Stories: Barbara Dannaher

Barbara Dannaher was one of tens of thousands of women who served as WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) during the Second World War. In hundreds of naval stations across the USA, WAVES occupied roles that allowed more men to serve at sea and in combat zones. Among this work, signals intelligence would prove some of the most crucial in the war.

Before the war, Barbara worked for United Aircraft in Connecticut. Her first date with her future husband, Tom, was on December 7th, 1941. By the summer of 1942, Tom was in the Marines and Barbara heard the first recruitment drive for the WAVES. Because her employer was a part of the war effort, Barbara had to request permission to leave for military service. That granted, she took the train to New York and enlisted in the Navy.

After many farewell parties – one of which involved a close brush with the horrific Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston – Barbara left for six weeks of training in Cedar Falls, Iowa. There, new WAVES learned the roles and responsibilities of the Navy, took classes and physical training, stood inspection, and prepared for service. After graduation and six days of leave, Barbara reported to Washington DC for her first assignment.

WAVES performing physical exercizes as part of their training in Cedar Falls.

Signals intelligence involves the interception and deciphering of enemy communications. From offices in Washington DC, densely encoded communications were deciphered by a series of specialized WAVES crews. Among all of these codebreakers, absolute secrecy was constantly emphasized. Unable to discuss their work, Barbara became adept at reading her fellow codebreakers to tell if their day’s work had been fruitful or frustrating.

The WAVES took turns at 8 hours shifts for an office that never closed. At every hour of day and night, codebreakers stubbornly attacked the mountains of code generated by the modern armies of Japan and Germany. Just as grueling as the schedule was the humidity of summer in Washington D.C. Uniforms designed by Main Bocher (himself a veteran of military intelligence in WWI) were popular and elegant, but made of wool. An all-white summer uniform eventually provided some relief from the heat, but ties remained a requirement year-round.

The discomforts of heat and hard work hardly dented the sheer excitement of the war effort. Barbara’s work focused on JN-25, a crucial Japanese naval code. This same code was used to the war’s conclusion, simply because Japan considered it indecipherable. In truth, Allied codebreakers – Alan Turing among them – developed a method that reliably cracked 10-20% of the code’s dense, apparently random numerical representation of words. “Cribs” – reliably recurring salutations included in the Japanese correspondence greatly aided this work. But in the end, sheer number crunching was the key:

Barbara worked at arithmetic day after day, month after month. She rarely saw anything beyond the numbers that were handed to her, and the completed calculations she handed down the line. Still, the intense secrecy surrounding codebreaking sometimes spiraled entirely out of control:

In her years of work, Barbara was never informed of the consequences of her labor. She wondered, as many did, what she was contributing to the war. Was she making things safer for Tom? Was she guiding bombers to Japanese targets? At the wars end, amidst the general jubilation and relief, she was finally permitted to read a wholly deciphered message, only to realize it was essentially meaningless:

The war’s conclusion brought great relief. Strangers offered Barbara their sincere gratitude and support. During a 2003 visit to France, she again found many grateful hosts after identifying herself as a veteran of WWII.

After the war, Barbara and Tom married. Together they raised six children. Among these children and grandchildren the family’s military traditions continues.

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