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

by Liza Mundy

That women were considered better suited for code-breaking work—as the letter that Rear Admiral Noyes sent to Ada Comstock suggested—wasn’t a compliment. To the contrary. What this meant was that women were considered better equipped for boring work that required close attention to detail rather than leaps of genius.

One electrical company asked for twenty female engineers from Goucher, with the added request, “Select beautiful ones for we don’t want them on our hands after the war.”

Through their brainwork, the women had an impact on the fighting that went on. This is an important truth, and it is one that often has been overlooked.

He stated, “I believe that our cryptographers… in the war with Japan did as much to bring that war to a successful and early conclusion as any other group of men.” That more than half of these “cryptographers” were women was nowhere mentioned.

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.

Nobody knows how Agnes Driscoll felt. Nobody bothered to take an oral history from one of the greatest cryptanalysts in the world.

But even once planners grasped the difficulty of fighting a two-ocean war using only men, the idea of putting women in uniform remained controversial. “Who will then do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the humble homey tasks to which every woman has devoted herself; who will nurture the children?” thundered one congressman. People worried that military service would imperil women’s femininity and render them unmarriageable. Many believed servicewomen would be, in effect, fully embedded “camp followers,” a euphemism for prostitutes and hangers-on who followed soldiers from post to post.

The chair of the Senate’s Committee on Naval Affairs argued that “admitting women into the Navy would break up homes and amount to a step backward in civilization,” as Gildersleeve put it.

Behind the success of the U.S. Navy were the code breakers. “The success of undersea warfare is to a certain extent due to the success with which Japanese code messages were translated,” noted a naval report. An American naval commander pointed out in a postwar memo that sometimes a convoy might slip through, but only because U.S. submarines were kept so busy by information from decoded messages that they could not handle all the convoys they were alerted to.

A number of the research department’s mathematical staff were female. Like everybody else, the Navy was eager to locate women capable of doing higher math—the very field that women long had been discouraged from entering—and the Naval Annex put out the word to boot-camp evaluators, asking them to be on the lookout for enlisted women who scored high on the math aptitude test. These women had not enjoyed anything like the same educational opportunities the men had, nor the chance to embark on distinguished careers as engineers and academic mathematicians. They did, however, have the aptitude, the desire, and the ability.