Page 52 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Part One

The Signal Corps enforced a requirement for its personnel to have American parents,
disqualifying Wash and another trainee, a Canadian, from their present assignment.

Instead, Wash found himself being shipped out to another military installation—
Camp Pinedale Army Base, located in a scenic lumber mill town just north of Fresno.
Pinedale had been used briefly as an internment camp for Japanese nationals, but now
the military was raising an Air Force squadron for deployment overseas. Wash told
them that he was ready and willing to join that unit, without letting on that he had
been let go of by the Signal Corps; he wasn’t telling if they didn’t ask. The Air Force
reviewed his records and accepted him. They didn’t require personnel to have both
parents as citizens. But meanwhile, Wash himself acquired American citizenship—a
prerequisite for working in his branch of military intelligence.

Codebreaking in Calcutta

“So I went abroad. When we left LA we didn’t know where we were going. It was a
long ride, and we landed in Melbourne. Then, we knew we were going to India. At
the time the Air Force was active in the Australia-Pacific area. Cryptography had two
bases—one in Australia for the Pacific, and other in India, for the China-Burma-India
theater, including Southeast Asia.” Wash would be sent to the base near Calcutta,
where the British 14 Army had set up codebreaking operations patterned after those
th
of Bletchley Park in England.

“Calcutta was in the eastern part of India. But in the waters there were a lot of
Japanese submarines, so rather than go straight to Calcutta where the base was, we
went through the south of Australia, where the sea was very rough, then to Bombay
where there were no Japanese submarines.”

Upon the arrival of his squadron in Bombay, Wash and his mates were given a
briefing, where they were told that, as cryptographers, they were never to permit
themselves to be flown over enemy territory. The Japanese were unaware of the Allied
success in breaking their codes, and if a cryptographer were captured and should talk
about what the Americans knew, the Japanese could switch codes, complicating and
prolonging the war effort.

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