National Cash Register, Joe Desch & the Four Rotor Enigma

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2024-04-25 23:30:07

Debbie Anderson knew in the summer of 1986 that time was running out for her 79-year-old father. After a series of small strokes and then a broken hip, Joe Desch, a man of iron independence, was forced to recuperate in a Kettering nursing home. There he took with him the painful secret he had kept coiled inside for most of his life.

"He seemed still to be fighting battles that should have been settled years ago," Anderson said. "There were little things that would set him off on tirades."

Anderson knew only that her father's pain and anger were tied to the World War II codebreaking research he had done at Dayton's National Cash Register Co. — the work that had driven him to a nervous breakdown, but which he had never been able to talk about, not even to explain the Congressional Medal for Merit he had received for his war service.

But then, one morning that summer, Anderson thought she had found a way to help her father unburden his heart. There was an article in the paper about the late Capt. Joseph Rochefort, who was receiving a posthumous medal from President Ronald Reagan for cracking a World War II Japanese code and providing the key to one of the U.S. Navy's greatest victories at the Battle of Midway.