Unbeknownst to these young women, the Army and Navy were hotly competing for their talents. The competition began when Ada Comstock, president of Radcliffe, was asked to suggest undergraduates who could be trained by the Navy in cryptanalysis. The surprise attack at Pearl Harbor had exposed the country’s intelligence deficit and created a new demand for educated women. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
As war progressed, the demand grew. In 1942 the United States grudgingly decided to admit women into military service, a wildly controversial measure. “Only bad women join the service,” one code breaker’s mother told her, but soon recruiting was in full swing and the mother was proudly snapping photos of her daughter in uniform.
Women rushed to enlist; one reporter described a WAAC recruiting station as a “tidal wave of patriotic pulchritude.” Women who tested high for intelligence and aptitude—and passed background checks—were routed into code-breaking service. Courtesy of U.S. Army INSCOM
The U.S. Army recruited schoolteachers in the South. Handsome young officers were dispatched to lure them. When Dot Braden approached recruiters at the Virginian Hotel in Lynchburg, they did not tell her the nature of the work, and probably did not know themselves. Copyright: Nancy B. Marion;
Credit: Courtesy of Lynchburg History
Women began to pour into D.C.’s Union Station, which now offered a servicemen’s canteen, an information desk for new government workers, and posters and flags attesting to the country’s determination to win. This photo is by Gordon Parks, a government photographer at the time. Courtesy of Library of Congress
Many rented tiny rooms at Arlington Farms, a Virginia dormitory built to house seven thousand women workers, known as government girls or g-girls, for the war’s duration. Locals dubbed it “Twenty-Eight Acres of Girls.” Government photographer Esther Bubley documented their lives. Courtesy of Library of Congress
Dot Braden worked at Arlington Hall, which before the war had been a girls’ finishing school complete with teahouse and lily ponds. It had been converted to a massive code-breaking facility that attacked the codes of Japan and many other nations, with more than seven thousand workers, most of them female. Courtesy of National
Security Agency
The U.S. Navy, not to be outdone, took possession of Mount Vernon Seminary, a girls’ school in tony upper northwest Washington, D.C., adding hastily erected barracks to house four thousand female code breakers. Courtesy of D.C. Department of Transportation
At Arlington Hall, Ann Caracristi (far right), an English major from Russell Sage College, matched wits against Japanese code makers, solving message addresses and enabling military intelligence to develop “order of battle” showing the location of Japanese troops. The messages would then be passed along to Dot Braden and other women whose efforts led to the sinking
of Japanese ships. Courtesy of National Security Agency
Also at Arlington Hall, a secret African American unit—mostly female, and unknown to many white workers—tackled commercial codes, keeping tabs on which companies were doing business with Hitler or Mitsubishi. Courtesy of National Security Agency
The Navy women broke enemy naval codes used across the world’s major oceans. Women formed the cryptanalytic assembly line that exploited the Japanese fleet code known as JN-25. They helped in the effort to shoot down the plane of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the attack at Pearl Harbor. “We really felt we had done something really fantastic,” said one, Myrtle Otto. “That was an exciting day.” Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration
Women also ran the machines that attacked the German Enigma ciphers, maintained wall maps that kept track of U-boat locations and Allied convoys, and wrote intelligence reports that would be used by naval commanders. Courtesy of
National Security Agency
During their off hours, the women wrote letters incessantly, sending the missives—often with an enclosed snapshot—to soldiers and sailors. One g-girl was writing twelve different men. Courtesy of Library of Congress
The women worked around the clock and often didn’t know whether to eat breakfast or dinner when they finished a shift. Navy code breaker Edith Reynolds (center), recruited from Vassar, relaxes with colleagues. Courtesy of Edith Reynolds White
The women enjoyed their freedom. Dot Braden (right) and her best friend, code breaker Ruth “Crow” Weston from Mississippi (left), were glad to get away from crowded Arlington Farms and rent an apartment on their own. Courtesy of ?family of Ruth “Crow” Weston
On their rare days off, the women would ride buses and streetcars to the beaches of Virginia and Maryland. This group of Arlington Hall code breakers includes Crow (far left), and Dot (peeking out from behind the pole). Courtesy of Dorothy Braden Bruce
When, in the spring of 1943, a group of members of the WAVES were loaded onto a troop train and sent “west” under sealed orders, they hoped they might be headed to California. They emerged to find they were in Dayton, Ohio. From the collections of Dayton History
At a top-secret building on the grounds of the National Cash Register Company (headquarters shown here), the women helped build more than one hundred “bombe” machines designed to break the German naval Enigma cipher. From the collections of Dayton History
Their bucolic campus was called Sugar Camp, named for the maple trees on the grounds. The women were warned to never go into town alone, for fear of being kidnapped by spies. From the collections of Dayton History
The women at Sugar Camp enjoyed great camaraderie even as they felt responsible for the welfare of brothers, husbands, and fiancés serving overseas. For some, the psychological strain would not abate even after the war was won. Courtesy of Deborah Anderson personal archives
After World War II ended, Stephen Chamberlin, operations officer for General Douglas MacArthur, declared that code breakers shortened the war and helped save thousands of lives. The postwar accolades did not mention that more than ten thousand U.S. code breakers were women. Courtesy of U.S. Army INSCOM
Many women stayed friends for decades after their service. A group of Navy women kept a “round-robin” letter going for seventy years. The
group included Elizabeth Allen Butler (front far left), Ruth Schoen Mirsky (front, second from right), and Georgia O’Connor Ludington (back, second from right). Courtesy of Ruth Mirsky