I heard about Code Girls several months before publication, and was determined to read it as soon as possible. My mother was one of the code breakers at Arlington Hall, a largely civilian group of women who worked under the auspices of the US Army. She fit the typical profile of Arlington Hall recruits: a teacher who left her job at a girls’ boarding school in Virginia to not only serve her country, but do more exciting and challenging work than was available to most women in peacetime. (The military recruited heavily for women with four-year degrees, which were rare at the time but required for teachers.) Arlington Hall was a place where a woman could fulfill her intellectual potential, where she was encouraged to learn and do as much as possible, as fast as possible, and work as hard as possible. The code breakers’ work was crucial to winning the war.
According to this book, the women worked for seven days straight, with their eighth “off” day spent on shopping, errands, and probably housework as well. However, my mother did not mind the long hours. On her commute from Washington, she even ran into Eleanor Roosevelt one morning around 6; Roosevelt said she took early walks to evade the Secret Service. Like other women in this book, my mother roomed with another woman who was also a code breaker and who became a close friend, and she enjoyed the camaraderie of her whole code-breaking group.
Author Liza Mundy weaves a number of narrative strands. She discusses the work done at not only Arlington Hall, but at the separate Navy code-breaking facility (where most code breakers were WAVES) and at Sugar Camp. Sugar Camp was an NCR rustic retreat outside Dayton, Ohio used in peacetime to train salesmen; during the war it housed WAVES who wired the bombes that NCR manufactured to break the German Enigma codes. Mundy gives as much technical detail on code breaking as the average, nonspecialist reader can probably handle. This includes work done during World War 1 and between the wars. Some World War 1 code breakers carried right on into World War 2.
I was disappointed that almost all the World War 2 information focuses on the Japanese codes. It’s true that the Japanese codes were extremely challenging. They were complex, the Japanese used several different codes, and the codes were changed constantly. It was hard to find Americans who knew Japanese. The code breakers were given some basic relevant vocabulary. Then--Mundy mentions only in passing, late in the book--the decoded messages were passed to translators, many of them missionaries or children of missionaries who had lived in Japan. Mundy also mentions somewhere that the messages of many other countries were decoded at Arlington Hall. (I’d assume this was also true of the Navy facility.) But that’s all she says. The organization of the code-breaking facilities seems to have been complex, with people working in many different groups for both efficiency and secrecy. I gained little sense of the overall organization or what the groups were. I have no idea what my mother worked on, but my guess is messages in French. She had a BA in French, she was fluent in French, and I’d assume Vichy France was pumping out messages at the same phenomenal rate as other countries.
Mundy may have focused primarily on the Japanese code-breaking group due to her choice to tell the personal stories of a number of code breakers, especially Dorothy (Dot) Braden, now Dorothy Braden Bruce. Dot worked in a Japanese group and Mundy interviewed her extensively for this book. Dot’s personal life included her close friendship with her roommate, code breaker Ruth Weston; Dot’s on-off engagement to a soldier named George Rush; and Dot’s postwar marriage to another soldier named Jim Bruce. Dot also had brothers in the war. In between handling all that coded text, Dot and other code breakers wrote huge numbers of letters, to husbands, fiancés, brothers, even soldiers they’d never met who wanted pen pals. The workforce was mostly female—my mother said there was only one man in her group, an elderly Egyptologist who had worked on cracking hieroglyphics. But the code breakers’ lives were full of men, to the extent that (Mundy relates) pregnancies were not uncommon among unmarried women at Arlington Hall. (The Navy was much tighter and required even married pregnant women to quit work.) I can’t help wondering whether my 30-ish mother was also feverishly writing to soldiers and dating numerous men when they were on leave. Certainly not my father—they did not meet till after the war and in any case, he was rejected by the draft due to a medical condition.
Although Mundy goes back and forth between code-breaking organizations and various personal stories, she manages to move through the war narrative more or less chronologically. Her descriptions of military and naval action are mostly focused on the end of the war, especially the excitements of D-Day and the Japanese surrender. My mother said that two of her coworkers always joked that “by the end of the war they’d be cutting out paper dolls.” When my mother and others came in after their day off, they discovered those two coworkers had spent that day making paper dolls, using every scrap of paper they’d saved up, and had hung the dolls all over the office. Mundy mentions that people danced in the streets of Washington.
However relieved the women code breakers were, their immediate experiences were not altogether joyous. The Arlington Hall workers were given a speech encouraging them all to quit work as soon as possible. Most did, at least after they married or had a child. (A few did stay into the Cold War and beyond.) The US mounted a reverse recruitment campaign, telling all women it was their patriotic duty to turn over their jobs to returning men. Women married the fiancés they’d been corresponding with and proceeded to have babies. Some were happy housewives; some were not. Many, including my mother, missed the sense of challenge and purpose they’d had as code breakers, and went back to work. After the war my mother got a graduate degree in mathematics, which my father (a physicist) never understood. Her verbal skills were so much stronger, he said; why was she determined to study mathematics? But mathematics was needed and valued at Arlington Hall, and many women did not discover their aptitude for it until they worked there. My mother waited till her children were old enough, then spent the rest of her career as a college math professor. Most of the code breakers still alive are now in assisted living facilities. It’s good that Mundy interviewed some, because they were told their work was top secret and should never, ever be revealed. Many revealed nothing substantive while they were alive, including my mother, though it was clearly one of the happiest times of her life.
When I was 12 or 13, my mother sat me down and taught me the rudiments of code breaking. This was just the beginning, she said; the work at Arlington Hall was much harder. What she was teaching me was not classified. But I should learn something about breaking codes, because I’d never know when I might need to.
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