The minute Ann Caracristi set foot in Arlington Hall she knew something important was up. It was around two o’clock in the afternoon on August 14, 1945, and Ann, the inventor’s daughter from Bronxville, was arriving for her shift. There was a palpable euphoria boiling down the halls of the building, moving ineluctably in her direction. And there was no question where the tsunami of excitement was coming from: the language unit.
The language unit at Arlington was an exalted group of individuals who knew Japanese and could translate messages into English. This was an unusual skill for an American in the 1940s to have. Some translators were young officers—the j-boys—who had been sent by the Army to language training in Berkeley, California, and Boulder, Colorado. Others were scholars such as Edwin Reischauer. Others were missionaries who had lived in Japan. Many in the last two categories had learned the Japanese language out of interest in, and love for, the land and culture. Most felt an emotional attachment to the country and knew people who lived and worked there. They were now working to defeat the nation they once had proselytized and studied.
The translators were crucial to Arlington Hall. There were never quite enough. They helped with book-breaking—recovering the meanings of code groups—and Ann Caracristi worked closely with them. Their other main job was to translate diplomatic messages from Romaji into English. The diplomatic messages were subtle and complex—they were diplomatic, after all—and getting nuances right was all-important. The language unit read every diplomatic message that came into Arlington Hall, and so far there had been half a million. They served as the linchpin between the code-breaking staff and the military intelligence unit that put together reports for the Pentagon and the Navy. The language unit had their finger on the pulse of the war, privy to the most high-level communications.
For the past six months those communications had been intense and wretched, as Japanese diplomats living in Europe reacted viscerally to what was happening in their homeland. The translators followed their wretchedness and even grew to feel attached to some of them.
The diplomatic ciphers coming into Arlington Hall included not only Purple messages, but those in other systems as well. Not every diplomatic missive was enciphered by the high-level Purple system. Other systems carried traffic about heavy industry, financial dealings, espionage, air raids, and commodities. There was one called JBB, used in the occupied islands and territories, and another called JAH, which was employed around the world and carried the largest volume of diplomatic traffic. JAH was an all-purpose code with origins that went back decades. The Japanese had used a version of it in Herbert Yardley’s time, when the Americans called it LA, and it had been one of the first codes Friedman’s acolytes tackled during their training, thanks to the fact that Yardley had stashed some old intercepts in his filing cabinets. The Japanese had updated it and continued to use it.
The odd thing about JAH was that, despite being a general utility-type workhorse—carrying news about pay and vacation—it also carried what one report called “a wealth of first-rate material.” The report noted with bemusement that “in spite of their security consciousness, the Japanese frequently transmit messages of real significance in JAH while at the same time including extremely inconsequential information in their most highly classified systems.” JAH “theoretically was restricted to low grade traffic of an informative and administrative nature,” but some messages gave U.S. intelligence officers insight into problems and personalities. JAH also contained “documentary material”—papers, speeches, orders, memos, publications—that could be used as cribs. It also gave economic and political data on occupied territories and was used to disseminate propaganda.
While many of Arlington Hall’s language units were headed up by j-boys, JAH was handled by a woman named Virginia Dare Aderholdt. According to a memo, Aderholdt graduated from Bethany College in West Virginia—Wilma Berryman’s alma mater—which was a four-year college founded by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and offered a first-rate language department and a commitment to good causes. Many graduates did missionary work abroad. Virginia Aderholdt had spent four years in Japan, and the JAH code now was her baby. She owned that code. She knew it backward and forward. She could scan and decode and translate almost simultaneously as it was coming through the machine built to receive it.
The Arlington Hall translators had experienced the war from a unique vantage point. They followed, intently, the conversations of Japanese officials. They followed what was taking place in captured territories whose Japanese-run governments were starting to weaken. Beginning in January 1945, the puppet government in the Philippine capital of Manila was having a hard time of it. When the titular head fled, the translators followed his flight into Taiwan by reading JBB. Later that month translators found themselves reading dispatches sent by the foreign office in Tokyo, reporting on the raids over the city by U.S. military aircraft. They knew when Japan began evacuating Japanese nationals from southern China.
And they were able to track the vigorous efforts of Naotake Sato, the Japanese ambassador to Moscow. Sato was assigned to entreat the Soviets to broker a peace deal on Japan’s behalf. In the spring and summer of 1945, Sato was incessantly busy. In April, it emerged that Russia was no longer willing to observe a neutrality pact with Japan and was massing troops to attack. Sato was doing everything he could to manage the situation and turn it to Japan’s advantage: begging for an audience with the Soviet foreign minister, sending messages, running back and forth. Arlington Hall translators followed his travels and travails. Moscow traffic became frenzied; the translators worked as hard as Sato did. When his efforts failed and Sato offered his resignation, feeling he had not lived up to his obligations to the emperor, the translators felt oddly moved on his behalf.
Sato’s resignation message was “received with great consternation by the Diplomatic translators here who had begun to really love that man,” read a postwar history. Tokyo responded by asking him to stay in his post as long as he could.