WW2 tecnology updated

[twobisquit]

http://enigmaco.de/enigma/enigma.swf

A flash version of the Enigma machine. Now you can send secret messages with this high power decoder ring!

Chris

[Walt's Daughter]

Oh fun, fun. I just sent you a SECRET message!!!

[Walt's Daughter]

I am going to move this topic to the WWII section, so we don't lose it. Since I am adding more to it, it should be given a place of "honor"! Fascinating!

[Walt's Daughter]

I love this stuff, so added another link too. This one does the same thing, but with a different approach. Basically I added it here for the extra links on their page explaining more about the enigma machine.

 

http://russells.freeshell.org/enigma/

 

I think I shall copy the actual story behind Joe Desch, right here. It's too good to miss and I want everyone who is interested, to read it.

[Walt's Daughter]

PART ONE OF EIGHT

 

 

Enigma

 

How Joe Desch, based in Dayton, beat the Nazi code and helped win the war

 

By Jim DeBrosse

Dayton Daily News

 

Debbie Anderson knew in the summer of 1986 that time was running out for her 79-year-old father. After a series of small strokes and then a broken hip, Joe Desch, a man of iron independence, was forced to recuperate in a Kettering nursing home. There he took with him the painful secret he had kept coiled inside for most of his life.

 

"He seemed still to be fighting battles that should have been settled years ago," Anderson said. "There were little things that would set him off on tirades."

 

Anderson knew only that her father's pain and anger were tied to the World War II codebreaking research he had done at Dayton's National Cash Register Co. — the work that had driven him to a nervous breakdown, but which he had never been able to talk about, not even to explain the Congressional Medal for Merit he had received for his war service.

 

But then, one morning that summer, Anderson thought she had found a way to help her father unburden his heart. There was an article in the paper about the late Capt. Joseph Rochefort, who was receiving a posthumous medal from President Ronald Reagan for cracking a World War II Japanese code and providing the key to one of the U.S. Navy's greatest victories at the Battle of Midway.

 

"I went out in the morning," Anderson said, "when he was brightest, and cheerfully handed him the clipping and asked, 'Dad, did you know this guy? See, they're giving him a medal like yours — but posthumously.' "

 

Desch burst into a stream of invectives "that could have been heard all over the state," she said. "He immediately tensed up and yelled, 'They've probably found out I'm in here and have this place bugged — afraid I'll spill the beans. Don't you ever dare bring that up again!' "

 

Anderson didn't. A year later, her father would be dead from a massive stroke.

 

 

FALL 1989

It was through her 10-year-old son that Debbie Desch Anderson first began to unlock her father's mystery.

 

Jesse, her younger boy and a fourth-grader at Holy Angels, had to write a family history for school. Jesse wanted to profile his grandfather, Joseph R. Desch, an electrical engineer and executive at NCR, who had died two years before. The boy was fascinated by his grandfather's personal things — scads of old photographs, papers and memorabilia boxed up in the basement of her Kettering home.

 

Anderson and her son started digging through her father's items. She happened upon two thick transcripts she had seen before but had never bothered to read. They were Desch's interviews with Henry Tropp, a historian from the Smithsonian Institution, dated Jan. 17 and 18, 1973.

 

This time Anderson began skimming the 300-plus pages of questions and answers in earnest, finding mostly technical stuff about Desch's role in the development of the modern computer. But beginning on page 111 of the first-day's interview, and continuing to page 119, the text had been slashed through with a felt-tipped pen. In the margin was written: "Delete from tape and manuscript."

 

The redacted words spoke of "an electronic cryptanalytic machine," of classified code names, British scientists and of top-secret equipment dumped and buried in the middle of the night.

 

Anderson devoured the words, hardly believing her eyes. Here at last was a glimmer of her father's top-secret work during WWII.

 

"He always said it had to do with codebreaking, and he wouldn't say anything more," she said.

 

As a teen-ager and young adult, Anderson never pressed him on it, either. She knew her father had gone on to head the military research division at NCR during the 1960s, and that's all she cared to know. "I was a true child of the '60s. I was embarrassed that my father was part of the military-industrial complex," she said.

 

Desch had burned the most crucial NCR war documents — but somehow had left the transcripts, and those eight pages intended to be stricken from history, at his home in Kettering. Now here they were, in Anderson's hands, like a thin ray of light pointing the way to treasure deep inside a cave.

 

For the next decade, Anderson would try to illuminate her father's mystery, often finding herself at odds with national intelligence officials and skeptical historians. But in doing so, she would discover the historic role that her father — as well as NCR and Dayton — played in shortening the world's most horrible war.

 

In 1942 and 1943, Desch had headed a top-secret program at NCR to develop a high-speed deciphering machine, called a Bombe, to crack the Nazi submarine code. The project was second in priority only to the Manhattan Project that built the Atom Bomb, and perhaps second only to the bomb in hastening the war to an end.

 

Joseph R. Desch died on Aug. 3, 1987, at age 80, with his story untold — until now.

 

With the help of Anderson and Colin Burke — a University of Maryland history professor who first unearthed the details of the NCR project — as well as newly released information from the NCR archives and dozens of interviews with the men and women who built the NCR machines, the Dayton Daily News will recreate those crucial months in Dayton leading up to the production of the NCR Bombe.

 

JUNE 5, 1943

It was a sunny morning with just a hint of sea haze on the horizon as Lt. "Goose" McAuslun and Lt. Richard S. Rogers flew their Navy warplanes over the vast, empty reaches of the mid-Atlantic, patrolling the vicinity of 35 degrees North, 45 degrees West, midway between Jacksonville, Fla., and Morocco.

 

McAuslun's Avenger dive bomber was armed with four depth bombs. Rogers' Wildcat fighter bristled with high-caliber machine guns. But in the blind-man's game of hunting enemy submarines, the pilots had something else just as important as their weapons — reliable intelligence information locating a line of 17 German U-boats in the area, lying in ambush for a westbound Allied convoy.

 

The pilots' mission: Find and kill the subs. The pair was on the last leg of a five-hour patrol, 70 miles from their escort carrier U.S.S. Bogue, when McAuslun spotted U-217 cruising placidly on the surface about seven miles to their right.

 

McAuslun signalled Rogers, who banked his Wildcat and dove, strafing the sub's deck. "He just tore off and left me in his smoke," McAuslun, now 81, recalled from his Henderson, N.C., home.

 

McAuslun followed in his tubby Avenger and released his four depth bombs at 75 feet, just as the sub began to dive.

 

But the crew of U-217 was too late. The four bombs exploded on either side of the sub's hull, lifting it out of the water and splitting the hull. The sub sank in just 33 seconds, with Rogers blasting at it one last time to send it on its way.

 

It was the first time the U.S. Navy had sunk a Nazi submarine in a purely offensive action. The day before, using the same intelligence, pilots from the Bogue had damaged and scattered three other U-boats. Naval historians say those two days marked a turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic.

 

The Navy pilots had no idea that the information guiding their mission had originated from Building 26 at NCR in Dayton, where an intercepted German message had been cracked just days before. Naval intelligence had relied on a high-speed decrypting machine called a “Bombe†— designed and manufactured in a top-secret program at NCR. So secret, in fact, that NCR's key role in the Allied intelligence effort known as Ultra would not come to light until half a century later, when a 1992 directive by then-President Bill Clinton released many classified documents.

 

Since the early 1970s, much attention has been given to the early Polish and British successes in cracking the Enigma code. The Poles called their first decoding machine a "Bomba," perhaps after the brand of ice cream cones favored by the codebreakers. Operating from the famed codebreaking school at Bletchley Park outside of London, the Brits refined and further mechanized the device, based on the theoretical work of mathematician Alan Turing. They dubbed their device a "bombe."

 

But by the spring of 1942, the German navy was again operating in total secrecy and with a vengeance, thanks to an upgrading of their Enigma machines. With the British Ultra effort stumped and the Germans dispatching ever more submarines to the Atlantic, the Allies feared they would lose ships to the wolfpacks faster than they could be replaced.

 

North Atlantic sinkings more than quadrupled in the last half of 1942 compared to the last half of 1941 — from 600,000 tons to 2.6 million tons. "And each of the nearly 500 ships sunk in those six months," wrote military historian David Kahn in Seizing the Enigma, "meant more freezing deaths in the middle of the ocean, more widows, more fatherless children, less food for some toddler, less ammunition for some soldier, less fuel for some plane — and the prospect of prolonging those miseries."

 

The Enigma was like a typewriter that encoded messages by scrambling each keystroke through a series of rotors. It could generate billions upon billions of possible letter combinations.

 

But unbeknownst to the Germans, the Poles and the Brits had been able to crack the three-rotor Enigma machine, relying in part on captured German documents. But when the German Navy added a fourth rotor on Feb. 1, 1942, the number of possible combinations for producing any one letter overwhelmed their decrypting abilities.

 

Under increasing pressure from the U.S. Navy, which had been kept in the dark while soaring numbers of its ships and sailors were lost to the wolfpacks, the British finally relinquished their control over Ultra and told the Americans to give it a go.

 

What was needed, and in a hurry, was a high-speed decoding machine that could run through all the possible Enigma combinations at heretofore unheard-of speeds — a machine that the British had been working on since late 1941 without success.

 

Navy theoreticians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology envisioned an all-electronic machine many times faster than the British bombe. But only two companies in the United States had the technical capability at that time to produce such a marvel — IBM and Dayton's NCR. The obvious choice for the Navy was NCR, where chairman of the board Col. Edward A. Deeds had a long working relationship with MIT as well as the Navy's top brass. It also had idle capacity — NCR, unlike IBM, had been ordered by the War Production Board to stop making its major product, cash registers, for the duration of the war.

 

In the end, the weight of the Navy’s demands, and the nation's, would fall most heavily on one man’s shoulders — those of Joe Desch. A modest but brilliant engineer, at age 35 he headed NCR's electrical research laboratory. Desch had already contributed to the war effort, unknowingly at the time, by inventing an electronic counter capable of operating at 1 million counts per second — at least 100 times faster than anything achieved before — for use in developing the first atomic bomb.

 

Unlike the Navy's theoretical engineers, who were mostly graduate students and professors at MIT, Desch was a floor-trained industrial genius, as savvy about front-office politics as he was knowledgeable about state-of-the-art electronics.

 

The MIT engineers "had a very different orientation than a practical engineer like Joe, but he was able to handle them all and get the job done. He was adored by these guys," said Colin Burke, former historian-in-residence at the National Security Agency and author of Information and Secrecy, the first book to detail NCR's attack on the Enigma Code.

 

In fact, when Desch took his wife, Dorothy, to Boston to meet the Navy personnel at MIT, she was completely thrown when people at the welcoming cocktail party started greeting her husband as "Dr. Desch."

 

"Dad said that people who mattered knew better, but that it was incomprehensible to the graduate students there that a man of his importance wouldn't be a Ph.D.," Debbie Anderson said.

 

Born in 1907, four years after the Wright brothers' first flight, to a German immigrant mother and a long line of Dayton area wagonmakers, Desch capitalized on his keen intelligence, and his fascination from an early age with the budding technology of radio, to rise above his humble beginnings in Dayton’s Edgemont neighborhood. He worked his way through the University of Dayton and graduated with honors in electrical engineering.

 

Prior to the war, Desch had built a national reputation for his work in designing miniature, fast-firing gas tubes — the "microchips" of the 1940s and the basis for electronic calculators at the time. The Navy was betting that if anyone could build a new generation of super-fast deciphering machines, it was Joe Desch.

 

The Bombe project would not only prove to be the biggest technical challenge of Desch’s career, but an overwhelming emotional drain. For the next two years, it would mean working 14-hour days under mounting pressure from Navy officials. It would mean severing relations with his German immigrant relatives. It would mean being placed under 24-hour surveillance, with his supervising officer quartered in his own home.

 

For the duration of the war, his life would be pinned under a microscope. And before it was over, he would suffer a nervous breakdown.

 

"They kept the pressure on, kept the pressure on and poor Joe took it very seriously," said Bob Mumma, the NCR business manager who reported directly to Desch and took over for him after his breakdown. "It destroyed Joe's health."

 

Mumma, now 95 and a resident of the Otterbein Home in Lebanon, scoffed at the suggestion that he and others involved in the Bombe project were heroes who shaved months from the conflict and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

 

"We were just trying to win the war," Mumma said.

 

SPRING 1942

For weeks that spring, Desch pored over blueprints for what promised to be a remarkable new code-breaking machine developed by Navy theoreticians. Even though he was overseeing 13 other military projects at NCR, this would be his ultimate challenge — a totally electronic deciphering machine 100 times faster than anything in use.

 

The Navy Bombe would rely on tens of thousands of the miniature, fast-pulsing tubes Desch himself had invented — pushed to the limit of their capabilities. After all, the foe they were attacking seemed almost invincible.

 

When the German military purchased all rights to the Enigma Cipher Machine first conceived by Dutchman Hugo Koch in 1919, and added several of their own innovations, they had every reason to think their coding system was impenetrable — even if the machine were captured.

 

In essence, the Enigma was an electrical typewriter that scrambled each keystroke through a series of alphabetized rotors, so that the text seemed generated at random. When a key was depressed, it tumbled the first rotor and, after a complete revolution, a second and a third rotor — just like the odometer on a car. But on the Enigma, each rotor scrambled the alphabet in a different way.

 

The operator could set each rotor at a different starting position as well, changing the line-up of the rotors. A notched ring on one rotor controlled the rotational behavior of the rotor to its left. As an extra security measure, the machine contained a plugboard that transposed individual letters (a for e, for instance, or h for m) to further confuse anyone trying to crack the code.

 

To unscramble the text, the receiving Enigma operator would be sent the original rotor positions, in code, as part of the message. He would also have a chart instructing him in that day's plugboard settings. Only an officer could change the line-up of the rotors inside the machine, based on frequent orders from command headquarters.

 

With all those variables in use, the possible number of Enigma encipherings for each character was staggering — 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 — or 10 to the 23rd power. And when the Germans introduced a four-rotor machine in early 1942, the possible combinations grew to 10 to the 26th power. (By comparison, the number of all atoms in the observable universe is 3 to the 80th power.)

 

Indeed, the Enigma might have been impregnable, except that even the Germans did not always follow proper communications security. Lapses and laziness, such as not resetting the wheel positions between dispatches and using predictable greetings and sign-offs, would create "cribs" (strings of known or suspected plain text) that would give Allied codebreakers the wedge they needed to decipher intercepts.

 

Nor did the Germans know that the British had secretly captured Enigma code charts and the machines themselves by raiding unwary German weather ships and boarding abandoned U-boats that couldn't be scuttled by their crews in time.

 

The NCR Bombe would basically work like an Enigma machine in reverse. By feeding it a "crib" of known or suspected plain text from an intercepted message, the Bombe would crunch through all the billions upon billions of possible rotor combinations on the Enigma machine until it arrived at the rotor sequence that had enciphered the text. Once the positions of the four rotors were known for any part of the cipher, the remainder of the scrambled text could be easily broken by running it in reverse through a captured Enigma machine.

 

But the more Desch went over the Navy plans, the more his practical side bumped up against a major stumbling block — an all-electronic machine would require far too many gas tubes (70,000 in all) and generate too much heat to operate reliably.

 

But what would Desch tell the Navy intelligence officers who had put so much faith in his engineering skills?

 

Monday: A complex man with an impossible job.

 

 

• Contact Jim DeBrosse at 225-2437 or by e-mail at jim_debrosse@coxohio.com.

[Walt's Daughter]

A complex man chosen for a complex and urgent mission

 

Joe Desch had to look back to see ahead

 

The story so far: NCR engineer Joe Desch has been given the seemingly impossible task of creating a high-speed machine that will quickly read the Nazis' Enigma code. He has begun to see the problems ahead, as the war grinds on.

 

 

By By Jim DeBrosse

Dayton Daily News

 

While Joe Desch agonized over a practical machine that could break Enigma, the secret Nazi submarine code, the German naval high command knew exactly what it had to do to win the war: sever the lifeline between the industrial powerhouse of America and the plucky resistance of the British — the last hurdle in the total domination of Europe.

 

The German wolfpacks were wreaking havoc in the North Atlantic, the number of kills rising every month as British intelligence and U.S. Navy escorts floundered without clues. A workable Bombe, as the codebreaking machine was called, was needed in a matter of months, not years.

 

"We were losing ships like mad. That's how this whole (project) got started," said Bob Mumma, an NCR manager who worked with Desch. "Of course, Joe had been in ROTC and had been assigned to a unit. . . . He felt guilty, I think, because he wasn't active. That's what bothered him."

 

Prior to heading the Bombe project, Desch had been commissioned as an officer in an Army ordnance unit. But when the Navy learned it might lose his technical expertise to the front, it pulled his orders, Anderson said. It was a guilty favor he would remember for the rest of the war.

 

Like the machine he was charged with building, Desch was a complex man: a deeply religious Roman Catholic with a strong sense of ethics, and yet someone who could unleash an inventive stream of curse words in the privacy of his office. He smoked Chesterfields, two packs a day, and when the work day was over, he liked his Scotch and water neat.

 

He had a surprisingly sentimental side, too. Letters to his wife, Dorothy, were always addressed to "Sweetie-pie" and ended with strings of X's for kisses and the signature "Icky Boo." On a business trip to New York in 1938, three years after their marriage, he sent her two letters on the same day, one wondering if she had seen the moon as he had seen it when his train had pulled out of the station early that morning.

 

Those who worked closest with Desch describe him as a technical genius who also was blessed with management skills. He was self-possessed and self-confident, without being cocky. "We were a good team. I took care of the details, he took care of the front office. He knew how to talk to those people," Mumma recalled. "And we both knew a hell of a lot about electronics."

 

Desch loved to garden, loved to dance, especially waltzes. He was an excellent ballroom dancer, Kettering's Debbie Anderson said of her father. "Mom said more than once they cleared the floor" at the Biltmore Hotel, a popular Dayton nightspot at the time.

 

Desch's background was a far cry from the Ivy League types at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had come to trust in his industrial know-how. He had lived the idyllic childhood of an early 20th century Huck Finn, canoeing and camping along the banks of the Great Miami River, shooting craps in the back alleys of Edgemont, hawking newspapers in the morning and ushering at nights at the Victory Theatre for his spending money. He was an altar boy and straight-A student at Emmanuel Elementary School, but enough of a troublemaker to have punched one of his Marianist instructors, and knocked him down, in a dispute over a math solution.

 

"He was a bit irreverent when he had to be," his daughter said. "But he got a scholarship to (the University of Dayton) prep school, so I guess the Marianists weren't too mad at him."

 

Unlike many of his young friends, Desch took no interest in hunting. He couldn't bring himself to kill, not even the rabbits his father had asked him to raise, Anderson said. "He loved taking care of the rabbits and building the hutch and all, but then when it came time to do what he had to do with them, he couldn't do it," she said. "I don't know if he sold them or not, but he gave them to a friend instead."

 

Much of Desch's technical knowledge was hands-on and self-taught, beginning in childhood. His father, grandfather and uncles were all master wagon-makers who knew how to work both with wood and metal and could fashion just about any tool for themselves.

 

"Dad learned how to tinker at a very early age," Anderson said. "He saw his first operating radio downtown when he was 11, and he was fascinated with it. He couldn't afford a new one, so he built his own. That's what determined the rest of his working life."

 

As a teen-ager, he started making his own vacuum tubes in the basement of his parent's house on Kirkham Street — launching his lifelong devotion to the field.

 

After graduating with honors from UD in 1929, he went straight to GM's radio division, where he supervised the testing of radios. Nine years later, he was hand-picked to run NCR's new electronic research department. His assignment: design the first electronic adding machine.

 

Desch's focus was designing smaller, faster and more reliable gas tubes for computation. As America's entry into the war neared, his successes would lead to military contracts for a variety of useful weapons. By the time the Navy approached Desch with its Bombe plans in the spring of 1942, the Army already had entrusted him with a project to design a "proximity fuse" — a radar-controlled shell that would automatically explode as it neared airborne targets. And as part of the Manhattan Project, he was designing a high-speed electronic counter needed for developing the atom bomb.

 

But all that work would be swept aside for the Navy's highest priority — breaking the Enigma Code.

 

In a tersely stated letter to the National Defense Research Committee on Aug. 17, 1942, Desch wrote: "We have other work of higher priority rating on which we can usefully place our engineers, but once they are started on such other work, they cannot be withdrawn . . . for some time to come."

 

By mid-summer, two of the Navy's bright young theoreticians were in England learning all about the British bombe and sending reports back to the States. Desch received at least some of that information, enough to persuade him that he needed to take a direction different from both the British and the U.S. Navy if he were to turn out a machine in time.

 

After weeks of agonizing, Desch decided on a major technological leap — backwards. He proposed an electromechanical device that wouldn't be pretty, wouldn't be elegant, but would accomplish the job through sheer brute force.

 

"We never had any doubt about it. We knew what (the machine) had to do," Mumma said. "It was just a matter of time, but time was of the essence."

 

Tuesday: Surrendering his privacy for the war.

[Walt's Daughter]

PART THREE OF EIGHT

 

 

Enigma

 

Intense scrutiny, feelings of guilt were heavy burdens for Desch

 

 

The story so far: As World War II grinds on, the Allies are trying to break the Nazi's famously difficult Enigma code, which uses a special rotor-driven machine to create billions of possible letter combinations. The British capture a machine and crack the code, but the Germans modify it and regain the upper hand. In 1942, the U.S. Navy turns to Dayton's National Cash Register Co. to create an electronic machine that can quickly read Enigma. While Allied shipping is being sunk by U-boats and lives are being lost, the effort to make a "Bombe," as the code-reading machine was called, fall on the shoulders of a single Dayton engineer at NCR: Joe Desch, whose efforts have remained so secret since then that even his daughter, Debbie Anderson of Kettering, only learned a few years ago how her father helped win the war. But the effort was long and hard, and took a terrible personal toll on Desch, a sensitive, self-taught man.

 

By Jim DeBrosse

Dayton Daily News

 

SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER, 1942

 

In mid-September, Joe Desch went back to the Navy brass with a revised plan for a decoding machine that could approach the performance, if not the elegance, of the Navy's all-electronic design. Desch's Bombe — part electronic but mostly mechanical — would crack the German Enigma code through sheer size and speed. And more importantly, as the war raged on, his Bombe could be produced in a matter of months rather than years.

 

Trusting in Desch and the solid reputation of NCR, the Navy promised everything and anything he needed to get the job done as quickly as possible — millions of dollars in funding, hundreds of trained personnel and a top-secret priority second only to the Manhattan Project and the development of the A-Bomb.

 

"It was so important that requests to the White House were processed within a day and cost overruns of incredible size were accepted without question," historian Colin Burke wrote in Information and Secrecy. "The jump from an estimate of $2 million to one of $4 million in a few months did not threaten the program."

 

But part of the bargain was that Desch's own life would come under intense scrutiny. He spent three days in Washington, D.C., under relentless interrogation before getting his security clearance. His inquisitors hurled insults and accusations, trying to break him down. It became so abusive that Desch told the Navy he didn't want the job — at which point they told him he was cleared and should return to Dayton to begin his assignment.

 

"He told me once he had had it up to here with their bull," said Debbie Anderson, his daughter, who lives in Kettering today. "But he must have calmed down, because he got the job."

 

The Navy was particularly concerned about Desch's German relatives. His mother, Augusta Stoermer, had emigrated from Germany at age 13. She had worked her way from Liverpool, England, to an uncle's home in Pittsburgh, where she made cigars, and finally to Dayton, where she met Edward Frank Desch and married him in 1906. The elder Desch died in 1937.

 

Homesick even in her later years, Desch's mother had kept in touch with relatives in Europe and had even gone back twice to Germany before the war. But even worse, Desch's half-cousin, Augusta "Gusty" Zimmerman, had a father still in Germany who was active in the Nazi Party, and a husband in Dayton who had tuned into Hitler's broadcasts before the war.

 

Desch was allowed limited visits with his mother and two younger sisters, but only if the family avoided all contact with Gusty and her husband. "There was a lot of bitterness with (Gusty)," who didn't understand why she was being shunned during the war, said Desch's sister, Mary Williams, 86, now a resident of Largo, Fla. "But it all came out afterward, and Gusty came around."

 

Desch was never out of sight of his Navy "shadows" — plainclothes guards who sat in parked cars outside his home and office, waiting to tail him around town. Years later, Desch would gleefully tell his daughter what fun it had been in the beginning to take the guards on wild goose chases. One evening he drove miles out of his way into the country to the old Belmont Dairy, only to return to his driveway. The guards ignored his greetings when he stepped out of his car.

 

Hardest for Desch to swallow, the Navy commander in charge of the project, Lt. Cmdr. Ralph Meader, was quartered in Desch's Oakwood home to keep an eye on him. The arrangement in the two-bedroom Tudor cottage at 413 Greenmount Blvd., which Desch had built just two years earlier for himself and his young bride Dorothy, was often tense.

 

"This Captain Meader . . . practically slept in his bed," said Bob Mumma, an NCR manager who worked with Desch. "I'll tell you, day and night, he couldn't get rid of him. Joe just about lost his mind."

 

Security at NCR was super-tight. Building 26, formerly NCR's night school at Stewart Street and Patterson Boulevard, was converted into a top-secret assembly plant, with machine gun-toting Marines watching from the roof. The guards were wounded veterans who had seen action early in the war, and they could be skittish, as Lou Sandor, one of the chief engineers on the Bombe project, discovered. Sandor, now 86, lives in Columbia, S.C.

 

"I had a habit of slamming the door to the restroom whenever I went in," Sandor recalled. One day he startled a Marine who was shaving in a restroom sink. "All of a sudden, I was staring into the barrel of a .45. I don't know who was scared more — me or the Marine who almost shot me."

 

Practically overnight, Desch's research department at NCR grew from a staff of 20 to more than 1,000. The Navy would give him just about anything he asked for, but Desch said later he got little direct help from the British.

 

"It was a one-way street," Desch told a Smithsonian historian in 1973. "The British came over and visited me and looked at everything I was doing, but I could never see anything they were doing."

 

Burke said better sharing of information about the Enigma between the two Allies "would have saved (NCR) at least three to six months" of crucial development time. But he said the British weren't entirely to blame. A U.S. Naval delegation was invited to tour Bletchley Park, the British Ultra codebreaking operation located outside of London, in 1941. "But when they came back (to the States), the information didn't get to the right people" — including Desch.

 

In December 1942, Alan Turing, the genius behind Ultra, visited NCR to offer advice, but ended up zinging much of what he saw in a scathing memo. Turing found fault with everything from the machine's gearing to its wheel sizes, but was especially snippy about an automatic feature that Desch and the other NCR engineers were proud of — the machine's ability to brake at high speeds and reverse itself to the exact sequence of rotor positions that had broken the code.

 

"They say the whole machine is being built sufficiently strong to withstand such strain," Turing wrote. "Possibly the real objection to this method is that the time taken over each stop is fairly considerable . . . 15 seconds, and of course it seems a pity for them to go out of their way to build the machine to do all this stopping if it is not necessary."

 

The Navy brass decided not to pass the memo on to Desch, for fear it would destroy his morale. Even so, Desch would pay a heavy emotional price in the months that followed. Developing a workable, reliable Bombe would take months longer than anyone had suspected. Through it all, Meader kept the pressure on.

 

Even the usually even-tempered Desch began showing signs of the strain. After one especially tense meeting with Meader and top-ranking Navy officials, "Dad came out and got up on a table and started shouting that everybody had to start working harder and working faster and get this machine out," Anderson said.

 

Meader had found an effective, and ultimately devastating, tool for motivating Desch — his guilt.

 

"Joe told me privately after the war that Meader said he was going to be responsible for the deaths of a lot of American boys if he didn't get the job done — that was a tremendous amount of pressure for anyone, but especially for Joe," said Carl Rench, 79, a former NCR engineer and vice president who became Desch's closest friend soon after joining the company in 1946. "Let me put it this way, he was a very religious man."

 

Anderson said her father told her long after the war that he had felt so much anguish over the sailors who were drowning in the Atlantic that he believed his very soul was in jeopardy. "This was the Catholic in him — he felt like he was in a constant state of mortal sin, so he stopped going to church."

 

The race to perfect the NCR Bombe, in many ways, was a race against Desch's own mounting burden of guilt.

 

• Wednesday: A modern-day search for the truth.

[Walt's Daughter]

Daughter's quest raises more questions

 

By Jim DeBrosse

Dayton Daily News MAY 10, 1990

 

Debbie Anderson was having a late breakfast with her husband Darrell, chairman of the theater department at the University of Dayton, when a story in the Lifestyle section of the Dayton Daily News caught her eye.

 

It was about a special exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the development of the modern computer, called "The Age of Information."

 

Part of the exhibit was a decrypting machine built by Dayton's National Cash Register Co. during the war. Bill West, then the archivist at NCR, credited Anderson's father, Joe Desch, and his assistant, Bob Mumma, with building the machine.

 

It was the first time Anderson had ever seen anyone publicly give credit to her father for the NCR Bombe.

 

"I had a migraine that morning . . . so I didn't trust what I saw. I reread it several times," she said. "And then I was kind of miffed. Here this machine goes to the Smithsonian and it was built by my dad, and nobody even bothered to call me." Anderson decided to travel to Washington, D.C., with her family. "I told my husband, 'Darn it, we should go down there and see this machine. The kids should see it.' "

 

Her next move was to contact the Smithsonian curator quoted in the story to see if she could find out more. The curator, in turn, referred her to a historian at the National Security Agency.

 

"I think he (the NSA historian) was stunned when I called," Anderson said. "I don't think anyone was supposed to give out their names and phone numbers there."

 

The historian agreed to meet with her, suggesting they do so informally at a coffee shop. But when Anderson said that she possessed documents, possibly classified ones, that she hoped to have explained, "there was a pause and he said, 'Oh, you'd better come directly to us.' "

 

JUNE 23, 1990

 

The Anderson's Astro Van was routed to the rear of the bunker-like NSA headquarters — a massive concrete structure at Ft. Meade, Md. — where they were greeted by armed guards and told to remain in their vehicle.

 

Moments later, when the historian who had arranged to meet Anderson arrived at the guard shack, she emerged with her Lazarus bag filled with documents. But when her two boys, ages 14 and 11, also started to exit the van, hoping to stretch their legs after the drive from their motel, they were told to stay inside.

 

It was just Anderson the historian wanted to see.

 

"So Darrell (her husband) drives off and here I am surrounded by all these men," she said. "I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, what have I gotten myself into?’ "

 

The contents of her bag were emptied and inspected, and Anderson was put through a metal detector before she was permitted to enter the building.

 

Anderson spent the next six hours inside the NSA headquarters, where she did nearly all the talking.

 

"The day was spent looking through the stuff I brought," she said. "People would come and go, and not one time in six hours did they make a comment. They're good at that."

 

There was one reaction, however. "A younger guy came in, close to my age, and I don't remember what he was looking at, but all he said was, 'Wow. Can you wait a minute while I show this to somebody?' He went away and came back, but he never said a word about why he was so excited."

 

When it was time to leave and Anderson started gathering up her father's things, the historian said to her, " 'You realize, of course, I can't let you take these out of the building,' " she recalled.

 

He said the documents had to be closely examined, to make sure all the material had been declassified. If so, her things would be returned to her by mail.

 

Anderson protested, but had no choice. She did, however, insist on an itemized, signed receipt. The material she left behind was returned, by third-class mail, three months later.

 

Anderson left that day disappointed. She had come to the NSA hoping to get some answers about her father's secret. Instead, she had only fed the secret with the little bit that she knew.

 

Parts of the NCR machine may still be secret, and although NSA officials won't say why, some experts believe it's because some of the same technology was used against the Soviets during the Cold War, and may still be in use today.

 

NCR "continued to be a major contractor for the government (after the war), and Joe (Desch) continued to sit on the advisory board" to the National Security Agency, said historian Colin Burke, author of Information and Secrecy, the first book to detail the development of the NCR Bombe. "But the documents aren't out there" to confirm NCR's Cold War involvement.

 

Patrick Weadon, an NSA public affairs officer, said, "We can't comment. The closer you get to present day, the less we can discuss."

 

JUNE 24, 1990

 

After years of trying to imagine what had consumed her father during the war, Debbie Anderson's first look at the NCR Bombe surprised her. "I was amazed at how huge it was," she said. "It was much bigger, much more imposing than what I had expected."

 

Her next reaction was frustration. The 7-foot-tall, 11-foot-long, 5,000-pound electromechanical decoder sat behind a waist-high partition at the Smithsonian, with no mention of her father's name in any of the plaques or brochures.

 

"Here I was at the end of a pilgrimage. I felt a connection to this thing and I wanted to go up and touch it, but I couldn't," she said. "There was a stream of people waiting and we just had to keep moving on."

 

The label describing the machine "said it was manufactured at NCR, not designed there," Anderson said. "I really wanted to smart off about it to somebody, but I didn't." It was what Anderson had come to dub "the standard one-line reference" to NCR's role in breaking the German Enigma code. The history books she had read and the few documents that she had thus far been able to obtain from the National Archive gave NCR credit for building the 120 Bombes and nothing more — as if the enormously complex machines had been stamped off an assembly line like so many widgets.

 

"It was so frustrating," Anderson said. "I knew there had to be more to the story, but no one would talk."

 

The lone remaining NCR Bombe would later be transferred from the Smithsonian to the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum at Ft. Meade, Md., where it is now on permanent display under the watchful eyes of NSA officials.

 

On their way back to Ohio that summer, Anderson and her family stopped at the Pennsylvania home of Esther Hottenstein, a Navy staff person who had operated NCR's secure telephone and telegraph lines to Washington, D.C. during the war.

 

Hottenstein had worked closely with Desch during her years in Dayton "and was very, very fond of Dad," Anderson said. Although she had been a schoolteacher prior to the war, Hottenstein had really wanted to be a physician, just as her brothers were, even though few women were encouraged to do so at that time.

 

At the close of the war, Desch advised her to "follow her instincts," Anderson said. "She went on to medical school and became a family doctor,, and she was always thankful to Dad for that."

 

For many years after the war, she kept in touch with Desch by mail and, after his death in 1987, with Anderson.

 

Anderson was looking forward to at last meeting Hottenstein in person, and although her visit sealed their friendship, it proved useless in her quest to learn more about her father's work.

 

All her questions were answered with the same polite reticence she had received at the NSA, Anderson said. "It was always, 'Well, gee, I can't tell you about that.' "

[Walt's Daughter]

The enemy codes crack, but not Joe Desch’s folks

 

By Jim DeBrosse

Dayton Daily News

 

MARCH 19, 1943

 

As one of the first technicians assigned to the top-secret NCR Bombe project, Phil Bochicchio, a Navy engineer from New Jersey, arrived in Dayton with orders to report to the U.S. Naval Computing Machine Laboratory, no street address given.

 

But when Bochicchio alighted at Union Station, he couldn't find a listing for the laboratory in the phone book or even anyone who had heard of the place. He walked around downtown, to the police and fire stations and then the Navy recruiting office. None of them had heard of the lab, either.

 

Finally, at the Dayton Municipal Building, a man at the Chamber of Commerce offered to drive Bochicchio out to NCR, where the Navy had several other projects in progress. But at NCR, the Navy liaison officer seemed clueless as well, Bochicchio recalled.

 

"He looked at my orders and said, 'I don't know what to do with you.' I said, 'Well, great. Just give me something to do.' "

 

Bochicchio did building maintenance at NCR for two weeks before he learned anything of the project that had summoned him to Dayton — and only after he had undergone a thorough background check.

 

"I got a letter from my Dad saying call home as soon as I can. When I called, my dad said, 'What kind of trouble are you in, boy? The FBI has been here, Naval intelligence has been here. All the neighbors are wondering.' "

 

Bochicchio wasn't in trouble, but he was in for a lot of hard work. As floor manager of the Bombe project in NCR's Building 26, he was in charge of setting up and debugging the mammoth decrypting machines. The Desch Bombe was a marvel of engineering — but, like all complex, unproven machines, prone to glitches.

 

Bochicchio said a big part of Desch's headache was trying to please both the Navy theoreticians, who designed the logic of the machine and insisted on speed, and the Navy cryptologists, who wanted something reliable and easy to maintain.

 

"The mathematician thinks one way, the cryptologist thinks another. And you're sitting in the middle and you have to try to figure out how in the hell to give them both what they needed from the machine," Bochicchio said.

 

The original NCR Bombe housed 16 four-wheel sets of Enigma analogs, or commutators, linked by miles of wiring. (Each machine was the equivalent of 16 Enigma machines, working in reverse.) To test the hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of Enigma rotor positions, each wheel contained 104 electrical contact points and had to be perfectly aligned when they touched the copper-and-silver sensing brushes.

 

That was a big order, especially when the first wheel of the machine spun at close to 2,000 rpms. At such speeds, keeping the wheels in balance and in their original shape was a daunting task.

 

To solve the problems of heat and distortion, Desch had wanted to use two smaller wheels, instead of one large one, as the first and fastest of the commutators. The Navy nixed that idea. Two wheels would add too much time and too many parts to codebreaking operations, since the wheels would have to be replaced before each run.

 

The machine also was prone to sparks and short circuits that ruined decoding runs, and oil leaks that created maintenance nightmares. Sensing brushes had to be kept oil-free. Power had to be evenly delivered through a complex of motors, shafts and clutches.

 

In short, the NCR Bombe was like a high-performance race car engine being pushed to its limits — before anyone even knew for certain it would work.

 

The original contract calling for the first Bombes to be delivered to the Navy in February 1943 was totally unrealistic, and Desch probably knew it from the start, intelligence historian Colin Burke said.Desch still hadn't produced a workable machine by March, when the German U-Boats were expected to strike Allied shipping in an all-out effort to turn the war.

 

After six months of intensive development, all Desch had fashioned were two temperamental prototypes, dubbed Adam and Eve, that leaked oil and broke down after two hours of operating at the speeds demanded by the Navy. The intense heat and centrifugal force warped and chipped the machine's fast-spinning wheels, made from a heat-resistant plastic called Bakelite.

 

In the meantime, Lt. Cmdr. Ralph Meader, the Navy commander in charge of the project, was constantly on Desch's back, reminding him of the American sailors who would die if the new machines didn't come on line.

 

"We were not actually aware of that," said Lou Sandor, part of the engineering team working for Desch. "We knew that (the machine) was for a decoding activity, but we just didn't know the details of it. . . . But I'm sure Joe was aware."

 

Debbie Anderson of Kettering, Desch's only child, believes Meader never suspected the full impact of his guilt-lashings. "Now I understand why Dad was really conflicted and angry most of his life," she said. "The Joe Desch I know carried a lot of anger around. I know it wasn't about me and Mom. And I wasn't sure it was about NCR, either."

 

Still, Desch didn't often lose his cool, at least not with his employees. "He was an amazing person to work for, very even-tempered," Sandor said. "Almost everyone I knew got mad (during the project). But I never saw Joe get mad and he had an awful lot of reasons to."

 

Instead, he internalized the pressure and guilt, took it home, let it fester through the long hours of the night. When he could get away for an hour or two, Desch liked to retreat to his garden plot off Wilmington Avenue, where he grew everything from corn to kohlrabi. And he loved to whistle, Anderson said, mostly Sousa marches and snatches of classical music and old romantic movie scores, perhaps to keep the demons in his life at bay.

 

As Dayton's steamy summer days approached and tempers began to flare, Desch and his engineers relied on old-fashioned tinkering. They found better ways of protecting the Bakelite wheels against the heat. Bochicchio served up a few tricks of his own, including soaking the machine's leather seals in oil before installation, to prevent leakage, and installing a circuit tester that checked for opens and shorts prior to running the machine. He also helped refine a circuit to filter out the "electronic noise" from the machine's wire sensing brushes as they bounced along the spinning surfaces of the rotors, thus reducing the number of false "hits."

 

The frustration at NCR was always with design, never with production. The engineers and technicians were amazed at how quickly they could get anything they needed from subcontractors. "From an engineering standpoint, it was wonderful," Sandor recalled. "Instead of waiting weeks and months, we had what we wanted in a few days. It was an absolute priority."

 

In the end, the NCR Bombe was too late to be the only decisive factor in the Battle of the Atlantic. Small escort carriers, converted from old freighters, were already doing that by providing air coverage for convoys.

 

Even so, the NCR Bombes — along with new radar that enabled pilots to hone in on U-boats — enabled the Allies to become the hunters, rather than the hunted, in the North Atlantic, said Bob Cressman, a historian at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C. "Initially, we would send our convoys around where we thought the submarines would be," he said. "But later on we had enough knowledge from the (deciphered) German codes that we could pinpoint where the submarines were going . . . and we started going after these guys."

 

Using U-boat transmissions cracked by an NCR Bombe prototype, pilots from the escort carrier USS Bogue located and sank the first German submarine in a purely offensive attack on June 5, 1943.

 

Certainly, it wasn't too late for the NCR Bombe to help pave the way for the D-Day invasion and shorten what promised to be a long, brutal war — if it could be made reliable and produced in great enough numbers in time.

 

"The alternative methods that the British were using had failed" against the German's four-rotor Enigma, Burke said. And even though the Brits later produced a four-wheel bombe in the summer of 1943, it was never as reliable as the American machines. "The only thing that could keep things moving as far as (Enigma) intelligence was the NCR Bombe."

 

By late May 1943, enough of the bugs had been worked out of the NCR machines that the Navy decided to push ahead with full-scale production. That called for a massive infusion of skilled manpower — or in this case, womanpower — to get the job done.

[Walt's Daughter]

WAVES roll in to work on top-secret project

 

By Jim DeBrosse

Dayton Daily News

 

MAY, 1943

 

After boot camp in the Bronx and two weeks of training and background checks in Washington, D.C., the WAVES were told only that they were being shipped west to work on a top-secret project — and to keep their mouths shut. As newly enlisted members of the U.S. Navy women's auxiliary, they would be joining another 400 or so civilian employees at NCR.

 

Their commanding officers in Washington "specifically told us they would shoot us at sunrise if we talked about what we were doing," said Evelyn Hodges Vogel, now 75 and a resident of Tucson, Ariz. The plucky Missouri native had lied about her age to enlist in the Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service at age 18. Recruits were supposed to be at least 21, but Vogel's father, a Navy man himself, had signed the papers against her mother's wishes.

 

"And we did keep our mouths shut," Vogel said. "Men always think women have big mouths, but we didn't. We were so proud to be serving in the armed forces and doing something that women had never done before."

 

In all, 600 WAVES would pass through Dayton to assemble Bombes at the U.S. Naval Machine Computing Laboratory at NCR, where their skills were desperately needed to offset the wartime shortage of men. Few had an inkling of the significance of their work until nearly a half century later, during a reunion here in 1995.

 

"I never even told anyone I was in the service until the last few years," said Evelyn Urich Einfeldt, now a 78-year-old resident of Oklahoma City.

 

The WAVES were quartered at Sugar Camp off Schantz Avenue, once a training center for the NCR sales force. They bunked eight to a cabin. Sixty of the Adirondack-style structures sat on a wooded hilltop overlooking Carillon Park.

 

During peak production, the bunks never grew cold: one shift of women worked while another slept. Shifts ran eight to 12 hours long, 24 hours a day, and were rotated weekly.

 

To maintain discipline and esprit de corps, the WAVES marched — to meals, to classes, to work. "We were marched all the time, no matter what the weather," said Catherine Convery Racz, 79, a Boston native who married a sailor from Dayton. She still lives here.

 

Each morning, 200 WAVES marched in full uniform from Sugar Camp — north on Main Street and west on Stewart to Patterson Boulevard — to NCR's Building 26, which overlooked the Great Miami River.

 

There they wired, soldered and assembled different parts of the massive Bombes — in separate rooms, so no one could identify a whole machine. To further keep secrecy, one WAVE was given the wiring diagram for one side of a commutator wheel, while a second WAVE soldered the other side of the same wheel. "I always said I was the best solderer on this side of the room," Racz quipped. "We got to be perfect."

 

The work could be tedious and exacting. WAVES who were less adept at soldering made wire harnesses, said Phil Bochicchio, who was floor manager of the NCR project. The 78-year-old retired engineer now lives in Ellicott City, Md. "We laid out plywood boards with nails, and each wire had a color code that went to a particular nail. Then they had to lace all those wires together with wax string. Finally, the girls that were adept at soldering nested those lacings into place."

 

"There was no room for mistakes. Now I understand why," former WAVE Jimmie Lee Long of Texas said in a letter to Debbie Anderson, daughter of the project's chief engineer, Joe Desch. Anderson helped organize the WAVE reunion here in 1995.

 

Intelligence historian Colin Burke said it was a testament to the WAVES' skills that the machines eventually proved so reliable: sloppy soldering was a major problem for other early computer prototypes, but not the NCR Bombes.

 

Once their shifts ended, the WAVES were free to enjoy themselves. Sugar Camp had a swimming pool, baseball diamond and recreation hall. Movies and skits were regularly shown in the auditorium, and the camp's cafeteria was renowned. "The food was excellent," Racz recalled. "I know we had a lot of good beef — things people on the outside didn't have during the war."

 

Dorothy Firor remembers the special advantages of living close to the Sugar Camp pool. "We went skinny-dipping in between the times the night watchman made his rounds."

 

For those WAVES who craved more excitement, downtown was jumping with after-hour spots — including restaurants and ballrooms at the Biltmore, Van Cleve and Miami hotels, as well as Lance's Merry-Go-Round, with its famous revolving dance-floor chandelier — where they could spend some of their $21-a-month stipend from the Navy. The women had an easy time getting around Dayton, even though the camp's transport — an old Woody station wagon — often broke down and had to be pushed.

 

"Wherever we were going, people would stop and ask us if we would like a ride," Vogel said. "Of course, in those days, nobody ever harmed us. The Age of Innocence was still intact."

 

Vogel, a small-town Missouri native, found plenty to do downtown back then. "It was a lot like Kansas City, which was the nearest big city where I was brought up," she said. "It turned out to be a wonderful duty station."

 

 

 

In the midst of the fun, the WAVES never forget their duty. If anyone asked about their work at NCR, they were instructed to say they were training on adding machines. "People must have thought we were pretty stupid to be there all that time learning how to run adding machines," Einfeldt said.

 

Several WAVES recalled how Joe and Dorothy Desch, older and more sophisticated, had floated in and out of their lives at Sugar Camp for Sunday dinners and other festivities — and always in the company of the couple's watchdog and unwanted house guest, Lt. Cmdr. Ralph Meader.

 

"We were all in awe of Joe and Dorothy, because they were beautiful people in appearance — like movie stars. And always dressed so fashionably," Vogel said. "Dorothy was more accessible. I don't mean that Joe was unfriendly, just kind of aloof."

 

Vogel said she realizes now that Desch must have been preoccupied with the project. "I know darn well he was," she said. "I found out later that it quite upset him to have Commander Meader in their home. I know it would have upset me."

 

The WAVES viewed Meader as a "fatherly type," Vogel said. "He was easy to talk to. He always called us 'his girls.' We weren't in awe of him as we were of Joe."

 

 

For many of the WAVES, the months at NCR passed almost like a dream. In fact, until top-secret documents were declassified in the early 1990s, it was as if the WAVES hadn't been here at all.

 

"There was no record I was ever in Dayton," Racz said. "For years, I couldn't understand why. All the important people who were there, and we still didn't know what was going on."

 

The notable visitors to NCR included Cmdr. Edward Travis, head of the British Ultra operation at Bletchley Park; Capt. Joseph R. Redman, director of U.S. Naval Communications; Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who masterminded the British bombe; and top Navy intelligence officers, including Howard Engstrom and Joseph Wenger.

 

All, with the exception of Turing, appear in a July 1943 photo taken outside the Desch home at 413 Greenmount Blvd. Most often, visiting VIPs were put up at the couple's two-bedroom cottage in Oakwood, the one high-security location in town other than NCR's Building 26. Armed security guards were parked in cars outside the home throughout the night.

 

"High-level people (from England) came over quite frequently," Desch recalled in a 1973 interview with a Smithsonian historian. "Admirals and even members of Parliament and Lords of the Admiralty and, Lord, I always ended up with them in my house."

 

Anderson said her father told her "these guys would literally sleep on the living room floor. . . . (Alan) Turing was one of them." Turing "was always charming and polite — typically British, I would guess," recalled Bob Mumma, Desch's top assistant during the war.

 

Little did they suspect that, before returning to England in early 1943, Turing would blast the NCR Bombe design in a secret memo to Navy officials.

 

Saturday: Close, but not close enough.