Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II
Liza Mundy
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.
THE SECRET LETTERS
December 7, 1941
The planes looked like distant pinpoints at first, and few who saw them took them seriously even up to the moment they dropped their payloads. An Army private, training at a radar station on the northern tip of Oahu, spotted a blip on his screen suggesting that a large formation of planes was headed for Hawaii, but when he pointed it out to his instructor and they called their superior, he told them not to worry. The blip—he assumed—was just a group of American bombers, B-17 Flying Fortresses, arriving from California. A Navy commander, peering out his office window, saw a plane going into a dive and figured it must be a reckless American pilot. “Get that fellow’s number,” he told his junior officer. “I want to report him.” Then the officer saw a dark shape fall out of the plane and whistle downward.
And now, just minutes before eight a.m., the planes erupted into full view, all of them, streaking in and filling the mild sky like a swift-moving thundercloud: nearly two hundred fighters and bombers, flown by Japan’s best pilots. On the underside of their wings glowed the round red insignia of the rising sun. Finally, the people looking at them understood.
Below the planes lay Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row, a line of American warships tied up on mooring quays in the blue Hawaiian waters, placid and unprotected—no barrage balloons, no torpedo nets. Almost one hundred vessels in all, more than half of the entire U.S. Pacific Fleet, dotted the harbor. In nearby airfields, American planes sat arrayed on the ground, wingtip to wingtip, clustered invitingly, fat targets.
The screaming tangle of enemy planes—a second wave arrived an hour after the first—dropped bombs as well as torpedoes modified to navigate Pearl Harbor’s shallow waters. One of the bombs found the USS Arizona, whose band stood on deck preparing for the morning flag raising. The bomb pierced the battleship’s forward deck, setting off a cache of gunpowder and creating a giant fireball. The ship—hit over and over—rose out of the water, cracked, and sank. Other bombs and torpedoes found the California, the Oklahoma, the West Virginia, the Tennessee, the Nevada, the Maryland, and the Pennsylvania, flagship of the Pacific Fleet. Diving, peeling off, coming back and back again, the Japanese planes struck destroyers and cruisers as well as buildings. Three battleships settled to the harbor bottom, another capsized, and more than two thousand men were killed, many still asleep. Nearly half of the men who died were on the Arizona, among them twenty-three pairs of brothers.
The planes on the airfields were virtually obliterated.
On the mainland, telephone switchboards lit up. Operators plugged calls as fast as they could. It was early afternoon on the East Coast and news of the Pearl Harbor attack raced through the country, traveling by radio, in special editions of newspapers, by people running along the street, crying out. Broadcasts and concerts were interrupted, the Sunday calm shattered. Congress declared war on Japan the next day. Germany—Japan’s ally—declared war on the United States three days later. Men flooded recruiting stations in the weeks that followed. Every American felt affected by the tragedy and by the abrupt entry of the United States into a global, two-ocean war.