Photo: US Navy History and Heritage Command #80-G-K-14433.  Click image to enlarge.  See a closer and somewhat clearer view.

The DC Mall in 2010

DC Mall Map 1945 (USGS)

The Wash­ing­ton DC Na­tion­al Mall when my Mom and Dad worked at the Navy Depart­ment during World War II, which is how they met. The Navy Department building is at right center, just above the trees, the front half of the long series of structures along the right side of the Mall, entrance at Constitution Avenue and 17th Street NW and extending to 19th St NW (a street I would live on briefly after I got out of the Army 22 years later, but a mile north near DuPont Circle). The rest of the series (from 19th St towards the Lincoln Memorial) comprises the Munitions Building, which was the Pentagon before there was Pentagon. These were all built in 1918. The structures that line the left of the Mall in the top photo are temporary buildings (Tempos) I-J-K-L that housed the US Navy Bureau of Supplies and Accounts during the War. The complex at the bottom (on the Washington Monument grounds) — Tempos 3-4-5 — was occupied by the Bureau of Ships. All these buildings are gone now, replaced by gardens and memorials including the World War II memorial at the east (near, in this photo) end of the Reflecting Pool, where the oval-ish pool is in the photo, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at about the far end of the Munitions building in the photo. Constitution Avenue (a.k.a. B Street) is to the right; the diagonal street is Virginia Avenue, the Lincoln Memorial is at the far end of the pool, and Memorial Bridge connects to Arlington, Virginia, and the Arlington National Cemetery, where my WWII Marine veteran Uncle Pete is buried, not far from the Iwo Jima memorial (he was there).  All of this is in walking distance.

National Mall aerial view, 1946. The temporary buildings where my Mom lived are in the bottom half of the image, left of center on the "peninsula". The Navy Department is above the right end of the mall. The Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge are at far left; the Washington Monument is at far right with long shadow. The corresponding map at left labels the buildings; it's just a small section of a much larger map. My father was still working in the Navy Building in 1946, and soon after that he'd be working in Tempos I-J-K-L alongside the Reflecting Pool when they were occupied by the newly formed CIA. He took me to all of these buildings when I was a child. The temporary buildings as well as the Navy and Munitions buildings were demolished between 1964 and 1971.

WAVES barracks and Signals work

I had always assumed that my Mom lived in the temporary buildings that were adjacent to the Reflecting Pool, because I remember her pointing them out to me in the 1950s, picnicking on the Lincoln Memorial lawn. But I see on the Federal Works Agency map that behind them (about where the FDR memorial is today) were other temporary buildings explicitly designated as dormitories and residence halls and identified by the Historical Society of Washington DC as Navy WAVES barracks, naming Curie Hall as an example. So it turns out Mom was pointing at buildings that were behind the ones we could see: WAVE Quarters B, West Potomac Park (but see note 6 below).

And what were all these WAVES and sailors (like my mom and dad) doing there throughout the war? Signals Intelligence. Military messages were generally transmitted in ciphertext, i.e. encrypted. Some of the WAVES and sailors worked in cryptography, encoding and decoding Navy messages as well as trying to break the codes of Axis messages, such as U-boat and Japanese Imperial Navy traffic. Others (like my mom and dad) sent and received Navy messages, presumably encrypted, in Morse code. Nobody was allowed to talk about this work, not even after the war, but the reason I know they weren't codebreakers is that they were enlisted, not officers. To break Axis codes, the cryptographers were aided by massive "bombe" machines like the one at left. Although originally the codebreakers worked in the Navy building, by late 1942 the operation had outgrown the space so the Navy took over the 38-acre campus of Mount Vernon Seminary at 3801 Nebraska Avenue, about four miles NNW of the Navy building, and it became the new top-secret Naval Communications Annex. More about my Mom's Navy work here.