01 April 2007
The Bombe
NCR Building 26 Being Encased at Dayton, 1960s
The hairs are going up on the back of my neck. I am glad I don't know anything about what is going on in the world where I used to live. I sense there is something afoot, and I am pleased I have nothing to disclose, and no oath to violate on what it might be. But I feel it coming, real as life.
There are things that are too powerful to talk about; secrets that must be kept. That is a fundamental tenet of the intelligence officer's life, and many people take their secrets to the grave. I am obligated to do the same thing on certain matters, and I will honor my signed declarations.
I met one of the female Naval officers- a WAVE in the parlance of the time- who worked at Nebraska Avenue during the Second War. It was a nice dinner at Bobby Van's new Steakhouse on New York Avenue. The WAVE had a wry wit, and a remarkable memory for places and things, and naturally talk at the table turned to the fact that she had lived in Washington during the tempestuous war years.
She said vaguely that she worked up by Ward Circle. That sparked my interest. The Nebraska Avenue Complex is now the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security, and I worked there for a while. The current occupants are newcomers to the campus, and I have had a long association with the previous management.
The campus is southeast of Ward Circle, where Massachusetts and Nebraska Avenues join in a hair-raising round-about. In 1942, the 38-acre site appeared ideal to house the radio intelligence functions that were being conducted in inadequate circumstances on the roof of Main Navy on Constitution Avenue.
The Nebraska Avenue site had the high ground, perfect for antenna placement above the swampy capital.
The Navy has been accused of high-handed seizure of the property of the Mount Vernon Girls School to house an extremely sensitive mission. The popular story goes that surveying crews where the first ones to show up, two weeks after Pearl Harbor, followed by officers who told the faculty to take a hike.
David Brinkely, the late NBC New anchor, is one of those who cast aspersions on the Navy's method and motivation, saying in his book “Washington Goes to War” that ”The Navy liked it, and the Navy took it.”
Legally speaking, the whole thing was strictly on the up-and-up, just like the Army's acquisition of the school at Arlington Hall, kitty-corner from Big Pink. The Second World War Powers Act of 27 March 1942 allowed for a “declaration of taking” in a condemnation proceeding. But this was agreed to in advance by school trustees as a necessary step to protect land titles, and was supported by an opinion of the US Attorney General.
The land was not taken officially until the year after 1942, and the spooks of Navy staff code Op-20G did not move in until February of 1943 in preparation for receiving the Machines from Dayton.
That part of the sensitive mission that was conducted at the old girl's school has been long declassified. Knowing the rest, I putting two-and-two together, I asked if she had worked on the Bombe.
The woman looked startled for a moment, since she had not disclosed anything more than the general location of her long-ago duty station. After a brief acknowledgment, she artfully changed the subject to a discussion of what it was like to live in Washington during those frantic times. She said that they had told her, on demobilization, that if anyone talked about what they did, they would go to jail.
Sixty-one years later, she was not going to risk jail time, regardless of my bona fides.
You will note that the Bombe is not the same thing as The Bomb. Both were national projects of incalculable worth in defeating the Axis Powers. Both have their legacies here with us in the modern world, for good or ill.
Nebraska Avenue was the heart of Navy codebreaking, though valuable independent work was done at Pearl Harbor, further from the flag-pole and closer to the fighting. Nebraska Avenue was the center, though, where the Bombe's were located. The name came from one of the indomitable Poles who stole a copy of the German Enigma coding machines just before Europe descended into madness. He reverse engineered a device to crack the settings on the box, and called his primitive decoding technique the “Bombe.”
That is what the British codebreakers continued to call the mechanical calculating devices invented by Alan Turing at Bletchely Park near Cambridge. The Bombes automated the process by which the millions of possible daily settings on the German enciphering machines were checked. With the machines, sometimes the British were able to read the German messages faster than the German commands to which they were sent.
Britain had a sense of urgency at Bletchely Park, but it was by no means the only place for innovation. In those days, the great State of Ohio was one of the hotbeds of technical innovation. A man named Joseph Desch was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1907, just 4 years after the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, and around the time they came home to the brown dirt of Ohio to refine their historic invention. He lived as a child just about a mile from the Wright Cycle Shop where it all began.
Dayton in the day was teeming with inventors, some crackpots, and others practical geniuses. There were mechanical wonders all around, auto-mobiles and radios and calculating machines and the companies that dealt in the invention of ideas.
Desch was thirty-one years of age when he worked at the National Cash Register Corporation, conducting research on the ability of using vacuum tubes and electric circuitry in counting devices. The idea was to automate the high-speed mechanical computing machines and boost the speed of calculations.
It occurred to him that there might be applications in using a new thyratron (gas-filled tube) developed by English scientist Wynn Williams. It was capable producing a counting ring of five digits. He theorized that if he used an arrangement of vacuum "trigger tubes" and gas tube counters in groups of ten, he would have the way to accomplish decimal counting.
>From that began one of the roads to the electronic computer. He was not the only one doing this sort of work before the war, but his approach was one of the most effective.
The Navy ultimately picked up his NCR lab at Building 26 on the corporate campus in Dayton to develop and build an American version of the British "Bombe." Joe Desch was going to go one better on the design: he intended to design an electronic deciphering device that minimized mechanical parts and optimized the code-breaking process.
The prototype provided by the Brits was incomplete. Pressure on Desch was enormous, as U-Boats ravaged the convoys headed east across the Atlantic. Captain Ralph Meader was assigned by the Navy to build fences around Building 26, post the Marine Guards, manage mid-night shipments of operational Bombes and train the incoming women officers who would run the machines.
There were no motels in the area, and even the concept of the motor-hotel was a novelty. Visiting brass, including members of Parliament and Alan Turing himself, slept on the floor of the Desch living room.
The WAVE I talked to at dinner drew the line at Dayton. She would not talk about anything further than the fact that she had trained there, the vicissitudes of the real estate market in wartime Washington, and how hard it was for women officers to date enlisted guys, since the guys owned no civilian clothes.
Desch took his secrets to the grave, dying in 1987 just as the secrets were first being talked about. He could never explain the Medal of Freedom that President Truman gave him in 1947.
The Spooks have fled Nebraska Avenue and Arlington Hall for the more secure confines of Fort Meade, in Maryland. I still visit Nebraska Avenue once in a while, and you can see that it is all still there, if you know where to look. Arlington Hall was given to the State Department, and the stately main building still presides over the campus off Route 50, even if no one remembers what was done there.
All this ancient history came up again when it was revealed that the University of Dayton intends to tear down Building 26 to make way for a 50-acre expansion of the campus, which was acquired from NCR when the company could no longer afford to keep the land.
They say that since the remodeling of Building 26 in the 1960s there is not that much left that is original, and thus has no historic significance.
That is preposterous. I've looked at the structural drawings, and the 1938 structure is all there, just as it is at the top of the page, surrounded by glass-curtain offices that could easily be removed, of anyone cared.
I have always had a certain sense of wonder about the good people of Dayton. They allowed Henry Ford to purchase the Wright Brothers Cycle Shop, and move it, brick and stone, to the Greenfield Village complex in Dearborn, Michigan.
I was pleased to be able to see it regularly when I was growing up, and did not have to go to the trouble of going to Dayton at all.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com