Colorado Women in World War II by Gail M. Beaton

Author:Gail M. Beaton [Beaton, Gail M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Women, Military, World War II, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781646420339
Google: _4fxDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2020-08-24T01:00:45+00:00

Figure 9.1. Eugenia Simms (left) and Frances Hale were two of thousands of young African American women who were hired by federal agencies to process millions of pieces of paperwork and documents on the home front. Courtesy, Frances Hale Currin.

In 1944, Nancy Thompson was recruited by the United States Army Signal Corps to become a code breaker in Washington, DC.14 After graduating from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism, she initially wanted to join the Red Cross; however, her mother—with a husband stationed in Italy with the Judge Advocate General’s office (JAG), her first husband (Nancy’s father) serving as the psychiatrist on General Dwight Eisenhower’s staff in London, and a son in the Army Air Corps—asked her daughter to find war work in the states. After passing FBI clearance Thompson boarded a train for the nation’s capital. She initially lived at Arlington Farms, barracks hastily erected to house civilian workers. There were thirty rooms on each floor. Thompson’s small room was at the opposite end of the single bathroom on her floor. Every time someone walked down the hall, the whole building shook. After nine months, Thompson and three other female civilians found better accommodations—complete with a doorman who doubled as the elevator operator—at 1616 Sixteenth Street in downtown Washington, DC.15 Their place was a furnished one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment on the seventh floor of the building. The bedroom had two double beds; depending on their respective work shifts, one of them slept on the sofa. Thompson and other code breakers worked eight-hour shifts at Arlington Hall, a former girls’ school in Arlington, Virginia. She rode an unmarked bus to work. Although the entire campus was utilized for the war effort, her color-coded badge allowed her entry only to her building and the cafeteria for which she had a timed meal ticket. Given slips of paper on which numbers and letters were written, the code breakers, or cryptanalysts, deciphered Japanese code. When she got a “hit,” Thompson turned in her papers to the captain. Working on messages from Fukuoka and Kumamoto on Kyusu, Thompson did not know the messages’ meanings because the codes were in Japanese. She worked twelve days before receiving two days off.16

The top-secret nature of her work permeated her living situation. The roommates never mentioned what they did at work or even the building in which they worked. Decades after the war’s end, one of them visited her in Denver. Seeing a government document stating that Thompson was a cryptographer, her roommate asked what that was. She herself had worked in the library—and Thompson never knew there was a library there! One of their other roommates had worked in the main building as a receptionist, a fact Thompson did not know at the time.17

Like other women working in Washington, DC, Thompson and her friends enjoyed going to the theater, attending USO events, taking the train to New York, and enjoying each other’s company out on the town. A group of them were in the Willard Hotel Bar when they heard the news of President Roosevelt’s death.

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