FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Dayton Codebreakers

In 1942, in an inconspicuous building at the National Cash Register company (NCR), Dayton, Ohio native Joe Desch began to design and build a machine that would ultimately allow the Allies to read the messages of Hitler’s Navy until World War II was brought to an end.

“Dayton Codebreakers,” premiering ______at ______on ______, tells the remarkable story of Joe Desch. Interviews with Desch’s daughter Debbie Anderson and others along with archival photos and film footage detail the contributions Desch made to help win World War II.

“I think that as we recount this piece of history, illustrating it with photographs and rare bits of footage, our audience may be able to relive the struggle this small band of engineers and Navy personnel waged in Dayton,” notedAnderson.

The role Desch played in the intelligence wars began in 1942 when the Navy approached NCR because of Desch, who was a pioneer in electronics research. The Navy needed to set up a program that could break into the complex enciphering of the German Enigma machine. English codebreakers at BletchleyPark in England were successful at reading earlier versions of the Enigma code but then the Germans changed to a more complex machine. “In February 1942 the Germans changed over to the four-wheel Enigma. And that blacked BletchleyPark out” explains Tony Sale, British historian and retired MI5 officer and member of the Bletchley Park Trust. Losses of shipments to besieged Britain reached disastrous proportions. The US Navy wanted an end to the peril.

In complete secrecy, 121electro-mechanical Navy computing machines, called bombes, were designed and built in NCR’s Building 26 and shipped in secret to Washington, D.C. to be used against the enemy. These machines were able to decipher Enigma messages in a matter of hours, giving the Allies an enormous advantage.

For this accomplishment Desch received the Medal for Merit from President Harry Truman in 1947. Truman wrote in the citation that accompanied Desch’s medal that “by his brilliant originality, superb skill and immeasurable perseverance, he contributed essentially to the effectiveness of important technical developments of great significance in the successful conclusion of the war.” But Desch pledged to keep his work a secret for life and never expected any other recognition for it.

Desch did keep his secret until his death in 1987, but from time to time he told his daughter stories, often humorous, about the characters and events that accompanied the war work. She learned of Cmdr. Ralph Meader, ever-present companion to the Desches, who lived in the Desch home and who Desch felt the Navy had placed there to make sure no word of the program leaked. He also talked of the hundreds of WAVES who worked on the project and lived at NCR’s Sugar Camp. Their fun-loving attitudes helped soften the pressure and challenge of his and their work.

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“Dayton Codebreakers”

Joe’s daughter Debbie remembered her father’s bits of the story and when her sons wanted to learn more about their grandfather, she embarked on a journey to find the complete story. For more than 12 years Debbie went to library after library, veteran after veteran and slowly began to fill the gaps in what her father had told her. “Debbie’s search into her father’s secret work is a compelling story,” said producer Aileen LeBlanc who has worked with Anderson on the documentary for more than two years. LeBlanc and Anderson worked in collaboration with the Montgomery County Historical Society and added interviews with surviving veterans of the project, and historians David Kahn, Tony Sale and Eric Rust. Original music was composed and performed for the film by Michael and Sandy Bashaw of Dayton.

Additional information about “Dayton Codebreakers” is available at

“Dayton Codebreakers” was produced by Aileen Leblanc and is being presented by ThinkTV, Greater Dayton Public Television.

ThinkTVis the most widely used non-profit educational, cultural, and informational service in southwestern Ohio. Each week, more than 750,000 viewers watch quality programming on ThinkTV16 and ThinkTV14. More than 100 school districts, serving 20,000 teachers and more than 400,000 students, receive ThinkTV’s daily educational programming and services.

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