Catherine Sanders Wright(1920-2017)

David, Florence and family would have experienced the flood that took place in the Connecticut River Valley in the spring of 1936.   Here are some pictures of that flood.

Catherine's World War II experiences

During my senior year in college The Navy approached Smith and I believe also many other colleges, but especially women’s colleges, requesting volunteers for a special secret program. Those who registered as interested were given a correspondence course to complete during the summer months. It was a course in cryptography. Another graduating senior who registered was Nancy Smith, from Easthampton. We studied the material together (there was no prohibition on that as far as we knew) and eventually went to Washington together as Civil Service employees. I think we were paid $160 a month. The Navy had arranged temporary housing for us in what I think had been a boarding school. We were given a bed in a large room with probably eight or ten other girls - a bed, a dresser, and closet space. There was a good dormitory type large bathroom, several showers, sinks, etc. and an adequate kitchen available to all of us. What we paid for it I don’t remember. It was meant to be temporary, and girls would get together to rent a house or apartment as a group to make the rent affordable. However, many of the girls came from wealthy homes and their families were subsidizing them. Nancy and I were on our own, but we eventually found an apartment wa could afford together, but it was only one-bedroom. It was on Irving Street, in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood.

As Civil Service, we were doing pretty routine office work - filing intercepted messages as they came in after they had first been checked by analysts, retrieving them if there was a sudden demand from the analysts for the traffic from a particular day or time, keeping records, stuff like that.  In October Nancy was ordered to Officer Candidate School at Smith. In December I was. There was one at Mt. Holyoke, too, and several other places also. It was a cold winter, with a lot of snow. We were housed in the dorms, and ate our meals at Hotel Northampton, a half mile or so from the campus. We marched down there in formation on often slippery streets. We were taught the military alphabet and military terminology, Naval etiquette, other stricter rules of Naval behavior, military airplane and ship identification, and probably something else more or less useful. Then we were commissioned and sent back to Washington.

From the first time we set foot in the Navy building (and even before, actually) we were regularly warned that we must not discuss what we were doing with anyone at any time. We would be hanged, drawn, and quartered if we did, or something equally fearsome.

Nancy got back before I did, of course, and before I got back the office we had been working in had moved from the old Navy Department buildings near the Mall to the campus of what had been the Mt. Vernon School for Girls - a very prestigious private school - on Nebraska Avenue out near the Maryland line. I don’t know where the school went, or if they ever got their campus back. All our transportation in Washington was by streetcar or bus. The new location was quite a bit farther for us to go, but the streetcar line was just a half block away, there was just one transfer to a bus, and both ran very frequently.

The establishment was now officially titled the Naval Communications Annex. Anybody in Washington who cares can always find out where you work and get a pretty good idea of what goes on there in a general way, and I feel sure that most people realized that “Communications” was a euphemism for “Intelligence.” Nancy was assigned the Japanese section.  When I got back, I was sent to the section working on German U-Boat codes.

The Germans had developed a coding machine called the Enigma. It had rotating wheels which scrambled the text - an “a” might come out as a “G” or an “I” when it was typed into the machine. I believe the machine in our office - supposedly the one used throughout the submarine fleet - has three rotating wheels and one stationary one. There was a code book of course on every boat, which had the instructions for each day - which of the rotating wheels to use (there were extras) and the letter setting to start the message. If we had that information, we could read the German radio traffic to its U-Boats and between the boats on the machine we had. I have seen the German coding system called “Ultra” also, but I’m not really sure what that means. I think “Enigma” was the name for the machine.

The Germans had other versions of the machine for other operations, but we were only concerned with the U-Boats. The Polish had started working on the Enigma codes before the war actually began and had recovered some wheel wirings. The French had actually captured a machine - or so I was told.  All that was before I came to the office.  Our job was to try to break the daily codes as fast as possible in order to keep track of the prowling U-Boats and sink them if we could. That is, we were to find the daily settings.

The British had been working on the problem for some years before we got involved in the war. One of their brightest cryptanalysts, Alan Turing, had invented a machine that could run the messages through thousands of possible settings until German plain text appeared.  Of course it was more complicated than that, but that was the basic idea. With a lot of machines working at once, many more settings could be tested faster and the U-Boats could be monitored and attacked before they had done their damage. British resources were very limited by then. They had a large intelligence establishment at a place called Bletchley Park, which was where Turing worked and had his machines, but a large building had been constructed on the grounds of the Communication Annex and it was full of those machines. They were manned by enlisted women, and programmed in one of the offices in our cluster of three ground floor offices.  The programmers were across the hall from mine.  “Programming” meant that an analyst picked a message that looked like some of the plain text might be easy to guess - weather messages, for instance, were popular - and a diagram of preparing the machine to run that message against the possible plain text was prepared. The girls running the machine looked for plain German text to appear.  That is an extreme simplification.  There is a section in a book called “Codebreakers:, about Bletchley Park, that has a much more detailed explanation, in the “HUT 8” section. By the way the men who worked on the machines to keep them in good working order - they worked hard and ling - were from Rochester, NY, not Dayton, OH. They were from whatever IBM called itself then.

There was a forth office upstairs, which I entered only once as far as I can remember. In that office, there was lots of gold braid on the sleeves of distinguished looking older men, and, big maps with lots of stick pins all over the walls. These I assumed were the strategists who used information the analysts got from the messages we were reading to hunt down the U-Boats.

When a possible break appeared in any text, it was sent immediately to the office where I was assigned. We sent it on to another office with a group of more highly trained analysts for further investigation. Both the programmers and the analysts were mostly people with a very strong mathematics background. While the analysts checked it, we cleared the decks for action in the small office I was in.  If the break was valid, those of us on duty there, enlisted and officer both, would start typing out the coded messages as fast as we could. There was only the one machine and we typed fast and took turns. However, sometimes that didn’t last too long because one or two of the machines in the other building would be set up to run the traffic.  That is, they would if the break had come early enough in the day. If the next day’s traffic was already coming in, working on that might take priority on the bombes (that was what the English had named the hard-working code-breaking machines) and the two of us in my small office stayed very busy.

The small office I was in also handled incoming and outgoing teletype traffic of our own, and various types of routine work. There was usually one officer and one enlisted woman in there at once.  We worked shifts - two days 8-4, two 4-12, two 12-8, two days off.  It is a very difficult schedule to work, but it is regular Navy work schedule if round the clock work is required.  Nancy and I were seldom on a synchronized schedule., so sometimes we didn’t see much of each other. We knew quite a few of the girls who had come to Washington when we did, but it wasn’t easy to arrange much social activity together. It could get somewhat lonely at time.

I do remember very well the time that several of us - I think it was four - had managed to have lunch in downtown Washington together and were on our way to a movie when we were confronted by a large black headline - letters five inches high - WASP SUNK - Since one of the girls in the group had a fiancé on the Wasp, it was a rude shock. He did make it home alright.

The odd hours also had an effect on my acquaintance with my future husband.  He was in Washington for a refresher course in Bomb Disposal and Weapons Intelligence which was held at the American University Campus, which was about a quarter of a mile further down Wisconsin Avenue  from the Annex. There were other naval schools there too, with a good many Navy men  there most of the time. I don’t remember how I happened to meet him originally, but the men from the different schools there were usually there on a temporary assignment; someone knew a girl who was stationed in the Washington area, she knew one of the girls at our place or was one of us, when that man left he introduced girls he had met to someone just arriving, - or just gave the new man some names.  We were perhaps too trusting, but the rules got bent in wartime.

Reminds me of another story. There was a girl Nancy and I know from somewhere - perhaps the original temporary housing. She wasn’t from Smith - St. Lawrence University in New York, I think, - but she had moved into a house with other girls, at least one of whom was from Smith. She had become very much involved with a man she had met, probably the way I discussed above.  He found himself in New York City for embarkation; there was some kind of glitch and the men in his group were told they would have a couple of days in New York while it was sorted out. He called, begging her to come to New York for a last goodbye. She had no money. None of her friends had enough money to let her have any. I had some traveler’s checks Dad had given me when I left home, for emergencies, and I said I would lend her enough money for her train ticket if we could get the check cashed. It was Saturday evening; we went downtown to the Willard Hotel and somehow conned the night manager to cash it for us.  The end of that story is that a couple of weeks later, during a house cleaning session, one of the girls found a letter shoved well down behind the sofa cushions addressed to this man, from his wife. The question - did he leave it there on purpose to be found later?

Anyway, Bill called me, we had a couple fo dates, we got on well and I liked him.  But then I heard nothing from him for a couple of weeks at least - probably longer. Then on very pretty day in the early fall I was walking down Wisconsin Avenue and I saw him driving back toward Wisconsin Avenue to the University.  Shortly after I got home, he called.  He said he tried to call several times, but never got an answer.(?). Which was possible, with the shifts we were working. From then on, we saw each other pretty regularly. He was assigned to new construction, the Oklahoma City, after the refresher course. He was sent to Newport to work with training the new crew for the ship, and when she was almost ready he came back to Philadelphia where she was being built. I went to her Commissioning.  We decided to get married before the ship left.  We were married, as you remember, on March 24, and the ship left for the Pacific Theater early in April 1945.

The U-505 happened early in 1945. Early in 1944 we were breaking the daily codes pretty regularly.  Sometime in the fall we got hold of a U-Boat daily code book, and then of course we were reading it regularly as it came in, and the Germans realized we were reading it.  I don’t know how we got that code book - theft was always a very viable option in that business, and the U-Boat base was at Bordeaux on the Bay of Biscay.  The French underground was very active. Anyway, the Germans decided to issue new code books - or try to. Just keeping the U-Boats decently supplied was getting harder and harder. They got the books to some boats, and not others, and or analysts soon figured out who had it and who didn’t. The strategists hatched a plot to ambush a boat and get the new book - that is, force the sub to the surface, not sink it, and board it. Not easy, because U-Boat orders were to scuttle the boat, not surface, in that kind of desperate situation. And all hands go down with her.

Our analysts were very well-acquainted with the U-Boat captains by now - their wives’ names, how many children, what they liked for breakfast, general temperament, etc. The choose one they didn’t think would scuttle immediately, but would give his crew time to get off. They sent Admiral Gallery’s Task force after her, it worked, and we had the code book.  The other story I mentioned to you was the man who was sent to pick up all our newly-acquired properties. He was a relatively young Reserve Lieutenant in his late twenties maybe, probably a teacher of Math at a high school or small university somewhere. He was given a sidearm to wear on his journey - a huge gun to keep with him at all times. He looked like he had never so much as handled any gun in his life, and he was more than a little afraid of it. Well, he had a couple of fine strong enlisted men to take care of him.  They brought the code books back safely.  I believe that nobody died (I’d have to check that for sure) and the captain did not go down with his boat.

The U-Boats had lost the fight before that happened.  Getting supplied, or getting orders from headquarters, was becoming impossible.  The couldn’t get back to port safely.  And of course the European phase of the war ended May 15. We had nothing left to do. We worked on some other Enigma codes, broke one diplomatic one that had never been broken. Then they started re-assigning us to other divisions, were we did essentially nothing. At least I don’t remember anything in particular about that time. In the fall I was placed on indefinite leave while the powers that be decided how many of us they might like to keep.  If we wanted to stay we were supposed to say so at the time.  I didn’t. I was ordered back to Washington in January. There I was given an honorable discharge and transferred to Naval Reserve.