Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

by Liza Mundy

Code breaking required literacy, numeracy, care, creativity, painstaking attention to detail, a good memory, and a willingness to hazard guesses. It required a tolerance for drudgery and a boundless reserve of energy and optimism. A reliable aptitude test had yet to be developed.

This lack of renown or regulation—the fact that it had not yet been established as a man’s field, or even a field—created a wide crack through which women could enter. To do so, it helped to have a high tolerance for the clandestine and irregular, a lack of squeamishness about reading words intended for other people, and a willingness to embrace the unknown. A little bit of desperation was also not a bad thing.

Thanks to his wealth, Fabyan was able to indulge his many curiosities. He was incubating any number of so-called research projects at a place he called Riverbank Laboratories, a suburban “think tank” located on an estate in Geneva, Illinois.

For his part, her benefactor was fond of inviting reputable scholars to soirees at Riverbank and liked to offer lantern displays—the early version of a PowerPoint presentation—in an effort to impress them and persuade them of the Baconian thesis.

One of these, the Vigenère square, developed in the 1500s and named for the French diplomat Blaise de Vigenère, achieves this by creating a twenty-six-by-twenty-six-square letter table, in which twenty-six alphabets are stacked on top of one another, each alphabet beginning with a different letter, with a keyword telling which alphabet to select for each letter to be changed.

To retain his influence, Fabyan offered at his own expense to set up a training school at Riverbank, where military officers and others could take a crash course in code techniques. Before they departed for Europe, the trainees—seventy-one of them, plus William and Elizebeth and Fabyan and a few others—lined up for a panoramic photograph in front of the Aurora Hotel, where the trainees were staying. Each was told to look either to the side or straight ahead. They were creating a biliteral cipher spelling out “Knowledge is power,” one of Francis Bacon’s favorite phrases. Unfortunately they didn’t have quite enough people, so they could spell out only “Knowledge is powe.” There was also a typo in the sense that one man looked the wrong way.

The American Black Chamber,

Berryman hailed from Beech Bottom, West Virginia, and graduated with a math degree from Bethany College.

It was the first time many of the women had spent time in a bona fide workplace—apart from a classroom—and they discovered what workplaces are and have been since the dawn of time: places where one is annoyed and thwarted and underpaid and interrupted and underappreciated.

These were so extensive, involving every Japanese, that the Allied general staff estimated (based on experience at Iwo Jima and Okinawa) that 1 million casualties might be expected by our allied forces, which I think induced Truman to use the atom bomb and to moderate FDR’s unconditional surrender ultimatum and accept Japanese surrender keeping the Emperor.”

At another desk, several other Goucher women, including Jacqueline Jenkins (later the mother of Bill Nye, aka Bill Nye the Science Guy), tracked “neutral shipping” based on daily position reports. Neutral shipping mattered because if those ships deviated from their assigned sea lanes, it might mean they were surreptitiously supplying U-boats.