by Jim DeBrosse
Bush’s connection to the Navy went back to World War I, when he was recruited to its New London, Connecticut, research laboratory to work on new devices for detecting German U-boats. (Hooper, too, had worked on the U-boat problem during World War I, but there is no evidence the two men ever met.) Bush never forgot his experience in New London, nor the fact that the Navy ignored most of his research group’s advice. As a result, he developed an intense dislike of bureaucracies.
In 1935, as Hooper and Wenger scoured the country looking for technical advice on how to update Navy communications and intelligence gathering, one of their first stops was MIT, where Bush was now regarded as perhaps the top academic engineer in the nation. Bush, Wenger, and Hooper joined forces at a time when their interests seemed in perfect harmony. Bush needed funding, Wenger needed technical assistance, and Hooper needed someone of Bush’s reputation to pry open the Navy coffers.
Hooper and Wenger described to Bush the latest cryptanalytic methods and challenges. Bush already knew the limitations of electromechanical tabulating, and he had begun to think of less cumbersome alternatives. Tabulating machines of the day used stacks of cards with holes punched in them to represent numbers or letters. Tabulators pulled individual cards past a reading station, where electrified metal brushes “sensed” the holes in the cards by making contact and generating electrical pulses. The pulses were then tallied by counters. While small banks of relays were later added to the tabulators to make them more efficient at counting, the mechanics of moving and stacking cards always limited the speeds of the machines.
On little more than a gentlemen’s agreement in 1935, Bush began to draft a plan for the Navy, with the promise that he would be paid ten thousand dollars in consulting fees—four times what a senior engineer hoped to earn at NCR in the late 1930s. Bush dashed off his report and submitted it in the first weeks of 1936. In it, he sketched the general outlines of a series of high-speed, optical-electronic devices that would be hundreds of times more powerful than IBM’s tabulators. How Bush had arrived at his plan so quickly was no mystery: he and his colleagues at MIT had begun thinking of ways to exploit the combination of electronics, optics, and film well before 1935.
Bush had long been convinced that the technology was in place for developing marvelous new machines that could instantly calculate numbers, store and retrieve business records, or count letter frequencies in codes. A photoelectric sensor combined with digital circuitry could search long spools of microfilm for specific words or patterns. As an easily reproducible and compact storage medium, microfilm already had captured the scientific imaginations of the day. At the 1925 International Congress of Photography, Emanuel Goldberg, a Russian-born inventor and industrialist, dazzled the scientific community with a grainless microfilm that could store the entire text of the Bible fifty times over on one square inch of film. But the problem for Bush, and those who followed him on his technological quest, was finding a workable way to search and tally the “hits” in such minuscule print.
That was still the primary technical challenge in 1936 when Bush recommended that the Navy design and develop what became known in the intelligence community as rapid analytical machines (RAMs). But Wenger and Hooper, for all their enthusiasm for the project, ran headlong into a Navy bureaucracy that didn’t cotton to “college professors” who asked exorbitant fees for fancy, abstract ideas.
Although Hooper did eventually land a Navy contract for MIT in 1936, Bush turned his attention to other projects and another source of funding—the nation’s corporations. Again, timing and chance shaped the history of the U.S. Bombe project: just as Bush was beginning his search for more donors, an old and influential friend of MIT returned as the operating head of NCR—Colonel Edward A. Deeds. The friendship between Bush, Deeds, and Charles “Boss” Kettering, the engineer who had come to replace Edison and Ford as the guru of American industrial science, was to link the futures of NCR, MIT, and the Ultra secret.
Deeds and Kettering were both hardworking farmboys from central Ohio who had seen education as a way to escape life behind the plow. A graduate of Denison University, Deeds began his career as a construction engineer at NCR, progressed to product development, and soon recruited Kettering, a star engineering student at Ohio State, to help him finish the job of electrifying the company’s line of cash registers. Deeds and Kettering saved NCR’s dominance of the world market against an onslaught of competitors in the early 1900s. Realizing how well they worked together, the two men decided to join forces on their own. In Deeds’s small, two-story barn behind his house on Central Avenue in Dayton, they invented the modern automobile electrical system—both the ignition and the self-starter—and put an end to the back- and arm-breaking business of cranking a car engine. They founded Delco (short for Dayton Electric Company), then sold it to General Motors and quickly became rich from the growth of the automotive giant.
Ohio, particularly Dayton, was a hotbed for inventors and entrepreneurs at the beginning of the century, boasting the Wright brothers in aviation, John H. Patterson and NCR in business machines, Charles Goodrich in rubber goods, and Deeds and Kettering in automotive and electrical engineering. The largely agrarian state of Ohio, unfettered by outdated factories and mills, had been transformed into one of the nation’s leading manufacturing areas by the Union Army’s nearly insatiable demand for weapons and supplies during the Civil War. By the end of the century, notes historian George W. Knepper, the state “led the way in nearly every new growth industry—automobiles, aircraft, electrical equipment, business machines and scores of others—even as it remained an important farming state.”
Deeds and Kettering were familiar with the workings of the military from their development of the water-cooled Liberty engine, which they designed and manufactured in a crash program for the U.S. Army and its allies during World War I; it was considered America’s greatest technological contribution to that war. Their newly formed Dayton-Wright Company turned out more than four thousand Allied planes using the Liberty engine. As a member of the Aircraft Production Board, Deeds had divested himself of any financial interest in the company, but his guidance of the fifty-million-dollar program led to accusations—and a federal investigation—of profiteering. Although Deeds was later exonerated, the humiliation of that experience made him wary of ever signing another government contract in which he, or one of his companies, might make a profit.
Deeds went on to be a major force in the creation of the American airline and machine-tool industries and eventually a kingmaker in American corporate finance. Kettering, who disdained business affairs and did many a job on a handshake, continued to tackle technical challenges, inventing ethyl alcohol to solve the problem of engine knock and, with much foresight, a more efficient diesel engine that he thought would help prevent depletion of the world’s oil reserves. Kettering also conducted some of the earliest secret experiments with rocket-guidance systems, designing a flying bomb called the Kettering Bug, a technology that was to resurface with devastating effect in World War II as the German V-1 “buzz bomb.”
In a classic example of what sociologist C. Wright Mills later described as the inner workings of the “power elite,” Bush first made contact with Deeds when the two men served on advisory committees that steered American aeronautical research. Deeds, in turn, introduced Bush to Kettering. Beyond an interest in planes and rockets, the three men also shared a faith in the use of technology to solve America’s problems, including the Great Depression and the massive unemployment of the day. And, like the Navy’s Hooper, the trio wanted to modernize the American military.
When Deeds accepted the NCR presidency in 1936 with a mandate to reinvigorate the company, Bush became the company’s unofficial technical adviser, pointing NCR’s long-term research toward the emerging field of electronics. By early 1937, after the Navy had at last signed off on Bush’s proposal for the RAM project, Bush had persuaded Deeds to donate a token but regular amount to MIT and to send a team of NCR engineers to
learn from his work on electronics and microfilm.
The chain from Deeds to Hooper to Bush found its next link in Joe Desch. Deeds had asked for Bush’s help in staffing NCR’s new electronics-research laboratory in 1938, but for whatever reason, Bush didn’t send any of his “boys” to Dayton.
NCR’s research director, Harry M. Williams, decided to look for talent locally, where there was an abundance of experienced, practical engineers who could balance the more abstract influence of MIT. Desch had already proved at General Motors’ radio research division and at Frigidaire that he was especially good at turning ideas into workable products. His experience included work on a radio-teletype system that could link electric typewriters, a device that later drew the interest of the Navy and IBM.
Beginning in 1938, Desch and his few assistants taught themselves about the latest electronic developments and soon became as skilled and knowledgeable as the MIT men. Frequently, Desch, not his advisers at MIT, was first to arrive at new discoveries and to build working machines. In fact, Desch beat MIT to the creation of an electronic digital calculator in 1940, albeit partly because Bush’s men were too busy with other projects. The size of a dishwasher and mounted on casters, the NCR calculator marked a milestone in digital electronics. Independent of MIT’s related work, Desch’s staff also explored the use of microfilm, high-speed printers, magnetic digital recording, and fast-pulsing miniature tubes for counting and tracking. It was in this last area that Desch soon gained a national reputation as an innovator.
Then, just as Desch’s work was leading to the development of new products and the promise of a healthier profit margin for NCR, war broke out and Deeds’s patriotism ended the company’s commercial quests. It wasn’t long before Bush’s National Defense Research Committee, aware of Desch’s expertise in electronics and manufacturing, came knocking on his door in Building 10 at NCR. Powerful and persuasive, the NDRC answered only to the president of the United States.
WHILE DESCH WAS leading NCR into the electronic age, the embryonic new guard at OP20G was struggling to do the same for the Navy. Their first RAM, called the Comparator, drew its power from the Index of Coincidence and the laws of probability, not from the kind of Enigma-mimicking logic the Poles and British were engineering into the early Bombes. It could therefore attack, at least theoretically, any kind of cipher system.
The IC method also could be computed with electromechanical machines, such as a punched-card tabulator. But even with the IBM machines, the process was very slow and labor-intensive; a long message could take days to analyze. Bush insisted he could produce a high-speed machine 150 times faster than the IBM tabulators. He hoped, in the long run, for machines that did at least fifty thousand letter comparisons per minute—and perhaps as many as two hundred thousand. Either punched tape or microfilm would allow the condensing and overlapping of text. Optical sensing devices, such as photocells, would register the matches, and, finally, electronic tubes would tally the results. *19
But the theory was far more elegant than the practicalities. Over the next five years, from 1938 through 1943, Bush’s MIT students, Navy scientists, and finally the best factory engineers in America struggled to make Bush’s idea work, and none would produce a reliable machine. *20
THE YOUNG MEN from MIT came to that November 3, 1941, meeting no doubt expecting that the RAMs and the pressing need for new technologies to attack Japanese codes and ciphers would dominate the agenda. After all, the Navy had been preparing itself for years to wage an inevitable war against the Japanese in the Pacific. But much of the discussion that day dealt with the “special problems,” as they were called at the meeting, faced by Agnes Driscoll and her Enigma team. Perhaps because the young engineers did not have proper security clearances at the time, the term “Enigma” was never brought up.
By this time, Driscoll had been struggling long enough with the German naval code, with so few results, that she humbled herself to seek the help of junior engineers. She may have asked John Howard to explore ways to automate the entries in her catalog and to speed up the search through its millions of records.
But Safford and the other leaders at OP20G failed to follow through on her request. Some two weeks after the meeting in Washington, Howard was sent some additional information on Driscoll’s problem but, at the same time, was told it was not of great importance. “Miss Aggie,” in essence, had been blown off by her own superiors, a clear sign that she was on her way to being labeled a has-been.
Yet if Joseph Wenger, who was posted in another section of Navy intelligence at the time and absent from OP20G’s line of command, had heard about the downgrading of Driscoll’s request, he would have been disappointed if not angry. Wenger still believed a statistical and machine-driven attack against the Enigma was the only answer to the German military’s constant upgrades of their machines and the intelligence blackouts that often occurred at the most critical moments.
Wenger’s belief was based on painful experience, not just theory. As an intelligence staff officer and former ship commander, Wenger had seen Japan suddenly change its code systems, time and again, and then watched in frustration as Navy cryptanalysts took years to reconstruct the new codebooks.
THE MORNING OF December 7, 1941, changed everything.
Finger-pointing immediately followed the Japanese surprise attack. Safford was the crypto officer who took the brunt of the blame. In early 1942, Safford and eventually Driscoll were pushed aside, making room for Wenger and the germ of the emerging M section.
As the new operational head of OP20G, Wenger acted quickly and decisively. He formed a new American Enigma team—with Robert Ely in charge—to explore alternatives to Driscoll’s method. Then, a few months later, he pulled Howard Engstrom from his assignment in OP20G’s radio wave–studies section and asked him to organize the M section. Engstrom’s orders were to mold the disparate collection of mathematicians and engineers into a working team whose goal was to develop new mathematical methods for codebreaking. The team’s more immediate task was to launch the Navy’s own RAM program, independent of Bush and the NDRC.
Although it seemed that Hooper’s and Wenger’s dream of giving science, research, and advanced technology a home in OP20G had come true, the times still were not right. The pressures of war did not permit the kind of experimentation and abstract research needed for truly creative approaches. As M was being launched, the Atlantic became a nightmare for U.S. merchant vessels. Those working under Engstrom were instructed to devote their talents to the quickest possible solutions for cracking the four-rotor Enigma, not long-term innovation. Ely’s quest for a unique Enigma attack quickly became one based on M’s still incomplete knowledge of the British Bombe. And quite soon M’s engineers were forced to retreat from Bush’s visions of a general-purpose codebreaking machine and to concentrate on the simplest possible devices to help the Allies’ hard-pressed cryptanalysts.
In early 1942, Hitler unleashed his U-boats against America, and dozens of freighters were torpedoed in sight of its coastal cities, where residents at times could watch the flaming horror. Within a few weeks, the Führer’s Operation Drumbeat did more damage to American ships than the Japanese had done at Pearl Harbor. More ominous still for the Allies, the U-boats were sinking the supply ships in Atlantic convoys at a pace that threatened the survival of Britain.
Wenger asked Engstrom’s young and relatively inexperienced group to become the core of the Navy’s attack against the U-boat codes and ciphers. To augment M with more experienced engineers, Wenger took the RAM program away from Bush and the NDRC and brought aboard the MIT team—Howard, Coombs, and Steinhardt—as the first of M’s engineering adjuncts. The search for more engineers continued, and by the end of 1942 OP20G had recruited many of the leading men in computer electronics, including Joe Desch. Very soon, it was clear that OP20G had become dependent on the nation’s industrial might—machines, ones quickly produced and therefore less ambitious in design, were needed in a hurry to replace the old h
and methods.
On top of the U-boat pigeon shoot in the Atlantic, there was also the fear that bombing or sabotage might destroy Bletchley’s makeshift and very vulnerable facilities.
Thus, in the spring of 1942, the American Navy was ordered to start forging its own Enigma-cracking capability, whether the British liked it or not.
Britain again rushed a group of its intelligence leaders to the States in March to protect its Ultra monopoly. By then, Denniston had stepped down as head of Bletchley Park. Its new commander was Edward Travis, a no-nonsense manager with a bulldog visage who was even less willing to share British technical secrets. The British again assured OP20G that Shark would be beaten, and they agreed to share more Enigma information. But in exchange, they reiterated their demand that the Americans concentrate on the Japanese problems and let Britain manage European intelligence. The British promised the Navy that it would soon create a new Bombe and insisted that the Americans would not have to design their own. They pleaded with OP20G to refrain from launching any crash programs that might lead the Germans to alter their code systems. Britain soon agreed to host a new team of experts from OP20G at Bletchley Park. They were to be shown and told all.
Yet OP20G doubted the British would ever devote enough resources to the Atlantic U-boat Enigma, grappling as they were with German Air Force and Army codes as well. And while the American Navy was under fire at home, the Army’s codebreakers resented having to rely on Bletchley Park, especially with U.S. troops about to take part in the Allied invasion of North Africa.
In a memo to his supervisors in April 1942, Robert Ely outlined the need for the Navy’s Bombe and its basic design—an all-new, all-electronic machine, without spinning wheels. But Ely’s OP20G memo also revealed the Navy’s still very incomplete picture of the Enigma, Shark, and the British Bombe. America’s experts were able to outline the workings of only the older three-wheel plugboard versions of the Enigma, and they seemed uncertain about the workings of the reflector. Furthermore, the memo contained only the broadest generalities about the British Bombe’s logic, and yet it asked a great deal of OP20G’s engineers: produce a single, ultrafast electronic marvel that would outdo all the British machines.