Albuquerque woman recalls hush-hush WWII cryptography work
Source: ROSALIE RAYBURN
The doctor who attended the premature birth of Jean Johnson predicted she wouldn't make it through the night.
He was wrong, the Albuquerque Journal reported (http://bit.ly/1TWrsgV).
She grew up to become involved in a World War II cryptography operation closely linked to work at Bletchley Park in England that was made famous in the 2013 movie "The Imitation Game."
But for 30 years after the events she was sworn to secrecy by a British act of Parliament.
"My husband never knew what I did in Washington," said Jean (Johnson) Bridgers.
She married architect Frank Bridgers, whom she met when they were both serving in China shortly after the war.
Now 92, she still recalls those war years in minute detail, the people, the places and the hush-hush environment at the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service headquarters outside Washington, D.C. Seated comfortably in the Northeast Heights where she now lives with her daughter, Lynn Bridgers, her eyes sparkled at times as she spoke.
Military training
Growing up during the Depression in St. Paul, Minnesota, she said, life was tough. Her father died when she was 5 years old, leaving her mother with three children and another on the way.
Bridgers was a pre-law student at the University of Minnesota in 1943, working a summer job to pay for college when she received a letter from the Army asking if she would be interested in going to radio operator school.
"The government would pay tuition and salary," she said.
Taking up that offer was the first step toward her military career. After radio and code training, she was sworn in to the 1st Minnesota Regiment of the Women's Army Corps at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, then traveled three days via train to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, for basic training.
"That was a different kind of experience," she said. "I learned what tired was."
Disappointment followed when she was sent to Holabird Signal Depot in Baltimore and despite her specialized training she was put to work in a library.
"It was one of the low points of my life," she said. "I could have stayed at home and worked in a library."
Then came the day when she learned she would be sent to Washington, D.C. She remembers the plank seats on the big truck that met the women off the train and took them to Arlington Hall, formerly a "swank" girl's school that became the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service headquarters during World War II.
Also memorable was the one-story barracks heated by pot-belled stoves where she roomed with 30 women.
"You could see cracks in the floor," she said.
Critical work
Jean Bridgers was assigned to a project later known as "the Ultra Secret," working at night in the basement, monitoring enemy communications and passing on information to their counterparts at Bletchley Park.
Cracking the messages encrypted by the Germans' Enigma coding machine was possible because information obtained by German and French spies enabled Polish scientists to reconstruct the technology and share it with the British, according to a BBC history documentary. The British eventually agreed to share information with the Americans.
Bridgers said she had a lot of satisfaction about being involved in something so critical to the war effort at the time.
"But today it's not satisfying, because the breaks that came through the Ultra Secret project sunk a lot of German boys on submarines," she said. "I get no pleasure out of that because I would never have deliberately killed anybody."
When the war in Europe officially ended on May 8, 1945, Jean Bridgers and her co-workers were told they would have other assignments. For several months she assisted with the Army effort to process returning troops.
Then, on Thanksgiving she read a sign saying the government wanted 50 women to relieve men being sent home from Shanghai. Soon after, she was on a C-54 military transport plane on a multi-day journey via Honolulu, Guam and Manila.
In Shanghai, she was among a handful of women assigned to the China theater Signal headquarters. They lived in a former French-owned hotel that had been stripped of all heating units by departing Japanese forces near the end of the war.
"This was no picnic in January," she said. "We had smelly five-gallon (oil) drums that would serve us (as heating) at night."
After a few weeks she received a promotion to staff sergeant and the chief signal officer entrusted her with reading dispatches for him and the chief executive officer on Sundays, when they were off duty. It only occurred to her much later that the reason she was picked was because she had top security clearance from her previous work in Washington.
Return home
The chief signal officer was also responsible for her meeting her future husband. He told her to go on a weekend excursion to Hangzhou with hundreds of servicemen who were at loose ends while they waited to be returned to the United States.
"I couldn't say no to the chief signal officer," she said.
Frank Bridgers was part of an Army Corps of Engineers unit that had been building runways and bridges in China.
They returned to the U.S. at separate times as Jean Bridgers was involved in closing up the signal office operation in Shanghai. When she arrived at Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco she was offered a job helping in personnel planning for Air Force officers in the post-war era.
She and Frank Bridgers married in Santa Fe in 1949 and moved to Los Alamos where he was working on a project for the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
They moved to Albuquerque in 1951 where he and a business partner started Bridgers and Paxton Consulting Engineering, which is still in existence.
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