How NCR engineer Joe Desch, working in secret in Dayton, Ohio, designed a pioneering codebreaking machine to help win World War II. Desch suffered a nervous breakdown but won the nation’s highest civilian honor for his struggle. His story would not be told until decades after his death.
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Anderson knew only that her father’s pain and anger were tied to the World War II codebreaking research he had done at Dayton’s National Cash Register Co. – the work that had driven him to a nervous breakdown…
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The German wolfpacks were wreaking havoc in the North Atlantic, the number of kills rising every month as British intelligence and U.S. Navy escorts floundered without clues. A workable Bombe, as the codebreaking machine was called, was needed in a matter of months, not years.
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Hardest for Desch to swallow, the Navy commander in charge of the project, Lt. Cmdr. Ralph Meader, was quartered in Desch ‘s Oakwood home to keep an eye on him.
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Debbie Anderson was having a late breakfast with her husband Darrell, chairman of the theater department at the University of Dayton, when a story in the Lifestyle section of the Dayton Daily News caught her eye.
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As Dayton’s steamy summer days approached and tempers began to flare, Desch and his engineers relied on old-fashioned tinkering.
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In all, 600 WAVES would pass through Dayton to assemble Bombes at the U.S. Naval Machine Computing Laboratory at NCR, where their skills were desperately needed to offset the wartime shortage of men.
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But then, as it was designed to do, the Bombe came back to life and began slowly to rewind. That could mean only one thing: It had scored a “hit” on part of an Enigma message fed into the machine.
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The gentlemanly rules of engagement Desch had learned so well as a young ROTC cadet at the University of Dayton had lost their meaning during the war. Surprise and vengeance had been the name of the game since Pearl Harbor. It seemed to Desch the madness and cruelty would never end.
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