By the spring of 1945, with tens of thousands of American men sacrificed to the final war effort—the Battle of the Bulge alone cost nearly twenty thousand American lives—the Allies had managed to regain momentum. They fought off the German counterpush and crossed the Rhine and into Germany, which was being subjected to a heavy bombing campaign that destroyed factories and munitions and, infamously, the city of Dresden. On the eastern front, Russian soldiers routed the German invaders and pushed toward Berlin, taking massive casualties. As the Russians drew nearer, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on April 30. It was now a matter of time. In Italy—one of the toughest, longest campaigns for the Western Allies—German soldiers who might have reinforced their comrades were pinned down and the fascists overthrown. Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were killed on April 28 and then strung up by partisans. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered. The Third Reich was no more.
The Allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic—and the European war. Admiral D?nitz—the new head of state in Germany—ordered his U-boats to stand down. The Enigma unit at the Naval Annex read a message from D?nitz to his surviving captains, which told them, “You have fought like lions… unbroken and unashamed you are laying down your arms after a heroic battle.” As GIs liberated concentration camps, the world would learn the full horror that had unfolded in Dachau and Buchenwald, a permanent stain on human history. Many of the women, and their families, also would never recover from the losses of sons and brothers and loved ones. But the boys in Europe—those who were left—were coming home. In Washington, conga lines pranced along the streets. Some of the WAVES went to the roofs of hotels to watch the celebrations. One WAVES member played a celebratory game of Ping-Pong at an officers’ club and later married her opponent. A number of code breakers would recall the magical experience of watching the nighttime lights, long dimmed for the war, come back on in the nation’s capital. Dot, Crow, and Louise absorbed the happy news at the apartment on Walter Reed Drive, though their workload did not abate.
To the contrary. The code breakers in both D.C. facilities—the Naval Annex and Arlington Hall—were reminded that the Pacific War was ongoing and the need for secrecy was as great as ever. “I have been informed and understand that the termination of the war in Europe does not affect the necessity for continuing to maintain secrecy concerning the classified activities and operation of the Signal Security Agency,” read a form that Dot signed. (The Signal Intelligence Service had been renamed the Signal Security Agency, with several iterations in between.) “And that existing security standards must be maintained for the remainder of the war and after the war is terminated.”
One month later, in June 1945, Virginia Braden wrote a fond letter to Teedy at his Army camp in Mississippi. “My Dear Teedy,” she wrote, “Hope everything is going all right with you Son. We got back from Va Beach Thursday night, we went Sat and I had a very nice time. You should have seen me riding a float in on a wave believe it or not. I got a real good tan and enjoyed just relaxing on the sand.”
She also let Teedy know what was going on with his big sister. Dot had written George Rush to tell him that she was not going to marry him, and George Rush had written her back to say that she was the only woman he would ever love. But now George had shown up in Lynchburg with a different Dorothy altogether, and this different Dorothy was his new wife!
George Rush has at last gotten married and is here with his bride. I haven’t seen her yet, but her name is Dorothy. He wrote to Dot around Xmas that she was the only girl he would ever love but she didn’t answer it. How fickle.
The real news, she added, was that Dot had told George Rush she had decided to marry Jim Bruce. “Ha! I don’t think she is really settled on anyone,” Virginia Braden wrote. “More power to her!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Surrender Message
August 1945
At Yalta on February 11, 1945, and again at Potsdam in July and August, Allied leaders insisted on unconditional surrender in which the Japanese would concede defeat and the emperor would step down. The Japanese government refused. On August 6, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, passed over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped the first atomic bomb in history to be used in battle.
Not long after, Alethea Chamberlain came to her station, sat down, and put on her headphones. She was a WAC intercept operator at Two Rock Ranch, a listening station the Signal Corps maintained near Petaluma, California, in a beautiful agricultural area north of San Francisco. It was a nice posting; the intercept operators could hitchhike into San Francisco.
Chamberlain began fiddling with her dial, trying to pick up the Hiroshima station she received. Hiroshima sent out a very good signal. Now all she got was dead air. There was nothing at all. She could not figure out why this was or what had gone wrong, why there was no signal at all coming from Hiroshima.
On August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped, this one over Nagasaki. The Japanese said they would consider surrender but insisted that the emperor be allowed to remain. Many women code breakers had brothers serving in Pacific units preparing to invade the Japanese homeland, an attack that, if it happened, would take place in November 1945. Ruth “Crow” Weston’s youngest brother was among them. Such an assault would entail the invasion of the southern island of Kyushu and could cost as many as a million American lives. During the first half of August, kamikaze attacks continued against American warships and aircraft. At Arlington Hall, Japanese Army message traffic told of the number of soldiers waiting to repel an invasion. The diplomatic traffic, however, was saying something slightly different.