Lecture to focus on role of female codebreakers during World War II
A little-known group of women in England used their brilliance to help the Allies win World War II. Texarkana College Trustee Ernie Cochran will give a presentation Monday on how the women of Bletchley Park, along with others, helped break the code of messages sent to the enemy.
“Codebreakers:
The Geese that Laid the Golden Eggs, but Never Cackled,” will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Perot Leadership Museum at the Palmer Memorial Library. The event is part of TC’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
Cochran, who has been on the board since 2016, began studying WWII at the age of 12. He said the title of the lecture is from a quote by Winston Churchill.
“You don’t really hear about it. They can’t tell,” Cochran said of those who knew of the codebreakers’ activities. “I wasn’t until the ’70s that any of Bletchley Park came out. You were still under penalty of death or 30 years for leaking this stuff.”
While the soldiers were in the water, on the ground and in the sky, nonmilitary people, including mathematicians, chess players, musicians and foreign language experts were cracking the codes to let those in combat know what was happening on the other side of the line. They used Enigma machines, invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius, which contained a combination of mechanical and electrical subsystems, to determine how to break the codes.
“If you go back and look at all these historic battles … every time we were reading their mail really, really good, we tore ‘em up,” Cochran said. “Every time the generals ignored the codebreakers … it usually bit them.”
The codebreakers were also essential in helping England during the battle, he said.
“What the codebreakers did is they put us, especially early when England was being starved, they bought
England time to get on their feet and for America to get our war machine going to where we could beat the Germans and the Japanese,” Cochran said. “Without the codebreakers, we couldn’t get supplies to England. Without them we were in trouble.”
He added that the codebreakers didn’t care what the messages contained, that they just passed them on to those who could get the information where it needed to go as soon as possible.
“They had no idea or interest what those messages said,” he said. “Their job was to get it broke so they could get reading. This is time sensitive stuff. If you’re gonna catch someone with their britches down, you gotta do it while their britches are down. You can’t do it a week later.”
Suzy Irwin, TC’s director of institutional advancement and public relations, said bringing lectures like “Codebreakers” helps support the academic training the school provides and brings to the forefront the practical application of many of the subjects taught there.
“This is just a great example of how mathematics and linguistics and music and different liberal arts training subjects can really be relevant in all kinds of different fields,” Irwin said. “The codebreakers is a fascinating topic that’s relevant just as much today as it was many years ago in wartime efforts.”
The lecture is free and open to the public.