Southwest Signal Corps WAC story

Cryptologia, Apr 2000 by Kruh, Louis

SOUTHWEST SIGNAL CORPS WAC STORY

Weise, Selene H. C. The Good Soldier: The Story of a Southwest Pacific Signal Corps WAC. White qane Pub. Co., Inc., 63 W. Burd St., P. 0. Box 152, Shippensburg PA 17257 USA. 232 pp. 1999. $40.00.

As one of only 150 Signal Corps Women assigned to the Pacific Southwest area in World War II, Weise offers a unique perspective as a member of the Woman's Army Corps (WAC) who served overseas with the Signal Corps. Her career started as a civilian clerk-typist at Camp Wallace, Texas in October 1941. When she became a WAC in March 1944, she was sent to Fort Oglethrope, Georgia for basic training and subsequently selected for further training as a cryptographer at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

Instruction included theories of cryptography, techniques to increase speed and accuracy of typing (helped by the use of only capital letters and no punctuation) and pigeoneering. In her first attempt to insert a message into the tiny tube attached to the bird's leg, the bird "gave one mighty flap, and was gone. He arrived at his destination minus a message." Training also included map-reading, using a field switchboard and to operate several types of cipher devices. One was the M-209 and its codebook with dates and times, with each one assigned a set of letters that were the settings for the machine.

After three months training, they were sent to Camp Stoneman, California and a few weeks later boarded a ship for a 27-day trip to New Guinea. Later, a C-47 took them for an 800-mile ride to Hollandia where Weise was assigned to the Signal Center at USASOS (United States Army Services of Supply). She was an assistant to the officer in charge and logged in all messages that came into the center to be encrypted and transmitted. Many incoming messages came in over radio and reception was not very good due to the tremendous humidity and high mountains that created interference causing them to be garbled. Frequently, after a message was decoded it looked like it was still in code. Weise' job was to go through those garbled sections and try to figure out what had been sent. Her previous training, use of stereotypical phrases, and a good imagination helped.

After an accident, Weise was hospitalized and transferred to the Quartermaster Corps. When she was sent to Manila, however, her MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) for 805 and 808, cryptographer and cryptanalyst respectively, took priority and she was back in the Signal Corps. Much of the city was still in Japanese hands and "every so often they took a shot at us."

Weise,, who later received master's and doctorate degrees from Syracuse University, also recounts the non-cryptographic experiences of army life, her friends in the service, family and friends outside the service, and the difficulties faced by service women when returning to civilian life after World War II.