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

by Liza Mundy

Frank Sinatra would sing at Club 400,

There were splendid hotels in Washington: the Willard, the Carlton, the Statler, the Mayflower. Most held frequent dances in their ballrooms, often sponsored by individual U.S. states, with big bands and lots of swing dancing.

People of all backgrounds were thrown together. The war, for her, was “this period of very creative thinking and concern about what life was all about, and what societies were all about.”

Saga of Myself,

The Americans knew exactly where the enemy’s most valuable—and irreplaceable—naval commander would be, and when. Yamamoto was known for punctuality. Far

Operation Vengeance,

They went window-shopping downtown and perfected the art of looking dressy with very little money. Dot managed to acquire a silver fox stole.

There was the actor Tony Randall—later famous as Felix Unger in The Odd Couple—clowning around (at one point he danced on a table) as he waited for the intelligence summary to be taken to the Pentagon.

By September 1943, most U-boats had been swept from the Atlantic waters. This was thanks not only to the new high-speed bombes but also to a host of other Allied war measures: advances in radar, sonar, and high-frequency direction finding; more aircraft carriers and long-range aircraft; better convoy systems.

SIGABA

unlike the German Enigma, it was never cracked.

The women at the Naval Annex followed the D-Day message traffic all night, reading the invasion from the vantage point of the opposing Germans.

The women learned that the French Resistance had acted swiftly to cut German communications. So much resistance, so many brave men working to defend the free world, had come together. “Even seated at our desks,” Ann White would later write, “we felt the power of our country.”

Japan hoped that if it could create sufficiently terrible casualties among the sailors, Marines, airmen, and soldiers launching attacks on the occupied islands, the United States might seek an early termination and Japan might gain a negotiated peace.

Leyte Gulf was the largest naval battle of the war, possibly the largest naval battle in history.

Battle of the Bulge. It was Hitler’s last big roll of the dice, the biggest, bloodiest battle the United States fought in Europe. And it was one of the war’s worst intelligence failures. Allied code breakers had noticed a radio silence suggesting the Germans were planning an attack, but the military did not pay sufficient attention and the soldiers were taken by surprise.

JAH was handled by a woman named Virginia Dare Aderholdt.

It was a nightmare finding housing after the war. Everybody in America needed a place to live.

In a postwar, Cold War America, child care was viewed with suspicion, as the kind of thing communists used to raise their children collectively.

The name associated with Venona is that of Meredith Gardner, a linguist and book breaker who brilliantly was able to interpret messages and recover code groups, leading to several prosecutions of Soviet

The nation lost talent that the war had developed. The 1950s and 1960s would not bring another critical mass of women to succeed the wartime code breakers, and in the 1970s and 1980s, women at the NSA would have to fight a battle for parity and recognition all over again.

Elizebeth Smith Friedman, another ex-schoolteacher, took a job in 1916 at an eccentric Illinois estate called Riverbank, where she helped found the U.S. government’s first code-breaking bureau. She later broke the codes of rumrunners during Prohibition. Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia