"We didn’t get recognized very much, that’s for sure."

--Dorthea Schloesser’s comment on the WAVES

At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor I was a 20-year-old secretary working for a construction company. They built professional buildings and I got to decorate the offices. It was fun. I was in the process of going to business school, I guess because my boss seemed to think I needed to.

Oh, that was so terrible that day. I really can’t remember how I heard about it, but it must have been a radio because there wasn’t any television. I know I just put my hat and coat on and went to my best friend’s house. Later on during the war her brother, who was in Patton’s 3^rd Army, was killed.

I joined the WAVES and was sworn in December 8, 1942, a year and a day after Pearl Harbor. They advertised in the paper. We didn’t have TV in those days and people began talking about; "Gee they’re taking women into the Navy now"! The thought just appealed to me. After all, my dad had been in the Navy and I was dating a young man who was in the Navy. So I thought it must be the Navy, not the Army! I’m from Boston and most of the people back there join the Navy. I guess it must have something to do with living by the ocean. The Midwesterners join the Army, not me. Of course I thought I was going to be on a ship out at sea but it was good I wasn’t.

My mother had to sign for me because you had to be 21 to join. The WAVES was formed in May of 1942. I had a hard time getting in the Navy. I didn’t weigh 100 pounds, their minimum requirement, and they sent me home and told me to eat a lot of bananas and milk shakes. It was wonderful but I sure can’t do that anymore. This went on from September until December. Finally they said, "We’ll waiver you." I never went did get over 100 pounds back then. I noticed in the book that Tom Brokaw wrote about World War Two (The Greatest Generation) that the lady who cooks on TV, Julia Child, tried to join the Navy but she couldn’t get in because she was too tall. Isn’t that something? She ended up at the Office of Strategic Services instead (the forerunner to the CIA).

I went to Oklahoma A&M in Stillwater, Oklahoma for basic training. I had to march and do all those military things and learn Navy correspondence and everything you would need to be trained to be a secretary. I was from a family of five girls and lived a very, very sheltered life in Boston. I got to the men’s dormitory in Oklahoma and I went into the head (the bathroom) and (spying a man’s urinal) said, "Well, what is this for?" Some of the other more worldly girls said, "Oh shoot, that is a foot bath. That feels really good after we march". So I thought, "Okay". I finally clued in when I noticed nobody else is using this footbath but me! It was very strict in basic training. You couldn’t talk after the lights out, and I just couldn’t keep it back all the time. I had to tell a joke or something one night so I ended up having to stay home all weekend and scrub the deck. I was in Oklahoma for three months and when I graduated and they sent me to Washington DC. Naturally, I thought I was going to be a secretary when I got there. I got paid $25 a month when I started.

When we got to Washington the first time, it was so scary because we had to go through the guardhouse. We were facing all these armed Marines we had to walk past, and I was thinking "I’m going to be a secretary, why do I need all these Marine guards to be a secretary"! The Navy had taken over a seminary in Washington during the war and made it into this communication center, and that’s where we were. They took us to the chapel first and sat us down and gave us this big speech about how we were going to be doing not secret work, nor top secret work, it was going to be ultra top secret work. Everything had to be kept very secret and if it wasn’t we would be shot. So that was our introduction. I started wondering, "Maybe I should go back home" but they said, "No, you have to stay". That little chapel became my special resting-place many a time because when there was a battle at sea, there was strict radio silence and we had no work to do, so to speak. I’d go over and visit the chapel and it was really a sweet little white, serene place.

Technically, I was in the Pacific Theater because I was trained to decode Japanese messages, even though I never left Washington. When the Japanese would send a Teletype, our Navy would intercept it out at sea and would Teletype it to our office. It would come on a strip of paper (it looked kind of like toilet paper) and it had a lot of numbers. Other people would type them up and scan them into our computer and I would get the garbled ones, the ones that wouldn’t read, and I had to try and make them read. There would be some letters on the top - the address or whatever, then lots of numbers. They were in sets of six and you had to cast out the nines to make it scan. So I would have to try to fill in to make it scan. See, those decoded messages had to be "stripped", so you know what they called me? A stripper. When I was getting ready to be discharged and my officer was writing recommendations for all the people, he said "Now what am I going to write for you, that you were a really good stripper in the Navy?!"

It didn’t take very long to learn the code, but I don’t know what the Navy would have done if they hadn’t had the WAVES to help them. The Japs changed their code a certain day every month.

We had what we called "rips", which would be like a dictionary to help us decode. The first thing the Marines did when they landed when taking a position in the Pacific was to get the Japanese codebooks. They would be shipped back to us in Washington. We would take the numbers from the strips of paper and look it up in the codebook and get the word. God bless those Marines--some of those codebooks would be bloody. My worst nightmare would be thinking about what they had to go through to get to it.

It would be an hour or so between the time a message was intercepted and we started working on it. There were radios at that time and the Navy did have a computer, you know. The computer was as big as the wall. A WAVE was responsible for that computer! Yes, (Admiral) Grace Hopper. She also coined the term the "computer bug". Actually it was a moth that flew in and caused the computer to break down.

I can’t remember completely any of the messages that I decoded. About all I can remember is "camitso da bonden" which means "in reference to your secret message." Come to think of it, I worked all night on one and it ended up "Happy Birthday to so and so in Timbuktu" but the brass took it all very seriously because they said it could be a message within a message.

As we were decoding messages we got a pretty good idea of how things were going in the Pacific.

We even knew how things were going when there was strict radio silence. That was a clue that the Japanese for was clobbering us awhile. We decoded messages having to do with several of the major battles in the Pacific, Kwajalein, Guadalcanal, Midway.

It was very stressful. We all really wanted to read those messages. I mean unstrip those messages, ungarble those messages because we knew how important it was. We called the place the sweatshop. A lot of the women had nervous breakdowns. I just wanted to go home.

We worked what you call swing shifts. After having just gotten off duty after an 11 PM till 7 AM shift, sometimes we wouldn’t be sleepy enough to go home and go to bed. My best friend, Dee, and I would go to the movies, then fall asleep in the movies. Mostly we didn’t have much social life because everything was centered on work and sleep until we earned our 48-hour pass. Then we’d go to New York to a show or something like that. She’s still a good friend, and even though we don’t see each other a lot because she lives in California, we talk on the phone quite a bit.

I wrote letters to my family, but I couldn’t tell them anything about where I was, or what I was doing. Nothing. Actually they didn’t ask too much.  They just assumed that I was doing secretarial work for the Navy. We all had special patches on our uniforms to identify our area of service. We had a Q because everybody knew what all the other letters meant but the Navy hadn’t used Q before.

People would ask, "What’s the Q for?" and I would just say, "I’m just a secretary, a cute secretary".

We also had an insignia. It’s an anchor in front of a propeller. The anchor represents the Navy and the propeller represents the WAVES, so we were the propeller behind the anchor.

My boyfriend was on the USS Hughes when it got torpedoed in the Pacific and he was injured. Guess where he ended up? Washington DC. I couldn’t believe it. I got this phone call from Bethesda Naval Hospital and I thought, "You know, I don’t know anyone there but I’ll take it anyway". The he said, "Hi! What are you doing here? Bring me a toothbrush".

I was home on a 48-hour pass and had a friend with me when we learned of the Japanese surrender. I lived in Medford, about five miles from Boston. We had gone into Boston to the Chinese part of town to have Chinese food and we were in the restaurant when we heard about it. We tried to get back home and the mobs in the streets were just hysterical. They were grabbing us and kissing us. Some Navy officers came along and took us to Harvard, which was okay, except they couldn’t get us inside. They had a lock down because of the surrender and the ensuing pandemonium. The officers didn’t know what to do with us. They had us sit outside on this bench and they’d put Cokes out the window and hand them down to us and actually I don’t even know how we finally got home! Neither my friend nor I to this day remember how did we get home? We do remember we were there all night because my poor mother was so worried and upset when we didn’t come home. I had no way of even calling her or anything. That was something else. When we got back to Washington all our other buddies were saying, "Oh, you missed it!" because they were in Washington and we weren’t. When they got all through bragging, and asked where we had been, we smiled and said, "Oh, we were locked in Harvard Yard with 5,000 men". We didn’t tell them we were outside on the bench.

There were many sad moments during the war because I lost a lot of friends.

I want people to know that they’ll probably never know another time when people were so, American...so patriotic. Even the civilians had to cut back on everything and we had blackouts and rationing. I never doubted that the Allies would win the War, even when things were going very, very badly and I was deciphering the messages. I don’t think I ever doubted we would persevere.

After the War I went back to the same job, same pay. Some things were still difficult. You couldn’t get some things, due to a lot of shortages. The other thing that seemed very unfair was that nobody wanted to rent you a house or an apartment if you had children. I remember that. That was sad.

The only reason we got into our apartment was that a friend of mine was a friend of the manager.

That wasn’t so great. For a lot of people it was, "I’ve been to war and now I can’t even find an apartment". It was a wonderful time though, peaceful and hopeful and we were all thankful it was over. I don’t think we had any choice but to go to war and I think we did the best we could.

Permission granted for use by Dorothea Schloesser  © 2001
Transcribed by Penny Burdge