The Secret in Building 26

by Jim DeBrosse

  Alvida Lockwood, a member of the WAVES who did repair work on the Bombes, chuckles whenever she recalls Meader. “He liked the ladies,” she said. Vogel concurred: “He wasn’t what you would call an attractive man. Actually, he reminded me a little of Santa Claus. But he had a twinkle in his eye all the time, and I think he made women—the girls—happy. I think they were attracted to him in a way.”

  Lockwood said she never saw Meader abuse his relationship with the WAVES. “He wasn’t the kind of man you were afraid would pinch you,” she said. Other WAVES viewed Meader as a “fatherly type,” Vogel said. “He was easy to talk to. He always called us ‘his girls.’ We weren’t in awe of him as we were of Joe.”

  Despite what would now be called his sexist bent, Meader saw the value in recruiting women to the armed forces, Einfeldt said. “There were a lot of higher-up people who didn’t want women in the service, but Commander Meader did. He appreciated what the women were doing. He ran a tight ship, though. You didn’t step out of line.”

  Many of the WAVES who assembled the Bombes now consider themselves groundbreakers and pioneers in expanding the work roles for women. But at the time, their motivation was to serve their country more than their gender. “We didn’t join for any reason other than patriotism,” Einfeldt said. After the war, “most of the women I knew didn’t even know they were veterans and could take advantage of GI benefits—because you did it for the patriotism.”

  In the process of serving their country, many of the women were encouraged to take bolder paths after the war—paths that might never have occurred to them without having been in the WAVES. Esther Hottenstein, Desch’s executive secretary during the war, left behind her old teaching job following her service and went on to medical school.

  Robarts, who had never been away from her parents’ home in the small town of Nashwauk, Minnesota, said her experience in the WAVES forced her to grow up in a hurry. “I must have cried the first two weeks of boot camp. I was awful homesick,” she said. “All these girls were talking about how great it was to get away from their parents, but I was just devastated.” After the war, she went off on her own to Butler University in Indiana, where she became a competitive diver and reached the NCAA championships.

  For many of the WAVES, the months at NCR passed almost as if in a dream. In fact, until top secret documents were declassified in the mid-1990s, it was as if they hadn’t been in Dayton at all. “There was no record I was ever in Dayton,” Racz said. “For years, I couldn’t understand why. All the important people who were there, and we still didn’t know what was going on.” Even their assigned rank in the WAVES, “Specialist Q,” was cloaked in mystery, she said, “although a lot of people joked that it stood for ‘cutie.’ ” Navy officials told the WAVES the classification involved work in communications but nothing more.

  Veronica Mackey Hulick, who had received a Navy Unit Commendation Ribbon and a personal letter from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal for her work in operating the Bombes during the war, tried repeatedly in the late 1970s to access her records. A written response from a rear admiral in March 1978 informed her that

  if pertinent files were maintained at the time, apparently they were destroyed after the war. Existing records do not show what specific duties you performed [in Washington] or at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton. The oath that you took in 1945 has not been modified by published accounts speculating as to activities carried out by personnel located at the Naval Communications Annex.

  The WAVES leaders realized that their enlistees wouldn’t always be focused on the war effort or their careers. That became clear to OP20G chief Joseph Wenger early in the American Bombe project. Even before production began in Dayton, Wenger had busied himself with finding the right location for the WAVES to operate the machines. In October 1942, he believed he had found the perfect spot and said so in a memo to his superiors. But the WAVES commanders, who were intent on attracting a high class of recruit, had other ideas, as well as the political clout to back them up.

  Wenger’s preferred site was a secluded Chautauqua camp, just fifteen miles south of NCR along a wooded, two-mile front of the Great Miami River, complete with all the amenities that the WAVES leadership thought essential to recruitment: a large hotel and auditorium, cottages, swimming pool, skating rink, tennis courts, Tom Thumb golf course, movie theater, and coffee shop. The site in Miami Township was rural but not isolated by any means: nearby traction-company lines, accessed from the camp by crossing the river over an iron footbridge, provided speedy service to Dayton and other towns in the area.

  In his memo, Wenger ticked off all the other advantages of the site: it was close to NCR, for ease of delivery and maintenance of the machines; in an area not likely to be attacked and that would therefore need no bombproofing; and far enough removed from other well-known OP20G activities so as not to raise enemy suspicions. What’s more, he estimated it would cost one hundred thousand dollars to renovate the site to meet Navy requirements, as opposed to one million dollars if the operation was based in Dayton.

  Wenger toured the site with a WAVES officer, Lieutenant Lawrence, and representatives from both the Bureau of Ships and the Bureau of Yards and Docks. The site was found “highly satisfactory” by the two bureau representatives but not by the WAVES lieutenant, “whose main objection rested in the fact that the site was about 15 miles from Dayton and, therefore, somewhat inaccessible,” Wenger said. “Moreover, Lieutenant Lawrence seemed greatly concerned over the fact that there was no prospect of suitable male companionship in the immediate vicinity.” In other words, the site was too far removed from the officers at NCR and Wright Field.

  Wenger ended his memo by strongly recommending that the Navy lease and develop the Chautauqua site and “if the WAVES raise objection to locating there, that we man the project with men.” Certainly the WAVES must have known that Wenger was bluffing: persuading the Navy brass to allocate hundreds of sailors to nonsea duties was nearly impossible by late 1942. And by that time as well, fears that Washington, D.C., and other major urban centers might be bombed had subsided. The WAVES also had plenty of political clout, given the elite background of its leadership and the strong support of Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House.

  The WAVES had their way: the operational site for the Bombes would not be in the rural splendor of southwestern Ohio but in the urban excitement of Washington, D.C.

  In November 1942, OP20G had notified the Mount Vernon Seminary for Girls, the oldest girls’ boarding school in the District of Columbia, that it was about to be taken over for “special training” of a secret nature. At the end of its fall semester, having been paid a sum of $1.1 million, the seminary vacated its nine ivy-covered brick dormitories and classroom buildings and its cozy chapel, clearing the way for Navy personnel to begin their move there in early 1943. The new site, later dubbed the Naval Communications Annex, was at Massachusetts and Nebraska avenues, near Tenley Circle, five miles from OP20G’s original location in the Main Navy Building on Constitution Avenue downtown.

  The fifteen-acre campus was chosen, according to a Navy brochure, for “its location at one of the highest points in the District of Columbia, with clear lines of sight to the Pentagon, Fort Meade and other military installations [and] away from tall buildings” and also because its buildings and spacious grounds could be converted easily to military use. Early in 1943, part of the land was used for the construction of two new high-security buildings to house the Bombes and other codebreaking machines.

  By fall 1943, Washington was ready to become part of Ultra.

  The four-rotor Enigma machine, introduced by the German Navy in early 1942 and shown here with its casing open, overwhelmed British codebreakers with its message-scrambling capabilities. The new naval system, called Triton by the Nazis and M4 Shark by the British, led to a near blackout in reading U-boat radio messages until December 1942. Photo courtesy of the National Archives

  A WAVE adjusts a commutator wheel on a U.
S. Navy Bombe, designed to attack the German Navy’s four-wheel Enigma. The American Bombe was developed and built in a top secret crash program in 1942–43 at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio. Photo courtesy of the National Security Agency

  Alastair G. Denniston (left), head of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park until 1942, displays his usual dapper appearance along a London street. Denniston visited U.S. Navy codebreaking headquarters in August 1941, prepared to tell the Americans everything the British had learned about breaking the German Enigma codes. Photo courtesy of the National Archives

  Agnes Meyer Driscoll, shown here in a rare photo taken a year before her retirement in 1957, was the U.S. Navy’s top codebreaker in 1941 when A. G. Denniston offered to share Britain’s hard-won expertise. Convinced she had already arrived at an old-fashioned paper-and-pencil solution to the Enigma, Driscoll rejected Denniston’s historic offer. Photo courtesy of the National Security Agency

  Captain Laurance F. Safford, Agnes Driscoll’s former student, was head of the Navy’s codebreaking operations in 1941. Safford strived to build the Navy’s OP20G division into an American version of Britain’s elite codebreaking group. He was removed from his position in a Navy shake-up soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Photo courtesy of the National Security Agency

  Admiral Stanford C. Hooper was the prime mover in leading U.S. Navy cryptanalysis into the modern machine age. Hooper and his Navy protégé, Joseph N. Wenger, believed that the introduction of electric ciphering devices, such as the German Enigma, would force codebreakers to become mathematicians, statisticians, and engineers—not just linguists with a bent forpuzzle-solving. Photo courtesy of the National Security Agency

  Joseph N. Wenger became head of the Navy’s OP20G codebreaking division soon after Pearl Harbor. OP20G developed some of the most advanced electromechanical machinery of the day, including the U.S. Bombe, to attack Japanese and German naval ciphers and codes. Photo courtesy of the National Archives

  Sir Edward Travis, who replaced A. G. Denniston as head of Bletchley Park in 1942, was a no-nonsense manager who at first put little trust in America’s ability to keep codebreaking secrets. By the end of the war, however, he had helped forge a remarkable alliance between American and British codebreakers. Photo courtesy of the National Archives

  Joseph R. “Joe” Desch, chief engineer for the U.S. Naval Computing Machine Laboratory at NCR, was the leading designer of the U.S. Bombe. Desch had been recruited by the Navy in large part because of his pioneering work in the development of fast-pulsing miniature gas tubes—the silicon chips of their day. Photo courtesy of the NCR Archive at the Montgomery County Historical Society

  Personnel of the U.S. Naval Computing Machine Laboratory, including Desch (front row, left), on the steps of Building 26 at NCR, where the U.S. Bombes were developed and built in a top secret program equal in priority to the Manhattan Project. Commander Bruce I. Meader (front row, third from left) was the on-site naval officer in charge of the program. Photo courtesy of the NCR Archive at the Montgomery County Historical Society

  Young Joe Desch (second from left), who grew up in Dayton just blocks from where the Wright brothers invented the airplane. The son of a wagonmaker and a German immigrant mother, Desch would become NCR’s chief of electrical research. Photo courtesy of the NCR Archive at the Montgomery County Historical Society

  Bruce Meader next to Dorothy Desch, wife of Joe Desch. Meader was quartered in the Desch home to keep an eye on the NCR engineer while he worked on top secret projects for the Navy. Desch, whose mother had Nazi relatives in Germany, was kept under twenty-four-hour surveillance by Navy security guards. Photo courtesy of Evelyn Urich Einfeldt

  This aerial photo of the NCR complex in Dayton, Ohio, taken in 1952, shows Building 26 separate from the rest of the main campus, in the very bottom right of the photo. Note the railroad spur behind the building, which was used to ship the completed Bombes to Navy codebreaking operations in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of the NCR Archive at the Montgomery County Historical Society

  U.S. Navy WAVES, hundreds of whom helped build the U.S. Bombes, march through the main gate at Sugar Camp, the NCR retreat center where they were housed during the war. WAVES marched in full uniform through the streets of Dayton to and from Building 26. To protect the secrecy of the operation, WAVES were instructed to tell the curious that they were training on business machines. Photo courtesy of the NCR Archive at the Montgomery County Historical Society

  A WAVE relaxes in one of the rustic cabins at Sugar Camp. The cabins, though cozy, were unheated and, until more permanent quarters could be constructed, were filled with bunks. Photo courtesy of the NCR Archive at the Montgomery County Historical Society

  WAVES line up to use the phone at Sugar Camp. WAVES swore never to talk about their work at NCR, even among themselves, and were told that they would be “shot at dawn” if they violated their oaths. For more than fifty years, none of the hundreds of WAVES involved in the Bombe project divulged the secret. Photo courtesy of the NCR Archive at the Montgomery County Historical Society

  WAVES stand by the old woody station wagon that was their only means of transport while staying at Sugar Camp. The Navy-issue car often broke down and had to be pushed. Photo courtesy of Evelyn Urich Einfeldt

  WAVES in black arm- bands march on the grounds of Sugar Camp to protest strict new curfews in November 1943. What the protesters didn’t know was that the tighter security measures were imposed after a potential spy was found to be working in Building 26. Photo courtesy of Evelyn Urich Einfeldt

  An aerial view of the Naval Communications Annex near Tenley Circle in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s. Formerly the Mount Vernon Seminary for Girls, the fifteen-acre complex was converted to house the 120 U.S. Bombes as well as the WAVES who would operate the machines around the clock. Photo courtesy of the National Security Agency

  WAVES perform delicate work on some of the commutator wheels used on the U.S. Bombes, shown in stacks on the floor. The 104 contacts of the brass-and-copper wheels, sandwiched between heat-resistant Bakelite, had to be wired by hand. Maintaining the 11,000 commutators the Navy required during the war presented the greatest manufacturing and security challenges of the Bombe project. Photo courtesy of the National Security Agency

  A WAVE keeps watch over a bank of U.S. Bombes inside Building 4 of the Naval Communications Annex. When a Bombe stopped running, it meant that it had arrived at a possible solution, often called a “hit” or a “strike.” Lights on the machine would flash, a bell would ring, and a probable key setting for an Enigma message would print out at one end of the machine. “We’d take the sheet of paper down the hall and knock on a door,” one WAVE operator recalled. “A hand would come out; we’d turn over the printout and go back and start all over again.” Photo courtesy of the National Security Agency

  WAVES at the Naval Communications Annex conduct some of the further testing and refinement of Bombe solutions needed to decrypt Enigma messages. Codebreakers used various hand methods and simple machines such as the M-9 (an Enigma simulator that helped find remaining steckers and the ring settings) to complete the Enigma keys, then produced a fully decrypted message. Photo courtesy of the National Security Agency

  Circular splashes mark the spots where Ensign Edward R. Hodgson’s machine-gun bullets hit near U-603. In this attack on June 4, 1943, one of Hodgson’s depth bombs bounced off the U-boat’s jumping wire before exploding. The submarine eventually escaped. The U.S. Bombes began playing a major role in helping break U-boat radio messages in September of that year. Photo courtesy of the National Archives

  Joe Desch in his new lab inside Building 20 after the war, where he spent years trying to improve his fast-firing miniature gas tubes. After nearly two years of fourteen-hour days and impossible production deadlines, Desch walked quietly out of Building 26 in August 1944 and off the job. Navy officials persuaded him to return six weeks later. Desch continued to grapple with Japanese codebreakin
g problems but stepped down as the Navy’s chief project engineer. Photo courtesy of the NCR Archive at the Montgomery County Historical Society

  Desch, pictured here in a 1950s portrait, continued to give technical advice to the Navy and the National Security Agency long after the war. In a secret ceremony at the Navy Department in 1947, he was awarded the National Medal of Merit—the highest civilian honor for wartime service—for his work in developing the U.S. Bombe. Desch could tell no one of the nation’s gratitude, not even his daughter, Debbie, who would puzzle over the significance of her father’s award for the next fifty years. Desch died of a stroke in 1987 at the age of eighty. Photo courtesy of the National Security Agency

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  A Well-Oiled Machine