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!”. Just because these women agreed to be invisible to the enemy, however, doesn’t mean they need to be invisible to history. What do you want American women of our time to hear? The Army and Navy's code breakers had … 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. 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. '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. 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. Mundy: The thought that recurs to me, in addition to just being grateful to be able to try to tell this story, is the phrase “hidden figures.” These women really were the hidden figures of the greatest generation. The Navy was always paranoid about any sort of “unconventional” background. 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. 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: And as I tried to show in the book, any number of other federal agencies were competing for these women – the OSS [Office of Strategic Services], the FBI, defense industries. Three veteran servicewomen explain what life was like as part of the code … They’re all still female. I literally cold-called most of the women and they were delighted to hear from someone who wanted to know about this. British codebreaker Alan Turing had a movie, The Imitation Game, made out of his life—and Benedict Cumberbatch to play him. 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 Army code-breaking operation, on the other hand, was segregated, but they did at least have an African-American unit. 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. 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. The story of Venona’s female code breakers has never been publicly told in full. 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. © 2021 Cable News Network. 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. About three-quarters of these were women. 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 … And I thought, “Well that’s an interesting kind of small story for an article of a short book.”. CNN Sans ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network. Password reset email has been resent. Female code breakers: The hidden figures of the greatest generation. Even the ones who were married but didn’t have children, they found that tough. the riveting, untold story of the brave young american women who cracked german and japanese code to help win world war ii! The ones who had children almost always felt like they had to leave. In a couple of cases family members put me in touch with their mothers. Her renown led to work for the military during World War I, when she organized the country’s first code-breakers. 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 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. 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. One of the last remaining women code-breakers at the heart of the D-Day secrets campaign at Bletchley Park has died aged 94. And it was very frustrating to me [that] there is very little documentation of it, other than some photographs and one pamphlet. Mundy: The Army women were civilians and the Navy women weren’t. Navy women broke enemy naval codes used across the world, helping in the effort to shoot down the plane of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto. CNN: What are you thinking about most as you launch this project into the world? But the Army operation was mostly civilian women, and it was OK there. 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. 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. PHOTO: It had taken her years to diagnose that entire system of code. Courtesy National Security Agency. They worked breaking German code at Bletchley Hall during WWII, so that’s the former part. And they did. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow. In 1952, four women who worked at the wartime code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, reunite to track down a … And the Nazis mostly saw women as breeders of the future master race. Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers durin 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. So I went out to the Cryptology Museum at Fort Meade [Maryland], which is attached to NSA. 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. 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. All Rights Reserved. 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. 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. 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. Liza Mundy has written a thrilling page-turner that illuminates the patriotism, rivalry, and sexism of the code-breakers' world. 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. 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. Untrained in codes and cyphers, Smith pretty much invented the field of cryptology. Clarke wasn’t the only female code breaker at Bletchley Park. In "Code Girls," journalist Liza Mundy tells the irresistible tale of the female cryptographers who learned to crack these diabolically difficult systems. 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. With Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Allen Leech. The Imitation Game, film review: The breaking of a code-breaker. There was just very little information on them. CNN: The Army code-breaking operation was open to nonwhites, while the Navy’s wasn’t. And I mean former code-breakers, not former females. 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. CODE GIRLS The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II By Liza Mundy Illustrated. CNN: How did you identify, connect with and interact with the women who became your biggest characters in the book? 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. The assumption was that their partner had had to ship out before they could get married. It was a woman code breaker who, in 1945, became the first American to learn that World War II had officially ended. 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. I do feel like these books and accounts are going to be able to build on each other and fill out history. Meet the female codebreakers of Bletchley Park. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. Directed by Morten Tyldum. Women Code Breakers of WWII - YouTube. Courtesy of National Security Agency. "—Lynn Povich, authorof The Good Girls Revolt "Code Girls is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary author. By then Bletchley was already reliant on a massive female workforce, like so many other wartime institutions. I was looking through the personnel file of Ruth Weston, who was Dot Braden’s great friend. 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. 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. Thus, out of about 20,000 total American code breakers during the war, some 11,000 were women. Although Enigma is about World War 2, especially the Battle of the Atlantic, and the attempts to counteract the Germans by breaking their Enigma codes, the strongest part of the movie focuses on the fictional tensions and intrigues amongst the team at Bletchley Park, where the team has to not only uncover the secrets of Enigma but also try to unmask a possible German spy in their midst as well as investigating the mysterious disappearance of a beautiful female code-breaker … 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. 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. At least 80 percent of the Navy’s domestic code breakers—some 4,000—were female. I feel like there was a lot of uneasiness with that. It had been overlooked by, I think it’s fair to say, the many historians who have gone through these collections. Says Mundy: “We need a few more buildings to be renamed or named after some of these figures and I hope that happens. And in many cases these women continued working on it for decades for the NSA. And they were wonderful connecting me with further research and ultimately, with some of the families. 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. The tragic story of pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing makes for an interesting and enjoyable movie… She and others clearly saw what was an opportunity. Success! 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. Success! 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. 416 pp. UK code breakers Bletchley Park. Because there had been fraternizing, and women had left their small towns and come to Washington and begun to live very different lives. It was very hard on the women who got pregnant, because they loved the work and suddenly had to leave. Mundy: It’s really the work of Agnes Driscoll, who was working on the Japanese fleet code throughout the 1920s and 1930s and kept diagnosing and re-diagnosing it as it was changing. Can you elaborate? 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.”. So while it was still possible, he interviewed a number of schoolteachers who were recruited during the war. 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. 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. In this, women’s abilities were thought to be superior to men’s. $28.. It “freed” men up from doing boring desk work and allowed them to be shipped out. 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. The role of female spies is a little-known part of the war effort. 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. Unlike the fits of genius dramatized in the films “Enigma” or “The Imitation Game,” code breaking was actually a marathon of tedium, an activity defined by comparing and recognizing patterns. The great American codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman hasn’t … If an account exists, we've sent an email with a link to reset your password. 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. Mundy: I worried at the outset of this project that there wouldn’t be enough information out there to tell the story. I assume that they were schoolteachers, but I don’t know that. It just was. With the men gone to fight the war overseas. Do you like crossword puzzles and are you engaged to be married? 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. In 1952, four women who worked at the wartime code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, reunite to track down a serial killer. 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. Site Design: Ilsa Brink, Podcasts, Talks, and TV & Radio Interviews. As I understand it, the German military did bring some women in but didn’t use them for this kind of high-level purpose. A secret African-American unit at Arlington Hall tackled commercial codes - who was doing business with Hitler or Mitsubishi. Okay, maybe not everyone’s. In the fall of 1941, mysterious letters appeared in … CNN: When it comes to gender, you make the point that the Axis powers didn’t mobilize women in their war effort the way the United States did. 7:22 AM EDT, Wed October 11, 2017. Knox led an all-female team and they decoded the Enigma machine responsible for German military intelligence. 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