Elizabeth’s family got the awful telegram. She was given leave to go home for two days. Her father’s hair turned gray, it seemed to her, overnight. None of them ever recovered from the loss. The same shipmate who sent the photo told her that Jack’s body was unharmed, but later she was able to see his Navy file and learned the full truth. Her big brother Jack had been one of the men who burned to death.
Some of the women broke messages warning about attacks before they happened but were helpless to avert them. Goucher’s Fran Steen—a lieutenant now—was working her shift as watch officer when a message came in saying that the destroyer captained by her brother, Egil, now serving in the Pacific, was targeted for a kamikaze raid. Her team alerted the Navy, but there was no way to prevent the attack. Fran kept working, knowing that the only thing she could do was her job. The kamikaze struck and her brother’s ship was sunk. At the time she thought Egil Steen was dead. It later emerged that he was one of only a few to survive, thanks to the spot in the ward room where he had been standing.
Donna Doe Southall was one of two hundred WAVES officers staffing the code room where the Annex received U.S. Navy dispatches with news about ship sinkings. Though she was responsible for Pacific messages, she was looking through the Atlantic ship-sinking traffic when she saw one saying that her brother’s ship had been sunk. She didn’t know it at the time, but a third of the crew survived, and the British destroyer Zanzibar picked her brother out of the ocean. He was taken to England, where he was treated for pneumonia and given clothing by the Red Cross.
For years, Donna’s mother sent packages to the woman who donated those clothes. One of the packages contained a blue dress Donna had worn as a bridesmaid, which any number of English girls got married in. But her brother was never the same. When he came home he developed schizophrenia, was made a ward of the Veterans Administration, and died suddenly at age fifty-nine. For her part, Donna married a naval officer who was on a ship off the coast of Okinawa that was hit by a kamikaze. He was blown out of his shoes, put in a pile with the dead, regained consciousness before he was disposed of, and lived to have a family with her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Teedy
December 1944
Teedy Braden was five years younger than Dot. The Braden siblings were close, and Teedy and Dot both had an excellent sense of humor. They loved to needle each other. When the siblings were growing up, Teedy and Dot’s other brother, Bubba, liked to size up Dot’s boyfriends. The two brothers would hang around the front yard of 511 Federal Street, passing judgment on whoever was going in and out visiting their older sister. The brothers also liked to clamber onto a crowded streetcar, at the other end from where Dot was standing, and loudly say things like, “Who would ever want to go out with that little girl with the permanent wave in her hair?” Dot likewise enjoyed teasing her brothers about their romantic lives. One summer a photo was taken of their family during a swimming outing, and Teedy was the only person looking off to the side while everybody else looked at the camera.
“What do you think is holding Teedy’s gaze so intently?” Dot wrote teasingly on the back of the photo. “Could it be the lady lifeguard?”
Teedy Braden finished high school on a Friday in June 1943 and by Monday he was in the U.S. Army. He started basic training at Camp Fannin in Texas. Within a year Eisenhower needed men to reinforce the troops who landed at Normandy and were now fighting their way through the fields and forests of France and Belgium. So the Army sent Teedy to Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, for training. At first it wasn’t clear what they were going to do with him. In July 1944, a month after D-Day, Teedy was still at Camp Breckinridge and was able to get a two-week furlough to go home to Lynchburg, leaving July 3, 1944, and returning to camp on July 16.
“I sure do hope that you won’t [be] too busy to run down as I sho would like to see you,” he wrote to Dot, but Dot was unable to get time off. He wrote her again after he got back to training camp. “How’s everything, gal?… I sure would’ve like to have come up and stayed with you for a while but I reckon it would’ve upset my schedule a little.” He said it was tough readjusting after leave. “Man, man, it sure is hard to get back into harness after being out of it a little while. By gum, they had all sorts of details waiting for me. Everything from KP to latrine orderly. That latrine orderly is a pip!… whew.”
Back at camp, he sensed something was up. “There’s a lot of rumors going around since we’re having ‘shakedown’ inspections and equipment check-ups.”
On July 31 Teedy wrote Dot to say that he might be coming to Fort Meade, Maryland, in about two weeks. “If I do go it’ll mean that it’s the first step toward taking a boat ride which we’ve all been expecting soon.” “Boat ride” was a euphemism for sailing on a troop ship across the Atlantic and into the heavy European fighting. “We’ll all go as riflemen,” he told her. His unit was practicing nighttime river crossings. He had sent a photo of Dot to “Gus and Johnny,” some mutual friends, but had not heard from either. “There’s a chance that they’ve gone on a boat ride as they were expecting it.”