[MUSIC PLAYING]
LIZA MUNDY: Thank
you for inviting me.
It's a thrill to be here on
the Cambridge campus of Google.
And as I'm sure all
of you well know,
we are-- for the
past year and a half,
we've been in a sort of
renewed discussion of inclusion
of women in the tech
sector, the experience
of women in the tech sector.
This is a conversation that
we periodically seem to have
and I'm here to remind you that
women helped create and found
the tech sector,
so much of which
was created and pioneered
during World War II.
My book, "Code Girls," is
not about coding so much
as it is about code breaking
during World War II.
Our code breaking force
was actually larger
than the British force at
Bletchley Park and more
than half of it was female.
And this is an untold story.
I think of it as a
mash-up of "The Imitation
Game" and "The
Greatest Generation,"
actually, because these
women were the hidden figures
of "The Greatest Generation."
So a mash-up of
all three of those.
And I like to start my
talks with this slide, which
sort of depicts the plight of
the educated woman in 1942.
This shows the May
court at Goucher College
in the spring of 1942.
A May court, as far
as I could tell,
it was a very common thing for
colleges to have at the time.
It was sort of a
vestige, I think,
of a Pagan fertility ritual,
in which young female college
seniors are dressed in virginal
white and symbolically ushered
into the marriage market.
And Goucher College
at that time was
what they call a girls' school.
The women who went there
were called Goucher girls.
It was an all-female college
in urban Baltimore, Maryland.
It's now coeducational
in suburban Towson.
But at the time,
it was all female.
It had been founded, like
most women's colleges,
in the late 19th century at
a time when people generally
believed that higher
education was not
only unnecessary for women but
not necessarily good for women.
That it sort of made women
over-educated, obnoxious,
difficult to live with.
There was actually a
Harvard physician--
this is no kidding--
who argued that
higher education made
women infertile because
it swelled their brains
at the expense of their wombs.
And people accepted that, or
some version of that viewpoint,
about the pointlessness,
really, of giving women
too much education.
And so schools like Goucher
and the Seven Sisters schools,
many of which are
here in Massachusetts,
were founded to tilt
against that viewpoint.
To show that women
deserved an education
and that women could succeed
in a difficult learning
environment.
So these were very
academically ambitious schools
that were founded to
educate young women.
And the women on this
platform were more unusual
than they would
even have realized,
in the sense that, at this
time, only 4% of American women
achieved a four-year
college degree.
And one reason for that was
because of this attitude
that it wasn't
necessarily good for women
to become over-educated,
and of course
because so many campuses in that
day were still closed to women.
The Ivy League was
largely closed to women.
My home state of Virginia--
the University of Virginia
actually held out for as long as
it could, into the late 1960s,
before it would award a full
four-year degree to women.
And so there were many campuses
that were closed to women
and there were many
families, particularly
coming out of the
Depression, that
were reluctant to pay
the tuition for a girl
to go to college.
Because even if a young
woman was very motivated
and did very well,
in terms of jobs
that were available after
graduation, really the only job
a woman could count
on upon graduating
from a fine institution
was teaching school.
And that's great if you
want to be a school teacher,
but if you want to be an
engineer or an architect
or a lawyer or a physician,
if you're a woman,
you would largely be shut
out of those graduate schools
and those business networks.
So many families would
do the calculation
and conclude that it wasn't
worthwhile to educate
a daughter.
But one reason
that a family might
decide to send a girl to a
girl's school like Goucher
would be so she could get
the proverbial MRS degree.
So that she could date
and hopefully marry
a young man attending a
neighboring men's school,
like, in this case, Johns
Hopkins or Annapolis,
the Naval Academy, which was
20 miles away from Goucher.
And so I've interviewed
many of the young women
on this platform, or
some of them at least,
and they recall a lot of dating
and also enormous pressure
to get married.
And so they experienced
sort of the twin pressures
of wanting to do well and
prove that women deserve
to be educated but
knowing that they
were under a lot of pressure
to get married by graduation.
And so, just to show
you, for example,
how strong this pressure
was, at Wellesley College
in Massachusetts, the
yearbook in the class of '42
actually had a section
naming all of the young women
who were engaged to be married
and who they were engaged
to be married to,
as well as names
of women who had left
before graduation in order
to get married and
who they had married.
So that's how intense the
pressure was to get married.
That's why they had
rituals like the May court
to symbolize that they were
being ushered into the marriage
market.
Wellesley at the
time had something
called the senior
class hoop role,
and the lore around
the hoop role
was that the winner
of that would
be the class' first bride.
What I love about
this particular photo,
though, is it shows how
the world was changing
and how the trajectory
of these women's lives
was about to change enormously.
So if you look at this young
woman where the cursor is,
her name was Jacqueline Jenkins.
Later on, after she
married, after the war,
her married name would be
Jacqueline Jenkins Nye,
mother of Bill Nye,
the Science Guy,
so you can get a sense of
her intellectual chops.
And this was her good
friend, Gwynneth Gminder.
And these two young
women had already
been secretly tapped
by the US Navy
to learn how to
become code breakers.
So they were being ushered
into an arcane field
that nobody in the
United States would
have heard of at that time.
Code making and code
breaking, as you may know--
many people in this room might
have indulged in it at some
point in your lives or now--
it's an impulse that
goes back really
to the beginning of
human communication,
as long as we've been
able to write and speak.
We have, at some point, had the
urge to communicate secretly
with somebody using
a code or cipher
that nobody else can break.
And if you don't believe
that this is true,
when I speak to elementary
school audiences
and I ask those kids
how many people in that
classroom have
made a secret code
or cipher at some
point in their lives,
every hand goes up because it's
also a really universal impulse
that children feel to
communicate without adults
being able to listen in.
So Julius Caesar had a cipher.
You might have heard of it.
You would move a letter four
spaces ahead in the alphabet
and substitute that
letter-- that's
called a substitution cipher.
As you may know, the mark
of a good code and cipher
is that ease of use
between the people
who know the system
and unbreakability
by the rest of the world.
So the cipher that Caesar used
would satisfy the ease of use
but not the unbreakability in
terms of the rest of the world.
That's a pretty easy
cipher, actually, to break.
So these young women
were being ushered
into a field that has
existed since the dawn
of communication.
That was very familiar
in Europe for centuries
before this time because
of diplomatic intrigue,
because of wars between
European countries and kingdoms.
But in the United
States, we were
more naive about what was
called listening in or reading
other gentlemen's mail.
We were reluctant
before the war to do it,
but we were having to learn
to do it pretty quickly.
And so these young women--
these two young women,
along with about a dozen
other Goucher classmates,
were being secretly trained
in a locked classroom
at the top of Goucher Hall,
taught by a Naval officer
as well as an English
professor named Ola Winslow.
Nobody on this
platform knew that they
were being prepared for a
completely different future
than the one that had
been envisioned for them.
Their families didn't know,
their brothers didn't know,
their boyfriends didn't
know, their roommates
didn't know that they
were secretly training
to become Naval code breakers.
And the reason that
those young women
had been tapped to learn how
to do this work of course
was because on
December 7, 1941, we
were attacked at Pearl Harbor.
It was a surprise attack.
Our fleet was anchored
in Pearl Harbor.
The goal of the Japanese was
to destroy our Pacific fleet
and to drive us to our knees.
It had the opposite
effect, of course.
It galvanized the
American public.
Every young man wanted
to sign up to fight.
And so the attack
at Pearl Harbor
was the galvanizing event that
propelled us into World War II.
We declared war on
Japan the next day.
Germany declares war on
us several days later.
And all of a sudden,
we were in what was
called at the time total war.
Global war.
All of a sudden,
men are shipping out
on aircraft carriers
in the Pacific Ocean,
on convoys going across
the Atlantic Ocean
to Europe and to North
Africa, and so we are suddenly
at war at exactly the time
when we understand just how
unprepared we are in terms
of our intelligence gathering
abilities, because the other
thing that Pearl Harbor was
was a massive
intelligence failure.
So I'm from the
Washington DC area.
We take for granted that
we have 17 intelligence
agencies in Washington now.
We had none of that at the
beginning of World War II,
when we are suddenly sending
so many young American men
into harm's way.
We have been reminded or we
have been sort of woken up
to our inability to anticipate
what the enemy is going to do.
Pearl Harbor was a terrible
surprise, particularly
to the US military,
particularly to the US Navy,
and heads are going
to roll as a result
of that terrible surprise.
And so what will
happen in Washington DC
is that we will
start to very try
to quickly build up our
intelligence gathering
operation.
The Office of Strategic
Services will be formed.
Our first really spy network,
which will become the CIA,
but it takes time to build a spy
network in foreign countries.
And what we could learn
how to do much more quickly
was intercept enemy signals and
learn how to break the enemy
code systems.
So if you've seen
"The Imitation Game,"
you're familiar
with at least one
of these code systems,
which is the cipher that's
being generated by
the Enigma machine
that the Germans are using.
All of the German
military services,
particularly the U Boats,
we are concerned about.
Admiral Donitz is communicating
with every U Boat,
using enciphered
communications that
have been scrambled by
the Enigma machine that
is in every U Boat.
And so that's just an
example of one system that's
being used during the war.
And just to give you a sense of
how many enciphered and encoded
systems are now racing
through the airwaves,
if you think of how
many communications
you send through
the air every day--
emails, tweets, Instagrams,
Facebook updates,
everything that you
send all day long.
You might be sending them now.
If you are, it's fine.
But you can imagine, you
know, if you individually
are sending this many messages,
think about during World War
II, this far-flung war in which
enemy commanders are having
to communicate over thousands
of miles with the people
that they command.
Admiral Donitz is communicating
with every U Boat.
Some of the boats are
thousands of-- you
know, 100,000 miles
away from his command.
And so all of these enciphered
and encoded communication
systems are traveling
through the airwaves.
Radio waves.
They are being encoded
and enciphered,
sent generally using
Morse code, and that
is what we have to learn how
to snatch out of the airwaves
and decipher in order that there
not be another Pearl Harbor
attack as we are sending our
young men into harm's way.
So the US Navy knows
that it has to ramp up
practically overnight.
It has to, as we
would say today,
scale up its code-breaking
force practically overnight.
And it has to do this at
exactly the moment when
the young men it
would normally recruit
to learn how to do
this work are suddenly
unavailable because
they're fighting.
And so the Navy
before World War II
had a very small
code-breaking bureau.
It was not a prestigious
occupation in the US Navy.
You can imagine, if you're
a career Naval officer,
you want to be
commanding a ship.
You want to be out
there on the ocean.
So there was a very
small code-breaking force
and there were
monthly memos that
were generated to say where they
were getting the sort of minds
that they needed in order to
learn how to do this work.
So this was-- when I was doing
my research at the National
Archives, I looked through
these monthly memos.
And normally, before
the war, the Navy
would have turned to MIT.
It would have turned to Harvard.
It would turn to places--
the Ivy League-- to
find young men who
were trainable to do this work.
And you can see in this memo,
the light bulb moment going on
over some Naval
bureaucrat's head.
Since the young men
are unavailable to us,
let's see what these
educated young women can do.
So you see, I've circled "new
source, women's colleges."
The light bulb moment goes on.
Let us try these educated and
trained young women who have
been at these great schools.
They've had Latin, they've had
Greek, they've had physics,
they've had math,
they've had English.
You know, they had this really
great liberal arts education.
So let's see if they
can serve the nation.
And so young women at
Goucher, as well as
all of the Seven
Sisters colleges--
Wellesley, Smith,
Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr--
young women would be secretly
identified by their math
and astronomy professors.
They were being invited in one
by one to secret conferences.
It was like a Harry Potter
moment for these young women,
when you get the letter.
And so they would be invited in.
They would be asked
two questions--
do you like crossword
puzzles and are
you engaged to be married.
And if they answered yes to
the first and no to the second,
then they would be invited to
take a secret correspondence
course that the US
Navy had developed
to train its cryptographers.
To train its cryptanalysts
and code breakers.
And they would come
to Washington DC--
this first cohort of
women who would train all
during their senior year,
at the same time that they
were doing all the academic
work they need to graduate.
They would come to Washington
at exactly the moment when
we understand in a major way
how important code breaking is
going to be to the
outcome of this war.
And keep in mind
that in 1942, it
was not foreordained that we
were going to win World War II.
That the Allies were
going to win World War II.
It looked very bleak, right?
All of Europe now is occupied
or is an Axis country.
Japan is a very, very
formidable foe in the Pacific.
So we do not anticipate that
we're going to win this war.
It's a very, very scary moment.
And so the women, after they
graduate in June of 1942,
they are exhorted by the US
Navy to come to Washington
as soon as they can.
There are so many
of them that they're
sitting on upturned
waste baskets in the very
crowded central Naval facility.
And in June of '42,
if you've heard
of any battle in World
War II, any sea battle,
you probably heard of
the Battle of Midway.
And that was a very important
battle in the Pacific
that turned on our ability to
break the Japanese naval fleet
code.
And the reason that we knew
how that fleet code worked
was because a woman named Agnes
Driscoll, a math and music
teacher from Texas, had been a
civilian working in the Navy's
code-breaking bureau
and she had diagnosed
that the Japanese naval
fleet code consisted
of five-digit code groups.
Might stand for,
let's say, destroyer.
Five digits.
And then they would add--
to encipher that
code group, they
would add five digits
to that code group
to encipher each digit, right?
To change each digit
using something
called non-carrying addition.
Agnes Driscoll had spent
the 1930s figuring out
how the Japanese system worked.
The reason that we weren't
able to read those messages
right before Pearl Harbor
was because the Japanese had
changed their code books,
as they did periodically,
and then we would have to start
all over again, figuring out
what the code group stood for.
But we were back
in by June of 1942.
The Japanese had
set out to ambush us
on the island of Midway and
finish off our Pacific fleet.
We read those messages.
We were waiting to
ambush the ambushers.
We defeated the Japanese
in the three-day sea
battle that's now one
of the most famous sea
battles of all time.
And all of a sudden,
it's understood
that code breaking is no longer
an obscure, unprestigious
occupation.
It's going to be
central to victory
in both theaters of war.
And so the women are
pouring into Washington
at exactly the moment when
we understand how important
their work is going to be.
So just to give you a sense
of the division of labor
when we enter the war, if you've
seen "The Imitation Game,"
you know that the
British, thanks
to Alan Turing and a
large code-breaking force,
have diagnosed how the
German Enigma system works.
So the British are going
to be the lead code
breakers for the Atlantic
Ocean and the European theater,
at least at the outset.
But we are going to be
a junior partner working
with them because we
are now at risk, right?
We're sending all these young
men across the Atlantic.
The convoys are being terribly
menaced by the wolf packs--
that the U Boats are
sinking our convoys.
But we're going to let the
British take the lead on that,
at least at first, but we
have lead code-breaking
responsibility for the
massive Pacific Ocean
where we have just been terribly
surprised not that long ago.
And so the US Navy
is going to be
primarily responsible
for breaking
the Japanese naval fleet code.
So that's what those young
women are going to do.
But meanwhile, our US
Army has responsibility
for a completely different
set of codes and ciphers
being used by the
Japanese Army, which
is now spread out on all these
islands around the Pacific,
right?
The Japanese have
taken the Philippines.
They've taken Guam.
They've taken Wake Island.
They've taken the
Malay Peninsula.
They've taken all
of these land masses
and the Japanese Army is
communicating back with Tokyo.
And so our US Army
is ultimately going
to need thousands of code
breakers to break these systems
and it also needs women.
And so World War II is this
wonderful, terrible moment
where there is
unparalleled competition
for the first time for
smart, educated women,
to show what they can do.
So the private sector is going
to start competing for women.
MIT is going to
start taking women
into its graduate programs
to run its analog computers.
And the US Navy
and the US Army are
going to start a hot
competition for educated women.
When I was doing my
research, I found
memos in which the
Navy was pissed off
because the Army got to Wheaton
College or Connecticut College
before it got there.
And it argued that the army
was poaching its girls.
So when the US Army
had to figure out
where it's going to
get its educated women,
it decides to turn to
teachers colleges as well.
These are humbler institutions
where women are being trained
to become school teachers.
So I'll just show
you because you'll
hear from her at the
very end, Dorothy Ramale
was training to be a math
teacher at Indiana State
Teachers College
in Pennsylvania.
To be a math teacher was a
high aspiration for a woman
because a lot of departments
wouldn't hire women
as math professors.
This is my central
character, Dot Braden.
She's still alive.
She'll be 99 this June.
So back in 1942, she
was a school teacher
in Chatham, Virginia.
And what I love about the Army's
recruiting strategy, which
is different from
the Navy's, the Army
decided that recruiting
secretly at teachers colleges
wouldn't be enough
for its needs.
So it decided to
massively recruit
in public, trying to get women
to sign up to do secret war
work in Washington.
So it decided to recruit
school teachers--
actual school teachers.
Young, overworked,
underpaid young women
who by definition
were single, because
in almost any occupation at
the time, if you were a woman
and you got married, you were
expected to quit and stay home.
And that was certainly
true of school teachers.
So these women were
the ideal workers.
That's the way we would
think of them today.
Underpaid, overworked, single.
They could work full-time.
They could work in the middle
of the night, which they
would be called upon to do.
And the Army's strategy
to recruit these women
was to send its handsomest
young Army officers out
to lurk in post
offices and hotels.
Initially, it was confined
to the Southern states
to a particular
bureaucratic division
because it was
recruiting civilians.
And so the thinking on
the part of the Army
was that these young women
would be induced to sign up.
Would be lured to
Washington, hoping
that they would make a marriage
to a handsome young man
like the officer who
was recruiting them.
And what I love about
Dot is she shows how
wrongheaded this strategy was.
In fact, in 1942,
Dot was a graduate
of Randolph Macon
Women's College, which
was a fine women's college in
downtown Lynchburg, Virginia,
which is where she grew up.
She was the oldest daughter
in a family of four.
Her mother was supporting
the whole family
as a secretary at
a uniform factory.
Her parents were separated.
Her mom was
supporting the family.
Dot was now working
as a school teacher.
Her income was very important
to the family upkeep.
She had two younger brothers
who were now in the fighting.
Like every young
American woman, she
wanted to do her part
to bring the boys home.
She also wanted to
get out of a marriage
that she had been sort of
pressured into entering into.
Her college boyfriend had sent
her a ring-- an engagement ring
from training camp
in California.
She didn't want to marry him.
She liked him, but
she didn't want
to spend the rest of
her life with him.
But she didn't
know how to get out
of it because women at
the time were told to not
upset the morale of the troops.
That was a big deal.
Women were entrusted with the
morale of the fighting force
and so she didn't feel like
she could send the ring back.
But the chance to
go to Washington
and do unspecified
secret war work
was a way to get
out of a marriage.
She wouldn't have to follow him
to training camp in California
the way that he
was pressuring her.
So I just love the fact
that the recruiting strategy
was exactly wrongheaded.
Even as she was very
inclined to take this job,
to sign on the dotted line
and come to Washington,
her other motivation was
to come to Washington.
Lynchburg, Virginia is three
hours away from Washington DC.
She had never been to
the nation's capital.
She grew up during
the Depression.
Her family didn't have a car.
She had never seen the big city.
And Washington now is
really the beating heart
of the free world.
Along with London,
England, you know,
it's the major
capital of free city.
So much of Europe
is occupied now.
It would really become the
heart of the Allied war effort,
and the chance to
come to Washington
and serve that effort was an
enormous opportunity for her
to help bring her
brothers home and also
to make twice as much money as
she could as a school teacher.
She was making $900 a year
teaching school in Chatham.
She would make $1,600 a year
working as a code breaker.
So in the fall of 1943, she
found herself in Union Station.
She took a cab to a place
called Arlington Hall.
Before the war, it had been what
they called a junior college,
which was a thing
back then, again when
it was thought that it
was best not to give women
too much education.
A junior college was a
place where a family could
send its daughter to board.
She could get high
school classes as well as
a couple years of maybe
college English and French,
as well as sort of typing and
horseback riding and deportment
and the kind of skills that
were thought sort of right
for an upscale young woman.
The US military needed
secure facilities
for its massive
code-breaking forces,
so it kicked those girls
out of Arlington Hall.
It moved the code breakers in.
Built temporary buildings.
You can see here the school
teachers now being trained.
Here they're learning
the geography of Asia.
You can them receiving
intercepted messages
from the Pacific.
And you can see how
big these rooms were.
Former school teachers coming
now to work for the war effort.
And what Dot still has a hard
time getting her mind around
is that she became part
of one of the three most
important code-breaking
successes of World War II.
And she didn't even understand
the importance of the work
that she was doing.
So two of them, you've
already heard of.
Our breaking of the
German Enigma cipher
was one of the most important
code-breaking triumphs.
We've heard of that because
of "The Imitation Game"
and because of places like
Bletchley Park that exist now
as museums.
The Battle of Midway
and our breaking
of the Japanese naval
fleet code was number two.
But number three, which you
don't hear as much about,
was our breaking of the
super-enciphered system being
used by the Japanese Army to
communicate with its supply
ships.
So the Japanese Army
spread out on these islands
around the Pacific.
Everything that's brought
to them-- food, fuel,
reinforcement
troops, replacement
parts for aircraft-- it all
has to be brought by ship.
These are former
commercial ships
that have been now commandeered
by the Japanese Army.
They're called [? marus. ?]
They are traveling around
the Pacific and other bodies
of water.
They're communicating
with their Central
Command what they're carrying,
where they're headed for.
We are intercepting
all of those messages.
They're being sent back
to the school teachers.
So it's 242 school
teachers, including
Dot Braden, who are
breaking those messages
systems as fast as they could.
Dot remembers running to the
Overlapper station, which
was the next station of what
was basically an assembly line.
The women would
break the message
as fast as they could so that
the contents could be radioed
to an American
submarine commander who
would be waiting on the horizon
when the supply ship appeared.
As a result of how fast and
well the school teachers worked
and how well the submarine
commanders did their job,
we sank thousands and
thousands of supply ships
to the point where most
Japanese Army deaths were
the result of
starvation and disease
because they weren't getting
the supplies that they needed.
So that's how
important the messages
were that Dot was breaking.
Again, these slides
just give you
a sense of how massive
the operation was.
I'll just talk very
quickly about one
more system to give you a sense
of how many systems there were.
This group of
women were breaking
the cipher system being
used by Japanese diplomats.
They were using
a machine that we
called Purple to scramble
the romanized letters
of a Japanese transmission.
So this might seem
counterintuitive,
but Japanese diplomats are
stationed in Europe, right?
They're stationed in Germany,
they're in Vichy France,
they're in occupied
France, they're in Italy.
They're all over Europe.
They're communicating with
Hitler and with Mussolini
and with all of the Axis
leaders and they're reporting it
all back to Tokyo in
very, very detailed,
wordy diplomatic messages.
We were reading every single
one of those messages thanks
to a woman named Genevieve
Grotjan, a graduate
of the University of
Buffalo, who before the war
had the key insight
that enabled us to break
that machine-generated cipher.
She had been unable to find
any university willing to hire
a female math
teacher, so she had
been hired by the
Army's very small
pre-war code-breaking
bureau and had
the central insight
that allowed us
to break that machine cipher.
And just to give you a sense of
how valuable this intelligence
was, when the Japanese
diplomats were invited
to tour the coast of France--
they were invited to see
Hitler's Atlantic wall.
His fortifications along
the coast of France.
They reported back where
it was well-fortified,
where it wasn't, so that when
we were planning the D-Day
landings, we knew that Normandy
would be a better place
to invade than a better
fortified spotlight
like Calais.
So again, that's the
quality of the intelligence
that was being produced by
these code encipher systems.
Again, you can
see how many women
and how exclusively female
many of these rooms were.
There was also an
African-American code-breaking
unit for the Army.
So the US Army was segregated
during World War II.
So was the Army's civilian
code-breaking force.
But there was a group of
African-American code breakers,
again, who had
achieved their college
education despite enormous
barriers in a segregated school
system.
And they were working
the codes enciphered
to the private sector.
So that will be familiar
to you at Google,
familiar to everybody who does
any kind of transaction online.
Just today as we hope that
our financial transactions are
enciphered after we
make them and encrypted,
which is our modern
word for encipherment,
so too were banks and companies
encrypting their communications
during the war.
And so this group was assigned
to the codes enciphered
to the private sector
to make sure nobody
was doing business with
Hitler or doing business
with Japanese companies
like Mitsubishi.
So that was very
important work as well.
So, just quickly,
the Navy women.
So the women on that
platform, graduating
from Goucher in their
frilly white dresses,
are now working for the US
Navy and they are actually
in the US Navy.
So this is another
tipping point for women.
World War II sees the
creation of the WAVES,
Women Accepted for
Volunteer Emergency Service.
Other branches of the military
will create female divisions
as well.
And so the Navy decides that it
wants its female code-breakers
to actually be in
uniform and to be
subject to military hierarchy.
So the women are sent back.
They're actually
sent to Smith College
to Officers Training Camp and
they will return to Washington
as full Naval officers.
And also this is a great
moment because women
who haven't had the benefit
of a college education
can enlist in the US Navy.
And if they test high for
aptitude, their math abilities,
or their language
abilities, then they
will also be routed into
the code-breaking operation.
So ultimately the US Navy
will have 4,000 women working.
This is a facility that is on
Nebraska Avenue in Washington
DC.
It was also a girls' school
and they kicked the women out.
They built barracks.
They moved the female
naval code-breakers in.
You can see again how female
these code-breaking offices are
and you can see the camaraderie
of the women working
in these offices.
And just a quick
anecdote because it's
one of my favorite
anecdotes, to give you
a sense of what it was
like for these women
to come together from
all over the country,
ultimately, one of the women
in my book, Jane Case Tuttle,
remembers enlisting
in the US Navy.
And she was actually
the daughter
of a very affluent family.
Her dad was a physicist,
Theodore Case,
and she thought when she
enlisted in the US Navy
that she would be made a
Naval officer because she
came from such an elite family.
Her family didn't want
her to join the Navy.
It was considered somewhat
scandalous for young women
to go into the
military at first.
Some people thought
they were bad girls.
But she very much wanted
to join the war effort
and so she took the
subway from the Upper East
Side of Manhattan down to
a Naval recruiting station
around Wall Street.
And she knew that
going in as an officer,
she would have to
take an eye exam,
and she was very
nearsighted, and so she
had memorized the eye chart
and she slipped her spectacles
into her pocket and she
passed the eye exam.
But then she had
to go around to all
of these other medical
stations to sort of get
basically the equivalent
of a physical,
and she got to the place
where the women were
told to strip down and disrobe
because men joining the US Navy
had to undergo a
group naked physical
and so the women had to as well.
And so Jane had gone
to a very fancy women's
boarding school-- girl's
school on the Upper East Side.
She had never seen another
woman without her clothes on.
The word "breast" was never
uttered at her fancy school.
So she had to take
her clothes off
and then a petty
officer came up and drew
a number between her
breasts, the number
nine in red marker
between her breasts.
And said, all right, now
go stand between 8 and 10
for your physical.
And Jane was so nearsighted
that she not only
had to really look
at the other women
but she had to really get
up close and peer in order
to figure out where she
was supposed to stand.
So that was her
welcome to the US Navy.
She's never forgotten it.
And her other
welcome was that she
thought she would
go in as an officer,
but because she
was a graduate of--
I believe it's called the Longy
Music School here, actually,
in the Boston area, that was
not considered by the Navy
the equivalent of
a college degree,
so she went in as what was
called an ordinary seaman.
As an enlisted woman.
So she had to actually live
in the barracks along with all
of the other enlisted
women and she loved it.
It was the great
moment of her life.
Getting out of sort
of debutante society
and being able to live alongside
and work alongside women
from all over the country.
It was an incredibly
important moment for her.
She recalls working
in these rooms
with incredible pride, which
was true of all of these women.
In fact, this is
a quote from Jane,
"We could tell what was
happening in the Pacific
because the stack
would get larger."
So you can see the Japanese
naval messages piled up
on these women's desks.
They are breaking
these naval messages
as fast as they can because they
know that we are pushing back
across the Pacific.
Of course the ultimate goal
is to retake the Philippines
and then possibly attack
the Japanese mainland.
And so the women know that
their brothers and boyfriends
are out there.
In some cases, they're breaking
messages that foretell the fate
of their brothers' and
boyfriends' ships and they want
to do everything they can.
They have to do a lot
of triage to determine
which are the most
important messages
and then move them along
as fast as they can.
You can see-- this is just
a worksheet that I found
in the National Archives--
you can see that they're
working this five-digit
super-enciphered system.
So they're doing the
brain work in order
to subtract out
the encipherment,
reversing the false math--
the non-carrying addition
that's been used.
They're having to
reverse-engineer that in order
to get down to the code group
and then tell what that code
group stands for in order to
know what the ship is carrying
and where it's going to be.
And so these are
just some worksheets
that I found in the
National Archives that
show the brain work.
And again, just very
briefly, we will eventually
take over the Atlantic
breaking of the Enigma cipher
from the British.
So the Germans get suspicious
that we have broken the Enigma
cipher, as we have, and the
German Navy makes its Enigma
machines more complicated.
It adds a rotor.
There were three
rotors originally
to scramble the German messages.
They add a fourth rotor.
And so the British machines
that Alan Turing helped design
no longer work well enough
to break those systems.
So we build these
faster, bigger machines
at a factory in Dayton, Ohio.
They're secretly transported
to Washington DC, where
we take over Atlantic
Ocean code breaking,
and it's pretty much
exclusively being
done by women, who
were designing really
the equivalent of
early computer menus.
They're looking at a
scrambled German message,
they are conjecturing where in
that message a German phrase
like [? "Biskaya ?]
[? wetter," ?] "weather
in the Bay of
Biscay," might appear.
And then they're doing
the mental brain work
to think, all right,
what loop would
turn this letter into this
letter and then this letter
into this letter, and so
they're designing basically
early computer
menus that will then
be plugged into
those machines to see
if they are a plausible
what's called key setting.
And then, if it is
plausible, they'll
plug the message into a smaller
machine that's basically
the equivalent of the Enigma.
If it produces an
actual German messages,
they know they've got it right.
That will be translated by
women who will then take it
to the room where another group
of women, mostly the Goucher
women, are maintaining
these huge wall
maps showing all of the U
Boats and their locations.
They'll write up
intelligence reports
for naval headquarters,
generating intelligence
reports, and as
a result of that,
and of course the work that
was being done on the Atlantic
Ocean by submarine
commanders, we
clear the Atlantic
Ocean of the U Boats
so that we can send the mass
of thousands and thousands
of convoy ships necessary
to mount the D-Day invasion
and begin to liberate Europe.
And this group of women
actually were reading the U Boat
messages as the Germans were
looking out on the English
Channel on the morning
of June 6, 1944
and they're seeing the
Allied invasion as it starts.
And the women experienced
the landing that way.
And so, again, that shows
you how crucially important
the women's contribution
was to the war effort.
The kind of intelligence that
they were generating that
was used by our military.
These are just some photos
of their brief free time
in Washington.
That's my central character,
Dot, behind a pole there.
The women were writing
letters incessantly
to keep up morale to
the men whose lives they
were trying to save.
My central character, Dot,
would disentangle herself
from her college boyfriend.
And she was writing at one
point about a half-dozen men.
She was more
reluctant to have that
go into the book than the fact
of her secret code-breaking.
She was a little
embarrassed that she
was writing so many guys.
But in fact, that was really
quite common at the time.
And the women were sending
a lot of photos as well.
Sort of the
equivalent of selfies
they were sending, again to keep
up morale to the men overseas.
She would make a best friend,
a former school teacher
from Bourbon, Mississippi.
Remember, this was
top secret work.
The women were told they
would be shot if they told
anybody what they were doing.
So even though
both of these women
were working on the Japanese
supply ship code-breaking
effort, they never talked
about it to each other.
They didn't even
know that they were
part of the same
code-breaking effort.
But their friendship was
so strong after the war
that they remained
close friends.
You can see Dot in
the striped shirt.
Her husband, the soldier
she was writing, Jim Bruce.
And that's her friend, Ruth
Weston from Mississippi.
Ruth would go on to work for
the NSA as a mathematician.
So the National Security
Agency is our descendant agency
of our successful World
War II code breaking.
Ruth would work as a
mathematician for NSA
until she became pregnant.
And then I found her
hand-written resignation note
from the 1950s, "I
resign my position
as a mathematician with the
NSA because I'm expected
to be home with my children."
And so after the war,
basically the women
were told, in secret
letters, thanks very much
for your service.
Now get back home
to the kitchen.
And most of them did leave
and go back to private life,
either immediately
or eventually.
When they had children,
they were expected
to leave the workforce again.
But their friendships
remained so powerfully strong
that actually, when Ruth Weston
was engaged to her husband who
you saw in that photo,
she invited Dot up to--
and her husband
basically to vet him
because she wouldn't
agree to marry him
until Dot had given the OK.
And this is a group of
naval enlisted women
who remained such close
friends after the war
that they had a chain letter
going between their friendship
group.
And that chain letter
kept going for 75 years.
Till, when I was
doing my reporting,
the woman in the
front, Ruth Mirsky,
was ultimately the
only one of them left.
And her email sign-on
is Ruth the Wave.
So even though she could
never talk about her service
and never got credit
for it anywhere,
her identity as a
naval enlisted woman
and as a naval code breaker
remained that important to her
that her email sign-on
would be Ruth the Wave.
And so I want to leave
time for questions
so I'm just going to show
two videos that will just
let you hear the voices
of the women themselves.
And I have others that
are on my website.
They're actually all on YouTube.
So you all can easily enough
listen to the other women
as well.
So this is Dot talking about
her train ride to Washington.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- With my two suitcases, my
umbrella, and my raincoat,
I went down to the train.
Now my uncle had to
take me down there.
No car.
And my mother and her
sister were standing there
crying when I got on the train.
I was very secure
that everything
was going to be just fine.
Washington would receive
me with open arms.
[END PLAYBACK]
LIZA MUNDY: And of course
her welcome to Washington
was being told that
she would be shot
if she disclosed the nature of
the work that she was doing.
And so I just want to
finish and let you hear
the voice of Dorothy Ramale.
You saw her photo earlier
in the presentation.
She was the aspiring
math teacher.
She was called in by the Dean
of Women at her Teachers College
and asked to take the Army's
correspondence course.
And she gives you the
sense of why the women were
so motivated to do this work.
She remembers seeing
all the men in her math
class rounded up and put on
a bus to go off to fight.
And she recalls sort of
the emotion of that moment.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- A bus came and it was at
2 o'clock in the morning
that the Army sent
a bus to get these--
oh, I don't know.
It seemed to me it
was all the men.
That there were no men left
in the college at that time.
They all had to go, I
think to Pittsburgh.
You see, since I was
taking mathematics,
I thought at the time I
was one of maybe two girls
were in the classes, you see.
So I knew so many of the fellows
that were going on that bus.
I'll never forget it.
[END PLAYBACK]
LIZA MUNDY: And what I also
love about Dorothy Ramale
is that she became
a math teacher
after the war at the public
middle school in Arlington,
Virginia that my own
children would later attend.
And so that's an example of
how these women continued
to walk among us,
without getting
any credit for what they did.
And I love the thought of
all of these middle-schoolers
taking Ms. Ramale's Algebra
1 or algebra 2 class
and having no idea that
this sweet, kind woman, who
many of them remember as the
best math teacher they ever
had, had been a badass code
breaker during World War II.
She was so good at what she did
that the US Navy poached her
from the US Army by offering
an officer's housing allowance.
So she went from the
Japanese supply ship code
to working the Japanese
naval fleet code.
That's how good she was.
And so it has really been
the honor of my career
to get to spend
time and interview
these women about
their work and to try
to get some
attention to the work
that they did because it was
pioneering code-breaking,
hacking, and computer
work that they were doing.
Cybersecurity,
cyberintelligence.
This is what they were doing.
And again, I think of
them as the hidden figures
of "The Greatest Generation,"
and their contribution
was remarkable.
I mean, it helped
us win the war.
After the war, the estimates
was that code-breaking shortened
the war by at least a
year, probably more,
and save thousands of
lives on all sides.
You know, Axis and Allied lives
because the war was shortened.
And so I have time to
take a couple of questions
if you have time before you
go back to your workplaces.
I'd be happy to field any
questions that you have.
Thanks for listening.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Given that
their work was secret,
I'm curious, at what point were
they allowed to speak about it?
And did you have any trouble
getting them to talk about it?
LIZA MUNDY: That's
a great question.
Thank you for asking.
So this story of wartime
World War II code-breaking
began to leak out as memoirs and
histories began to be written.
And so at a certain
point in the early 1990s,
the story was
officially declassified,
but nobody tracked
down the women
and told them that
it was OK to talk.
So there were more than 10,000
women who did this work.
Most of them carried the
secret to their graves.
When I was trying to talk
Dot Braden into telling me
her story, it took
me about a half
an hour to persuade
her that it was finally
OK to talk because nobody
had given them the go-ahead.
So that's why they
didn't get credit.
But she wanted to tell her
story, because after the war,
both of her brothers survived
the war and both of them
had top-secret security
clearances in their work
after the war.
And they would get together
and brag about their clearances
and Dot could never
tell them that she
had a top-secret security
clearance as well.
So that's how frustrating
it sometimes was.
AUDIENCE: I assume most
of the messages that they
were decoding would be
in German or Japanese
or another language.
Were they also then
having to take language
training so they could recognize
words when they came up?
LIZA MUNDY: Yeah,
that's a great question.
So the code systems that you
saw that were number groups.
So let's say it stood for rice.
Let's say the code group
stood for, you know,
we're carrying rice.
You didn't have to
necessarily even think
the Japanese word for rice.
You could think the
English word for rice.
So some of the systems,
you didn't really
have to know much Japanese.
And the military-- you
know, these supply ships,
there was a pretty limited
vocabulary that the supply
ships would be using.
So they could be taught a
little bit of Japanese--
the names of islands
and things like that--
and work with those
numerical code systems.
But if it was the
Enigma machine, which
was scrambling German
messages, or if it
was the Japanese Purple machine,
which was taking romanized--
that's essentially
phonetic spelling
of Japanese that is then
scrambled by the machine--
and then what you get at the end
is, again, phonetically spelled
Japanese.
They did need translators.
So if a young woman
from the Seven Sisters
had majored in German,
she would be snatched up
to work at the Enigma unit.
And similarly, there weren't
many people who knew Japanese,
but some people who
did were missionaries.
And so graduates
of Bible colleges
would actually be recruited to
work as Japanese translators.
And in fact, the Japanese
surrender message,
the first person who read
that was a young woman
who was a graduate of Bethany
College in West Virginia.
She had been a
missionary and so she
was being used as a translator.
So she was the first person
who read the Japanese surrender
message.
AUDIENCE: I'm curious, what made
you interested in this subject
area?
Why did you start
to research it?
LIZA MUNDY: I happened to have
a conversation with a group
of historians at the NSA.
Most of our federal agencies
have wonderful historians
offices, like the FBI does,
the CIA does, the NSA does.
And I was speaking to a woman
historian there and a woman who
is a curator at the--
we have a little cryptography
museum in Fort Meade, Maryland
that is our equivalent
of Bletchley Park,
and they told me this story
based on some documents
that I had come across.
I was talking to them and they
spent several hours with me
and laid out this
story at a time
when I didn't know anything
about code breaking.
I look back at some of
the questions I asked them
and sort of my level of
ignorance is embarrassing.
So the minute I
heard the story, I
thought it would be an
incredible story to tell,
and this is a time period when
"Hidden Figures" had not yet
been published.
There's a great book called
"Rise of the Rocket Girls"
that wasn't out yet.
So there were a
number of books that
were percolating along kind of
simultaneously about women's
contributions to the STEM
field and to American history.
And so the minute they
told me this story,
I knew that I would
like to try to tell it,
and I just had to
ascertain whether or not
I could find any women who
would be in their mid-90s
who could tell me about
the work and whether I
could find documentation to
support their recollections.
Because of course I couldn't
use their recollections
unless I could document it.
And I was surprised at how--
I had to have a lot of
records declassified.
It took about a year and a half.
But there was a
lot of information
already in the archives
at the National Archives
that had just really been
neglected by historians,
I must say.
AUDIENCE: Does the
cryptographic museum
now have copies of your book?
LIZA MUNDY: I think--
that's a good question.
I think it does, yes.
I'll have to check.
Thank you for asking.
AUDIENCE: So this
sounds like a story
that more people need to hear.
Will there be a movie?
LIZA MUNDY: It has been optioned
and it's working its way
through that process.
So I agree.
I mean, that really
is how many people
come to stories like this.
So fingers crossed.
AUDIENCE: Did you find any
records in the colleges--
like in all of the
Seven Sisters colleges,
did they keep their own
records about the women who
left during the war?
LIZA MUNDY: That's
a great question.
Oh, I'm sorry, women who left
during the war to do this work?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
LIZA MUNDY: Yes.
So Wellesley College
in particular
has done a really good job
of maintaining those archives
and Goucher has as well.
Some of the other schools
really didn't even necessarily
know that it had happened
because very few records were
kept.
And the only reason that
Wellesley-- one of the reasons
is a member of the
class of 1942 decided
to send surveys to all
of her female classmates
to find out what they
did during the war.
And a number of them wrote to
say, well I was a code breaker.
And this was the
first inkling, really,
that any of their classmates
had done what they had done.
And I went and looked
at those archives
and it's fascinating, though,
to see what the other women were
doing as well.
You really get a sense of
how women were being suddenly
recruited by Armstrong Cork, by
all of the defense contractors.
They're all out there
reading blueprints
and using their math
and language educations
in so many different capacities.
So that was a wonderful
trove of documents.
It really gave me a sense of--
and the women
themselves remember.
They said, you know, we had
so few recruiters on campus
in 1941 and everything
changed by 1942.
Thank you for spending
your work day with me.
[APPLAUSE]
