by Jim DeBrosse
She began skimming the three-hundred-plus pages of questions and answers, finding mostly technical details about Desch’s role in the development of the modern computer. Tropp had been looking for material to add to the Smithsonian’s History of Computers project. But beginning on page 111 of the first day’s interview and continuing on to page 119, the text had been slashed through forcefully with a fine-point, felt-tipped pen. In the margin was written: “Delete from tape and manuscript.” But the felt pen had been no match for the thickness of the bold pica type.
The redacted words spoke of “an electronic cryptanalytic machine,” of classified code names, of British scientists, and of top secret equipment dumped and buried in the middle of the night. Anderson devoured the words. Here at last was a glimmer of her father’s top secret duties during World War II, the pivotal years in his life he had never shared except in the broadest terms.
As a teenager and young adult, Anderson had felt little curiosity about her father’s wartime service. She knew her father had gone on to head the military-research division at NCR during the 1960s, and that’s all she cared to know. “I was a true child of the sixties. I was embarrassed that my father was part of the military-industrial complex,” she said.
Desch had burned the most crucial NCR war documents but for some reason had left the transcripts atop his heavy Tudor-style desk, “where even his dumb daughter could find them,” Anderson said. Now here they were, in Anderson’s hands, like a thin ray of light pointing the way to treasure deep inside a cave. For the next decade, Anderson tried to illuminate her father’s mystery, often finding herself at odds with national intelligence officials and skeptical historians. But in doing so, she discovered the historic role that her father—as well as NCR—had played in shortening the world’s most devastating conflict.
May 4, 1958—Kettering, Ohio
IN THE COLOR home movie, Debbie Desch, then a second-grader at St. Albert the Great, is decked out in her First Communion dress and seated between her mother and father on the living-room sofa. Her father, a proud smile on his face, leafs through her Communion prayer book. A year before, Desch moved his family into the spacious Dutch colonial home in west Kettering, where the First Communion celebration is now taking place.
The same movie shows Desch, his mother, and his two sisters as they gather around the dining-room table. The estrangement of the war years, when Desch had been ordered to limit his family visits for security reasons, was long forgotten. “I remember it was always really hard for Dad’s family to relax with us—except for that day,” Anderson said. “Everything went right, and everybody was in a good mood.”
Anderson learned years later, when she was a parent herself, that it was also the day that her father had received the Blessed Sacrament for the first time since 1943, when, in the midst of his guilt and frustration over not being able to perfect the Bombe, he had quit going to church. Desch had reconciled with his faith just days before Debbie’s First Communion, after he had given his confession to Father George Steinkamp, an outspoken priest with a sharp sense of humor who had been his religious mentor at Emmanuel Elementary School. Steinkamp, then in his seventies and in poor health, was the only priest to whom Desch felt close enough to unburden his soul. Desch had phoned Steinkamp personally and asked if he could make special arrangements to have his Confession heard. Steinkamp was so frail he couldn’t walk from the rectory to the church, so Desch gathered him in his arms, carried him into the church, and set him in the confessional. “Remember, this was the 1950s,” Anderson said. “You had to use a confessional.”
Carl Rench said that, by the late 1950s, Desch had found a measure of peace within himself, as well as a deep religious conviction. Often in those days, he and Desch debated each other’s interpretations of scripture. “He was a Catholic, and I was a Protestant, and we had a lot of fun doing that,” Rench said. “We went through everything Mark, Luke, and John ever wrote. We even compared some of the stories.”
Rench said there was no question that Desch was a different man in 1958 from what he was in 1946, when Rench first began to work for him at NCR. “We were both trying to behave the way Jesus would want us to behave,” he said. “Joe was very satisfied with his feelings about the church and the Bible. And I got the sense that he was very proud of what he had been able to accomplish, finally, during the war.”
Yet none of the men and women who had worked so hard on the NCR Bombe ever sought credit or recognition for their contribution, including the four NCR engineers most intimately involved in its design and production: Joe Desch, Bob Mumma, Lou Sandor, and Vince Gulden. All four received, in secret, certificates of commendation from the Bureau of Ships for their service.
“We worked hard, and we worked long hours, but I wasn’t out anywhere where I was being shot at,” Sandor said. “Those were the guys really out there doing the tough job.”
Age and family responsibilities gave Desch a new perspective on life as well as new burdens, and by the 1960s, Anderson said, her father’s heart was no longer in his work. His next quest harked back to his interest in gardening, a hobby that had helped him relax and escape during the war: hunting for mushrooms. Desch was determined to be the first person in the world to cultivate morel mushrooms, a tasty species found in wooded areas. He brought home equipment from his lab at NCR in order to collect and cultivate morel spores. At one point, he inoculated his entire front yard with the tiny spores, but he never succeeded in growing them. He lost interest even in this venture in 1971, when his wife of thirty-six years, Dorothy, died of throat cancer when Desch was sixty-four. “He went into a long depression after that,” Anderson said. “He was never the same.”
With Debbie away at Ohio State, Desch lived quietly by himself in the family’s home in Kettering for the next fourteen years. He was forced to leave the house in 1985 after suffering a series of small strokes and breaking his hip. But in June 1987, following six months in assisted living and nine more months in a nursing home undergoing intensive therapy, he made a remarkable recovery; he insisted on going home.
Anderson recalled the way her father, glancing back at the nursing home on his way to the car, “stuck out his jaw and said, ‘Not many people walk out of that place.’ He was very proud he’d been able to do that. He really wanted to die at home.” He lived his final months there, active and content. Friends and family dropped in frequently, and he spent many hours talking on his ham radio under the call sign of W8ANP and carefully recording his contacts around the world.
On August 3, 1987, when Anderson made her daily phone call to check on her father and got no answer, she knew something was wrong. She and her husband drove the few miles from their Dayton home to her father’s. His morning paper was still in the driveway. They found him on the floor beside his bed, partly paralyzed and speechless from a stroke. Anderson and her husband spent the day with her father at Kettering Medical Center, where he died that evening in intensive care. “That’s exactly how he wanted to go,” she said. “He wanted to be in his own home, and he wanted to go quickly.”
But Anderson couldn’t help feeling cheated by her father’s death. “I know this is selfish and petty, but I can remember thinking once or twice that day, ‘Whatever happened during the war, he knows, he still knows, and we’re not going to get a thing,’ ” she said. “I thought, ‘Damn it, it’s going to be lost.’ He never told anybody. He never wrote it down.” Just before he died, “I could sense he was trying to speak,” Anderson said. But when his time came, he quieted and seemed at peace. “He didn’t fight it,” she said.
She still doesn’t know what kind of peace her father had found. His death, like so much of his life, was cloaked in mystery.
“I don’t think at the end he figured it all out. Who does?” she said. “But he had accepted it just the same.”
May 10, 1989—Kettering, Ohio
DEBBIE ANDERSON WAS having a late breakfast with her husband, Darrell, chairman of the theater department at the Uni
versity of Dayton, when a story in the lifestyle section of the Dayton Daily News caught her eye. It was about an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the development of the modern computer, called “The Information Age.” Part of the exhibit was a decrypting machine built by NCR during the war, on loan from the NSA. NCR archivist Bill West credited Anderson’s father, Joe Desch, and Bob Mumma with building the machine. It was the first time Anderson had ever seen anyone publicly give credit to her father for the NCR Bombe.
Anderson decided to travel to Washington, D.C., with her family, including her two sons, ages fourteen and eleven, to see the machine. Her next move was to contact the Smithsonian curator quoted in the newspaper to see if she could find out more. The curator, in turn, told her to phone an historian at the NSA. “I think he was stunned when I called,” Anderson said. “I don’t think anyone was supposed to give out their names and phone numbers there.”
The historian agreed to meet with her, suggesting they do so informally at a coffee shop. But when Anderson told him that she possessed documents of her father’s, possibly classified ones, that she hoped to have explained, “there was a pause and he said, ‘Oh, you’d better come directly to us.’ ”
June 23, 1990—Fort Meade, Maryland
THE ANDERSONS’ ASTRO van was routed to the rear of the bunkerlike NSA headquarters—a massive concrete structure at Fort Meade, Maryland, twenty miles north of Washington, D.C.—where they were greeted by armed guards and told to remain in their vehicle. Moments later, when the historian who had arranged to meet Anderson arrived at the guard shack, she emerged with her shopping bag filled with documents. But when her sons also started to exit the van, hoping to stretch their legs after the drive from their motel, they were told to stay inside. It was just Anderson the historian wanted to see.
“So Darrell drives off, and here I am surrounded by all these men,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, what have I gotten myself into?’ ”
The contents of her bag were emptied and inspected at the guard shack, and Anderson was put through a metal detector before she was permitted to enter the building. Anderson spent the next six hours inside the NSA headquarters, where she did nearly all the talking. “The day was spent looking through the stuff I brought,” she said. “People would come and go, and not one time in six hours did they make a comment. They’re good at that.”
There was one reaction, however. “A younger guy came in, close to my age [forty] at the time, and I don’t remember what he was looking at, but all he said was, ‘Wow. Can you wait a minute while I show this to somebody?’ He went away and came back, but he never said a word about why he was so excited.”
When it was time to leave and Anderson started gathering up her father’s things, the historian said to her, “‘You realize, of course, I can’t let you take these out of the building.’” He said the documents had to be closely examined, to make sure all the material had been declassified. If so, her things would be returned to her by mail. Anderson protested but had no choice. She did, however, insist on an itemized, signed receipt. The material she left behind was returned, by third-class mail, three months later.
Anderson left Fort Meade that day disappointed, but her visit the next morning to the Smithsonian exhibit redeemed the trip. After years of trying to imagine what had consumed her father during the war, Anderson’s first look at the NCR Bombe surprised her. “I was amazed at how huge it was,” she said. “It was much bigger, much more imposing than what I had expected.”
Her next reaction was frustration. The seven-foot-tall, eleven-foot-long, five-thousand-pound electromechanical decoder sat well behind a waist-high partition, with no mention of her father’s name in any of the plaques or brochures. “Here I was at the end of a pilgrimage. I felt a connection to this thing, and I wanted to go up and touch it, but I couldn’t,” she said. “There was a stream of people waiting, and we just had to keep on moving.”
The label describing the machine said it was manufactured at NCR but said nothing about it being designed there or by whom. It was what Anderson had come to dub the “standard, one-line reference” to NCR’s role in breaking the German Enigma code. The history books she had read and the few documents that she had thus far been able to obtain from the National Archives gave NCR credit for building the 120 Bombes and nothing more—as if the enormously complex machines had been stamped off an assembly line like so many widgets. “It was so frustrating,” she said. “I knew there had to be more to the story, but no one was talking.”
On their way back to Ohio, Anderson and her family stopped at the Pennsylvania home of Esther Hottenstein, a member of the WAVES who had operated NCR’s secure telephone and telegraph lines to Washington during the war. Hottenstein had worked closely with Desch during her years in Dayton and was very fond of him. She had been present when Desch snapped and walked out of Building 26, vowing never to return. For many years after the war, she had kept in touch with Desch by mail and, after his death, with Anderson.
Anderson was looking forward to at last meeting Hottenstein, and although her visit sealed their friendship (“It was like we had always known each other”) it proved useless in her quest to learn more about her father’s work. All her questions that day were received with the same polite reticence she had received at the NSA, Anderson said. “It was always, ‘Well, gee, I can’t tell you about that.’ ”
September 18, 2002—Dayton, Ohio
ON A CRISP, windswept morning, Building 26 stands empty and quiet at the corner of W. Stewart Street and S. Patterson Boulevard, its future undecided. The first brittle leaves of autumn scuttle across its empty parking lot. The plaque honoring the once secret and vital defense work done inside the building stands separate from it, riveted to a boulder at the corner, signaling perhaps the day when the building will no longer exist. NCR says it has yet to decide what it will do with Building 26. Its fate is one more piece in the company’s struggle to downsize, outsource, consolidate, and move ahead into the future—and, like Joe Desch, leave the past behind.
Endnotes
* 1 Since the publication of Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret, the original meaning of the term “Ultra” has become distorted through years of popular misuse. American and British codebreakers in World War II had used “Ultra” only as a label assigned to top-secret decrypts, translations and intelligence reports derived from a high-level enemy code or cipher. “Ultra” was neither a synonym for any one code or cipher product, nor was it a cover name for any cryptologic organization or activity.
* 2If no contradictions were found in a particular wheel combination, the setting was tested on a copy of the Enigma machine by entering the cipher text and seeing if plain text emerged.
* 3The British term for loop was “closure.”
* 4Good cribs could be neither too short nor too long. On the one hand, a long crib helped ensure that a plain-cipher match was correct and that only one such match would appear in a message. A crib based on short, repeated terms such as UBOOTE were of much less value. But longer cribs also contained a technical danger. Turing’s Bombe method was premised on only the first Enigma wheel moving during encryption. Long cribs might trigger a “turnover” of the other wheels. Turnover could be overcome, but it required extra Bombe time and intensive work by analysts.
* 5In the Enigma itself, the current flowed in only one direction through the wiring in its wheels. But the Bombe wheels “opened out” the flow of electricity in both directions, tracking twice the number of wheel positions. To accommodate the flow of current back and forth, each wheel had four sets of electrical contacts, or 104 contact points per wheel. The metal brushes of each spinning drum rubbed against the four concentric circles of twenty-six fixed contacts on the machine’s panel, each contact representing a letter.
* 6A second test was then made on the register, either by hand or automatically, to see if there were any stecker contradictions. If no contradictions were discovered, the wheel positions were noted, as were th
e steckers indicated by the test board and relays. Together, the positions and steckers were called a “story.” With those in hand, a codebreaker would set up an Enigma clone and see if the message deciphered to readable German text. If plain text did emerge, the Bombe run was said to have led to a “Jackpot.”
* 7If the Bombe operator had guessed the wrong stecker, the machine would produce one of two results. First, if the Bombe did not have correct wheels or was not at the correct wheel positions, the current would flow through all the wires on the cable, and the test register would display all hot points. This indicated contradictions in the menu and, thus, no solution.
But the Bombe kept running, advancing the wheels in synchronization through the 17,570 possible wheel positions (for a three-wheel machine) until a “hit” was again sensed.
* 8Again, this stop was only a probability worth looking into. As before, a stecker-consistency check was done, and then the story was used on the Enigma clone to see if a jackpot had been produced.
* 9In Battle of Wits, Stephen Budiansky cites this possible example from the Red Book:
Plain message: FROM KAGA ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL 2130
Plain text: From Uppercase Kaga stop ETA 2130 stop Follows
Code text: 21936 48322 01905 38832 87039 11520 38832
Additive: 02923 41338 00989 15861 28959 23693 18229
Enciphered message: 23859 89650 01884 43693 05988 34113 46051
* 10As the men tapped to represent the Navy prepared for their departure in late January, Safford fumed, perhaps hoping that Driscoll’s recent reassignment would—as she strongly hinted—lead to a major discovery that America could keep to itself. Independent U.S. power over the German naval-code systems might persuade American policy makers that the nation had little need for further “exchanges” with the British.
