Janice Benario Luncheon

WWII Veteran Janice M. Benario Speaks at Chapter April 2007 Luncheon.

Janice M. Benario is Associate Professor Emerita, Foreign Languages (Latin and Greek) at Georgia State University. She was a LTjg during WWII and handled the decoded and translated German Naval ENIGMA messages, passing the material directly to CNO and COMINCH, Admiral Ernest J. King. Janice had a fascinating and inspiring story to tell.

I can tell you from listening to her presentation that Janice is still sharp as a whip and you’ll have to get up pretty early in the morning to get ahead of her! She related her experiences during the war to us as if they had happened just yesterday. Her recollection of the details of those days seems undiminished by time.

The "Battle of the Atlantic" as it was called lasted from September of 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland to May of 1945 when the Germans surrendered. Janice said that the Enigma code breaking played a major role in the winning of that battle by dealing effectively with the German U-boat vs allied supply ship conflict.

Surprisingly, the Germans were never told until 1974 that the Enigma code was ever broken! Nearly 30 years after the war! When that happened, people involved in the “Ultra” project as it was called, were finally free to relate some of the details of that effort. Several books on the project have since been published. Janice published her own book on the subject titled "Top Secret Ultra: The Allies: Secret Weapon in the Battle of the Atlantic".

You may wonder how Janice managed to get into such an envious and significant position during the war. She said that the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) had been founded in order to allow patriotic women to serve in the Navy at that time. She was actually attending Goucher College near DC and was approached and asked if she would be interested in attending a cryptology course. Little explanation of the need was offered at the time. She decided it would be interesting and signed up for the course, which she said ran for about twelve weeks. Once the women had completed the course they were offered a choice of a civil service position or a commission in the WAVES.

Janice was commissioned, and after an eight-week indoctrination at Mt. Holyoke College, was given a Top Secret clearance and was one of four women assigned to the Naval Communications Annex in Washington, DC. This was the headquarters for the project to break the German Enigma code. There were 35 people working in that office, designated OP20-GI-2A. This included a combination of officers and enlisted personnel, most of whom were professors or mathematicians and the like. The office came to be affectionately called “The Office of College Professors” and no one knew much of anything about them other than that!

Janice started in office OP20-GI-2A in September of 1943. She lived in a local boarding house and had a roommate from whom she had to keep secret her real job. Janice claimed that her roommate told her that she tried to get the information out of her in her sleep at night, but couldn’t! Just name, rank, and service number!

There were several versions of the Enigma machine itself, of which the German Navy’s was the most complex. The later versions had three to four rotor wheels that could be set to 26 different positions each. The front panel also contained 26 plugs that could be set in random patterns as well. The main part of the machine had a standard looking typewriter keyboard with a set of lights above that matched each available letter on the key board. Pressing one key on the keyboard would randomly light up one of the letters, depending on the setting of the aforementioned parts. Initially the Germans changed the settings, and thus the code, every month. Later on they changed them every week. Toward the end of the war they changed them every day.

Janice reported that Poland had somehow managed to gain possession of an early version of the Enigma machine. From that discovery began the efforts to reverse engineer and clone the machine to work on decrypting the messages that were created by using it. This was at first a combined British/U.S. effort, but shortly after it became a U.S. only project, based on our successes. A machine called the “Bombe” was invented that tested for possible Enigma solutions at a greatly accelerated rate than could any human mathematicians. This machine stood several feet tall and easily filled the entire wall of a room. (It looks to me like a precursor of the ENIAC, which was built to calculate artillery firing tables. It too was a room-sized device bristling with cables and plugs and lights.)

The US built “Bombe” machine, she said, was several times faster than the British version, which was one reason why the entire project was turned over to us rather quickly. Another reason was that National Cash Register was recruited to build clones of the Enigma machines for the Navy’s use. NCR was never told what they really were. Hey just some strange looking typewriters with lots of wires inside.

Their office’s reports containing the decrypted messages were sent via courier/car to the submarine tracking facility headed by Admiral King. These reports were used for various military planning purposes including convoy routing, etc.. As a result of code breaking, in late 1943 to early 1944 the tide starting turning in the German U-boat vs supply ship war. The decrypted Enigma traffic also played a huge role in the planning for D-Day on June 6, 1944.

After the war effort, Janice served out the remaining six months of her tour of duty at the Bureau of Medicine. This, she reported, was considerably less interesting than her stint at OP20-GI-2A!

The cracking of the Enigma code was called one of the greatest allied intelligence successes of WWII. Without it, the war might have gone on for another one or two years, or possibly resulted in the atomic bomb being dropped on Berlin.

Click on the following link for a picture of LTjg Benario in 1943, plus pictures of an Enigma machine and a Bombe machine.

Janice - Enigma - Bombe

The Chapter extends it gratitude to Janice for her service to her country and her time to relate this incredible experience to us all.

Click on a thumbnail image to view a full sized picture.

Chapter President Steve Frederick '72 welcomes Janice Benario to the luncheon.

Janice begins her presentation.

Steve thanks Janice for her service during WWII and for sharing her story with us.

Steve presents Janice with her personalized Atlanta Chapter apron.