Joseph Desch
The engineer who led the build of the US Navy's Bombe — and carried the secrecy to his grave, tormented by what he was never allowed to tell.
When the British Bombe could no longer keep up with the four-rotor naval Enigma, the United States built its own. Joseph Desch (1907–1987) led the work at National Cash Register in Dayton, Ohio, where more than a hundred "US Navy Bombes" were made from 1943. They were faster than the British ones and took over much of the work of breaking the U-boat traffic in the Atlantic.
Desch was never allowed to speak of what he had done. The secrecy wore on him, and only decades later — partly through his daughter's research — did his role become known. He is an example of how much of computing's early history played out behind closed doors.