Journalist lies a monday, talks about her book cold girls. The American Woman code breakers of world war ii. The next session is one that i had mentioned earlier, unfortunately lynn olson could not make it and our other panelists, lies a monday has agreed to expand on her original top. Weve asked catherine to lead this section this session. Shes been involved with the museum for over a decade, and just a month ago she had organized a joint program with our museum and the Second World War research group, where we had everyone come for a deallong program. So catherines information is in your program, and i would point out in addition to being a professor at the Mississippi State university, shes an author of two books. One called a curse, and the other one strategy and tactics. Ladies and gentlemen doctor Catherine Barr b. A. And liza munday. Good morning, happy to see all these nice faces up in front, this is a fantastic event and im excited to be part of it, i would like to introduce liza munday who is a journalist and writer for books. You can read her fuller biography in the program, she is going to talk to us about an amazing book. Code girls. That i recommend, and im looking forward to her presentation. Thank you so much for that introduction, it is thrilling to be here at the museum which i visited during the course of my research. Its fun to see my colleagues from the Washington Post and rob papers at the Marshall Museum in lexington who helped me when i was doing research it is wonderful to speak to this incredible conference and im struck in walking should museum the sort of the representation of rosie the riveter, which is the most common image of women and their purchase and their participation during the war. While that was an important contribution to americas military prowess and the allies, we only recently are coming to realize the extent to which women contributed to brainwork during the war. Two military intelligence and to the field of intelligence, in general. Intelligence was a way that which women contributed, and my book is about 10,000 women who came to the war doing during the war to do a signals intelligence work. They comprise more than half of our code breaking force. And these are women who up rooted themselves from their universities in towns to come to washington. And the lynn olsons book is such an important contribution to how women contributed to espionage and to the resistance movement. And sarah rose, who will be presenting on saturday has also contributed to that. Theres a whole body of scholarship now filling out the story about womens contributions to intelligence and to resistance work. So i would like to start my presentation with a photo i think of as depicting the plight of the College Educated woman in 1942. This photo shows that may court at goucher college. The ritual in which graduating senior women are dressed in virginal white and ushered into the marriage market. What you would not know from this photo, after college was a Womens College in 1942, it is coeducational now. It is what was called a girls school. What you would not know is how unusual these women were who are on this podium. In 1942, only 4 of american women achieved a Fouryear College degree. The reason for that was that College Going was not widespread among the population, male or female. For women, there was a lot of academic real estate still closed to women. The ivy league for the most part was closed to women. In my home state of virginia, uva held out as long as it could. A lot did not admit women. A lot of families do not think it was worthwhile to educate a daughter, even at those schools that would educate them, because the fields of endeavor available to educated women were so narrow. If you are a College Educated woman, the only job path open to you after graduation would be Teaching School. And that is great if you want to be a schoolteacher. But if you want to be an architect or a doctor or a lawyer, or businesswoman, you are going to be shut out of the graduate schools that you would need to attend. And he will be shut out of the professional networks. So a lot of families to the economic alkylation and decided it was not worthwhile coming out of the depression to pay the tuition to send a daughter to a Womens College. There were a lot of people who thought Higher Education was not good for women in the 19th century, there was a doctor at harvard who argued that Higher Education and women infertile because it swelled their brains at the expense of their wombs [laughter]. So schools like goucher and the Seven Sisters colleges had been founded to tell to against that. That bias against educating women and to prove that women can do the work, that women deserved to be educated. Schools like goucher were very rigorous liberal arts colleges. The women had to take latin, greek, physics, french. They got a very, very thorough education. It was very highpressure academic environment. At the same time that they were coping with all of this academic pressure, there was also a lot of pressure to get married. Because the reason that a family might send a daughter to college but was so she could get a proverbial, m. R. S degree, to meet and hopefully marry, a man from a neighboring mens school. In the case of the gouchers girl, it would be Johns Hopkins or the naval academy, and that way and sure her economic and social future, by marrying a man who had good academic prospects are good family standing or both. The women i interviewed who graduated in 1942, and i interviewed a number of them, described Enormous Economic pressure and normas pressure to get married. So you would and enormous pressure to get married. So you would have rituals at the end of the senior year rituals like that make court civilizing theyre being ushered into the marriage market at Wellesley College in massachusetts, the yearbook had a section naming the women who were engaged, the name of the man they were engaged to, as well as a section for women who had left college for getting married, in order tobecause that was considered an ok thing to do. You would go to college and meet somebody and he would leave before graduation to get married wellesley had a different ritual. The senior class hoop roll. The winner of the contest will be the class first bride. Academically motivated women were looking at these pressures in the fall of 1941 and spring of 1942. What i love about the photo is you cannot tell but it shows how the world is changing for these women. Two of the women on the platform, Jaclyn Jenkins, the one closest to the may queen, after the war when she married, her fiance, who was in a p. O. W. Camp on wake island, her name would become Jaclyn Jenkins night, mother of bill nye the science guy, who many of you know is that wellknown science educator and television presenter. That gives a sense of her academic chops. Her good friend gwyneth clement are, these two women had been secretly tapped by the u. S. Navy to learn and become naval code breakers. They were being ushered into an ancient field of coded languages, which goes back to as long as human beings have been able to speak and write, somebody has had the urge tos communicate secretly with 70 else using a code or cipher no one else can understand. Julius caesar had a cipher he used come of that was actually not hard to break. This was a field unfamiliar to americans before world war ii and these women were quickly learning how to take frequency counts, how to count how many letters were in a message, understanding letters have a mathematical behavior. The underlying pattern to the number of times letters appear in the english language. They are learning how to do this in english and in other languages. It is top secret work that in the case of that goucher girls, they are attending a code breaking course, organized by the u. S. Navy. They are training once a week in the top of a locked classroom at the top of goucher hall, being trained by an enlist professor at goucher and by an officer of the u. S. Navy. This is top secret work. So they cannot tell their brothers or their boyfriends or their parents or their roommates other their classmates or any of their friends on that podium that they are being ushered into a completely different future than the one they were being prepared for. The reason those young women have been tapped is, in december of 1941, the attack at pearl harbor was not just the event that propelled america into world war ii, but it wasit exposed our intelligence gap. Our lack of intelligence capabilities, the fact that we had not known the attack was coming. It exposed the fact that we did not have much in the way of intelligence gathering in 1941. Im in the washington, d. C. Area, 17 intelligence agencies. We have intelligence agencies that exist to oversee other intelligence agencies. But in 1941 and 1942, we do not have any of that. We do not have the cia yet we did not have the National Security agency, the nsa. We have to ramp up our intelligence gathering practically overnight. It will take time to build a spy network overseas. The oss will be founded, women will be recruited for the oss, including, famously, julia child. That will take time. What we have to learn to do overnight is to intercept and decipher and decode enemy signals. German signals, japanese signals, from all of the world. Politicians, diplomats, military commanders, are communicating using codes and ciphers. You heard reference to ultra. Im sure everyone in this room knows that ultra was the intelligence from the german enigma machine, that the different ranches of the German Military were using. Also the Japanese Army, Japanese Navy, japanese diplomats were all using different codes and ciphers. We had to ramp up our ability overnight to do that work and find people who could do that work, so we would not be surprised again the way that we were at pearl harbor, as we are sending so many of our men, practically overnight, into harms way in the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean before the war, the navy had a small code breaking bureau it was not a prestigious field in the u. S. Navy. If your career officer in the u. S. Navy, you want to be commending a ship, on the ocean. You do not want to be in an office back in washington, trying to decipher the Japanese Naval fleet code. It was not considered an important field of endeavor and the u. S. Navy. But there was a small bureau. So the u. S. Navy had been in the habit of recruiting young men from schools like m. I. T. And harvard who seem to have the sort of minds that would lend themselves to code breaking. All of a sudden, after pearl harbor, those men are unavailable because they are shipping out to fight. The u. S. Navy had been generating monthly memos, saying where they were finding their potential code breakers to train, what they were learning how to do. You can see, this is from a december, 1941. They are talking about where they are finding their men to learn how to be code breakers. What they are being trained how to do. Given the fact that the men are becoming increasingly unavailable, you can see in this memo the lightbulb moments going on over naval officers had, where are we going to find our thousands of code breakers we are going to need . New source, Womens Colleges . So the decision was made in the absence of available men, lets see what these educated women can do . Lets test as well as young women of the Seven Sisters colleges, were called in and asked two questions, do you like crossword puzzles and are you engaged to be married . If they answered yes to the first endnote or the second, they would be invited to take this topsecret Training Course developed by the navy. A lot of the young women were engaged, because there was more pressure to get married as men were shipping out, they wanted someone at home waiting for them, but a lot of them lied, because whatever they were being invited to do sounded more interesting than sitting around waiting to see if there brothers and boyfriends were going to be ok. So at the beginning of our entry into world war ii, the division of labor in terms of the code breaking theater was that the british had primary code breaking responsibility for the Atlantic Ocean. You have heard of altar and the german enigma machine and you knew that alan turing had the breakthrough that enabled the british to break the enigma cipher, that the german suspicious and the german navy changed the design of the enigma machine. There was a bloody and deadly period when we lost the ability to decipher the german naval cipher and lost a lot of convoys in the atlantic. So britain had been breaking the enigma cipher for some time when we entered the war, so we were the junior partner in the Atlantic Ocean. That would change. We were very engaged in enigma code breaking, but we were the junior partner and it took a while for the two countries to cooperate in that. The british werent convinced of our ability to keep a secret. So that was the division of labor. But in the Pacific Ocean, the u. S. Had prime lead code breaking responsibility. And we had just been terribly surprised in the Pacific Ocean, and the division of labor in the u. S. Military services was the u. S. Navy, the women you saw on the platform, they had lead responsibility for the Japanese Naval fleet code. It was our navys responsibility. But the u. S. Army had responsibility for code breaking by the Japanese Army, which is now spread out on all these islands and landmasses around the Pacific Ocean. So the u. S. Army had to figure out, where are we going to get our women . If the navy had approached all these Womens Colleges and sewn up the northeastern seaboard, where are we going to get our educated minds to work on the Japanese Army ciphers . The army decided to recruit schoolteachers. This is dot braden, from lynchburg, virginia, not far from my hometown of roanoke, virginia. She was Teaching School in 1942, eldest daughter in a family of four, mom a single mother, her mother, her parents were separated, her mother was supporting their household and dots salary of 900 a year was supporting her mother and her household, and her two younger brothers were already in the u. S. Army. She was overburdened by work and what i love about her story is, it shows how the u. S. Army recruiting strategy was wrongheaded, even as it worked. The army approach to recruiting schoolteachers was to send their handsomest young Army Officers out to lurk in post offices and hotels throughout the south at first, eventually all over the country, with the idea that schoolteachers would see a handsome, young officer, and think, if i go to washington to do war work, i can make a marriage to a man who looks like that. So marriage was much on the militarys mind when it was recruiting these young women to come to washington. But dot was trying to get out of a marriage that she was not interested in pursuing. Her College Boyfriend was training in california and he had sent her an Engagement Ring through the mail. She liked him fine, but didnt want to spend the rest of her life with him. He was pressuring her to follow him to california to marry him and she didnt want any part of it. When she walked through the doors of the Virginia Hotel in lynchburg and saw this handsome army officer recruiting young women for topsecret war work in public, the schoolteachers couldnt even know what they were coming to washington to do. , she didnt even care of that guy was goodlooking. She knew this was a respectable way to get out of having to follow her fiance to california. So it was a way to avoid an early engagement she wasnt interested in. I was also an opportunity to make twice as much, almost, as she was making Teaching School. It was an opportunity to travel to washington, the beating heart of the free world in 1943, and it was an an opportunity to show women could participate in war work and bring home the men she loved and protect their lives. So in 1943, dot braden took a train for the first in her life to washington dc. The arrival of trains was being announced by womens voices for the first time for obvious reasons, the men were off fighting. She took a cab to a place Arlington Hall across the river in virginia. Before the war it had been what was called a junior college, in the day when women should get some education, but not too much. Junior colleges were a place affluent families would send their daughters to get a smattering of french and english and math, but also piano, typing, deportment, horseback riding, skills that were thought to serve them well later in life. The military needed topsecret compounds for the massive code breaking operations that would begin to develop. And they didnt have secure compounds the way we do now in washington, so they kicked the girls out of Arlington Hall, moved schoolteachers in, and overnight dot braden found herself working in this massive, hot, temporary building with thousands of other schoolteachers, civilian women, taking trash courses in the geography of as