In the winter of 1927, 6-year-old Ida Irene Fields wasn’t in school — instead, like most of her young classmates in Kathleen, she was weeding strawberry fields and picking the red fruit near the sharecropper’s home she lived in with her parents and younger siblings.
“She didn’t help with planting until she was 10,” said her daughter, Georgia Dodd, a retired Polk County school teacher. “She also had to watch the four younger siblings many, many days so that Grandma could pick.”
From the humble beginnings of a sharecropper’s daughter, she grew up to graduate as salutatorian of Kathleen High School in 1940, excel in business school, then join the Women’s Army Corps in the summer of 1943. She reached the rank of tech sergeant and worked near the Pentagon to enter data for American code breakers, contributing to the Allies’ victory over Japan during World War II.
Last month, the Lakeland City Commission and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Annie H. Darracott Chapter, marked the 10th anniversary of Dodd’s passing by proclaiming March 18, 2024, as Technical Sergeant Ida Fields Dodd Day in the city of Lakeland.
The audience in the packed City Commission chambers listened as Mayor Pro Tem Stephanie Madden and Georgia Dodd took everyone back to September 1943 and told the story of Ida Fields (she wasn’t married yet) taking the train to Tampa to join the WACs and then traveling to Daytona Beach for basic training.
“After weeks of marching and KP duty, she was recognized for her typing and bookkeeping skills and on Oct. 28, 1943, she was assigned and transferred to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.,” Madden said.
Fields learned to use IBM key punch and collation machines as a member of the Second Signal Service Battalion in Arlington — one of only several hundred women who worked nine days on, took one day off, and then started her nine-day shift again. She rotated regularly from day shifts to swing shifts and midnight shifts.
Exposing a closely guarded secret
Georgia Dodd researched what her mother and colleagues did to contribute to cracking the Japanese code. The code was one of the most closely guarded secrets during the war and allowed Japanese ships and troops to maneuver in secret until Fields and her colleagues helped uncover their language.
“It turns out that every day at noon, every at-sea Japanese ship signaled its new time, position, course, speed and other movement details to Tokyo — and now directly to the Allied codebreakers,” Dodd said. “Being able to decode the daily location of every ship ‘greatly assisted’ the American Seventh Fleet in planning air raids and submarine attacks.”
She said that after one of those American raids on a tiny island in the Pacific, near New Guinea, Americans recovered the most current version of the Japanese codebook. As Japanese soldiers retreated from the island, they had buried their signal codebook, along with several other diplomatic documents, in a strong box rather than risk burning them and having the smoke give away their location.
The strongbox flooded before the Allies found it, so all the pages had to be separated, dried and photocopied. Then those photocopies were sent to the WACs’ station at Arlington Hall.
Transcribing punch cards
“Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Mama and dozens of other WACs worked overlapping nine-hour shifts to retype those pages from the hard-won and hard-to-read photocopies,” Dodd said. “Keypunch machines converted the series of number and letter codes into holes in punch cards that could then be read, formatted, stored and reprinted by the earliest forerunner of today’s computer.”
The punch cards the WACs labored day and night to create and the reprinted pages of code were sent to the codebreakers for decoding. The holes in the cards were read by the IBM machines, which could detect similarities and repetitions in phrases or number patterns.
“Because of the WACs data entry assistance and recreating the actual codebook and then in reading the daily codes, the Allies increased their number of decrypted Japanese messages from fewer than 2,000 in January to more than 36,000 in March of 1944,” Dodd said. “The intelligence windfall was so beneficial to MacArthur that he upped the Pacific invasion timetable by a full two months.”
Following the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, on Sept. 2, 1945, Emperor Hirohito surrendered.
“She did that, she helped,” Dodd said proudly. “My Mama, Tech Sgt. Ida Irene Fields Dodd, helped the Allies win the war in the Pacific.”
Homecoming
Following the Japanese surrender, Dodd helped to process returning GIs at Governor’s Island in New York. Then she was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and finally honorably discharged at Fort Bragg, North Carolina on Feb. 25, 1946. Two months later, she married her hometown sweetheart, George Monroe Dodd, who had been stationed in Europe, and the two raised four children. Dodd also worked for the Polk County Public Schools as a lunchroom worker.
She died on March 16, 2014, and was buried in Mount Tabor Baptist Church Cemetery in North Lakeland next to her husband.
Then for a few minutes in 2024, her children, grandchildren, family and friends gathered to remember “her selfless action, unwavering devotion and extraordinary talents that saved our nation and many lives in the armed forces.”
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