TMRC and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WWII military slang (see also foobar).

TMRC and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to

have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WWII
military slang (see also foobar). It seems likely that
`kluge' came to MIT via alumni of the many military electronics
projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's
venerable Building 20, in which TMRC is also located) during
the war.

The variant `kludge' was apparently popularized by the
Datamation article mentioned above; it was titled "How
to Design a Kludge" (February 1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling was
probably imported from Great Britain, where kludge has an
independent history (though this fact was largely unknown to
hackers on either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate in
the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers over the First and
Second Edition versions of this entry; everybody used to think
kludge was just a mutation of kluge). It now appears that
the British, having forgotten the etymology of their own `kludge'
when `kluge' crossed the Atlantic, repaid the U.S. by lobbing the
`kludge' orthography in the other direction and confusing their
American cousins' spelling!

The result of this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S. hackers
pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly for its
meaning and pronunciation, as `kludge'. (Phonetically, consider
huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as opposed to sludge, judge,
budge, and fudge. Whatever its failings in other areas, English
spelling is perfectly consistent about this distinction.) British
hackers mostly learned /kluhj/ orally, use it in a restricted
negative sense and are at least consistent. European hackers have
mostly learned the word from written American sources and tend to
pronounce it /kluhj/ but use the wider American meaning!

Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's
meaning.