D-Day was under way. After a weather-driven delay of more than a day, the night of June 6 had cleared enough to enable—barely—a nighttime crossing of the English Channel. The full moon gave the Allies the tide they wanted, and the storm that had been whipping up the channel abated for just long enough to launch ships that had been poised for days. During the night, nearly twenty-five thousand airborne troops dropped by parachute and glider into the fields above the beaches. The Normandy beach landings—the largest seaborne invasion in human history—were commencing. It was finally happening. The Allies were invading France.
Now the traffic really started coming. The next message described thousands of Allied ships—nearly seven thousand warships, minesweepers, landing craft, and support vessels—filling the English Channel off the coast of Normandy. The message enumerated the destroyers, the cruisers, the tankers, the supply ships. More bulletins followed. Far away—thousands of miles from where the women were frantically working, full of hope and dread and curiosity—the ships’ hulking silhouettes loomed against the morning sky, bringing more than 160,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers and the weapons and supplies they needed to assault the shores of occupied France.
And now the Americans were taking Utah Beach, the amphibious tanks making their way through the waves exactly as they had been designed to do, powered through the water by little propellers on their bottoms. The Army Rangers were scaling Pointe du Hoc under terrible fire; the frogmen were swimming in; the sappers were blowing paths that would enable the soldiers to leave the beaches and continue on toward the hedgerows and into northern France. The Royal Winnipeg Rifles and the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada were emerging onto Juno, taking very heavy casualties. The tanks at windswept Omaha were sinking, terribly, in the wind and the unforgiving swells, as Germans rained devastation from the cliffs above. Seasick, undaunted, the Allied soldiers kept coming, wading ashore, facing mortars, flamethrowers, machine guns, long-range artillery fire.
The women at the Naval Annex followed the D-Day message traffic all night, reading the invasion from the vantage point of the opposing Germans. The Allied soldiers were braving the beach, scaling the cliffs. The women read it all, into the morning and through the rest of that day. At 1:40 in the morning they were warned to “make no reference of any kind to the fact that we know about the invasion, even after the news comes out officially,” according to the watch officer log. All night the women bolted up and down the stairs of the laboratory building, taking the messages to the translators one floor above—even though Ann could read them herself. They felt excitement, relief, horror. They well knew how momentous the event was. But how was it evolving? They could not be sure. The messages told them some things, but there was so much more they wanted to know. The women wondered how many men were dying; whether the Nazis were counterattacking; how the assault was unfolding.
The women worked as hard as they could. In the twelve-hour period between 0730 and 1930 on June 6, the crews scored eleven jackpots on the bombe machines, eight of those coming in one watch, as the Germans shared news about the invasion, beyond what was taking place on the beaches. The women learned that the French Resistance had acted swiftly to cut German communications. So much resistance, so many brave men working to defend the free world, had come together. “Even seated at our desks,” Ann White would later write, “we felt the power of our country.”
The Normandy landings came as a complete surprise to the Germans—a surprise that saved an estimated 16,500 Allied lives. The Allies over the next weeks were able to establish a true beachhead, linking Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold, and Sword, and then to break out past the hedgerows and begin the liberation drive toward Paris.
At 0800 on the day of the invasion—afternoon now, in France—Ann White finished her all-night shift and walked out of the Naval Annex, feeling bleary and spiritually unsettled. There was a bus line that ran from nearby Ward Circle to a stop near National Cathedral, the neo-Gothic landmark on Wisconsin Avenue just north of Georgetown. Beside the cathedral was St. Alban’s Church, which was smaller but exquisitely beautiful, and open around the clock. During the war St. Alban’s had never once been empty. At least, it had never been empty while Ann had been there. She and some of the other women code breakers slipped inside and found places in the pews.
D-Day was a great achievement. They knew that. But somehow it did not seem cause for celebration, or not exactly, or not yet. Going to church was the only way they could think of to honor the tragedy and loss, which they sensed though they did not yet know the full extent: the Allied soldiers bobbing facedown in the water, drowned under their packs; the Rangers shot down as they dug handholds with their knives to scramble up the cliffs; the bodies on the beaches; the pilots who crashed in the fog and the smoke; the parachutists who drowned in marshes. It was the only way they could think of to honor the men who had made this sacrifice.
Ann would remember the Normandy invasion as one of the great moments of the war, and she would remember her wartime code-breaking service as the great moment of her life.
But for now, all she could do was pray for the souls of the dead.
Up and down, up and down. Set the wheels on the spindles, program the machine, sit down, wait. Then up again. Set the wheels on the spindles. Program the machine. Sit down, wait. Days after the Normandy invasion, the WAVES worked the bombe machines as the messages kept pouring in. “The invasion has caused a great increase in the amount of our traffic,” read the daily log for OP-20-GY-A-1. “A great quantity of administrative traffic, representing several circuits, has appeared.” Jimmie Lee Hutchison Powers worked her bombe bay all during the Normandy landing and its aftermath, and so did her hometown friend Bea Hughart. The two former Oklahoma switchboard operators jumped up and down, changing wheels, inputting menus, day after day, as the Allied soldiers began to fight their way toward Paris. These women’s experience of the glorious liberation of France was the heat and noise and urgency of the bombes—and the dread knowledge that the men they loved were taking part in the action overseas.