But even that was not enough.
The Army needed more code breakers, and then more still. So it went looking beyond college campuses, for female schoolteachers interested in pursuing a new line of work. Such women were not hard to find. Teachers’ pay was notoriously low, and classrooms often were enormous. The Army dispatched handsome officers to small towns, remote cities, and farm communities, where they stationed themselves in post offices, hotels, and other public places. Posters and newspaper ads promoted their appearances, seeking women open to a move to Washington to serve the war effort, women who could “keep their lips zipped.”
And so it was that on a Saturday in September 1943, a young schoolteacher named Dot Braden approached a pair of recruiters standing behind a table in the soaring lobby of the Virginian Hotel, the finest lodging place in her hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia, and one of the grandest hotels in the state. The man behind the table was an Army officer, and the other recruiter was a woman dressed in civilian clothing. Dot herself was twenty-three years old, dark-haired, slight, adventurous, confident in her own abilities. She was a 1942 graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, where she studied French, Latin, and physics, among other subjects. She had spent one year teaching at a public high school and wished never to repeat that experience. She was the eldest of four children and had two brothers serving in the Army. She needed to earn her own living and help support her mother.
Without knowing what she was applying for—the recruiters provided no concrete job description—Dot Braden filled out an application for a job with the War Department. Just a few weeks later, Dot found herself on a train rattling out of the tobacco-growing countryside of Virginia’s Southside region, headed 180 miles north to Washington, D.C., with excitement in the pit of her stomach, very little money in her pocketbook, and not the faintest idea what she had been hired to do.
INTRODUCTION
“Your Country Needs You, Young Ladies”
The U.S. military’s decision to tap “high grade” young women—and the women’s willingness to accept the summons—was a chief reason why America, in the aftermath of its entry into World War II, was able to build an effective code-breaking operation practically overnight. That millions of women served the war effort by rolling up their sleeves and donning trousers and jumpsuits to work in factories—the celebrated Rosie the Riveter, who helped build bombers and tanks and aircraft carriers—is well known. Far less well known is that more than ten thousand women traveled to Washington, D.C., to lend their minds and their hard-won educations to the war effort. The recruitment of these American women—and the fact that women were behind some of the most significant individual code-breaking triumphs of the war—was one of the best-kept secrets of the conflict. The military and strategic importance of their work was enormous.
During World War II, code breaking would come into its own as one of the most fruitful forms of intelligence that exists. Listening in on enemy conversations provides a verbatim, real-time way to know what that enemy is thinking and doing and arguing about and worrying over and planning. It provides information on strategy, troop movements, shipping itineraries, political alliances, battlefield casualties, pending attacks, and supply needs. The code breakers of World War II advanced what is known as signals intelligence—reading the coded transmissions of enemies, as well as (sometimes) of allies. They laid the groundwork for the now burgeoning field of cybersecurity, which entails protecting one’s data, networks, and communications against enemy attack. They pioneered work that would lead to the modern computing industry. After the war, the U.S. Army and Navy code-breaking operations merged to become what is now the National Security Agency. It was women who helped found the field of clandestine eavesdropping—much bigger and more controversial now than it was then—and it was women in many cases who shaped the early culture of the NSA.
The women also played a central role in shortening the war. Code breaking was crucial to Allied success in defeating Japan, both at sea and during the bloody amphibious assaults on Pacific islands against a foe that was dug in, literally—the cave fighting toward the end of the war was terrible, as were kamikaze attacks and other suicide missions—and willing to fight to the death. And in the all-important Atlantic theater, U.S. and British penetration of the Nazi Enigma cipher that German admiral Karl D?nitz used to direct his U-boat commanders helped bring about the total elimination of the Nazi submarine threat.
The chain of events that led to the women’s recruitment was a long one, but a signal moment occurred in September 1941, when U.S. Navy rear admiral Leigh Noyes wrote a letter to Ada Comstock, the president of Radcliffe College, the women’s counterpart to Harvard. For more than a year the Navy had been quietly recruiting male intelligence officers from elite colleges and universities, and now it was embarking on the same experiment with women. Noyes wanted to know whether Comstock would identify a group of Radcliffe students to be trained in cryptanalysis. He confided that the Navy was looking for “bright, close-mouthed native students”—that is, high-achieving women who had the sense and ability to keep a secret and who had been born in the United States and were free of close ties with other nations.
“Evidence of a flair for languages or for mathematics could be advantageous,” Noyes said, adding that “any intense sociological quirks would, of course, be undesirable.” Without stating what such “quirks” might be, the admiral suggested that a handful of promising seniors could enroll in a training course the Navy had developed.
“In the event of total war,” Noyes told her, “women will be needed for this work, and they can do it probably better than men.”
Ada Comstock was happy to comply. “It interests me very much and I should like to take whatever steps would be thought serviceable,” she promptly wrote to her friend Donald Menzel, an astronomy professor at Harvard who was serving as a point person for the broader naval recruiting effort. Astronomy is a mathematical science and a naval one—for centuries, navigation was done using the position of the sun and the stars—and many of the instructors who taught the secret course would come from the field.