Disparate as their backgrounds were, the women who answered these summonses—that of the Navy and that of the Army—had a handful of qualities in common. They were smart and resourceful, and they had strived to acquire as much schooling as circumstances would permit, at a time when women received little encouragement or reward for doing so. They were adept at math or science or foreign languages, often all three. They were dutiful and patriotic. They were adventurous and willing. And they did not expect any public credit for the clandestine work they were entering into.
The last fact was perhaps the most important. In the late spring of 1942, the first wave of women recruited by the U.S. Navy finished their secret courses and turned in their final problem sets. Those who had stuck with the course and answered enough problems correctly—less than half of those recruited—arrived to start their duties, working in the Navy’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters, which quickly became so crowded that a few found themselves sitting on upturned wastebaskets.
The women were told that just because they were female, that did not mean they would not be shot if they told anybody what they were doing. They were not to think their sex might spare them the full consequences for treason in wartime. If they went out in public and were asked what they did, they were to say they emptied trash cans and sharpened pencils. Some would improvise their own answers, replying lightly that they sat on the laps of commanding officers. People readily believed them. For a young American woman, it was all too easy to convince an inquiring stranger that the work she did was menial, or that she existed as a plaything for the men she worked for.
“Almost everybody thought we were nothing but secretaries,” one of the women would say years later.
During the most violent global conflict that humanity has ever known—a war that cost more money, damaged more property, and took more lives than any war before or since—these women formed the backbone of one of the most successful intelligence efforts in history, an effort that began before the Pearl Harbor attack and lasted until the Second World War’s very end. In the manila packets they opened before arriving in Washington, the women were told that, up to now, the secret cryptanalytic work they had been selected to perform had been done by men.
“Whether women can take it over successfully,” the Navy letter told them, “remains to be proved.”
The letter added: “We believe you can do it.”
The women recruits were entering an environment of large and clashing male egos. There was furious infighting between the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy, to a degree that would have been comic if it weren’t taking place in the middle of a war. For several decades the two services had built small and separate code-breaking operations, which were competitive to a point where it sometimes was not clear who the real enemy was. “Nobody cooperated with the Army, under pain of death,” said naval code breaker Prescott Currier. This was an overstatement, but not by much. Part of the clash had to do with money; as they began expanding, both services were competing for appropriations. Part of it had to do with glory. Part of it had to do with jealousy. Part of it had to do with the fact that the military-industrial complex was being ushered into full flower. Any number of agencies were founded and nurtured during World War II, and all jostled for power and resources. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—forerunner of the CIA—all vied for a piece of the code-breaking action.
The British—who centralized their own operation—were appalled. One British liaison described the Americans at the war’s outset as “just a lot of kids playing at ‘office.’”
As that comment suggests, the Americans also had to contend and cooperate with England’s own code-breaking venture, Bletchley Park, the storied British operation that employed “debs and dons”: brilliant Oxford and Cambridge mathematicians and linguists—mostly men, but also some women—who labored in dim and chilly “huts” at a drab and ungainly estate some sixty miles outside London. In and around Bletchley Park there also were thousands of women, many from upper-class families, who operated “bombe” machines, which were built to crack the Enigma ciphers used not only by the German Navy, but also by the German Army, Air Force, and security services. In 1941, when America entered the war in earnest, the British had an older and more sophisticated code-breaking operation than did their Yankee allies.
But the American code-breaking operation ramped up quickly and became ever more crucial as the war progressed, growing larger than Bletchley Park. At the outset of the joint effort, the Allies decided that the British would lead code-breaking efforts in the European theater. The Americans had lead responsibility for the immense Pacific, with help from their allies. As the war went on, the United States’ code-breaking operation also became central to the European conflict. The ranks of that operation became steadily more female, as men shipped out to the hot, dry sands of North Africa, to Italian mountain ranges and snowy European forests, to the decks of Pacific aircraft carriers, to the beaches of Iwo Jima.
In such a competitive culture, it was easy for the women’s contribution to be overlooked. The women took their secrecy oath seriously, and they came from a generation when women did not expect—or receive—credit for achievement in public life. They did not constitute the top brass, and they did not write the histories afterward, nor the first-person memoirs. And yet women were instrumental at every stage. They ran complex office machines that had been converted to code-breaking purposes. They built libraries and information sections that were vital sources of “collateral,” the term for subsidiary material such as public speeches, shipping inventories, and lists of ship names and enemy commanders, which helped break messages and illuminate their content. They worked as translators. They pushed forward new fields such as “traffic analysis,” which is a method of looking at the external features of a coded message—the stations where messages are being sent from, or to; sudden fluctuations in radio traffic; ominous silences; abrupt appearances of new stations—to learn about troop movements. Women were put in charge of “minor” systems—weather codes, for instance—that turned out to be crucial when major systems went dark and could not be read.
And a number of predominately female teams attacked and broke major code systems. Once broken, a code must be exploited and, often, rebroken, and women formed the great assembly line of workers who did this.