Word from Frances Wilbur

[reeds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jim Reeds)]

In the past few days I have had a number of emails from Frances
Wilbur (born Frances Puckett) about her experiences working at
Arlington Hall, Virginia, for the US Army cryptanalysis service,
1942-1946. She was a member of the "Voynich Manuscript Research
Group" organized by William F. Friedman, the group called the
"First Study Group" by Mary D'Imperio. She must have one of the
world's longest-lasting interests in the Voynich Manuscript. Her
name appears often in the surviving FSG minutes and on the
surviving FSG transcription documents.

She asked me to post these emails to the group at large.  They
pick up in mid conversation with Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
who had apparently asked about the American PURPLE cryptanalysis.
Any text in [square brackets] is my editorial explanation.
I deleted 2 sentences referring to personal matters.

[start of edited emails from Frances Wilbur]
[4 June 2000]

Of course we were at war by then. In March I turned 21, In June
1942 I  graduated from Beloit College. I had completed
Cryptanalysis III. I had ten  days at home before I reported to
the SIS in the Munitions Bldg. on  Constitution Ave. in DC. and I
spent those ten days in assembling a suitable  wardrobe for DC's
hot weather, getting my train ticket and reservations,  making sure
I had a place in a boarding house in DC, and tying up loose  ends.I
had no idea how long I would be gone.

    I am certain that Col. Friedman really was overseeing Col.
Rowlett's work  on the PURPLE code. Col. Rowlett was very nice to
me. I remember walking  down the hall on the third floor of C
building when Col. Rowlett stepped out  of the code room across the
hall and said,"Frances, come here a minute. I  want to show you
something." I followed him in to the code room where there  was a
big file drawer full of yellow radiograms. He pulled one out and
showed it to me. It was the ORIGINAL of the message that MacArthur
had sent  as he left. It read, But we are not, repeat not
defeated."

    Since we always had to repeat the negative in a code message to
be sure  it wasn't omitted in transmission, this impressed me a
lot. When that was  published in the newspapers, they left out the
"repeat not".

    I thanked Col. Rowlett and went on back to my office in B Bldg.
I  remember being shown the model of the PURPLE as it was first
reconstructed,  and it was not terribly impressive to look at, but
I did realize by that time  what a tremendous achievement it
represented. I think I was the youngest  person in the entire SIS
so I took a lot of ribbing but I didn't mind,. I'll  send this to
Jim Reed also. Frances

[Cryptanalysis III = correspondence course run by the Army, using
3d volume of "Military Cryptanalysis" by W. F. Friedman.

SIS = "Signals Inteligence Service", name of the US Army
codebreaking group at start of the war. First located in the
Munitions Building in Washington DC, then moved to campus of
Arlington Hall School in Virginia.

B building, C building = buildings at Arlington Hall.]

[My reply: the not-terribly-impressive-to-look-at PURPLE machine is
probably the same one in display at National Cryptologic Museum;
the description fits.]

[5 June 2000]

I am certain that is the model they showed me--a wooden box, etc.
Not what  one would call impressive.  There is another story in
my head which I wish somebody could confirm. One  of the Purple
messages told of changing all the keys on Purple around the
Pacific. The new keys or rotors were going to be shipped out on a
ship  marked as a HOSPITAL SHIP for security. We were between a
rock and a hard  place. We did NOT want the Japanese to know we
werre reading their messages.

 Finally it was decided to ask one of our subs to sink the
"Hospital Ship".  There was a huge fuss over that. The captain of
the sub was court-martialed  publicly, but they put him in the
witness program, was given another  identity, his family moved
away, etc.
    Do you know anything about that? Frances

[Answer: I know nothing about this.]

[Another letter about just division of credit for breaking PURPLE
between Friedman and Rowlett, and about Friedman's alleged
breakdown. I just checked my Kahn (p.389): WFF admitted to Walter
Reed 4 Jan 1941, discharged 24 March 1941, had to retire (with
permanent disability) from his lieutenant- colonelcy from the
Signal Corps reserve. This was before Frances arrived on the
scene; WFF apparently completely recovered by then.]


[5 June 2000]
 Hi Jim--I never heard a word about a nervous breakdown by our
boss. I find  it hard to believe. As the war was winding down
he wrote Mrs. Voynich for  permission to bring our photo team up to
New york in order to photocopy the  manuscript in the bank vault
where she stored it after her husband's death.  She granted
permission, so he took our team of photo experts to New York and
brought back the famous copies we went to work on. This was long
after the  purple had been broken. Does that sound like someone
having a breakdown??

    He himself met with each one of us to ask if we would be
interested in  that project. He contacted 22 of us, and then we
all met together in a big  room, and he gave us a brief talk on
what he hoped to do--assigning us in  pairs to work after hours to
decide how many characters there actually were  in the manuscript,
after which we would asign a letter or a number to each  one so
they could be punched out on IBM cards and then sorted in different
ways. My partner was Salome Betts whose former job was with the
New York  City Library. She was a little older than I was, but she
might possibly be  around somewhere. The library might have some
personnel records. Too bad we  didn't have computers back then!
 Frances

[I think the VMS photocopies now in the Friedman collection in the
Marshall library are a mixture of Petersen's (made in the 1930s,
but acquired by WFF in the 60's after Petersen's death) and of the
ones used by the FSG, made in 1944 as Wilbur described above.]

[6 June 2000]

[Sentence deleted.]
I will be glad to share my reminiscences with the Voynich mailing
list. Can  you forward the appropriate messages to the list for
me? After this I will  send the list a copy. Or send you a copy
to send on to those people.  Somebody told me that Mrs.
Friedman, head of the Treasury Dept code unit,  might even have
been better at that business than WFF. I am trying to keep my
Voynich mail so it could be part of Somebody's memoirs Some day.
[Sentence deleted.] I will go offline and write you something else
at length  so I won't get logged off. Best, Frances

[7 June 2000]

 I heard but never saw that Friedman had a bad temper. I guess
someone might  have speculated that he was on the edge of flipping
out. This is only  rationalization on my part for that story about
a nervous breakdown.

    For the record: I was born in 1921 in Mankato, MN, graduated
from Beloit  College, WI in June, 1942, Phi Beta Kappa and Phi
Sigma Iota (French)  reported to the SIS at Munitions Bldg in DC
ten days after graduation. My  college boyfriend Richard Wilford,
returned home in 1945 after 3 years in  England, Africa, and Italy
and we were married ten days lateron March 23,  1945.. I continued
to work at Arlington Hall till March, 1946 when I  resigned because
I was pregnant. I was working with the Voynich group by  then, and
was very sorry I had to leave. The people I worked with in the
SIS were great.

    My bosses always listened to "Duffy's Tavern" on the radio and
we had a  lot of fun quoting their malapropisms. more later.
 Frances

[end]





-- 
Jim Reeds, AT&T Labs - Research
Shannon Laboratory, Room C229, Building 103
180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USA

reeds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, phone: +1 973 360 8414, fax: +1 973 360 8178