The first woman I'd like to talk about who was important to the Allies in WW2 is Dot Braden. In short, her work involved decrypting enemy messages to sink enemy supply ships.
During September of 1942, the US government was still in the midst of recruiting thousands of women for their cryptography exploits.
School teachers and librarians were among those recruited by the government. Dot Braden, a teacher from Virginia, was one of these women. Born and raised in Virginia along with her siblings by her single mom after her parents were divorced when she was a child, Dot had grown up idolizing her mother for persisting through financial hardship.
Early Life
Dot had always been intelligent as a child, reading grown up adult detective novels along with her siblings and scoring high on arithmetic tests in school. Her mom had dealt with the difficulty of financial peril and did not wish for her daughter to deal with the same, so when the time came, she insisted on her going to a college to pursue a degree that could benefit her in a career. They did not have the money to afford college, but a local gentlemen's club offered to give her a scholarship that would pay for her education, but not for the books she needed to purchase at the college.
Dot cried and cried upon hearing this, but to her luck, her uncle offered to pay this fee so long as they didn’t tell his wife. Elated, Dot resolved to go to an elite college, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, which was highly esteemed for being difficult and challenging. During the next four years of her life, Dot would work extremely hard, grading physics papers for extra money and working at a flower shop as well. She discovered she had a talent and interest in languages, as she took both Latin and French as a teenager and continued with these languages in college.
Her Teacher Years
Twenty-two-year-old Dot, fresh out of college, took a job as a teacher in 1942 at a public high school in Chatham.
Having never taught at a school before, Dot found herself teaching English to eleventh and twelfth graders, French to first and second years, ancient history, civics, hygiene, calisthenics, and advanced physics. This was due to an extreme shortage of both male and female teachers.
Male teachers had left for the war, and subsequently female teachers had left to marry the men leaving for war before they had no chance to. For all of Dot’s effort, working eight hours a day for five days a week, she was only paid $5 dollars a day. Years later, she would have difficulty explaining why she did not quit. But Dot was a persistent and intelligent person, and she tried her hardest in teaching her students. It was not for nothing, though, as her composition class beat an elite boarding school in a themed essay contest. The mother of one of her students even thanked her for her hard work, saying that her daughter was going to study physics in college as a result of her extraordinary teaching.
As the year ended, however, Dot quit and went back home to Lynchburg, Virginia, now out of a job and living with her mother and four siblings. Dot’s mother Virginia Braden did not rely completely on her income, but it helped enormously as she was raising four children on her own. Her mother resolved to find a new job for her daughter that would not require her to do any work she did not want to do, which took out the jobs as a waitress, housemaid, or a telephone operator.
At some point in time, Dot’s mother found out that government recruiters had been set up at a hotel close to their house, and that the recruiters were looking for school teachers. Little information was given about the job itself, but Dot was excited nonetheless.
She had never been to Washington before, and had rarely left the state of Virginia itself, as she never took vacations.
Recruited for the Army
Dot went to the hotel and found two recruiters, who seemed interested in Dot’s capabilities with languages. They asked her to fill out an application, to provide character references, and to state if she had family members serving in the military. Dot’s family was indeed very involved with helping the military and their country, as both of her brothers were serving, and her little brother even had Dot volunteer their dog for service, although they received a letter declining their dog’s service. A few weeks later, Dot received a letter explaining that she had been accepted to work as a civilian for the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service. She would be paid $1,620 a year, which was an enormous amount compared to her nine hundred dollar yearly salary as a teacher. Dot did not even know what the job entailed, but in October she found herself on a train to Washington D.C. As she arrived, she took a cab to a ferocious looking compound called Arlington Hall. Pre-war, Arlington Hall was a two year junior college for girls, but it had been requisitioned by the U.S. War Department and turned into a government operation. As she walked into the hallway, she found herself surrounded by other women who seemed as unsure of their surroundings as she was. In that hallway, she signed a secrecy oath and loyalty oath that entailed her swearing to never discuss any part of her work with anyone not afflicted with her official duties.
The woman passing out these papers informed Dot of a facility where she could rent a room to live in, which was built to accommodate many young women who were going to Washington to take government jobs to help the war. These female-only dormitories helped support the rapidly growing population of Arlington County, and as these residences kept on building, it was becoming known as “Girl Town” or “28 Acres of Girls” due to the vast amount of women that now lived there. In this area of Arlington Farms, each dormitory was named after an American state, and had communal bathrooms and showers along with murals to inspire the women and many other facilities and amenities. During the orientation period she received many lectures on absolute secrecy and finally understood her job, which was for her to break enemy codes. The rooms in which people worked were filled with women working diligently on graph paper, cards, and sheets of paper.
School teachers proved to be particularly useful in decrypting messages, and people who scored high on arithmetic tests were often good at cryptography as well. At the beginning, Dot was assigned a job of sorting messages, which was a base first assignment. After she had finished it, she was told she had been moved up to the next level. Afterwards, she sat through hours of lectures on security and secrecy, as well as tests on the Japanese language. She was called for an interview, in which her interviewer wrote that she was “attractive and well dressed”, but also “intelligent” and “nice”.
Her permanent assignment had been chosen based on this, and as she soon found out, she would be breaking the codes that directed merchant ships moving around the Pacific islands.
The merchant ships were bringing essential supplies to the Japanese army, and cutting off the enemy’s line of these critical supplies would allow for America to save tens of thousands of American men’s lives. From this assignment, Dot would be in charge of determining which merchant ships to sink.
Having served her country as a cryptanalyst, the incredible woman passed away at the age of ninety-nine in 2019. It is important to remember and honor her for her contributions to the world of women in STEM and America.
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