Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army and Navy recruited over ten thousand women to serve as code breakers in Washington, D.C. Liza Mundy documents how these recruits, often former schoolteachers or college students with aptitude in mathematics and linguistics, moved into secret barracks to intercept and decrypt enemy communications. They broke the Japanese "Purple" cipher and tracked German U-boats, providing intelligence that shortened the war. The narrative tracks specific figures like Dot Braden and Agnes Meyer Driscoll, detailing how they operated complex analog machinery and identified patterns in encrypted traffic while maintaining total silence about their work for decades.

This book serves readers interested in military intelligence and the social history of technical labor. It appeals to those who study how wartime necessity shifted gender roles in professional environments. Readers gain a technical understanding of cryptographic methods used before the digital age and an appreciation for the administrative scale of the American signal intelligence effort. The text provides a record of how these women secured a permanent place for female analysts in the modern intelligence community, shifting the historical focus from the front lines to the specialized labor of the home front.

Outward-looking and clear-cut; an easy read.

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