Code Girls: The Women Who Helped Win WWII

 

CODE GIRLS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE AMERICAN WOMEN CODE BREAKERS OF WORLD WAR II

By Liza Mundy

Hachette Books, 2017, 448 pages.

★★★★

 

 
 

Perhaps you have heard of the WACS and WAVES, but women’s contributions during World War II remain underappreciated. This is certainly true of those who worked as code breakers, like a deceased friend who was recruited when she was an undergraduate at Mt. Holyoke College. In deference to what would have been her wishes, I will refer to her  by the initial B.

 

 I did not know of Code Girls by Liza Mundy when B was alive. I sometimes wish we had known about this book earlier, though it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. B was chatty, sharp, and irreverent, but took no bait when prompted to talk about her wartime role. “I took an oath," said she, and maintained that stance even though stories about code girls had begun to surface in her lifetime and much of their once-secret mission had been declassified.

 

Mundy’s book gives an appreciation for the burden these women carried. They came from all walks of life, including those plucked from the best women’s colleges, but given that just four percent of women attended four-year colleges in 1942, the main criteria were an affinity for math, languages, and/or puzzle solving. B was highly intelligent, so I'm sure she ticked all of the boxes. The task was nothing less than breaking German and Japanese secret communications in an age in which electronic computing was in its infancy and there was no such thing artificial intelligence. Try cracking powerful mechanical encrypting machines through brainpower alone. Even if you figured out messages linguistically, what did the nonsensical words mean? That took late nights, intuition, and sweat.

 

Here's the kicker: much of what the women discovered could not be used, lest Axis powers suspect that their codes were compromised and change them. Information had to be parceled carefully and saved for crucial moments. Imagine the enormous weight of having advance knowledge that hundreds of GIs were marching toward their deaths. Many of the women had brothers and husbands in the war and their information could have prevented the slaughter of someone else's brothers and husbands. I often wonder if that's why B took her oath to the grave.

 

Mundy does a fine job of giving glimpses into the mindsets and patriotism of her subjects. Decades after the war ended in 1945, some were allowed to break their silence. Among them were a former Virginia school teacher, an African American recruit, a Smith College history major, an English scholar and champion swimmer, and a woman from a backwoods Pennsylvania town. Naturally, though, Mundy has lacunae in her story. After all, how much has been forgotten or embellished after the more than seven decades later?

 

There are common touchstones. The women spoke of their training. Those from humble backgrounds had never before ventured far from home before they reported to training facilities; several had to scrape together fare to get there. Quite a few had no idea what they had volunteered to do until they arrived. They had a sense of duty, but were also aware of the sexism of male superiors and bristled from the disrespect shown by men who were their intellectual inferiors. There were also maters of lower pay, poor work conditions, and crummy lodging. In the 1940s, what we’d today call structural sexism was the social norm. Many of Munde’s informants did not reflect upon fairness until years later; one gets the sense they were too busy and too exhausted to dwell upon it at the time. They simply figured out how to bypass inter-service rivalries, deflect personality clashes that led to inefficiencies, and cope with everyday indignities.

 

The code “girls”–and most were indeed young–were a mix of traditional and non-traditional individuals, some of whom presented in conventional feminine ways and others who embraced proto-feminist ideals. However we view the code breakers though, the stakes couldn’t have been much higher. Until the Japanese codes were broken in 1943, the United States was losing the war in the Pacific and it wasn’t much better in Europe. This alone makes the case that more attention should be cast upon those women whose names do not make the history books. They should take their place aside famous men such as MacArthur, Eisenhower, Halsey, and Patton.

 

Mundy’s is a fine early corrective. Only a lack of an index mars an otherwise stellar work.

 

Rob Weir