Code Girls summary

In the summer of 1916, Indiana native Elizebeth Smith arrived at Riverbank Laboratories, in Illinois.

Riverbank was run by an eccentric millionaire called George Fabyan, who was hiring researchers to prove the theory that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of William Shakespeare’s works. Bacon allegedly confessed his authorship in a cipher that was printed in Shakespeare’s First Folio. Needless to say, it didn’t take Elizebeth long to question the existence of the code she was enlisted to crack.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States was taken by complete surprise. The preemptive military strike and Japan’s subsequent declaration of war made it clear that the US military urgently needed to strengthen its intelligence.

As it turns out, the navy had been scouting recruits for its cryptanalyst office even before the attack. Agnes Meyer Driscoll may have been a great asset, but the office was still too small to handle the load of work that needed to be done. And in addition to recruiting men from leading colleges and universities, the navy wanted patriotic women with a liberal arts education and a demonstrated talent for foreign languages, science, and math. They also wanted the women to be attractive, so that they would marry and leave the navy sooner rather than later once the war was over.

The women who moved to Washington, DC to become code breakers were known by locals as government girls, or g-girls. Of course, those outside of their workplace assumed that the g-girls were helping with menial office work. In reality, their work was extremely intense, with seven-day shifts of up to twelve hours.

Yet for most of these women, life in the capital was also a time of unprecedented freedom.

You’ve probably heard of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who pioneered code-breaking methods at England’s Bletchley Park. But there were also American women who contributed major cryptanalytic breakthroughs during World War II.

One of the biggest advances in code breaking during the war was cracking the Japanese cipher machine known to the Allies as Purple. It was a job that Elizebeth Friedman’s husband William, working in the army’s Signal Intelligence Service, was determined for his team of civilian code breakers to accomplish.

Throughout the war, the g-girls faced sexism from male superiors, colleagues, and others outside of their workplaces. But while hierarchical structures prevailed in the navy, work at Arlington Hall was comparably egalitarian. At Arlington Hall, even newcomer code girls could become leaders of important units.

One such newcomer was twenty-three-year-old Bronxville native Ann Caracristi – known to her coworkers as Annie – who joined in 1942. Annie had an English degree, but Arlington Hall supervisor Wilma Berryman – an early recruit hired by William Friedman – noticed that she also had a talent for engineering; she promoted Annie to be the leader of her research unit. 

The code girls’ work on Japanese ciphers was pivotal in the US’s ultimate victory. But their work reached beyond the Pacific.

In 1943, one group of WAVES members was sent to Dayton, Ohio to live on a campus called Sugar Camp. There, the women helped build over 100 “bombe” machines – a design originally perfected by the British at Bletchley Park. As they would later find out, these machines were made to decipher messages intercepted from the intricate German Enigma ciphering machine.

When it came to sinking Japanese ships, the code girls took pride in their work.

Still, reading the details about the horrors of war was psychologically taxing. News about American casualties, especially at the violent end of the war, troubled many. In some cases, women were even aware that their enlisted husbands, boyfriends, or brothers were in danger without being able to do anything about it.

A few months after the war was over, the women at Arlington Hall were thanked for their service and relieved of their positions. Some time later, army operations officer Stephen Chamberlin publicly announced that code breakers were responsible for saving thousands of American lives and shortening the war. But he didn’t mention that more than 10,000 of these cryptanalysts were women.

In fact, during her research the author found that much of the official information about the code girls’ contributions to the war effort had been classified for over 70 years. She had to petition to have it declassified. Given this, it came as no surprise that the women had mixed experiences when it came to their careers in the postwar years.