COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—She sat in her neighbors’ living room in Middlesex, England, waiting to die.
It was Sept. 3, 1939.
Twenty-one-year-old Barbara Brown Saks went to a neighbors’ house with her parents to listen to an important radio announcement. At 11:15 a.m. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s voice filled the airwaves: Britain had declared war against Germany for attacking Poland.
An air-raid siren blared. Saks’ father, an air raid warden, ran down the street, whistle blowing. He’d always said that if Britain and Germany went to war again, London would be razed.
Saks and her mother dashed home for the gas masks, then returned to their neighbors’ to meet their collective fate.
Though she didn’t know it at the time, Saks had decades more to live and would play a role in a top secret project that some historians say shaved years off the war.
But on that black day, the war was new and uncertainty reigned.
“I don’t remember feeling scared, but I certainly wasn’t very happy,” said Saks, who now lives in Colorado Springs. “We settled down waiting to be burned to death, but something very different happened.”
“Something very different” turned out to be absolutely nothing, at first.
Saks later learned that the siren was a false alarm.
For months, the nation waited out the Phony War, as the sides of what would become World War II postured but didn’t fight.
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The boredom was punctuated by loneliness.
Saks’ fiance had left, too. She’d waved goodbye to him the year before, as he sailed away to flight-training school in Egypt.
To Saks, waiting faithfully for him while playing roles on London’s amateur stage wasn’t enough. She visited the Air Ministry in London to help the war effort. It wasn’t long before Saks received a letter ordering her to report for basic training.
She was dismayed and confused. She already had a job as a junior associate at Unilever Ltd. More important, she was rehearsing for “Bittersweet,” a play in which she had a major part.
“I wrote and told them, ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t come yet because I belong to the London Amateur Stage.'”
She received a reply: Report to basic training.
“On Monday, April 22, 1940, instead of opening in ‘Bittersweet,’ I opened in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.
“Isn’t that strange?”
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Saks was sent to a Lincolnshire training station. She worked in the operations room, plotting Spitfires and Hurricanes on a map table.
It was the first act of what Saks, ever a thespian, considers a three-act military career.
The war played out before her, and she was taken by the costumes.
“London was so full of strange uniforms at that time,” said Saks.
Polish, Danish, Norwegian, South African, Australian and eventually American airmen came. “It was quite the international affair.”
The fighting started in the summer of 1940 in English skies.
Saks was on duty on Sept. 15, 1940, now celebrated as Battle of Britain Day and considered a turning point in the European war.
“We had to wait for our fighters to return,” Saks said. “Many made it back safely; some had to land at air bases on the way north because they were crippled or damaged. The air battle really saved Britain and altered the course of the war.
“Had Britain been invaded, there’d have been no D Day.”
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The second act of Saks’ military career began in January 1943 at officer candidate school. She’d passed the officer selection board three years earlier but held out for a job in intelligence.
“We were told that bigwigs from the Air Ministry and War Office would come to interview us and needed six officers for a special, hush-hush job,” she said. “We were told that if we were chosen, to please say yes because the country needed us.
By February Saks went to Bletchley Park, where British code-breakers cracked the secrets of Axis radio transmissions.
Through the end of the European war, Saks served in Hut 3, Block D. She translated groups of five numbers into groups of five letters using a key.
The numbers-turned-letters were bits and pieces of Axis communications that could be decoded after the Germans’ Enigma machine had been cracked.
Saks’ desk was one of the final stops as the Nazi secrets made their way to the hands of top Allied leaders like Winston Churchill.
She knew her work was important. But she wouldn’t understand the role she played in the Enigma saga until 1974, when F. W. Winterbotham’s “The Ultra Secret” detailed the British code-breaking operation.
“There was a little hatch with a little ledge, and every now and again the hatch lifted and a piece of paper was pushed in,” Saks said. “Whoever wasn’t doing anything jumped up and grabbed the piece of paper because speed was of the essence.
“We were on our honor not to stop and read the letters and put them together into words. I wish I’d read one, but I never did.”
Once the translation was recorded on the same piece of paper, Saks would walk it to a chicken-wire basket and press a button.
“It may have sounded boring, but it wasn’t boring at all. It was quite exciting, as a matter of fact.”
Germany’s defeat meant a change of scene, but not a change of scenery for Saks.
She was moved to the Japanese intelligence section, where she scanned tabloid-size sheets of paper filled with groups of three capital letters for identical groups.
“Can you imagine a more boring job?” Saks said. “I was so happy when the Pacific War was over.”
Japan’s surrender ended act two.
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The question “Paris or Brussels?” began act three.
Saks was asked where she’d like to be stationed. Having visited Paris during her school years, she chose Brussels.
She arrived in October 1945 to a former Gestapo headquarters turned Allied post-war office. Her job was compensating members of the underground and their survivors.
She reconciled the accounts of Allied service members rescued by the underground with the accounts of underground members, weeding out the frauds.
“I would bring them upstairs to the office and give them the money,” she said. “When the widows came in, I was in tears, and they were in tears because on the way up, they were telling me what had happened to their husbands. It was quite an emotional time.”
Saks and her fiance, Clive, lost touch during the war. He’d met a woman in Cairo and was planning to marry her.
“I sent a letter that said ‘be happy’ and all the rest of it,” Saks said. “This is when I decided to make the RAF my career. And along comes this American with different ideas!”
That American was 1st Lt. Daniel Saks, who also worked in Brussels.
“Every now and again the door would open and he would say, ‘Gee, I love that girl,’ and disappear,” she said. “Another time he opened the door and said, ‘I’m going to marry that girl one of these days.'”
On April 23, 1946, he did just that.
Section Officer Barbara Saks left the service in May. She took a war-bride ship to America.
They had two kids during a 58-year marriage that ended with Daniel’s death.
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Saks came to Colorado in 2006 to be closer to her son and grandchildren. She moved into a local senior-living facility that fall and has lived there ever since.
For a 94-year-old, Saks is fantastically healthy. She enjoys gazing at Pikes Peak from her top-floor apartment almost as much as she loves completing crossword puzzles and acrostics, a code-breaking game which she calls her passion.
She attends monthly veterans’ get-togethers at The Peak Grill and meetings of Toastmasters and Military Officers Association of America.
She says she didn’t spend much time mulling over her military career until she moved here.
“I’ve never been made more fuss of in the 65 years I’ve been in the U.S. than I have in Colorado Springs,” she said. “I never much thought of myself as being a military person, but here I’ve been in contact so much with the military.”
In 2008 she learned that the local chapter of The Retired Enlisted Association hosts a yearly Battle of Britain Day ceremony, which she has attended ever since.
In 2011 the Royal Air Force arranged for her to be presented with two medals: the Defence Medal and the War Medal. She is proud to wear them on special occasions like the annual Veterans Day parade.
In her final act, though, Saks shuns the spotlight. The honor, she said, should go to those who served on the front lines.
“I always feel that I don’t belong,” she said.
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Information from: The Gazette,
