US Navy Cryptologic Mathematicians during World War II

Abstract

Histories often marvel at the impressive mathematicians who were part of the World War II team at Bletchley Park, but what often goes unrecognized is that the United States Navy assembled a similarly impressive team. This paper recognizes some of the mathematicians who served at the Washington, D.C. Naval Communications Annex during World War II.

Keywords:

• 3801 Nebraska Avenue NW
• Naval Communications Annex
• OP-20-GM

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Deborah Anderson (who is coordinator of the Dayton Codebreakers website and daughter of Joseph Desch, the director of the United States Naval Computing Machine Laboratory when, during World War II, it was located at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, OH), Rene Stein (who is the librarian at the National Cryptologic Museum), Lee Gladwin (who formerly worked for the Center for Electronic Records of the National Archives), and Perri Hamilton of the University Archives of the University of North Texas for information about some of the US Navy cryptologic mathematicians who appear in the photograph in this article.

Notes

¹The quote is from British codebreaker Gordon Welchman, in 1940. Welchman made the statement when he was interviewing Joan Clarke for a position at Bletchley Park [13, p. 113]. Clarke (later Murray) had studied mathematics at Cambridge. Welchman had been one of her instructors. See also http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/ClarkeJoan.html

²Throughout this article, we will blur the present-day distinctions among mathematics, statistics, and computer science and call all mathematics.

³Another person who took the correspondence course is Justice John Paul Stevens. He took it while a senior at the University of Chicago. Stevens was assigned to Station Hypo in Pearl Harbor in 1943 and did traffic analysis.

⁴William Wray was Dave's mother's uncle.

⁵The Naval Cryptologic Veterans Association (NCVA) Echoes of our Past [15] contains two others. On page 41 there is a photograph captioned “A powerhouse of historical figures, photo taken in November 1944 in front of the Chapel at 3801 Nebraska Ave., Washington, D.C.” One of the people identified in the photograph is Commander Ely who appears in Figure 1. On page 42 is a photograph captioned “Cryptologic offcers in front of the Chapel at 3801 Nebraska Avenue., Washington D.C. September 1945.” One of the people identified in the photograph is Captain H. T. Engstrom who appears in Figure 1.

⁶Included in the Wray family files along with the photograph was a copy of a published page that included the photograph and the identification that was used for this article. The page has been identified as a “Picture from the Past” on page 99 of the Fall 1969 NSA Technical Journal. The photograph is titled, “Naval Security Station, Washington, D.C., October 1945.” Captain Raymond P. Schmidt, USNR (Ret.), who served from 1968 until 1981 as the first historian of US Navy cryptology since World War II, believes the building in the background is probably Building 17 (which later housed the Headquarters, Naval Security Group Command) of the Naval Communications Annex at 3801 Nebraska Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. The site now houses the US Department of Homeland Security.

⁷The following is a biographical sketch for Campaigne from an 1983 article in Cryptologia (volume 7 number 2, p. 190): Howard Campaigne received his mathematics degree from Northwestern University and taught at the University of Minnesota. After submitting plans for a cipher machine to the Navy, he received a commission on 5 December 1941. By the end of the war he was a commander in Europe. As a civilian employee of the National Security Agency he became Chief of Research with a concentration on computer research. Upon retirement from NSA he returned to college teaching in Slippery Rock (PA), Portales (NM), and Birmingham (AL) and then to Boston as a computer specialist. He now [1983] resides in Portales, giving flying instructions and programming his microcomputer.

⁸“Exact Markov Probabilities from Oriented Linear Graphs.” Annals of Mathematical Statistics 28(4), 946–956.

⁹The obituary of Joseph Jackson Eachus in The Daily Telegraph [7] states that Eachus was born in Oxford, Ohio, and was a mathematics major at Miami University.

¹⁰[11] describes work done by several of the people in the photograph—Clifford, Eachus, Ely, and Engstrom—and John Howard on Enigma.

¹¹“[Engstrom] served on the Yale faculty until 1941, when he joined the naval intelligence group in Washington. He had worked in algebra and was a specialist in polynomial substitutions. Engstrom was well known in the 1930s as a young algebraist.” [16, p. 27].

¹²Gleason's work with Greenwood is mentioned in [20].

¹³Some documents date his PhD as 1935.

¹⁴Land-Air, Inc., is one of the two original companies that formed the foundation of DynCorp, a private military company.

¹⁵The 1949–1950 University of North Texas Bulletin lists Maple as an associate professor of mathematics. It would appear that Eugene Hanson, who was the chair of the mathematics department at the University of North Texas, hired his former Naval Communications colleague into the department and later as part of the technical staff of Land-Air, Inc.

¹⁶The biographical information about Pearsall is based upon a biographical summary that appears in a list of 1996–1997 interviews for the Oral History Program at the University of North Texas: OH 1163 CANBY, Louise Pearsall (128 pages).

¹⁷ http://www.daytoncodebreakers.org/ (Accessed January 12, 2011.).

¹⁸ http://www.daytoncodebreakers.org/waves/pearsall.htm (Accessed January 12, 2011.) Copies of the National Cash Register Company (NCR) identification cards for Pearsall and Howard are embedded in the text of the interview. The Dayton Codebreakers site also contains copies of the NCR identification cards for Eachus and Engstrom. http://www.daytoncodebreakers.org/personnel/personnel navy.htm (Accessed January 12, 2011.).

¹⁹Howard was the project manager for Vannevar Bush's 1930s Memex project, and Coombs and Steinhardt (along with Claude Shannon and others) were research assistants.

²⁰[16] contains a history of ERA and the contributions of Engstrom, Steinhardt, Coombs, and Howard to the development of the computer industry in the United States.

²¹The obituary also notes that: “[Steinhardt] belonged to the third generation of Steinhardts born in Newark, where the family was in the leather-manufacturing business. After attending Tome Institute in Port Deposit, Md., he graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served there for several years as an associate professor.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Christensen

Chris Christensen is a professor of mathematics at Northern Kentucky University. One of his interests is the relationship between mathematics and cryptology.