Women also tested America’s own codes to make sure they were secure. They worked as radio intercept operators at global listening posts. The Navy did not permit its women to serve overseas—much as many wanted to—apart from a few who went to Hawaii, but the Army did admit its code-breaking women into the war theater. Some Army women would be sent to Australia and to Pacific islands such as New Guinea. Some would move with General Douglas MacArthur when he occupied Tokyo after the war. Other women helped create “dummy traffic”: 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—rather than on the beaches of Normandy.
These were the formative days of what is now called “information security,” when countries were scrambling to develop secure communications at a time when technology was offering new ways to encipher and conceal. As in other nascent fields, like aeronautics, women were able to break in largely because the field of code breaking barely existed. It was not yet prestigious or known. There had not yet been put in place elaborate systems of regulating and credentialing—professional associations, graduate degrees, licenses, clubs, learned societies, accreditation—the kinds of barriers long used in other fields, like law and medicine, to keep women out.
Women also were put in a peculiar position by dint of being brought into the workforce to free up men for military service. “Release a man to fight” was the phrase of the day. As a result, men who had been doing office work sitting at desks were able to ship out to the violent war theater. This led to the women’s being welcome, but also to their being resented, and resented in a very different way from the women who came into workplaces in the 1960s and 1970s.
It was a profound situation, psychologically. The women were brought in to free men to go forth and, potentially, die. Yet the work they were doing was intended to ensure that those men lived. They were trying to protect the very men whose lives their arrival put in danger. The women were recruited at a time when psychological testing was not yet widely used—to see who could cope with this sort of thing and who could not—and post-traumatic stress was not a recognized condition. All of the women had brothers and lovers and fiancés and friends serving in the war. A number of them broke messages that told the fate of their own brothers’ ships and units. The work took its toll. Some of the women never recovered. Louise Pearsall, recruited to work as a mathematician on the Enigma code-breaking project, was one of those who suffered a breakdown afterward. “She was a total wreck,” said her brother William.
That women were considered better suited for code-breaking work—as the letter that Rear Admiral Noyes sent to Ada Comstock suggested—wasn’t a compliment. To the contrary. What this meant was that women were considered better equipped for boring work that required close attention to detail rather than leaps of genius. This was a widespread view in the 1940s. In the field of astronomy, women long had been employed as “computers,” assigned to do lower-level calculations. This was seen as women’s rightful domain: the careful repetitive work that got things started, so that the men could take over when things got interesting and hard. Men were seen as more brilliant than women, but more impatient and erratic. “It was generally believed that women were good at doing tedious work—and as I had discovered early on, the initial stages of cryptanalysis were very tedious, indeed,” recalled Ann Caracristi, whose first job as a code breaker was sorting reams of intercepted traffic.
To a real extent, the same prejudice against women persists to this day. Even now, the disciplines that are hardest for women to break into—like math and laboratory and computer science—are the ones that are believed to depend on innate genius, a trait long, and wrongly, associated chiefly with men. The literature of code breaking has played into this myth. Stories about code-breaking exploits often focus on a titanic genius who enjoys a flash of inspiration that breaks the code and releases a stream of vital information. Narratives like these encourage the notion that genius springs isolated from the brain of a lone individual, inevitably male. The legendary names enshrined in the public history of code breaking are those of brilliant men like Alan Turing at Bletchley Park; Joe Rochefort, the American naval officer who helped mastermind the code breaking that led to victory in the Battle of Midway; or Meredith Gardner, the American cryptanalyst who recovered the meanings of Russian messages as part of a U.S. program, code-named Venona, that led to the exposure of Soviet spies. Their reputation is often burnished by eccentricity—Joe Rochefort is depicted as pacing his underground lair in Oahu, wearing a smoking jacket and slippers—or their tragic end, as when Alan Turing was persecuted for homosexuality and committed suicide. But all along there have been female geniuses whose contributions are as important. It’s just that far less attention has been paid to them, and often these women were denied the top spots that would have brought them more recognition.
But the genius narrative is overblown. Code breaking is far from a solitary endeavor, and in many ways it’s the opposite of genius. Or, rather: Genius itself is often a collective phenomenon. Success in code breaking depends on flashes of inspiration, yes, but it also depends on the careful maintaining of files, so that a coded message that has just arrived can be compared to a similar message that came in six months ago. Code breaking during World War II was a gigantic team effort. The war’s cryptanalytic achievements were what Frank Raven, a renowned naval code breaker from Yale who supervised a team of women, called “crew jobs.” These units were like giant brains; the people working in them were a living, breathing, shared memory. Codes are broken not by solitary individuals but by groups of people trading pieces of things they have learned and noticed and collected, little glittering bits of numbers and other useful items they have stored up in their heads like magpies, things they remember while looking over one another’s shoulders, pointing out patterns that turn out to be the key that unlocks the code.
One of the best code-breaking assets is a good memory, and the only thing better than one person with a good memory is a lot of people with good memories. Every step of the process—the division of enemy traffic into separate systems; the noting of scattered coincidences; the building up of indexes and files; the managing of vast quantities of information; the ability to pick out the signal from the noise—enabled the great intuitive leaps. The precursor work during the war was almost always done by women, and many of those intuitive leaps were made by women as well.
Precisely because they did not expect to be celebrated or even promoted, the women tended to be collegial. This was in marked contrast to the Navy men—especially—who were fighting for recognition in a hotly careerist service. “The women who gathered together in our world worked very hard. None of us had an attitude of having to succeed or outdo one another, except in trivial ways,” recalled Ann Caracristi years later. “I mean, you wanted to be the first to solve a particular problem, or you wanted to be the first to get this recovery. But there was very little competition for, you know, for money, or anything of that nature, because everybody really assumed that when the war was over we would be leaving… The majority of the people considered it a temporary way of life.”