‘Code Girls’: The women who worked undercover in World War II
‘Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II’ By Liza Mundy Hachette Books, 432 pp.; $28
NEARLY everyone knows of Rosie the Riveter, the patriotic construction worker flexing her biceps in the posters and drawings seen everywhere during World War II. Fewer people know the story that Liza Mundy reveals in “Code Girls,” about the thousands of American women who broke secret enemy messages during the war.
Their work was classified and their identities secret; a necessary part of the intelligence game is staying out of the spotlight. (Even the National Security Agency was once so secret that the government denied its existence, leading many wags to call it No Such Agency.)
Mundy uses a mixture of anecdote and fact to disclose these women’s accomplishments, emphasizing how underpaid they were, and she brings to life many of their stories, especially Dot (Dorothy) Braden’s. Dot Braden Rosie. Mundy interviewed Dot over three years, from June 2014 to April 2017, and she depicts Dot’s life from the day she left her job teaching school and started working for the War Department in 1943. Dot didn’t know exactly what she would be doing, but she’d receive $1,600 per year — double what she made teaching school, the typical job of a college-educated woman at the time. Her story, even her marriage, is sprinkled throughout the book, adding a personal component to esoteric shop talk about intercepted radio traffic, codes and ciphers; frequency counts, cryptanalysis and superencipherment. Mundy also offers brief glimpses of the careers of some of the better-known women, including Agnes Driscoll, a first-rate cryptologist, and Ann Caracristi, who became deputy director of the NSA.
Thousands of women like Dot volunteered to perform work that they swore not to divulge. “The women took their secrecy oath seriously,” Mundy writes, “and they came from a generation where women did not expect — or receive — credit for achievement in public life. They did not constitute the top brass, and they did not write the histories afterward, nor the first-person memoirs. And yet women were instrumental at every stage.” The women worked in secret in Arlington Hall, the Naval Annex in Washington, D.C., and in Dayton, Ohio, where National Cash Register was making a machine called M-9 that helped decrypt German Enigma messages. The penalty for breaking a signed secrecy oath was a $10,000 fine or 10 years in prison. So the women usually talked in “airy terms about [doing] clerical work.” One woman told a Navy admiral who was covertly checking up on her, “I fill inkwells and sharpen pencils and give people what they need.”
The United States had 20,000 codebreakers during the war, and 11,000 were women. Female cryptographic personnel did every job the men did. Many were cryptanalysts, of course, but cryptanalysis requires a lot of paperwork and record-keeping. So many women were hired as clerks, linguists, typists and translators. Teams of women cracked messages encrypted by the Japanese Navy and by the Japanese cipher machines Angooki Taipu A and Angooki Taipu B, which the Americans code-named “Red” and “Purple.” They also helped break messages encrypted by various versions of German Enigma machines.
Decrypting enemy messages was more than just clerical work and solving puzzles — lives depended upon the work. Decrypted messages contributed to military victories over the Germans and the Japanese. Decrypted intelligence led to “Operation Vengeance,” the plan to kill Admiral Yamamoto, who conceived the attack on Pearl Harbor. Thanks to intercepted and decrypted messages, Admiral Nimitz knew more about the Japanese than the Japanese did, which contributed to the American victory at the Battle of Midway.
Because of its value in human lives, cryptanalytic work could be debilitating and sometimes led to nervous breakdowns. And even though they performed the same excruciating work as men, the women were not paid the same. In 1941, the Navy recommended that female college graduates who’d taken a course in cryptanalysis be paid $200 per year less than men with the same qualifications. Women with master’s degrees made $600 less than men with the same degree, and female PhDs made $900 less. Even old-timers like Driscoll, who was the equal of William Friedman, the father of modern cryptanalysis, were undervalued; Friedman was always paid two or three pay grades ahead of her.
But it wasn’t all work. Long-lasting friendships were formed. Some of the women were quite prim and proper for the time, but there were love affairs and marriages.
In researching this extraordinary book, Mundy perused declassified Army, Navy and NSA archives. And she managed to get some, but not all, material declassified. She also examined private collections and oral histories, and conducted interviews with some of the “code girls” and their relatives. Mundy’s book is expansive and precise. It’s anecdotal enough to make it an entertaining read for the layperson, and there’s plenty of technical detail to interest the crypto-nerd.