Cryptography in Halifax

Transcription

Cryptography in Halifax

In Halifax, the barracks were a problem again, because everything was just getting underway. There were 100 girls in each dormitory, and four dormitories—400 of us. In the middle of the dormitories were the showers and sinks. I don’t remember anymore, there must have been 25 or 30. It was huge. And everyone was working shifts, meaning there was no nine to five. It didn’t exist. We worked nights, days and Sundays, and got one Sunday off each month. And we were paid 90 cents a day. That was our salary. You got there, signed in, got changed and started working. We often had to work on a message that someone else had already started encoding because where the coding ended, there were still one, two or three pages to do, and we always did them in pairs. We always worked in pairs. One person looked in a kind of dictionary, and the other, let’s say there were numbers, so I would say “I’m going to be in Halifax on such and such a day,” because there were just sentence fragments and we could only use four numbers to keep things short, and there were often repetitions. So we’d have only the word Halifax [inaudible], Québec or New York. . . It was all put in a book. That was some work. Everything had to be checked twice, two times. Then once they were done, the girls would take their sheet of paper to the . . . the room. We weren’t many per room, but they weren't little, they weren't little holes in the wall, they were fairly big rooms because at that time there was lots of space… you needed silence, you couldn’t have people talking at the same time as us. Not because it was secret—after all, we were all in the same boat. So we talked, we read, we took things out, we did this and that, we did it in pairs. I don’t remember, I was alone in a room when I did that. In the teletype room, there were 20 or 25 machines going night and day. We always had to learn more—new codes, new machines. I went back to St-Hyacinthe to take a specialized course. The teletypes there didn’t spit out a tape like Western Union did with Halifax, uncoded or coded, but on small paper tapes. This was a tape that… You typed in the text, and in the machine it was scrambled, all mixed up, and came out on a strip of paper just over an inch wide, which was perforated. And each perforation was a letter or a number. And you know, I couldn’t say how long it took, but after a little while I could read them as fast as I could read book. That quickly—you had to be very fast. And once you encoded it, for example, to send to Washington, you put it on a machine sending to Washington and on another machine if you wanted it to go to London. But you didn’t have to repeat the message each time. You only had to type it once. The only thing was the code name because if you were going to Toronto and there was danger en route, I would have a special code name for you. And only you or I would know it. I’d sent you a message for you to decode, saying, “don’t take this route, take another route.” So everyone had their own code name, which changed all the time. Everyone knew that. We couldn’t give the enemy the chance to intercept, to figure out our code.