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

by Liza Mundy

“In the event of total war,” Noyes told her, “women will be needed for this work, and they can do it probably better than men.”

“It was generally believed that women were good at doing tedious work—and as I had discovered early on, the initial stages of cryptanalysis were very tedious, indeed,” recalled Ann Caracristi, whose first job as a code breaker was sorting reams of intercepted traffic.

He also shared his view that many of the world’s people “do not look like a happy people. They are sullen—look like they lack ambition. When you get back you are just proud of the fact that you are an American, and you are willing to do anything you can to preserve the standards.”

But even as the Arlington women were being educated and courted, they were receiving a subtle message that their very involvement in the war effort—these apartments they were renting together, the furniture they were buying, the meals they were cooking, their newfound independence—was creating troubling social changes.

Thanks to cryptanalysts reading JN-25, Nimitz knew more about the planned attack than most Japanese officers did. “He knew the targets; the dates; the debarkation points of the Japanese forces and their rendezvous points at sea; he had a good idea of the composition of the Japanese forces; he knew of the plan to station a submarine cordon between Hawaii and Midway,” noted an internal history.

In 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt and WAVES director Mildred McAfee managed to gain entry for African American women into the WAVES. But there would be no racial experimenting at the stodgy and sometimes paranoid Naval Annex, where top officers considered any newcomer—anybody with an unorthodox background—to be a security risk.

Unlike the Navy, Arlington Hall also had an African American code-breaking unit. This was not so much because the place was unusually liberal-minded, but rather because Eleanor Roosevelt—or somebody at the top—had declared that 12 to 15 percent of the Arlington Hall workforce should be black. It was poor recompense for the fact that many of Arlington’s black residents had been pushed out of their homes by the construction of the Pentagon and other military edifices, but work was welcome and this was better than nothing.

The African American unit monitored the enciphered communications of companies and banks to see what was being transmitted in the global private sector and who was doing business with Hitler or Mitsubishi. They kept a library of 150 systems, with careful files of addresses and characteristics of all the world’s main commercial codes.

The U.S. government began doing the opposite of its wartime recruiting; it made propaganda-type films telling women it was important to leave their jobs, return home, and tend their households. The films pointed out that it was unnatural for women to be breadwinners, taking jobs from men. Quitting one’s job became a matter of patriotism.

For the Navy women, however, their experience of GI benefits was hampered by the old idea that women are not suited for the highest levels of learning.