- Collection:
- Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
- Title:
- Oral history interview of Janice M. Benario
- Creator:
- Bruckner, William Joseph
Benario, Janice M., 1923- - Date of Original:
- 2004-10-06
- Subject:
- World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
World War, 1939-1945--Cryptography
Enigma cipher system
ULTRA (Intelligence system)
Benario, Herbert W.
Stimson, Dorothy, 1890-1988
Winslow, Ola Elizabeth
Dönitz, Karl, 1891-1980
King, Ernest Joseph, 1878-1956
Churchill, Winston, 1874-1965
Turing, Alan Mathison, 1912-1954
Kahn, David, 1930-
United States. Naval Reserve. Women's Reserve
Goucher College
Georgia State University
Emory University
Mount Holyoke College
Mount Vernon Seminary
Johns Hopkins University
St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)
Sweet Briar College
United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944
Vergilian Society
WAVES
D-Day
Naval Communications Annex - Location:
- Italy, Lazio, Rome, Rome, 41.89193, 12.51133
Italy, Naples, 40.8359336, 14.2487826
United Kingdom, England, Dorset, Christchurch, 50.7344198, -1.76512
United Kingdom, United Kingdom, England, Oxford, 51.7520131, -1.2578499
United States, California, City and County of San Francisco, San Francisco, 37.77493, -122.41942
United States, District of Columbia, Washington, 38.89511, -77.03637
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Maryland, City of Baltimore, 39.29038, -76.61219 - Medium:
- video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv - Type:
- MovingImage
- Format:
- video/quicktime
- Description:
- In this interview, Janice Benario recalls her experiences as a member of the Navy's WAVES during World War II. She worked as a cryptographer in Washington, D.C. in what became known as the "Office of College Professors." Her work was top secret, and the work accomplished there was instrumental in hastening the war's end. She also describes her post-war life as a classicist college professor.
Janice Benario was a cryptographer in Washington, D.C. with the U.S. Navy during World War II.
JANICE BENARIO ATLANTA HISTORY CENTER VETERANS HISTORY PROJECT INTERVIEWER: JOE BRUCKNER DATE: OCTOBER 6, 2004 TRANSCRIPTIONIST: STEPHANIE MCKINNELL JOE BRUCKNER: This is October 6, 2004. We're at the Atlanta History Center in Atlanta, Georgia. This is Joe Bruckner, B-r-u-c-k-n-e-r, and I'm speaking with Mrs. Janice Benario about Mrs. Benario's experiences in World War II and before and after World War II. Mrs. Benario, we really appreciate you coming down here today and sharing your experiences, and we look forward to hearing your story. JANICE BENARIO: Well, thank you. JB: Would you state your complete name and date of birth please? JB: Yes. I was born Janice Marguerite Martin in Baltimore, Maryland. I married Herbert Benario in 1957. I was born February 19, 1923. JB: And you were born in Maryland? JB: In Baltimore. JB: And where are you currently living? JB: I live in Atlanta. My husband accepted a position to teach at Emory in 1960. I came down and looked around and found one for me at Georgia State University. So we've been in Atlanta since 1960. I retired 20 years ago. He retired a couple of years later, and we now live in a new condominium right across the street from the Emory Law School. So we've always lived in the Emory neighborhood. JB: Mrs. Benario, tell us a little bit about your upbringing, where you were born, your family. JB: Well, I am an only child. My father was an attorney. My mother is a housekeeper, stayed at home, and I went to the public schools in Baltimore, graduated from Western High school, and received a scholarship to go on to Goucher College. I really wanted to go away but my father said with Goucher College six blocks down the street, there was no need to send me away. So my war stories really start at my senior year at Goucher. I'll wait until you want me to get into that. JB: Where were you when war broke out, when Pearl Harbor was attacked? JB: I remember hearing that over the radio. I lived at home during college, started college in '39. I was sitting, studying on a Sunday afternoon when I heard about Pearl Harbor. JB: What was the reaction of you and your family and friends? JB: Well, I had heard my family talk about World War I, and I never really thought I'd see another big war. JB: From that point forward, from Pearl Harbor until you got involved in the war effort, what were you doing? JB: I was at Goucher College. I had started as a freshman in 1939, and so '41 was the end of my sophomore year. JB: Did you go ahead and complete college? JB: Oh, yes. JB: Graduated in what, 1943? JB: Graduated in 1943. My father had, and I also, had always planned that I would go on to graduate school. There's no point in doing it in the war because most of the professors were also involved. JB: Tell us how you got involved in the war effort and what you did during the war? JB: That's quite a story, really. The Navy, shortly after Pearl Harbor, had formed its women's reserves, the WAVES, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. Apparently, most of the girls who wanted to get in first were high school graduates and went in as enlisted personnel. The Navy wanted to attract more college graduates and so in the spring of 1942, they first gave a course in cryptology to seven of the leading women's colleges. Now that sounds like the seven sisters, and if one goes through the list, that is, that's Smith, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Radcliff, so on. But the seventh one, Vassar, wasn't there. Goucher College was put in its place, and that may have been because our Dean Stimson was cousin to the Secretary of War. So the course was given at Goucher in the spring of '42. I knew nothing about it because this was highly secret. I don't think anybody knew anything about it except a professor who was chosen to teach it, the dean, and the president. Certainly the other students didn't. In the fall of 1942, I was a senior, Latin history major. The professor, Elizabeth Winslow, professor of English, herself a recent Pulitzer Prize winner for biography, asked me if I would like to join this group, this course in cryptology. I hardly knew what cryptology was at that point, but she explained that one could work for the war, either through civil service or go into the Navy as a WAVE officer. At that time, all the advantages seemed to be in joining the service. We took this course, oh, I guess it was 10, 12 weeks long. We were told, of course, when we were invited that this was secret. One did not talk to anyone about it. Of course, my parents knew I was taking the thing. We met once a week in a locked classroom late on Friday afternoon on the top floor of one of the classroom buildings. If any of our friends wanted to know what we were doing or why we were still staying down at school, we had to either make up something or go the other way because it could not be broadcast that this course was being given. In the spring, the college held a public induction service for women going into all the services, the WACS, the WAVES, the SPARS. We were inducted. After graduation as midshipman, we went to eight weeks indoctrination, either at Mount Holyoke or Smith. I was sent to Mount Holyoke. That took most of July and August of '43. We had exams. We learned to drill. We learned a lot of Navy regs and such. When we passed the exams and graduated, we were ensigns. As I remember, there must have been 100, 125 in that class from all of these women's college. A large proportion were to be sent to Naval Communications in Washington, D.C. We all went down there for general indoctrination. All of us were cleared to handle top secret material. We knew nothing could be said about whatever we did. Down there we got individual orders. One girl from Radcliff, two others from Goucher, and I were assigned to the most highly classified office in the Naval communications annex. That was the office that was reading the Enigma messages from the German admiral Durnitz to his U-boats. We then went out to the communications annex. The Navy had taken over the old Mount Vernon girls' school at the corner of Massachusetts and Nebraska in Washington. There we were told which offices we were assigned to and taken to them. The four of us were cleared to handle top secret “Ultra” material. That's something no one else knew anything about, and we certainly couldn't tell anything about it. In fact, on that first day we were told that to talk would be considered treason in wartime. You know the punishment for treason. And so nobody talked. JB: Now was ultra the code name for the project? JB: I'd like to, if I might, to approach this from a different angle and then read something which I wrote first of all. Because of the secrecy of this, I had almost forgotten the whole story until 1991 when my husband got me a book called, by David Kahn, “Seizing the Enigma.” I was looking through it. There were some pictures in the middle, and there was a picture of our whole office. And here am I looking out over someone's shoulder. JB: Point to yourself. JB: In the second row there. So when I saw this in print, I decided it probably was alright to talk about it. Well, a couple of years later, I was a classicist, teaching Greek. At a professional meeting, I talked to someone who was preparing a special issue of a journal entitled “The Classics in Military Service.” He said to me that evening, he had enough stories by men and about men, did I know any woman who did anything interesting in World War II. I looked at him and I said, “Leon, she's sitting right here with you, all you have to do is ask her.” And so he did. And I wrote the article. I entitled it “Top Secret Ultra.” And I would like to read a little bit of the first paragraph because that will set the stage. “Now some fifty-odd years later, I am able to write those three words and tell the story of my activities as a WAVE officer from 1943 to '45. My parents never knew what I did. They died before I could tell. My husband only learned after 20 years of marriage. My children were in high school before they knew.” David Kahn writes in his book “Seizing the Enigma” Ultra was the greatest secret of World War II after the atom bomb. The German commander, Admiral Durnitz, communicated with his U-boats and controlled their maneuvers by means of the Enigma code machine, considered to be impenetrable. Ultra was the code name assigned to the super secret operation by the British and later the Americans as they attempted to unlock the technology of that machine. After December, excuse me, I was one of the few WAVE officers privileged to serve in the secret inner sanctum at the Naval Communications annex where machines broke each day's code. Officers translated the German messages, and we sent the material on to the upper echelons. In fact, the level of combat intelligence immediately below the, Admiral King himself. So where were we? JB: Tell me what you did day to day when you would go into the office, when things were really hot. What would you do? JB: Well, that's a good question. That's one that I've gotten when I've given some talks about it. I'd like to tell you a little bit about who was in the office first of all. No one knew what happened behind the closed doors of our office. They were locked with a buzzer, and we had to push this according to a code that was changed every week, to get in. And of course when the doors opened, there was nothing but a wooden barricade. Nobody could see anything. There were about thirty-five people in that office, covering it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There was only one regular Navy man, the commander, who was in charge of the office. The other men worked in the Naval Reserve. They had been specially recruited because of their talents, English professors, language professors, philosophy, to work in this office. And so that no one knew what we were doing, we were called the Office of College Professors because of all these men who were working there. We also had on each watch a couple of translators that translated the German messages into English. We had some research people who worked only in the daytime who studied all the U-boats and kept index cards on U-boats and personnel and German military terms and so on and so forth. And we had a hand-picked enlisted secretarial staff who typed all of our work. There was a neutral shipping desk which also had two WAVES from Goucher from the previous class working there. So, it was with those people that I spent my days and nights for two years. Now what did we actually do in there? I guess the easiest thing to say is I was a glorified paper pusher, certainly never used that cryptology course that we had. One of the Allies' great intellectual successes was the finding out how the Enigma machine worked and then developing a machine which would reverse the messages so they could be translated. So since the messages were translated by machine, this didn't leave, there wasn't, when I got in, personal contact really with the messages. You have to remember, I entered in September of 1943. The war had been going on for four years, since '39. All this time, the Battle of the Atlantic was so important because the British Isles needed their supplies. Winston Churchill, this dominated Winston Churchill's attention the whole way. When I got into the war, there was agreement between the British and the United States to exchange all Enigma messages, all knowledge of the Enigma, the samples of the two machines, and everything was cooperation between them. Actually Polish cryptanalysis had first unraveled the Enigma machine, the wiring of it, and they developed what was called the Bomb, a machine which would unravel this. Both of them worked fine. Electric pathways, very complicated. Of course, when one is dealing with the code, sender and receiver have to have the key. It was estimated that there were 159 million, million, million possibilities as to ways this Enigma machine could be set up. Germans didn't think we could ever get into it, but the Allies did, and that gave great advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic. Well, and the third thing, by the time I got in, the Allies were reading the Naval Enigma traffic almost currently. I remember a couple of periods of a week or ten days when the key couldn't be found, and we would be delayed in reading it, but most of the time it was current. So, what did I do? When I got my desk, the messages were broken on the machine in an office beneath ours. Their secretarial staff printed out the German messages on long strips of yellow paper, as we used to get our telegrams, and put the messages together and sent them upstairs to our office. They went first to the translators who by that time had lots of help. They knew how the messages started, key words and such, and they knew weather reports and position reports. So they would translate them into English, give them to our typists who would make copies of the English. The English messages were handed first to the senior watch officer who read them and studied them and of course would call our research people to certain ideas. Then the messages were passed down to the junior watch officer and staff, that was ours. One of our main jobs, there was a big wall map of the Atlantic Ocean, the United States and Europe. We kept pins for each of the submarines that we knew about and often received position reports so we would move those pins to where they were. We kept track of the convoys; we had little pins with flags on them for convoys. In the meantime, also we knew how the Germans made a grid over the Atlantic Ocean so position reports could be given with simple letters and numbers. We were to keep that up to date. Another important thing we did each morning, on the mid-watch about 7:30, we prepared an envelope with all of the messages, the translations from the day, the neutral shipping report, and a submarine, U-boat report written by the research people with big letters across the top, Top Secret Ultra. We put this in an envelope. It was signed over to an armed carrier who appeared every morning at the Naval communications annex. He put it in his locked bag and went out to his automobile and carried it downtown to the main Navy department where this envelope was taken immediately to the American submarine tracking room, which was the intelligence unit of Admiral King. There were only four people who were allowed in there who got these messages. It was those people who made the decisions whether a convoy needed to be re-routed or whether we could go out and search out a submarine and destroy it. This wasn't quite as easy as it sounded because Winston Churchill and Roosevelt were determined that the Germans not find out that we were reading these messages. So something had to be done that wasn't obvious. So for instance if we knew a submarine was over by Africa, when it was on the surface, a plane, an Allied plane would have to be sent over. That plane could be seen because otherwise how would we know where these submarines were? Several times during the war, Admiral Durnitz became very suspicious because it seemed that we knew things, we got our convoys out of the way, and we were sinking some submarines. But his underlings always persuaded him that the Enigma machine could not be broken. This was the Naval traffic. The Army, the Air, and the Navy used the Enigma machine but with different variations. The Naval Enigma was the most complicated. Since Admiral Durnitz could never be persuaded, the Germans changed nothing. We read the messages on to the end of the war. By the end of, I went in September of '43, by the end of that year, the tide of the war was beginning to change. The Germans were sinking fewer of our supply ships, and we were sinking more of their U-boats. JB: Were you still in that position in June of 1944, Normandy invasion? JB: Yes, and that's a good question because one of the things which I remember most about 1944 was D-Day. All of the Enigmas contributed to the Allies' preparation, to how they learned where the Germans were, what supplies and so forth. I was on the mid-watch, went on midnight June 5th and was on until 8:00 a.m. June 6th. 8:00 a.m. in Washington was afternoon in Europe. We learned about the invasion because we were reading the traffic currently at the time. The message to Admiral Durnitz to each one of his U-boats that yes, the Allies had invaded the coast of France. So that's how I found out about it. The Germans, for three months, we kept them deceived. They thought there would be a second invasion to the north at Calais, but of course there never was. The story of that deception is very interesting also. There have been books written about it, and it's quite interesting. JB: Is that when we built the fake army? JB: Yes, built the fake army over in England. There, you have a list of books, that handout. I have a handout which I give when I'm talking about Top Secret Ultra. The first, it's arranged not alphabetically but chronologically because the first book is one by Winterbottem in 1974 entitled “The Ultra Secret.” That's when all this material was declassified. The, down near the end of the list, I have one by Gerard, “Secret Soldiers.” That's the story of World War II's army of deception, fascinating book. Then one from 2003 by Halfler, “Code Breaker's Victory: How the Allied Cryptographers won World War II.” This is fascinating also. Historians are beginning to feel that code breaking was a large part of the entire victory in World War II and that really some of the code breakers should have the reputation of the admirals and the generals because through the code breakers. Now I don't know if, here is a picture of the Enigma machine and the Bomb, which is the machine which breaks it. I don't know if that'll come through. JB: Try to get it on there. JB: My hand shakes. JB: So that's the Enigma machine on the left? As we're looking at it on the screen? JB: Yes, the typewriter looking device. JB: And the large one? JB: Is the Bomb. JB: That's you right above it? JB: Right. JB: OK, yeah, we got a good picture. How much longer after the Normandy invasion did you serve in that position? JB: Our office worked, and was really important work until the day the Germans surrendered in May, went through the same routine. We continued working through September because there was traffic, particularly from the early parts of the war that we didn't have the keys for. We just caught up on a lot of things and worked as I say until September. WAVE officers were being dismissed according to the time when they had come into the service. I had six months more to go, and so I was moved to an office in the Bureau of Medicine where I was put to grading doctors' correspondence courses, which was quite different from what I had been doing. I ultimately was released to inactive status in May of 1946. JB: When you were in this position and you would have free time and you'd be out with friends or whatever you would do socially, how did you handle the questions about what you do, since it was such a top secret thing? JB: Well, Washington was of course full of service people and so many of them were in work that couldn't be talked about, so no one thought about it too much. I had a civilian roommate a good part of the time because officers were given a living allowance, and so I just lived in one of the many women's boarding houses in Washington. My roommate always said she was going to get me to talk in my sleep and tell what I did, but she never did. JB: Did you have a lot of communication with your family during this time? JB: Oh, yes, Baltimore is only 40 minutes away on the train from Washington. Since between two of the watches we had 48 hours off, I frequently went home. There were many trains and military people moving all the time. That's one thing about living in Washington then, and working all these watches, women were safe any hour of the day or night. We'd go roaming around because where I lived, I had a four-block walk to Dupont Circle, and then a long bus ride to get out to the communications annex. But midnight, 4 a.m., didn't matter. JB: Was it an exciting place to be during that period? JB: Oh, yes. JB: When did you leave the service? JB: I had a good bit of leave piled up because we couldn't take it all during the early years, and really at all during the war. So actually I went home in March of '46 but was privileged to wear the uniform until the actual date of my discharge, which was in May. So I took advantage of flying which I could do in uniform and I had never been to the West Coast, so I flew in a Navy plane from Washington out to San Francisco area. JB: What was that like at the time, what was your reaction to what you saw at that age, going out there? JB: Well, it's amazing. What I remember most about that trip was it was a big plane, was that I had to pay sixty cents so they would feed me breakfast on it. JB: Times have changed. JB: Then I managed to get a ride back for free. And of course, I was _ for three years on active service, which meant I had four years of the GI Bill coming to me. So I stayed out, oh how was it, three or four years, then entered the graduate school of the Johns Hopkins University, and the GI Bill paid for the whole four years that it took me to get a master's and a Ph.D. JB: What did you get your master's and Ph.D. in? JB: Classical languages, Latin, Greek. And of course when one teaches that, I taught at Georgia State here in Atlanta, meant doing a little bit of everything, archeology, history, philosophy. JB: What were you told when you left the military about your position and what you couldn't say and couldn't do? JB: I don't remember exactly what we were told, but somehow or another we knew that we couldn't talk. We weren't to tell anyone. I believe my family knew that I worked on the German side of it. That was the sum total of it. JB: What was your feeling when you were finally able to talk about it, years down the road? JB: Well, it took a while to get used to it. It really wasn't until I saw my picture printed in the book that I felt free to talk about it. Goucher College had an article about us in their alumni magazine in 1992, and they had quotes from a couple of the women who said they still wouldn't talk about it. There just wasn't any question ever in our minds, no temptation. JB: When you were doing this, when you were in the service, did you realize you were part of one of the major events in world history? JB: No, I know a lot more now about how what we did fit into the overall scheme of the Battle of the Atlantic than I ever knew then. I mean, there are so many good books that have been written in the past ten years that covered the story, and about the machines. JB: You've had an interesting life since you got out of the service. Tell us a little bit about it. JB: Oh, yes. I received my Ph.D. in 1952 from the Johns Hopkins University. My first teaching position was at St. Johns College in Annapolis, Maryland, the great book school. That was a very good start for me, but I knew I didn't want to stay in that kind of school. So next, I taught for six years at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. In the meantime, Herb and I were married, and when he accepted a position at Emory, we came down to Atlanta. Never dreaming we'd still be here now. Both of us love to travel, and so we became connected with the Virgilian Society of America which runs a summer program at a villa outside of Naples in Italy. For a number of years we ran that summer program over there. When our children were born, because we were paid for the summers that we were over there, we could take the boys with us and our two children had some summers early on in Italy. Our first sabbatical, we spent the whole year in Italy, in Rome, the two boys were with us. They were then three and five. Our second sabbatical we spent in Oxford, England, and the boys went, and went to school in England. They were in middle school by that time. We have continued to travel in our retired years. JB: You make presentations now on your experiences in the service? JB: Yes, that story that I told today, Emory University had me give a talk back in April of 2002. That has led to lots of invitations, and I have told my tale now to over 1000 people. So it's neat, to have this happen in the years when I was 79, 80, and 81, I never dreamed possible. Never dreamed I'd be giving public lectures. JB: Well, before we stop, is there anything else about your experiences that you would like to tell us. It's such a fascinating story, and I want to be sure we haven't missed anything about you, while you were in the service or before or after that you would like to make sure we have included on the tape. JB: Oh, that's hard to say, because one could go into so many details. I think we've covered the main points of it. I will say since there are some pictures of me in this, the WAVES were very proud of their uniform, particularly that hat. JB: Will you show us a copy of your picture in the service, in the WAVES? JB: Yes, I have one. Do you want the midshipman one or . . . This was as a midshipman, a simpler insignia on the cap. Here as an officer. JB: Those are great pictures. Would you give me the name of your unit just to make sure we have that on the tape, the unit which you actually served with? JB: It's, well, I was at the Naval Communications Annex. Our office, the title of our office was OP20GI2A, Op under the chief of Naval operations, GI, general intelligence, A, the Atlantic theater. JB: Well, I can't tell you how much we appreciate you taking your time to come in here. This is a fascinating story, and I don't think we have anything like this on any of our other interviews. We want to thank you for what you did for the country. - Metadata URL:
- http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/333
- Additional Rights Information:
- This material is protected by copyright law. (Title 17, U.S. Code) Permission for use must be cleared through the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center. Licensing agreement may be required.
- Extent:
- 39:31
- Original Collection:
- Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center - Contributing Institution:
- Atlanta History Center
- Rights:
-