Jimmie Lee’s husband, Bob Powers, had piloted one of the gliders supporting the Normandy landing. Bob had gone in on the first wave of aircraft, taking off from England. Gliders were engineless aircraft towed by planes, then released over fields and forests, sailing through the skies carrying troops as well as weapons and even vehicles such as jeeps, which would be waiting for the paratroopers and the men coming up from the beaches. The gliders were known as “flying coffins” because of their flimsy structure and the danger of the work. The pilots, going in, knew the odds.
By now, every American knew that there was a particular look to a telegram that arrived announcing a military death. It would come on a Sunday morning. Telegrams had little clear window boxes bearing the address, and if the soldier in question was dead, there would be blue stars around the address. A few days after the invasion, Jimmie Lee got something that was not quite that. Her high school sweetheart and husband of one year, Bob Powers, had been downed over Sainte-Mère-église, a French town near one of the glider landing areas. The fog and smoke had been terrible, as had the antiaircraft fire. Her telegram said he was missing in action. There was a period of terrible uncertainty and then in September, she got the worst news: Her young husband was indeed dead. Bea Hughart’s fiancé had been killed at D-Day as well. The two women had joined the Navy to try to save the lives of American men, especially the ones they knew and loved. Even while succeeding at the larger mission, they had failed at the intimate and personal one.
It was only now that Jimmie Lee understood the import of the work she was doing. When she asked for leave to attend her husband’s funeral in Oklahoma, her request was denied. There were other bombe operators getting the same telegrams, and they could not all be allowed to leave. Jimmie Lee stayed at her post. Her father died not long after. She was never able to go home and unburden herself, never able to talk to her father about how much she missed her husband. Nor had she been able to tell her own father good-bye.
There was so much loss even amid the victories. Ten months after D-Day, in April 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt died. The women cried like babies. There was a funeral procession when the president’s body was brought to Washington from Warm Springs, Georgia, and much public mourning, and the WAVES marched in a parade to honor him. People wondered whether the new president, Harry Truman, would be up to the job. Some of the women made individual trips to the White House, standing at night in the eerie quiet of Lafayette Square, where the sound of water dripping from the trees was the only noise, along with the changing of the guard.
In many ways the waning days of the war were the bloodiest and worst. In both war theaters, Axis leaders resolved to make any Allied victory as costly as possible in terms of lives lost. Japan hoped that if it could create sufficiently terrible casualties among the sailors, Marines, airmen, and soldiers launching attacks on the occupied islands, the United States might seek an early termination and Japan might gain a negotiated peace. The kamikaze air attacks began in the Pacific, and attacks by suicide boats as well. “There were many signs the enemy was disintegrating,” recalled Elizabeth Bigelow, who was breaking Japanese codes in the Naval Annex, working in a unit called “keys.” Even as they could see the Allies were winning, the women lived in fear of messages bearing the worst possible news.
The code breakers did what they could to monitor the well-being of loved ones, and sometimes succeeded. At the Naval Annex, Georgia O’Connor was working in the library unit with her friends. Thanks to the U.S. Navy messages coming in over the ECM—the machine that transmitted internal American messages—she was able to follow the USS Marcus Island, the escort carrier on which her brother was serving. She tracked the carrier through all of the war’s final Pacific battles: the invasion of the Philippines, the Battle of Okinawa, the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The Marcus Island suffered kamikazes and near misses as it passed through the Surigao Strait and Lingayen Gulf and along the Luzon coast. Georgia’s brother was in the radio room of the ship. She did not communicate with him personally, but she was able to tell her family he was safe, though she could not tell them how she knew this. “We always knew what was going on in the South Pacific,” she said later.
Others were not so lucky. Elizabeth Bigelow, recruited out of Vassar, had two brothers serving in the Pacific. One was in the Marines. Her other brother, Jack, a Princeton graduate, was serving on the Suwannee, an escort carrier that belonged to the carrier group known as Taffy 1. Jack was the oldest son in the family, a golden boy whom everybody, Elizabeth most especially, adored. He was small but well-built and had been a gymnast at Princeton. Early photos of him in a Navy uniform showed him to be “a young man with a hat that looked too big for his slight form,” she later remembered. Quiet and good-natured, he had started at Princeton in 1938 and studied electrical engineering. After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the naval reserve, and that Christmas he gathered with friends who were also newly enlisted, and Elizabeth was struck by “the excitement and hope in their voices.” In 1942 he was inducted into the Navy, where he became a radar officer. The Suwannee saw action in the Gilbert Islands, Kwajalein, and Palau, and by early 1944 a shipmate had sent her a photo that showed “Jack totally exhausted and looking decades older.”
In late October 1944, the campaign to retake the Philippines began. The Taffy 1 group participated in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the decisive battle to win back the Philippines. Leyte Gulf was the largest naval battle of the war, possibly the largest naval battle in history. The battle itself involved successful code breaking but at one point it also was nearly disastrous for the United States. It was the first battle that saw organized attacks by kamikaze airmen. During the days-long engagement, Admiral William Halsey and his Third Fleet were lured out to sea; the Japanese attacked the Seventh Fleet, which the Suwannee was part of, and the escort carriers found themselves the first line of defense. A kamikaze tore a hole in the flight deck of the Suwannee. The plane’s bomb pierced the deck and exploded between the flight and hangar decks, setting off a terrible fire fed by aviation fuel dripping down from burning planes on the deck above. Many men in that part of the ship were incinerated. They jumped overboard if they could.