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Published Saturday, November 15, 2008 in Local

WAVES veteran Benario reveals her WW II story

By Megan Almon

The Times-Herald

It was 1974 before Janice M. Benario told the man she'd been married to for 25 years the same story she shared Friday at the A. Mitchell Powell Jr. Library in Newnan.

That was the year she received a book that surprised her -- David Kahn's "Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes."

She was surprised even more to find her face in one of the book's photographs.

Sworn to secrecy, she'd been silent for 30 years about her involvement with the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II. Little did her husband know Benario had worked at an extremely high level of United States Intelligence, deciphering enemy signals and codes by way of "Ultra" decoding machines.

Benario's presentation, "Top Secret Ultra: The Allies' Secret Weapon in the Battle of the Atlantic," began by telling of Goucher College, a small, all-girls school in Baltimore, Md. A senior, Benario was approached by a professor about a secret cryptography class, one of seven being held at women's colleges throughout the nation. The class met in a locked classroom each Friday, late in the afternoon.

"If someone asked what we were doing so late on a Friday afternoon, we were to turn around and walk away or come up with a story," she said.

Benario graduated in 1943 and joined the Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES). She departed in July for eight weeks of indoctrination and graduated with nearly 100 other women as an ensign, cleared to handle top-secret material.

Benario received her individual orders in Washington, D.C. She and three others were assigned to "Top Secret Ultra," the most high office in the communications annex. Specifically, they would be handling communications traffic between the German high command and U-boats.

Benario was told that "any talk" of their work would be considered treason. Only 35 individuals could enter the office she was assigned, a short walk from the boarding house she lived in near Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C.

Hers was called "the office of college professors," because most of the men working with her -- most in the U.S. Naval Reserve -- held PhDs. Benario has since learned that the Americans allowed many of their top secret operations to be overseen by low-ranking officers -- the absence of high rank deflected attention.

Benario's work was "tiring and demanding," and required the utmost accuracy at all times.

The Germans' ciphering machine, called the Enigma, was "very complicated," to say the least.

The machine consisted of a battery and a series of keys and switches that, when set properly, would determine which of 26 light bulbs would illuminate which letters of the alphabet. Plaintext messages, when typed into the machine, would "illuminate" as ciphertext messages that -- when sent by telephone or radio to a recipient and entered into another Enigma machine on the proper settings -- would illuminate the plaintext message.

The word "Hello" might be encoded and sent out as "Azrwk." When "A-Z-R-W-K" was entered into the receiving machine, "H-E-L-L-O" would illuminate.

To make all this possible, the machines were set according to a sequence of rotors, letter rings on each rotor, numbers and letters visible through three tiny windows, and plug-in wire connections on a complex plugboard. The "start setting" possibilities were mind-blowing, the number somewhere around 10 to the 26th power.

Large machines called "bombes" were designed to break the codes.

These "bombes" -- weighing around two-and-a-half tons each -- were located in the office below Benario's. The machines picked up German communications traffic and "spit out" yellow strips of paper with streams of letters.

The strips were sent to Benario's office by way of pneumatic tubes, where translators divided the streams of letters into German words then translated the messages into English.

The messages were varied -- German U-boat positions, daily reports, Allied-forces spottings, orders from the command centers. Benario and others kept track of enemy locations on a large wall map with the grid the Germans used to chart the Atlantic -- pins for U-boats and flags for convoys.

At the end of a shift, every translated message was placed in a manila envelope and handed to an officer who drove the envelope and delivered it by hand directly to the United States Navy Submarine Tracking Room, located just down the hall from the office of Admiral Ernest J. King.

The information Benario and her comrades collected became the key intelligence that rerouted U.S. convoys to avoid enemy attack, and the information allowed U.S. forces to plot offensives of their own. But the source of the information had to be kept secret, lest the Germans know the Allies had decoded their Enigma. Planes and ships were sent to scout areas where the U.S. knew enemy U-boats were so that they might be "found" by those means.

By spring of 1944, Benario said the Ultra operations had made it so that more enemy subs were being sunk than allied supply ships.

Her work contributed to the organization of troops and supplies on D-Day, which, according to research, might have been delayed as much as two years if not for Ultra.

"This is just one of those things we have to be glad happened the way it did," she said.

Benario continued with Ultra until the fighting shifted to Japan and the Pacific. She completed her active duty at the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.

She received the World War II Victory Ribbon, the Battle of the Atlantic Victory Ribbon and the Presidential Unit Citation (Navy) Ribbon, and used her four years of G.I. Bill to finance four years of graduate work at The Johns Hopkins University, earning her master's and PhD in classical languages -- Latin and Greek. She met her husband, Herbert, while at Johns Hopkins.

The pair moved to Atlanta in 1960, where Benario taught at Georgia State University until she retired in 1984 with the permanent title Associate Professor Emerita in Foreign Languages. After retirement, she taught part-time at Emory University and Agnes Scott College.

Since 2002, Benario has spoken to more than 2,500 people about her wartime experience.