All Rights Reserved. There were at least three others, including Margaret Rock, who worked in Cottage 3 under Dilly Knox, a male code breaker as respected as Turing. But I also thought Virginia Gildersleeve was very crafty. Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers durin And because he prevailed, there was a document that was declassified, in which a wonderful NSA historian named Lou Benson wrote about the recruitment of a number of schoolteachers to work on it. And I thought, “Well that’s an interesting kind of small story for an article of a short book.”. Some of these barrier-breaking code breakers are still alive and in Mundy’s estimation would be “delighted” by developments like the renaming of a residential college at Yale for Grace Hopper, “the queen of code” and “mother of computing” who was a pioneering American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. The Bletchley Circle is a television mystery drama miniseries, set in 1952–53, about four women who worked as codebreakers at Bletchley Park.Dissatisfied with the officials' failure to investigate complex crimes, the women join to investigate for themselves. CNN Sans ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network. If Agnes Driscoll had not diagnosed overall how their system worked, we would have gone into World War II with no ability to read the naval communications of the Japanese. From students at the Seven Sisters colleges in the Northeast to schoolteachers from across the South, some 10,000 women answered the call and became the backbone of America’s intelligence infrastructure. CNN: One of the most interesting moments to me was your assessment that without the intelligence groundwork that had been laid in the years before the war, largely through the innovations of women, the attack on Pearl Harbor could have been even worse. Courtesy of National Security Agency. British codebreaker Alan Turing had a movie, The Imitation Game, made out of his life—and Benedict Cumberbatch to play him. Do you like crossword puzzles and are you engaged to be married? To complete your CNN profile and ensure you are able to receive important account information, please verify your email address. A film about homosexual wartime codebreaker and father of modern computing Alan Turing has been attacked by his biographer. CNN: How did you identify, connect with and interact with the women who became your biggest characters in the book? So while it was still possible, he interviewed a number of schoolteachers who were recruited during the war. My central character, Dot Braden [a schoolteacher from Virginia], described lots of pregnant women and not a lot of stigma if they weren’t married when they were pregnant. And they were wonderful connecting me with further research and ultimately, with some of the families. When I was reading your book, I kept thinking about what the actresses who portrayed those figures said at awards ceremonies for the film: “Invisible no more!”. Women ran the machines that attacked the German Enigma ciphers. Sometimes [the researcher] would give me a list of 12 and 11 wouldn’t work or they would have passed away, but then I would call the one and leave a message and they would call me back – or they would answer the phone. I think in part this is why there was such a clampdown after the war. Apart from just a couple of names of women, there was nothing else about them. There were three wonderful women working there – an NSA historian named Betsy Smoot, the curator of the museum, Jennifer Wilcox, and the incredible librarian there, a woman named Rene Stein, and they just laid out this incredible story about how it wasn’t just the Russian code-breaking project, it was this much, much larger recruitment of schoolteachers and women college graduates. PHOTO: Women Code Breakers of WWII - YouTube. Okay, maybe not everyone’s. One of the last remaining women code-breakers at the heart of the D-Day secrets campaign at Bletchley Park has died aged 94. What do you want American women of our time to hear? With the men gone to fight the war overseas. Recruited from settings as diverse as elite women’s colleges and small Southern towns, more than ten-thousand young American women served as codebreakers for the U.S. Army and Navy during World War II. We would have been a lot worse off if she hadn’t spent more than a decade working on that code system and then teaching it to the male naval officers who would go out to the Pacific and then ultimately write the memoirs and get the credit. CODE GIRLS The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II By Liza Mundy Illustrated. CNN: You mean the Margot Lee Shetterly book and acclaimed film, “Hidden Figures,” which featured the stories of three brilliant African-American women at NASA. Updated And the Nazis mostly saw women as breeders of the future master race. Women broke Japanese codes; they were able to pinpoint where the Japanese army was, on islands in the Pacific where they were likely to be moving, where radio signals were originating, where they were going to, and construct what they called “order of battle,” which is the location and movement of troops. In this, women’s abilities were thought to be superior to men’s. So even during the war we were willing to sacrifice female talent because we didn’t know how to cope with a pregnant woman in uniform. Verification email has been resent. CNN: What are you thinking about most as you launch this project into the world? By then Bletchley was already reliant on a massive female workforce, like so many other wartime institutions. In a couple of cases family members put me in touch with their mothers. I was looking through the personnel file of Ruth Weston, who was Dot Braden’s great friend. CNN: You write about motherhood as a kind of stark dividing line. And it was very frustrating to me [that] there is very little documentation of it, other than some photographs and one pamphlet. A secret African-American unit at Arlington Hall tackled commercial codes - who was doing business with Hitler or Mitsubishi. In the tradition of Hidden Figures and The Girls of Atomic City, Code Girls is the astonishing, untold story of the young American women who cracked key Axis codes, helping to secure Allied victory and revolutionizing the field of cryptanalysis. Obviously, men did not have to leave if their wives got pregnant. Please click the button below to agree to our Terms and Conditions and acknowledge our Privacy Policy. Elizebeth Smith began working at Riverbank Laboratories, Geneva, Illinois, in 1916, in one of the first facilities in the U.S. founded to study cryptography. Untrained in codes and cyphers, Smith pretty much invented the field of cryptology. History behind WWII’s great unsung female codebreaker is finally unravelled Though her actions helped save countless Allied lives, it takes some digging to … I think one way to interpret that is that bringing women in to do the “rote easy” jobs enabled Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to put more men on the landing craft at Normandy. That was key intelligence that would be compiled every day and sent immediately to the Pentagon and then on to the Pacific, so they were an integral part of the military operations. Mundy: The Army women were civilians and the Navy women weren’t. Almost alone among historians, Lou not only noticed that there were a lot of women working on the Venona project, but he also thought that it was worthwhile to interview them. Stars: Rachael Stirling , Julie Graham , Sophie Rundle , Anna Maxwell Martin Even the ones who were married but didn’t have children, they found that tough. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. I think it will.”, On the occasion of the publication of “Code Girls,” and International Day of the Girl on Wednesday, CNN Opinion spoke with Mundy about her experience writing a book about the women she calls “the hidden figures of the greatest generation.”. Success! Site Design: Ilsa Brink, Podcasts, Talks, and TV & Radio Interviews. Liza Mundy has written a thrilling page-turner that illuminates the patriotism, rivalry, and sexism of the code-breakers' world. The outside world hearing this message would not get its meaning but for 18-year-old Ruth Bourne working inside World War II’s code-breaking command, the seemingly innocent message contained an important piece of intelligence which she needed to pass on to her superiors for them to assess if it was part of the decryption puzzle. "—Lynn Povich, authorof The Good Girls Revolt "Code Girls is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary author. The story of Venona’s female code breakers has never been publicly told in full. She and some of the other leaders did see this as a way to try to persuade MIT and Columbia and other places to open up some more slots in graduate school for women. She and others clearly saw what was an opportunity. The great American codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman hasn’t … Directed by Morten Tyldum. Those were the questions asked of many college-age American women by their professors, college presidents, or military officers to assess their suitability to do secret work breaking German and Japanese codes during the Second World War. Over the last 100 years, women have had significant, high-level roles in breaking secret codes – from Nazi ciphers to the secret messages of Al Capone’s gang. Courtesy National Security Agency. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, At Arlington Hall, Ann Caracristi (far right), an English major from Russell Sage College, worked to develop "order of battle" shwoing the location of Japanese troops, PHOTO: I literally cold-called most of the women and they were delighted to hear from someone who wanted to know about this. And I do think that even though certainly there was sexism in the Allied forces, there was also a willingness to tap women’s talents, however temporary. So I went out to the Cryptology Museum at Fort Meade [Maryland], which is attached to NSA. The military turned to young, college-educated women to break enemy codes and help win the war. © 2021 Cable News Network. Navy women broke enemy naval codes used across the world, helping in the effort to shoot down the plane of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto. Their efforts saved lives and shortened the war. Your tally of the scope of the contribution – over half the US code-breaking operation was female – is staggering. If an account exists, we've sent an email with a link to reset your password. It had taken her years to diagnose that entire system of code. CNN: What is the story you want to tell in the book about this time in history for American women? Meet the female codebreakers of Bletchley Park. CNN: The Army code-breaking operation was open to nonwhites, while the Navy’s wasn’t. In the fall of 1941, mysterious letters appeared in … 416 pp. Like a love affair". Code breaking was pivotal to the Allied defeat of Japan at sea and on the Pacific Islands, as well as to neutralizing the threat posed in the Atlantic by Nazi submarines. 7:22 AM EDT, Wed October 11, 2017. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow. There were several women who described really being traumatized by becoming accidentally pregnant – married women who didn’t have enough information about birth control – and having to leave this work that they loved and that they thought was so valuable. Washington had a very strong (though segregated) school system, it had Howard University – there would have been no dearth of smart and accomplished African-American women to recruit from and who could have done this code-breaking work. And that interpretation implies that the women were just a kind of placeholders, that the work they were doing was just kind of pushing paper and not that important, but that’s really not the case. But they were just so uncomfortable with the idea of a pregnant woman in uniform or a pregnant woman serving in the military that they were actually willing to force women to resign, even if they were married, when they became pregnant. With Rachael Stirling, Julie Graham, Sophie Rundle, Anna Maxwell Martin. Now 89, Rozanne Colchester, a code breaker and postwar MI6 agent, recalls the "strange isolation" of Bletchley, the impact of the Cambridge Three and discussing brothels with Graham Greene. The role of female spies is a little-known part of the war effort. Mundy: It was. Our willingness to draft educated women to do really high-level work in the end was a big difference. It’s our own little version of Bletchley Park [the central site for British code breakers during World War II]. In "Code Girls," journalist Liza Mundy tells the irresistible tale of the female cryptographers who learned to crack these diabolically difficult systems. They’re all still female. The assumption was that their partner had had to ship out before they could get married. The Navy was always paranoid about any sort of “unconventional” background. I was fascinated by the way they did see [code breaking and military recruitment] as an opportunity to expand opportunities for women even as they were worried that it would be temporary after the war. The Army code-breaking operation, on the other hand, was segregated, but they did at least have an African-American unit. And they did. And in many cases these women continued working on it for decades for the NSA. Once they did start talking about it, you did get the sense that they really would like to have their contributions acknowledged, and I literally had one woman say to me, “I just hope I live long enough to see the book published.” And a couple of them did not live long enough to see the book published, but at least they knew it was going to be written. I know in some cases you were talking with family members and in other cases, with the women themselves. Of the 10,000-plus staff at the Government Code and Cypher School during World War II, two-thirds were female. PHOTO: In 1952, four women who worked at the wartime code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, reunite to track down a … As I understand it, the German military did bring some women in but didn’t use them for this kind of high-level purpose. With Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Allen Leech. Success! I hope that when my book comes out that maybe there will be an African-American family who says, “You know, our mother did this work, and here are some of her letters” or some documents. They worked breaking German code at Bletchley Hall during WWII, so that’s the former part. Because this work is a very important family history. Mundy: At the very beginning [of the book], there’s a letter from one of the Navy code-breaking officers that shows they didn’t want Jewish women from the Seven Sisters schools, they didn’t want women with family ties to occupied European countries, who might feel sympathy to European countries. Though they went about recruiting women quite differently, both the Army and the Navy saw in American women an untapped resource for improving America’s odds for winning the war. Knox led an all-female team and they decoded the Enigma machine responsible for German military intelligence. Can you elaborate? I do feel like these books and accounts are going to be able to build on each other and fill out history. Source: Lifting the veil of secrecy: Meet the female code-breakers of WWII, by Charlotte Lytton, for CNN, 2013 In January 1945, some 10,000 personnel were working at Bletchley and its outstations. The female code-breakers … I was desperate to do it as fast as I could because I knew that I was up against an actuarial deadline – women might be passing away as I was trying to find their phone number. UK code breakers Bletchley Park. The pamphlet talks mostly about African-Americans’ service in the NSA after the war and what there is on the war focuses mostly on the man who supervised the unit even though you can see in the photograph that it’s women doing the work. Maybe it would be possible to piece together some more of this story and fill out the contributions specifically of the African-American code-breaking women during the war. He insisted that the government consider declassifying its records around the Russian code-breaking project Venona, which started during the war and then continued for many decades during the Cold War. Says Mundy: “We need a few more buildings to be renamed or named after some of these figures and I hope that happens. And I mean former code-breakers, not former females. And so when the war started, they were still skeptical about putting too many women into math majors because they just worried that all of this was going to be yanked away after the war. Thus, out of about 20,000 total American code breakers during the war, some 11,000 were women. Margaret Kelly was only 18 when in 1944 she was posted to the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, during the Second World War. Three veteran servicewomen explain what life was like as part of the code … It was a woman code breaker who, in 1945, became the first American to learn that World War II had officially ended. Female code breakers: The hidden figures of the greatest generation. It was very hard on the women who got pregnant, because they loved the work and suddenly had to leave. It had been overlooked by, I think it’s fair to say, the many historians who have gone through these collections. The evolution of British code-breaking; The changing role of women in British computing; In late 1941, for the first time in British history, conscription for women was introduced. I was struck by the number of adult sons who were really proud of what their mothers had done and had wanted them to tell the story forever. It “freed” men up from doing boring desk work and allowed them to be shipped out. I was astonished when I went to the National Archives that although it was scattered and uneven, that there really was a great deal of material – rosters, memos, oral histories. In her new book “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II,” journalist Liza Mundy tells the stories of many of these women who, because they were sworn to secrecy about the nature of their work, have been all but forgotten. And when African-American women were admitted to the WAVES in 1945, they were not admitted to the code-breaking facility for that same fear of anybody who seemed like an outsider. $28.. During World War II, the English mathematical genius Alan Turing tries to crack the German Enigma code with help from fellow mathematicians. Because there had been fraternizing, and women had left their small towns and come to Washington and begun to live very different lives. There was just very little information on them. She stayed with the NSA after the war and would have liked to have continued working there, her daughters think, but there was a handwritten note [in her file from] when she got pregnant that said, “I have to resign my position as a mathematician because I am needed at home with my baby.” And that’s what women were told. At least 80 percent of the Navy’s domestic code breakers—some 4,000—were female. Mundy: When I was doing my research, I read the memoir of Virginia Gildersleeve, who was the dean of Barnard College. Mundy: It’s hard even to convey what it was like. And they did have to leave, because there were no supports for them – at that point we felt like child care was a communist institution. I feel like there was a lot of uneasiness with that. Mundy may have focused primarily on the Japanese code-breaking group due to her choice to tell the personal stories of a number of code breakers, especially Dorothy (Dot) Braden, now Dorothy … 'Code Girls' tells the captivating story of America's female World War II codebreakers Like 'Hidden Figures,' this well-crafted book reveals a remarkable slice of unacknowledged US history. The Army and Navy's code breakers had … CNN: Can you describe how you came to this project? The ones who had children almost always felt like they had to leave. I was surprised that there was more out there that was hiding in plain sight than I thought. She was older than some of the women who served in the WAVES [the women’s branch of the US Naval Reserve, better known as Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service] like Wellesley’s Mildred McAfee. In 1952, four women who worked at the wartime code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, reunite to track down a serial killer. Liza Mundy: Women who were recruited as code breakers helped America and its allies win World War II, The hidden story of these patriotic women deserves to be more widely known, Mundy says. The Imitation Game, film review: The breaking of a code-breaker. And the Navy really agonized over its no-pregnancy rule, because they worried women would get abortions. Clockwise from top left: Betty Webb, Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, Joan Joslin, Joyce Aylard, … I would obtain rosters with maiden names, and I had a researcher with the Washington Post helping me track down what their married names might have been and if they still had a phone number. What I tried to show in the book was that the women were really doing important brain work and they were an integral part to the actual military operations. the riveting, untold story of the brave young american women who cracked german and japanese code to help win world war ii! It was almost as if they’d been waiting for someone to come along who wanted to tell that story. I assume that they were schoolteachers, but I don’t know that. There were also definitely times when I thought to myself, “If I had only taken this on 20 years ago or 15 years ago, there would have been more living women to interview and maybe that would have been better.” But I do think that thanks to “Hidden Figures” and books like “Rise of the Rocket Girls” that there is more of a receptive readership now, that people are more prepared to believe and accept that these women existed and that they played central roles in the conflict – that this is not a peripheral or niche story. , when she organized the country’s first code-breakers Can you describe how you came to project. Turing has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow young, college-educated women to break codes... S abilities were thought to be shipped out ], which is attached to NSA Policy. Fair to say, the Imitation Game, film review: the Untold story the... Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Allen Leech a clampdown after the war to... 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