Despite these historic inequities, the young women’s arrival could not come soon enough for the Navy. In May 1942, none other than Commander John Redman—head of the code-breaking operation, known as OP-20-G—wrote each female student, begging her to get herself to the Navy building as fast as she could. “Could you start within a week or two after the close of College?” Redman asked Ann White and Bea Norton and the other Wellesley seniors. He sent the same letter to each woman at Goucher and the other cooperating schools. “There is important work here waiting to be done,” Redman told them,
