Liza Mundy - Code girls: the untold story of the American women code breakers of World War II

Im in some kind of hush, hush business. Somewhere in Wash. D.C. If I say anything Ill get hung for sure. I guess I signed my life away. But I dont mind it.

Jaenn Magdalene Coz, writing to her mother in 1945

In researching and writing this book over several years, I drew from three large archival collections of documents produced by the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy code-breaking units during and after the war. Most were classified for many decades, and now can be found at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. The collections run to hundreds of boxes and include thousands of memos, internal histories, reports, minutes, and personnel rosters, citing everything from lists of merchant ships sunk, to explanations of how certain codes and ciphers were broken, to names and addresses of newly arrived code breakers, to captured codebooks. I filed Mandatory Declassification Review requests with the National Security Agency, resulting in the recent declassification of more material, including some fifteen oral histories conducted by NSA staff over the years with women code breakers, as well as volumes of a multipart history of wartime Arlington Hall. (Somewhat astonishingly, other parts of that history remain classified.) I located some forty more oral histories, as well as scrapbooks and rosters, at the Library of Congress and other archives. I consulted scholarly articles and the many books on code breaking and the war.

I interviewed more than twenty surviving code breakers, located in various ways. A few had contacted NSA, or their family members had. I placed notices on websites. I obtained rosters and consulted databases to find contact information. In other cases, friends and acquaintances provided names, or, often, one woman would lead me to another. I also obtained civilian and military personnel records that are publicly available in the National Archives personnel records facility in St. Louis, Missouri. These were supplemented by high school and college yearbooks, scrapbooks, recruiting pamphlets, newspapers, personal letters, and the very good alumnae records that many colleges maintain. In some cases, of course, I had to trust the womens memory, but a surprising amount of what they recollected could be confirmed with archival records.

In just a few instances, however, archives proved insufficient. I wish, for example, that I could include more information on Arlington Halls African American unit, but very few records of that unit seem to exist.