The Untold History of The American Women Code Breakers of World War II

Women played a crucial part in World World II. One of the big ways they made a difference was when a group of more than ten thousand women served as cryptographers, also called Code Girls. The women chosen worked at military-operated facilities such as Arlington Farms in Virginia, Naval Shipyards, or WAVE headquarters in Washington, D.C. They worked to end the war in silence, cracking and creating codes, and were silenced to secrecy.

All over the world, groups of college-educated women were personally recruited from campuses, selected at the recommendation of their alma mater. Some women began seeking out United States Navy WAVES or United States Army WAC recruiters after their creation in 1942. 

The women that were chosen were issued manila envelopes that contained a brief introduction to the arcane history of codes and ciphers. In addition, they received numbered problem sets for them to complete every week. 

During World War II, Virginia Dare Aderholdt was an Arlington Hall cryptanalyst and Japanese translator. She decrypted the intercepted Japanese surrender message on August 14, 1945. She mostly decrypted the messages in an older diplomatic code, JAH. 

The women that were recruited all had very different backgrounds, but they also had a handful of qualities in common. All of the women were smart and resourceful and were great with math, science, or foreign languages, often all three. 

After graduation, Ann Z. Caracristi was recruited by the Army to work as a code breaker. She was recommended by the Dean of Russell Sage, and she worked on IBM machines. She started with sorting paper but worked her way up through the ranks and was sent to Washington, D.C.

The first code breaker recruits reported to Navy headquarters in Washington, D.C. During the war, women made up an astonishing eighty percent of the ranks. In addition, the Army also made use of the female cryptanalysts but had them stationed at Arlington Hall in Northern Virginia. 

Arlington Hall was a junior college for females and a boarding school for high school and junior college students from 1927 until 1942. However, in 1942, the United States Government took over Arlington Hall as their new location for cryptanalysis work and military intelligence. 

Agnes Meyer Driscoll was a brilliant young teacher who studied mathematics, music, physics, and foreign languages. She was one of the first women to enlist in the war and started as a stenographer. 

The women's work was to be kept entirely secret, and they were told that if they committed treason, they would suffer the full consequences. The women were told to say they emptied trash cans and sharpened pencils if they were asked about their jobs. 

Bletchley Park was the main site for British cryptanalysis during World War II and housed the Government Code and Cypher School. It is famous for its impact on the war and for the work that was performed there. 

Helen Nibouar was a cryptographer and part of the select group who first worked on the SIGBA cipher device during World War II. She was recruited by a woman who encouraged her to give cryptography a try and trained at Morrison Field. 

Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein was a mathematician and cryptanalyst who worked for the Signals Intelligence Service during World War II. She played an important role in decoding the Japanese cryptography machine Purple. 

The Navy accepted a large number of enlisted women and the first female commissioned officers who would supervise them. In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Navy Women's Reserve Act into law, which created what was commonly known as the WAVES, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.

The Bombe was an electromechanical device used during World War II. It was used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages. 

Margaret Crosby was an archaeologist and historian and graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1922. During the Second World War, she joined the Office of Strategic Services and worked as a cryptographer for the OSS' Greek Desk. 

While the majority of the messages that the women's code breakers decoded were about the war, there were always some that were more personal. There were messages about birthdays, deaths, and birth notices. Parsons felt like she got to know many of the men and their families in a way that humanized them. 

During World War II, there was a unit put together of African American women who secretly worked as code breakers in Arlington, the massive intelligence operation. The Arlington Hall Station was unusual for the time in that up to fifteen percent of its workforce was Black. 

The women working as code breakers during WWII did not expect any public credit for the important work they did. Over the last hundred years, women have worked in code-breaking but never received any recognition. 

Mavis Batey was one of the leading codebreakers during World War II at Bletchley Park. She worked as an assistant to Dilly Knox and was involved in the decryption effort before the Battle of Matapan. 

A group of women code breakers helped identify those who passed American and Allied secrets to the Soviet Union during and after World War II. Their work unveiled such infamous spies as the British intelligence officer Kim Philby, the German-born scientist Klaus Fuchs, the British diplomat Donald Maclean, and several others. 

Female code breakers were instrumental at every stage of World War II. In Washington, they ran complex office machines that were converted for code-breaking purposes. 

Elizebeth Smith Friedman was an expert cryptanalyst who deciphered many enemy codes during both World Wars. In addition, she helped solve international smuggling cases during Prohibition. Friedman was often called 'America's first female cryptanalyst,' as a woman with a sharp mind and nerves of steel. 

During World War II, women codebreakers served several roles. They listened for coded radio messages from other countries and tested American codes to ensure enemies couldn't break them. 

During World War II, the Navy did not permit its women to serve overseas, even though several of the women wanted to. There were several who went to Hawaii, and the Army did allow its code-breaking women into the war theater. 

Some of the women code breakers helped create 'dummy traffic,' also called fake radio. They sent fake radio signals that helped fool the Germans into believing the D-Day invasion would take place in Norway or the Pas-de-Calais region of France instead of the beaches of Normandy.

Margaret Rock was recruited to Bletchley Park after she had impressed Dillwyn Knox, head of Intelligence Service at the Government Code and Cypher School. He wrote about her, "Miss Rock is entirely in the wrong grade. She is actually fourth or fifth best of the whole Enigma staff and quite as useful as some of the professors. I recommend that she should be put on the highest possible salary for anyone of her seniority."

During World War II, women were considered better suited for code-breaking work because it was thought they were better equipped for tedious work that required close attention to detail rather than leaps of genius. Men were seen as more brilliant but also more impatient and erratic. 

The women listening in on enemy conversations provided a verbatim, real-time way to know what the enemy was thinking, doing, arguing about, worrying over, and planning. 

Women played a central and important role in significantly shortening the war. Their work was crucial to Allied success in defeating Japan and without it, the war could have continued for years.

Thanks to the intelligence revealed by the WAVES of OP-20-G, ninety-five German U-boats were either sunk or captured by the end of World War II. For example, it was discovered that German U-boats were planning on sinking the ship, Queen Mary.

Joan Clarke was a codebreaker, and her work during the war saved countless lives. In addition, her work was formidable enough to command the respect of some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. Clarke was the only woman to work as part of the quest to crack German Enigma ciphers. 

Codebreaking required a strong understanding of math since many ciphers replaced letters with numbers and hide the message with equations. The women needed good memory, persistence, and patience, and they learned plenty of tricks. 

Even though women were doing very important work during World War II, they were sometimes treated poorly. For instance, the women codebreakers were doing the same work as men but were paid much less, and some military men treated the women poorly because they didn't think the women were important. 

Thousands of women served during World War II as codebreakers and, in fact, played a crucial role in ending the war and saving lives. However, most were kicked out of the military after the war ended. 

In 1941, a handful of letters began showing up in student mailboxes at America's top women's colleges. Of course, the messages were cryptic and brief and required the women to decode them. 

The Vigenere square saw rapid development in cryptography in order to secure messages from one's enemy. It helped code-breakers create the Enigma machine during World War II. The code girl students learned the Vigenere square as a method of disguising letters dating from the Renaissance.

Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, also called the Playfair cipher, was the process that enabled the British to read high-level German army messages during World War II. They decoded several communications between the OKW, the German High Command in Berlin, and their army commands throughout occupied France. 

The Wheatstone's cipher was invented by Decius Wadsworth, a Colonel in the United States Army. The system involved a set of two disks, one inside the other, and the outer disk had twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the numbers two through eight. 

Some of the women decoders were also Y Listeners and messengers. They risked their lives to intercept and gather enemy communications, and the 'Y Service' was an elite group of WRENS at Bletchley Park during World War II. 

Originally, the women codebreakers that were brought in by the Army and Navy were still considered civilians. They weren't allowed to officially join and serve until 1942, but even then, there were considerable disparities. 

The Type B Cipher Machine was codenamed Purple by the United States, and it was an encryption machine that the Japanese Foreign Office used. It was an electromechanical machine that used stepping-switched to encrypt the most sensitive diplomatic traffic. 

Women codebreakers had a difficult job, and on top of that, they couldn't talk about their jobs, and most lived in cramped conditions. They worked in an environment of large and clashing male egos, and their work was simply dismissed. 

The Enigma machine is a cipher device that was used to protect diplomatic, commercial, and military communication. It was used extensively during World War II and was considered so secure that it was used to encipher the most top-secret messages. 

William Coffee was an African American man who supervised and recruited African American women for a new analyst unit. He ended up recruiting more than one hundred African American scholars, analysts, and linguists for the agency. 

Hut 6 was a building comprised of exclusively female code-breakers who would receive Enigma keys every day and would have to determine if the messages in any way resembled German. It was stated that the working conditions inside were horrible, with poor lighting, heating, and a lack of proper ventilation. 

Dorothy Braden was a top-secret code breaker during World War II. Her unit worked to disclose the locations of Japanese ships in the Pacific, protect the lives of American service members, and identify and intercept enemy supply movements. 

The Colossus was the code-breaking electronic computer used at Bletchley and was designed by Tommy Flowers. It was used for radio transmissions and was liable to be overheard and possibly deciphered. 

The Bletchley Girls consisted of many women code breakers, but three of them are shown in the photo below: Rozanne Colchester, Pamela Rose, and Ruth Bourne. Rozanne was fluent in Italian, which was helpful in the air force section, where she decoded hand-encrypted messages.

OP-20-G was 'Office of Chief Of Naval Operations' and was the United States Navy's signals intelligence and cryptanalysis group during World War II. The mission was to decrypt, intercept, and analyze communications from the German, Japanese, and Italian navies.