiment—the desire to take her up in a private plane. But the letter suggests that the two of them were still figuring out their relationship, which, like so many during the war, was evolving purely through correspondence, with no phone calls, no in-person visits. Given the time and distance, developments were halting and tentative. During Jim’s brief stay in Brazil, where there wasn’t as much rationing—he’d been able to eat ice cream and drink a Coke—he debated getting Dot a present but wasn’t sure they had progressed to the point where he could send her intimate things. “Dot, I started to send you some silk stockings from Brazil but didn’t know how you would like the idea of me buying you clothes.” He had sent his sisters each a pair and told her “if you would like some just send me your size” and he would ask a friend stationed in Brazil to get some for her.
In July 1944, Dot sent Jim a photo of herself with a friend at Beverly Beach. Her own letters must have given him the idea that she was leading a carefree, almost dilettantish existence. “Note the Coney Island background,” she wrote on the back. She sent another of her sunbathing with a different female friend, noting, “The man behind us in all of these fixed the camera every time it got stuck.” She also sent a photo of her with five Arlington Hall colleagues, including Crow, on an excursion to Colonial Beach. Dot was half-hidden behind a pole, but the group of code breakers looked very glamorous and carefree, wearing summer dresses or shorts and blouses. Crow was perched on a ledge on the far left-hand side, wearing shorts and smiling. “All together!” Dot wrote on the back. “Carolyn is the first on the left. It’s a pity the pole wasn’t larger! P.S. Carolyn isn’t really that pumpkin-headed!”
In August 1944 she sent one of herself and Crow lying on their stomachs on towels on the sand. It said, “Aren’t we cute? Carolyn is the other of this twosome. P.S. We did get burned.”