by Jim DeBrosse
December 1943—Washington, D.C.
MARY LORRAINE JOHNSON, one of several hundred WAVES who faced long hours and uncomfortable, even dangerous conditions running the Bombes, remembers mostly the deafening noise inside Building 4 at the Naval Communications Annex near Tenley Circle. Scores of American Bombes were lined up on two open floors, whirring and clacking as they raced through the millions of permutations possible on the Enigma machine. “The noise factor was something else,” she said.
When this machine started running, it was so loud . . . all of us got to the point that we wanted to scream that it hurt so badly. I think that it affected different girls to different degrees. We soon learned we had to tune the noise factor out—mentally tune it out. It took us about six weeks because we would sleep and still hear that awful noise. . . . Some girls were having ear problems, and going in [to Navy doctors] and saying, what is wrong with my ears and I have an awful buzzing in my head.
In the Washington summers, the WAVES sweltered in the intense heat generated by the machines. “We had [a] constant sauna,” Johnson said. “Our officers were very strict watching us and would pass the salt pills around because we would go in with a fresh uniform and after two hours we would be wringing wet. . . . Occasionally we would have a girl pass out or feel woozy and a salt pill would bring her out of it and she would be OK.” A fast-spinning commutator wheel, made of copper, brass, and Bakelite and weighing nearly two pounds, could take off an operator’s limb if loosed from its spindle. “The safety of operating these machines was intense,” Johnson recalled. “One time a wheel came off, a bottom wheel, the one that is going so fast, and it just missed my legs by a fraction of an inch. Fortunately, there was a wall there and it went right into the wall.”
On the Bombe’s gray metal face were two rows of black disks with a rotating brass pointer that could be set from 00 to 25 around the circumference. Each number represented a different letter of the alphabet to be tested according to the menu for the Bombe run. Below the knobs, both on the front and back of the machine, were four rows of eight commutator wheels, for a total of sixty-four wheels.
Setting up the machines for each run called for intense concentration. The menu instructions for mounting the different wheels and setting their starting points were not easy to follow, and a slight mistake could lead to a missed solution and a severe reprimand. Some types of Bombe runs were physically tiring, especially those designed to handle possible Enigma wheel turnovers within a crib. On some of those “Hoppity” runs, as they were called, the machine had to be stopped and the wheels reset an average of fourteen times, at exactly the right points during the run.
The WAVES had plenty of much-needed opportunities to blow off steam. Recreational activities included tours to Mount Vernon and Annapolis, dances at naval stations and Army bases, picnics at Rock Creek Park, bike rides along the Potomac, roller-skating, and free concerts. There were classes in ballroom dancing, dramatics, bridge, and hobby crafts. Organized sports included swimming competitions in the station pool, tennis, archery, badminton, softball, basketball, bowling, horseshoes, croquet, Ping-Pong, billiards, and golf at a course in Maryland. WAVES interested in music could join the glee club, string ensemble, quartets, or orchestra, with their instruments furnished by the Navy.
Despite the many leisure-time opportunities, secrecy restrictions and the long work hours often kept many WAVES from taking advantage of them. More often, socializing took the form of spontaneous after-hours gatherings of the kind that moved local resident and attorney James D. Mann to write to the commander of the annex:
For some time it has been impossible for the people living on the north side of Van Ness Street, between Nebraska and Wisconsin Avenues, to sleep between 11 p.m. and about 2:30 a.m. This is due to the unusual amount of noise made by the young men and women stationed at the Communications Annex. I suppose they work at night and go to the Hot Shoppe on Wisconsin Avenue between the aforementioned hours. . . . One morning this week about eight WAVES walked up the middle of Van Ness Street at 1:30 in the morning singing. In about five [or] ten minutes, two Marines came along singing at the top of their voices. It is nothing unusual for there to be six to a dozen instances of noise like this after midnight.
BREAKING SHARK WAS not just a matter of building and operating machines but of inventing processes and organizing human resources. Codebreaking, like modern invention, had outgrown the days of one man or woman sitting down with a pencil and paper and waiting for inspiration to strike. It had become an elaborately cooperative effort involving numerous steps, the skills of hundreds of people, and a division of labor that could capitalize on those proficiencies.
American and British field stations intercepted U-boat radio messages and relayed them by special Teletype lines to the Traffic Group, a dozen or so people whose around-the-clock job was to see if any of the intercepts fit into known Enigma networks, such as Shark. Identifying networks (or systems) was not a simple matter. The disguised message indicators that specified the network had to be unraveled and identified, sometimes with the help of the radio frequency or the time and place of origin of the transmission.
Once its network was identified, the message was usually forwarded to another OP20G subsection for radio fingerprinting—that is, a means of telling exactly which German station or U-boat sent the message—and also to the decryption section for Atlantic problems, known as GY-A. A copy of the message was transmitted to the British at Bletchley Park as well, so that both countries could compare the intercepts in case problems arose in decrypting them.
If the message had been transmitted on a system with an already fully solved daily key, processing was relatively straightforward. The Communications Group used an Enigma analog machine, known as the M-8, to decode the message by simply setting the machine to the known keys, much the same way a German Enigma operator receiving the same message would have done, and typing in the transmitted letters.
If the message was from a system or day whose key was not fully solved, it was sent to the Decryption and Crib groups. When only minor parts of the keys were missing, the codebreakers used various hand methods and simple machines such as the M-9 (an Enigma analog that helped find remaining steckers and the ring settings) to complete the keys and then produced a fully decrypted message.
The Decryption Group sometimes faced a greater challenge: finding the starting position of the wheels. To do this, they called upon their voluminous catalogs of matching plain and cipher text and, when required, the RAMs, the Bombes, and their attachments.
Once the decryption was completed, the plain-text message was forwarded to the translation section, known as GI, where German naval language was turned into useful English. From the translators, the message went to OP20GI, whose job was to compile fragments of information into plain intelligence. Huge historical files had to be built up to enable the analysts to understand a translated message. The history of each U-boat and each of their captains, for example, helped pull meaning out of a translated message. From “GI,” the intelligence was disseminated to those responsible for military and diplomatic decisions.
If the message was from an Enigma system that had not been solved, it was sent to the Crib Group, whose members had perhaps the toughest job among the codebreakers: to sift through the many intercepts to find a message in which they could safely presume to know a significant portion of the underlying plain text. Those working in the Crib Group needed an intimate knowledge not only of German military and Enigma procedures but of the circumstances under which the message was sent. That meant constantly staying on top of the latest developments by reading as many past and current messages as possible. Even more so than translating, cribbing was an art, one dependent on intimate knowledge of many German systems and the habits of those transmitting the messages.
Many useful cribs for Shark and the other networks the Americans were attacking by the end of 1943 came from other, better-known systems already tackled by the British. That meant
that the Americans were at a disadvantage and dependent on GCCS for good cribs throughout much of the war. As well as having a long head start on Shark, GCCS was reading dozens of other German systems. The British knew the habits of U-boat captains and their Enigma operators, and they were reading higher-level systems, such as Dolphin, which carried messages repeated on Shark.
Following the spring 1942 accord between GCCS and OP20G, the British not only set the priorities for which messages were to be processed in America but frequently sent the “Amirs” (the codename for cribs) to be used on the Bombes and the long reencodements from other systems that could be used as a source of cribs by the Americans. Throughout the war, the Americans received a flow of Amirs from England, sending only a few of their own crib suggestions, codenamed “Rimas,” to GCCS.
It took quite some time for the Americans to become adept enough at cribbing and menu construction for their test solutions to match the power of those sent by GCCS. The British were years ahead in the indexing of points of reference—the meanings of thousands of abbreviations and military terms and the names of German commanders and their units. At times, minor conflicts arose over the Allied agreement to run jobs using British cribs and menus ahead of those found by OP20G’s Crib Group. The Americans occasionally felt that the British were sending weaker cribs (thus weaker menus) for the U.S. Bombes than GCCS was using on its own machines, thus giving England an advantage in breaking the system.
The next step performed in the Crib Group was to see whether the assumed crib would set up enough restrictions on the possible Enigma keys that it could be used as a menu. Once the menus were constructed, the Crib Group then determined which wheels and wheel orders were to be tested and in what sequence. *24
The menus and the wheel lists were sent to GYA-2, the Bombe Operations Group, where the machines and their crews of WAVES were assigned their tasks. Generally speaking, menus for more urgent messages or those more likely to lead to a solution of the day’s keys were assigned to more of the machines. Depending on the type of problem, it took the WAVES anywhere from a few minutes to more than a half hour to follow the menu orders and mount the proper wheels and starting positions on a Bombe. Once the machine was started, a full test of a Shark key typically required twenty minutes, exclusive of stops.
Veronica Hulick, one of the WAVES who operated the Bombes, told Smithsonian historians that when the machine arrived at a hit, lights flashed, a bell rang, “and a probable key setting would print out” at one end of the machine. “We’d take the sheet of paper down the hall and knock on a door. A hand would come out; we’d turn over the printout and go back and start all over again.”
The final step in the Bombe process, short of reading the message, was performed by the print testers. These WAVES used simple machines, such as the M-8 and M-9, to test the limited number of solutions suggested by the Bombe. From them they selected what seemed like the Jackpot. Once obtained, the keys were sent to the Decryption Group, which did further handwork to arrive at a full solution. The Traffic Group was then notified so it would forward any new messages in the same system to the correct department.
Such a complex system needed careful coordination to prevent errors. All of the groups worked under the supervision of a watch officer, who managed the flow of traffic and solutions.
Security at the Naval Communications Annex was just as tight as it had been at Building 26, again with armed guards stationed outside every room. The WAVES who operated the machines were never told the purpose of their work. Even WAVES officers were denied access to codebreaking aids and procedures, unless they were carefully screened. Only a handful of WAVES were assigned to work with confidential and secret materials and to supervise the assembly and operation of the Bombes. The Navy, always conscious of social class, chose women for the job “who, because of their background, reputation and family connections, are suitable for assignment to secret duties in Communication Intelligence,” said an April 1943 request from Vice Chief of Naval Operations William J. Lee.
Hulick said the WAVES had much to prove back then. “If you were good-looking, you were dumb. And if you were blond, you were even dumber. And, of course, no woman could keep a secret. That’s what we were up against.”
The WAVES not only proved that women could keep a secret, but that they could do it better than most men, said Peg Fiehtner, who was the assistant chief of staff for the Naval Security Group Command at the Communication Annex before retiring in 2000. Never in the history of American intelligence had so many people kept a secret for so long, she said. “It was one of the few secrets kept during the war. It was never compromised.”
But the American Bombe project narrowly escaped a very different history. In November 1943, seven months before D Day, one man working quietly in Building 26 almost betrayed the entire Ultra operation.
11
An Enemy Within?
November 1943—Dayton, Ohio
JAMES MARTIN MONTGOMERY, JR., worked the night shift in the laboratory in Building 26 where the top-secret Bombes were now being built at a rate of six per week. A tall, slim, bespectacled young man of Appalachian descent, Montgomery was perceived as something of an odd bird by his coworkers and supervisors—he was a self-educated, self-proclaimed electrical engineer who never said much to anyone and was perhaps a little on the cocky side. But he was hardworking, bright, and reliable, all traits that had earned him promotions from assembler to checker to lab technician in less than two months since his hiring in August, along with a near doubling of his salary from sixty to one hundred dollars a week. For a twenty-three-year-old man one generation removed from the hardscrabble hills of eastern Kentucky, that was good money in 1943. Odd bird or not, Montgomery was enough of a company man to register with NCR’s share-a-ride office, offering space in his 1937 Chrysler coupe to fellow workers who lacked transportation.
At the end of his shift on the morning of November 5, Montgomery and his rider found each other. Montgomery told the man he’d meet him out in the parking lot, after he paired up with his wife, Lillian, who worked the same shift as an assembler in another part of Building 26.
It was almost 6:00 A.M. on this damp, chilly morning as Montgomery’s coworker headed out to the parking lot behind Building 26. No records are available on what exactly happened next, but it’s easy to imagine that when the rider reached Montgomery’s car, he opened the passenger door and slipped inside to warm himself. Once settled, he pulled out a cigarette, poked it in his mouth, then instinctively reached for the matches in his shirt pocket. Empty. He tried his jacket pockets. No matches there, either.
Desperate for a smoke, the coworker must have pulled open the glove compartment to the car. As he rooted around in the loose papers there, he found no matches, but what he did find must have given him reason to pause—a small stack of three-by-five white index cards, filled with the typewritten names of foreign people and organizations, most of them obviously German and Japanese. Hermann Schwinn. Captain Fritz Wiedemann. Deutsches Haus. The German American Bund. The Japanese minister to Mexico. An officer in Japanese naval intelligence. There were nearly forty listings in all, on thirteen separate cards.
He rooted around some more and found a folded letter. When he opened it and started reading, he found more to stir his worst suspicions. It was on letterhead from the German embassy, addressed to James Montgomery. It read: “Referring to your letter of January 10, 1941, I beg to inform you that this embassy is not in a position to comply with your request.” At the bottom of the letter had been typed the names of eleven more foreign names and organizations.
Hastily, the coworker slipped everything back into the glove compartment, trying to arrange the items exactly as he had found them, and waited for Montgomery and his wife to arrive.
He probably said little to the couple as they drove him home that morning while his mind and emotions churned with questions. Should he call Navy security when he got home? The FBI? By the time his shift at NCR started again at 7:
00 P.M., he knew exactly what he had to do. He found his supervisor and asked if he could speak to him in private. The supervisor suggested they step into his office. There, the man spilled out what he had found.
In fulfilling his patriotic duty, the coworker had no idea of the top secret tug-of-war that would ensue that day and for months to come between Navy officials trying to protect Ultra and law-enforcement authorities trying to protect the constitutional rights of the accused.
The supervisor nodded and took it all in, but he may have wondered if the informant had overreacted to what he had seen. Why would anyone in his right mind keep a list of spy contacts in their glove compartment? Besides, managers at NCR had no reason to suspect Montgomery of anything. He was a valued employee—never late, did his work, kept his mouth shut.
Perhaps the supervisor thought the man was jealous of Montgomery’s series of promotions or suffering from overwork and an overactive imagination. For whatever reason, records show that the supervisor waited until 8:00 A.M.—two hours after the end of the shift that night—to call Ralph Meader.
Meader had a very different reaction to the coworker’s story. Here was a threat to everything the Bombe project had struggled to achieve, and just as OP20G was at last becoming an equal partner with the British in tackling the Shark problem. Meader immediately called the local representative of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the agency in charge of security at the plant. Meader must have inwardly winced as he did so. Since the 1930s, the ONI and the Navy’s codebreakers had been drifting apart and engaging in increasingly frequent and bitter turf battles. In fact, the ONI had been effectively shut out of Ultra, and only a few of its highest officers knew of the top secret codebreaking operation.
Meader raced his beat-up, Navy-issue Nash Rambler as fast as it could go to Building 26, where he got on the secure cable line to Washington and began typing an urgent message to Captain Earl F. Stone, assistant director of naval communications in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations.