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

407 Pages·2017·18.96 MB·English

by  Liza Mundy

Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Liza Mundy
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“Waves of the Navy,” Words by Betty D. St. Clair, Music by Elizabeth K.
Ender, © 1944 WB Music Corp. (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Used by
Permission of Alfred Publishing, LLC.
Permission to quote from the lyrics of “Ginny the Ninny of the First Platoon”
was kindly given by the descendants of Louise Allen Armstrong.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mundy, Liza,
1960–author.
Title: Code girls : the untold story of the American women code breakers who
helped win World War II / Liza Mundy.
Description: First edition. | New York : Hachette Books, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020069 | ISBN 9780316352536 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780316439893 (large print) | ISBN 9781478922704 (audio book) | ISBN
9781478922711 (audio download) | ISBN 9780316352550 (ebook) Subjects:
LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Cryptography. | World War, 1939–1945—
Participation, Female. | Cryptographers—United States—History—20th
century. | Cryptography—United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC D810.C88 M86 2017 | DDC 940.54/86730922—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020069
ISBNs: 978-0-31635253-6 (hardcover), 978-0-31643989-3 (large print
hardcover), 978-0-31635255-0 (ebook) E3-20170909-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
The Secret Letters
Introduction: “Your Country Needs You, Young Ladies”
PART I
“In the Event of Total War Women Will Be Needed”
Chapter One: Twenty-Eight Acres of Girls
Chapter Two: “This Is a Man’s Size Job, but I Seem to Be Getting Away with
It”
Chapter Three: The Most Difficult Problem
Chapter Four: “So Many Girls in One Place”
PART II
“Over All This Vast Expanse of Waters Japan Was Supreme”
Chapter Five: “It Was Heart-Rending”
Chapter Six: “Q for Communications”
Chapter Seven: The Forlorn Shoe
Chapter Eight: “Hell’s Half-Acre”
Chapter Nine: “It Was Only Human to Complain”
Chapter Ten: Pencil-Pushing Mamas Sink the Shipping of Japan
PART III
The Tide Turns
Chapter Eleven: Sugar Camp
Chapter Twelve: “All My Love, Jim”
Chapter Thirteen: “Enemy Landing at the Mouth of the Seine”
Chapter Fourteen: Teedy
Chapter Fifteen: The Surrender Message
Chapter Sixteen: Good-Bye to Crow
Epilogue: The Mitten
Photos
Acknowledgments
Also by Liza Mundy
Advance praise for Code Girls
Bibliography
Notes
Newsletters
To all these women,
and to Margaret Talbot
I’m in some kind of hush, hush business. Somewhere in Wash. D.C. If I
say anything I’ll get hung for sure. I guess I signed my life away. But I
don’t mind it.
—Jaenn Magdalene Coz, writing to her mother in 1945
Author’s Note
In researching and writing this book over several years, I drew from three large
archival collections of documents produced by the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy
code-breaking units during and after the war. Most were classified for many
decades, and now can be found at the National Archives at College Park,
Maryland. The collections run to hundreds of boxes and include thousands of
memos, internal histories, reports, minutes, and personnel rosters, citing
everything from lists of merchant ships sunk, to explanations of how certain
codes and ciphers were broken, to names and addresses of newly arrived code
breakers, to captured codebooks. I filed Mandatory Declassification Review
requests with the National Security Agency, resulting in the recent
declassification of more material, including some fifteen oral histories conducted
by NSA staff over the years with women code breakers, as well as volumes of a
multipart history of wartime Arlington Hall. (Somewhat astonishingly, other
parts of that history remain classified.) I located some forty more oral histories,
as well as scrapbooks and rosters, at the Library of Congress and other archives.
I consulted scholarly articles and the many books on code breaking and the war.
I interviewed more than twenty surviving code breakers, located in various
ways. A few had contacted NSA, or their family members had. I placed notices
on websites. I obtained rosters and consulted databases to find contact
information. In other cases, friends and acquaintances provided names, or, often,
one woman would lead me to another. I also obtained civilian and military
personnel records that are publicly available in the National Archives personnel
records facility in St. Louis, Missouri. These were supplemented by high school
and college yearbooks, scrapbooks, recruiting pamphlets, newspapers, personal
letters, and the very good alumnae records that many colleges maintain. In some
cases, of course, I had to trust the women’s memory, but a surprising amount of
what they recollected could be confirmed with archival records.
In just a few instances, however, archives proved insufficient. I wish, for
example, that I could include more information on Arlington Hall’s African
American unit, but very few records of that unit seem to exist.
I have included dialogue only when it was related to me, or recited in an oral
history, by someone who was present. I use maiden names and other terms of the
time, except in the epilogue, acknowledgments, and notes.