The Secret in Building 26

by Jim DeBrosse

  Torchon recalled his meager training for guard duty with laughter. “The day before, the lieutenant [in charge] took us out into the woods and put up some targets. We had .38-caliber guns, and we started shooting. I think we killed two squirrels. I don’t know. I thought, ‘What the hell is this going to prove?’ ”

  But for the engineers and managers on the NCR project who knew what was inside those crates, those early fall days of 1943 weren’t the stuff of nostalgic, carefree memories. Although enough of the bugs had been worked out, no one was as yet certain the Bombes would work over the long run. Perhaps least certain of all was Joseph Wenger, who was overwhelmed by the awesome responsibility of the Bombe project late that summer. To recuperate, he decided to take himself and his family to Florida in September. For the next six months, he relaxed with his wife and son in a cabin in Clearwater, not far from his parents’ retirement home. There, he built kites, walked along the beach, and took up again the drawing and sketching he had eschewed for a career in the Navy.

  Wenger was still in Florida in November 1943 when the turning point came for the American Bombe. By December, the average time to decrypt a Shark key was just eighteen hours with the help of the new machines. It was seldom more than forty-eight hours until late 1944, when a dearth of messages and a splitting of the U-boat keys lengthened break times for several months. But until the end of the war, the U.S. Bombes were breaking the keys for all Shark messages and most of the German Army and Air Force codes.

  After a hospital stay and an OK from his superiors, Wenger returned to work in Washington in April 1944 with his faith in Desch and NCR justified. The Bombes had proved their worth. With no downtime, save for minor repairs and scheduled maintenance, the Bombes were running twenty-four hours per day, every day.

  The fact that the Bombes eventually did perform reliably and as promised is a tribute not only to the engineers who designed them but to the skills of the men, and women, who built them.

  9

  The WAVES Come Aboard

  May 1943—Dayton, Ohio

  AFTER NAVY BOOT camp at the Hunter College campus in the Bronx and three weeks of background checks, testing, training, and indoctrination in Washington, D.C., seventy young women boarded trains at Union Station in Washington for a top secret assignment they were told they could never discuss, even among themselves, at a destination described to them only as “out West.”

  They were bright, adventurous, patriotic women, most of them in their early twenties, who had enlisted in the women’s naval auxiliary—Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES). Selected from “good families” all over America, from the biggest cities to the smallest towns, it’s easy to understand how, as their train steamed westward, many of the recruits entertained fantasies of a tour of duty in southern California—with movie stars, sunny beaches, pleasant climes. But those dreams were abandoned when they disembarked later that day at Union Terminal in Dayton, Ohio.

  “It rained and rained and rained that month. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s going to rain here forever,’ ” said Catherine Convery Racz, who had been a telephone operator in Boston. She was one of the first among six hundred WAVES in all who assembled Bombes in Building 26 in 1943 and 1944. Their skills and their pledge of security were desperately needed to offset the wartime shortage of men.

  The WAVES may have guessed at the nature of their work, but few had more than an inkling of its significance, even those who went back to Washington in the fall to operate the codebreaking machines. One of them was Evelyn Hodges Vogel, a plucky Missouri native who had lied about her age to enlist in the WAVES at age eighteen. Recruits were supposed to be at least twenty, but Vogel’s father, a Navy man himself, had signed the papers against her mother’s wishes.

  Vogel said the women had been warned by their commanding officers in Washington that they would be punished just as severely as the men if they violated security requirements. “They told us they would shoot us at sunrise if we talked about what we were doing,” Vogel said. “And we did keep our mouths shut. Men always think women have big mouths, but we didn’t. We were so proud to be serving in the armed forces and doing something women had never done before.”

  The WAVES organization, less than one year old, had been born in controversy. Concerned about the extra cost and administrative problems, the Navy brass had resisted strong political pressures to enact a women’s service until spring of 1942. But once Congress passed the enabling legislation in June, the Navy quickly set up a program, using the leaders of America’s elite women’s colleges as the top officers to assure the public—and the recruits—that the WAVES would be respectable, ladylike members of the armed services.

  Any concerns that the women might be made to ape their male counterparts was dispelled when Parisian couturier Mainbocher was asked to design the WAVES uniform. Donating his work to the Navy, the Chicago native insisted on a simple, proper, but form-fitting and feminine design that proved to be a worthy recruiting tool. A savvy advertising campaign by former journalist and publicist Louise K. Wilde emphasized the glamorous aspects of naval service—fashionable uniforms, training on college campuses, unusual work, and opportunities to meet men—and attracted a large number of enlistees.

  Desch and Meader had felt the Bombe design and the refinement of its components were far enough along to justify taking the final steps toward large-scale manufacturing. The second set of prototype machines, Cain and Abel, which were much like the final production Bombes, were under construction, contracts were being let to suppliers, and there were no hints of the technical problems that were to emerge in June and July. While Desch scrambled to find skilled civilian workers, Meader scoured the Navy for more electrical engineers and put the final touches on a program for training the many codebreaking clerks who would be needed for the expected rush of U-boat intelligence once the American Bombes arrived in Washington.

  THE NAVY KNEW that, in order to compete with the much higher wages offered in the private market, it would have to supplement its meager salaries for women volunteers with plenty of amenities—comfortable living quarters, decent food, and, where possible, recreational facilities and dating opportunities. The WAVES leaders were able to void the Navy’s antifraternization rules, allowing the WAVES and male Navy officers to date and even marry.

  The WAVES recruitment strategy of demanding class while offering perks worked well. They met their quotas, avoided any serious scandals, and could afford to be selective. The WAVES wanted quality rather than numbers alone, and their enlisted personnel were older (ages twenty to forty-nine), more skilled, much more highly educated, and more socially acceptable than the men in any of the armed services or the women recruited to the Army. Not surprisingly, the Women’s Army Corps fell short of its recruitment goals. One of the WAC leaders, Jeanne Holm, blamed the corps’ early failures, in part, on the Army’s insistence that the military women be treated no differently from the men, subjecting them to unattractive uniforms, bland food, and lack of female amenities in the training camps.

  In contrast, the WAVES leadership took an almost maternal interest in their young charges. While the enlisted Navy men on the Bombe project were left to fend for themselves in Dayton’s crowded wartime housing market, the WAVES were quartered at Sugar Camp, a private compound of rustic cabins nestled among the wooded hilltops overlooking the NCR campus. NCR gave the Navy full use of the thirty-one-acre site, which had been built in 1894 as a training center and retreat for the company’s sales force.

  The conditions at Sugar Camp, especially in the cold months, weren’t always the height of comfort, however. The WAVES bunked as many as eight in cabins that had been designed to house just four—two guests on each side, with a shower, a toilet, and a pair of sinks in between. The unheated structures were rustic and charming—built entirely of wood, with latticed windows and built-in closets and beds, each with its own writing table, goosenecked lamp, and fan. But during that cold, rainy spring of 1943, the fans were of
little use. “Oh my goodness, it was cold. We slept in the same bed, or we put newspapers in between the blankets,” recalled Joan Bert Davis. In the fall, heated barracks were built.

  Despite the spare lodgings, Sugar Camp offered a dining hall, infirmary, recreation center, auditorium and theater, baseball diamond, and a large outdoor pool. “It felt like a little country club,” said Sue Unger Eskey. “We were more or less like a bunch of overgrown Girl Scouts. We loved it.” Jimmie Lee Long, a Texas native, said Sugar Camp was a breath of welcome air after boot camp. “We had been cooped up with so many girls at boot camp. We weren’t used to this mass of people. And when we got to Sugar Camp, we had a chance to go off and curl up somewhere on a log or on a bench and read a book. You could find a little peace and time to think and write letters.”

  Still, there was plenty of work to be done. During peak production of the Bombes, the Sugar Camp bunks never grew cold: one shift of women worked while another slept. Shifts ran eight to twelve hours long, twenty-four hours a day, and were rotated weekly.

  The WAVES found their lives carefully regimented, as did the Navy men, with a midnight curfew (often violated, the women said) and a strict dress code. Their civilian clothes were sent home, and even their sports attire was furnished by the Navy. Those who married during their tour of duty were given seven days off, which were subtracted from their annual leave, and had to get permission to wear their wedding gowns for their big day.

  To maintain discipline and esprit de corps, the WAVES marched in full uniform, their hair pinned neatly beneath their hats, to meals, to classes, to their factory shifts. “We were marched all the time, every day, no matter what the weather,” Racz said. Each morning, traffic was halted on Main and Stewart streets as two hundred WAVES strode four abreast the mile or so from Sugar Camp to NCR’s Building 26. They were hard to miss, especially for enlisted men looking for female attention. “I’m afraid the sailors were not very well-liked by the WAVES,” recalled Robert Shade, who had been a Navy machinist mate stationed at NCR. “I had a Model A roadster and I used to drive 10 sailors to work. . . . Of course, the WAVES were marching along and we would count cadence with them—if you can picture 10 sailors hanging on a Model A roadster.”

  In Building 26, the WAVES worked from blueprints and diagrams to wire, solder, and assemble parts of the massive Bombes—each task performed in a separately guarded and locked room, so that no one could identify a whole machine or even a component. A WAVE never met any of the other workers in Building 26, other than those assigned to her room. The Navy often sacrificed efficiency to secrecy: one WAVE would be given the wiring diagram for one side of a commutator wheel, while a second WAVE worked on the other side of the wheel in a separate room.

  “We never talked about our work or asked about other activities being carried out in other parts of Building 26,” Sue Unger Eskey wrote in a letter many years later to Joe Desch’s daughter, Debbie Anderson, who organized a reunion of the Dayton WAVES in 1995. “We had no knowledge that the Bombe was being conceived and built directly over our heads on Floor 2.”

  Even so, Eskey had an idea of what those rotors she was soldering so carefully might be used for. “If you had any intuition or deep thoughts about it you could sort of figure it out. There’s 26 wires and 26 digits on the wheels and, oh yeah, the alphabet has 26 digits, too. . . . I knew absolutely nothing about codes or anything, but I had that thought. And, of course, I didn’t share it with anyone because we were not allowed to talk about anything.”

  The work could be both exacting and boring, especially on the graveyard shift. “Bonnie Skinner would sing to us half the night so we could stay awake,” Eskey recalled. “She had a beautiful, operatic voice.” Dorothy Firor, who was in charge of one of the rooms in Building 26, remembered that not everyone came whistling to work on the morning shift. “I would stand at the door and say good morning as the girls came in. One of them would always say, ‘What’s good about it?’ ”

  Vogel worked in Firor’s room:

  The loveliest thing was that when we would have lunch hour or rest period, we would all put our heads down on our work table and Miss Firor would read to us the Bobbsey Twins or Little Women. She would read us all these childhood books, and just lull us into relaxation. Then when the time period was up she would close the book and say, “Well, I’ll start on the rest of it later.” We were her flock.

  It was a testament to the WAVES’ skills that the machines eventually proved so reliable: sloppy soldering was a major problem for other early computer prototypes, but not the NCR Bombes. Inside each rotor that imitated the fastest wheel of the Enigma machines was complex internal wiring that had to hold up under speeds of two thousand rpm, generating centrifugal forces that warped or cracked many of the wheels. The scores of electrical connections on each wheel had to be meticulously matched and circuit boards soldered, sometimes using a microscope. A single mismatched connection or a weak solder point could lead to hours or even days of wasted efforts by cryptanalysts and engineers. The Bombes demanded more than eleven thousand such precision wheels. Even so, “There was no room for mistakes. Now I understand why,” Long said in a letter to Anderson.

  Although the WAVES had been carefully screened in Washington, not all of them were up to performing the delicate soldering and assembly work. Those who failed at those tasks were trained to assemble wire harnesses for the machines’ circuitry, said Phil Bochicchio. “We laid out plywood board with nails, and each wire had a color code that went to a particular nail. Then they had to lace all those wires together with wax string. Finally, the girls that were adept at soldering nested those lacings into place.”

  More than one of the WAVES working on the Dayton Bombes cracked under the stress and tedium and had to be reassigned, despite their knowledge of the project. One tired WAVES member committed every codebreaker’s worst nightmare: she absentmindedly walked out of the secret Bombe-decryption room carrying both an original ciphered message and its plain-language equivalent. Both were recovered before falling into the wrong hands.

  A more delicate problem arose when officers learned that a WAVES member was pregnant. She was released from service, but not before she was sworn to secrecy about anything she had done for the Navy.

  Less serious personnel matters cropped up throughout the war, usually involving requests for transfer out of OP20G and minor disciplinary infractions. In mid-1944, the officer in charge of morale reported that some twenty WAVES per day were coming for help with personal matters. As a result, the officer requested more staffing and a separate office so that private conversations could be held with WAVES who were “emotionally upset or wishing to discuss a highly personal problem.”

  The Navy found ways to help the women relax. Once their shifts ended, the WAVES were free to enjoy themselves, either on or off the Sugar Camp grounds. Curfews were seldom enforced. There were ball games and poolside activities just outside their cabin doors and movies and skits in the Sugar Camp auditorium. The camp cafeteria never closed. “The food was excellent,” Racz recalled. “I know we had a lot of good beef—things people on the outside didn’t have during the war.” Firor recalled the special advantages of living next to the Sugar Camp pool. “We went skinny-dipping in between the times the night watchman made his rounds.”

  Getting around town was never a problem for the WAVES, even though the camp’s Navy transport—an old woody station wagon—often broke down and had to be pushed. “Wherever we were going, people would stop and ask us if we would like a ride,” Vogel said. “Of course, in those days, nobody ever harmed us. The Age of Innocence was still intact.” Firor recalled a polite young farmer on his way into town who offered a ride to her and another WAVES member as they were walking to the opera. The women asked the farmer if he would like to go to the opera, too. “I’d as soon hear pigs squeal,” he replied.

  The WAVES were pet oddities in Dayton, both as women in uniform and as Navy personnel in the town where the Army Air Corps tradition had
originated with the Wright brothers themselves. If anyone asked about their work at NCR, they were instructed to say they were training on adding machines—a story that matched the project’s cover name, the Naval Computing Machine Laboratory. “People must have thought we were pretty stupid to be there all that time learning how to run adding machines,” Evelyn Urich Einfeldt said with a laugh.

  Many NCR families made a point of “adopting” individual WAVES, inviting them to their homes for Sunday meals and to their churches for services, providing an escape from the regimented life at Sugar Camp and a gathering place as well for those who wanted a more familylike atmosphere for parties and social affairs. In those times of rationing and shortages, “even the people in the department stores were lovely to us,” said Dorothy Braswell. One downtown store owner in particular made a point of ringing up Sugar Camp as soon as he received a new shipment of nylons, so that the WAVES always had the first pick of what had become a scarce wartime item, she recalled.

  Many WAVES remembered how Joe and Dorothy Desch, older and more sophisticated, had floated in and out of their lives at Sugar Camp for Sunday dinners and other festivities—always in the company of Ralph Meader. “We were all in awe of Joe and Dorothy, because they were beautiful people in appearance—like movie stars. And always dressed so fashionably,” Vogel said.

  Betty Bemis Robarts remembered Mrs. Desch as “a beautiful woman—tall and elegant, just like she stepped out of Vogue.”

  According to several WAVES, Desch had an even more compelling reason not to like or trust his naval supervisor: Meader was a well-known flirt. There were times, Desch knew, when Meader was in his home with Dorothy. Debbie Anderson said that, even during the roughest times in her parents’ marriage long after the war, her father had never accused her mother of an affair with Meader. But she said her father was infuriated that Meader would often flirt with Dorothy.