World War II Remembered

Encrypted Messages

186 Encrypted Messages • Charles Latham U.S. Army World War II began for me, in more ways than one, on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941. I was 23 and was doing my first year of teaching history and Latin at Salisbury, a small boarding school for boys, in the northwest corner of Connecticut. I was pretty thoroughly convinced, by what I had heard around home in Indiana and by what I learned in an American Foreign Policy course I had taken at Princeton, that Hitler was not a real danger to the United States, and that Americans should avoid European entanglements. I wasn’t militant about it, but in my one year of graduate study at Harvard I thought that President Conant might spend more time speaking to students and less in running down to Washington to urge more aid to the British. But that Sunday afternoon in 1941 changed the world. Like thousands of other Americans on that day, I realized—just like that—that I had been dead wrong about American foreign policy. I didn’t run down the next morning and enlist, like some of my friends, but taught till June. I did my warlike duty by standing once a Encrypted Messages: Charles Latham 187 week in a high field to watch for the highly unlikely possibility that an enemy plane might fly by on its way to a secret rendezvous. At the instruction of my draft board, I underwent a physical exam in Hartford, where a technician drawing blood broke the needle off in my arm and where the psychological exam consisted entirely of a man who leered at me and asked, “Do you like to go out with girls?” (“Yes” equals “normal.”) Drafted in Indiana in July, I was assigned to the Signal Corps and shipped off to Camp Crowder in the Ozarks of southwestern Missouri, where I got toughened up and learned to like and respect the decent, clean-cut farm boys from nearby states. Then there was a six-day train ride, via Texas, Chicago, and several points between, to Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. For those six days I shared an upper berth (a tight fit) with a young man named Myrl Leedom from Anderson, Indiana, the only person I ever knew who belonged to the Epworth League. One of the two denizens of the lower berth was a proficient gambler, whose mother ran a pool hall in Richmond, Indiana. He wore octagonal rimless green glasses which made him look as though he knew something you didn’t. He chose me as his stakeholder: he never took more than a hundred dollars into a game. I held his surplus winnings, and by the end of the trip I was holding more than two thousand dollars for him in cash—a healthy sum for 1942, and almost twice what I had earned by teaching in the previous year. When we reached New Jersey, he went right to a post office , bought a money order for the whole amount, and mailed it to his mother. The last I heard of him he was serving as an assistant chaplain. Under Bill Bundy During my short stay at Fort Monmouth, the Army tried unsuccessfully to make me a typist. Then one day a group of us were shipped to a station in the Virginia countryside near Warrenton. There, life was part rustic and part technical. The barracks were in the woods, a mile or so from the mess hall. Our company commander was Bill Bundy, whom I had known pretty well in graduate school at Harvard— a product of Groton and Yale who did everything by the book. We got up good and early—say 4:30—and he marched us to the mess hall for breakfast. “We’ll fall in again at 5:13. Let’s synchronize our watches.” We operated on Bundy War Time. (After the War was over, Bill served 188 World War II Remembered in the CIA and then in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as Assistant Secretary, first of Defense and then of State.) After a couple of months at Warrenton, where we divided our time between studying cryptography (secret writing) and cryptanalysis (finding ways to read secret messages) and various kinds of hard physical labor, we shipped to Arlington, outside of Washington, D.C. It was there that I spent most of my Army service. The Arlington...