The Axis powers never mobilized their women to the extent that the Allies did. Japan and Germany were highly traditional cultures, and women were not pressed into wartime service in the same way, not for code breaking or other high-level purposes. There are of course many reasons why the Allies prevailed in World War II—the industrial might of the United States, the leadership of military commanders and statesmen, the stoicism of British citizens who endured years of bombing and deprivation, the resistance of the French and Norwegian undergrounds, the cunning and resourcefulness of spies, the heroism of citizens who helped and harbored Jewish neighbors, and the bravery and sacrifice of sailors and airmen and soldiers, including the millions of Russian soldiers who bore the brunt of military casualties and deaths.
But the employment of women also was one of these factors. It wasn’t just that the women freed the men to fight, enabling General Dwight Eisenhower to load more men into landing craft at Normandy, or Admiral Chester Nimitz to staff more Pacific aircraft carriers. Women were more than placeholders for the men. Women were active war agents. Through their brainwork, the women had an impact on the fighting that went on. This is an important truth, and it is one that often has been overlooked.
On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army had 181 people working in its small, highly secret code-breaking office in downtown Washington. By 1945 nearly 8,000 people would be working stateside for the Army’s massive code-breaking operation, at a much-expanded suburban Virginia venue called Arlington Hall, with another 2,500 serving in the field. Of the entire group, some 7,000 were women. This means that of the Army’s 10,500-person-strong code-breaking force, nearly 70 percent was female. Similarly, at the war’s outset the U.S. Navy had a few hundred code breakers, stationed mostly in Washington but also in Hawaii and the Philippines. By 1945, there were 5,000 naval code breakers stationed in Washington, and about the same number serving overseas. At least 80 percent of the Navy’s domestic code breakers—some 4,000—were female. Thus, out of about 20,000 total American code breakers during the war, some 11,000 were women.
Many of the program’s major successes did emerge at the end of the war, and the public could appreciate what had been accomplished in secret. Late in 1945 the New York Times published a letter that General George Marshall had written to Thomas Dewey during his 1944 presidential campaign against Roosevelt, laying out some of the victories the country owed its cryptanalytic forces and begging Dewey to keep them secret. Once the war was over, the letter was made public. In it, General Marshall pointed out that thanks to the country’s cryptanalytic forces, “we possessed a wealth of information” regarding Japanese strategy. He revealed the hidden cause of certain famous naval victories and pointed out that “operations in the Pacific are largely guided by the information we obtain of Japanese deployments.”
Also after the war, the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack noted that Army/Navy signals intelligence was “some of the finest intelligence available in our history” and that it “contributed enormously to the defeat of the enemy, greatly shortening the war, and saving many thousands of lives.” Major General Stephen Chamberlin, who served in the Pacific, announced that military intelligence, most of which came from code breaking, “saved us many thousands of lives” in the Pacific theater alone, “and shortened the war by no less than two years.”
Members of Congress were quick to commend the code-breaking forces. “Their work saved thousands of precious lives,” orated Representative Clarence Hancock of New York, speaking on the floor of the House on October 25, 1945.
They are entitled to glory and national gratitude which they will never receive. We broke down the Japanese code almost at the beginning of the war, and we knew it at the finish of the war. Because of that knowledge we were able to intercept and destroy practically every supply ship and convoy that tried to reach the Philippines or any Pacific Island. We knew, for example, that shortly after MacArthur landed on Leyte a large convoy with 40,000 Japanese troops was dispatched to reinforce the Japanese forces there. They were met by our fleet and by our airplanes at sea and were totally destroyed.
He stated, “I believe that our cryptographers… in the war with Japan did as much to bring that war to a successful and early conclusion as any other group of men.”
That more than half of these “cryptographers” were women was nowhere mentioned.
PART I
“In the Event of Total War Women Will Be Needed”
CHAPTER ONE
Twenty-Eight Acres of Girls
September 1942
Chatham is a bump in the road in the southern part of Virginia: a small, picturesque town of just over a thousand people, with well-tended Victorians and a downtown known for its handsome redbrick Greek Revival courthouse. Originally a center of commerce for farmers tending the miles of tobacco land surrounding it, Chatham is the seat of Pittsylvania County, named for William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, a member of the English Parliament who sympathized with the American colonists and objected to unjust taxation. Though somewhat remote, the town has always been high-minded. In 1942, Chatham boasted both a fancy boarding school for girls and a private military academy for boys, educating the children of the Virginia and North Carolina gentry and would-be gentry.