By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Betty Bennett of Berrien Springs doesn't break Japanese codes anymore, as she did as a World War II WAVE, but she still enjoys solving crossword puzzles.
Bennett, then a junior history major at Wellesley College outside Boston, was drafted into naval intelligence, sort of, which is how she would come to be one of seven women sharing the "house of hot beds" in Washington.
Bennett, who led off Southwestern Michigan College Museum's fall lecture series Wednesday evening, shared 60-year-old cryptanalysis stories for which she had been sworn to silence for 25 years and couldn't reveal even to her family.
She and about 15 other young women returned to college to find "strange notes" in their mailboxes. The secretive invitations asked them to attend a meeting concerning doing work for the war effort.
Throughout their senior year the young women studied code-breaking two nights a week.
Bennett still smarts at being sent to a rival women's college, Smith, for naval officer training.
Bennett felt "very fortunate" for her assignment to the office of one of the six men in Navy cryptanalysis before the war, Francis Raven.
One of her first duties was signing a pledge to not talk or write about anything she did for 25 years. She could say only that she worked at the communications annex "way out northwest" at the corner of Massachustts and Nebraska. "They had taken over a girls school, Mount Vernon Seminary, and that's where we worked. By then it was all fenced in and we had ID cards. We had to really behave to get in."
Raven possessed a photographic memory, she said.
At the dawn of the computer age to come, Raven believed the human brain would prove better than any machine that could be conceived.
Her own lack of a sleep pattern would come in handy when she became a mother and a grandmother, she laughed.
Bennett recalled "D-Day" on June 6, 1944. "One of the big things we did do was we got a message through on our purple machine from the Japanese ambassador in Germany had just been taken on a tour of all the emplacements. For some reason he sent this all back to Japan. Gen. Eisenhower had lots of good information, but this was up-to-date. I can still feel Mr. Raven breathing down our backs to 'get this broken.' "
Cryptanalysis also helped make the Battle of Midway a turning point in the Pacific.
That brought her back around to Pearl Harbor. "This you can take any way you want," she said, "but we discovered one reason we weren't supposed to say anything for 25 years was because there could be cover-ups. All the books are coming out now. One person says, 'We didn't know ahead of time,' and the next saying, 'Oh, yes, we did.' Mr. Raven said he was there on Saturday afternoon when this message came through. The 'Winds Message' was a 14-part message sent by the Japanese. If east winds were blowing, they were going to attack the United States. They didn't say exactly where, but some of the men that came back from Pearl said out there they had been tracking the Japanese Navy, which had been dead silent for 10 days.