Candace Fleming puts her research skill and storytelling talent to use to write a remarkable nonfiction account of ten teenage girls who broke ciphers, kept secrets, and helped win World War II. Because everyone employed at Bletchley Park—code name Station X—signed the Official Secrets Act, their vital, top secret toil was unknown for more than thirty years. Writing The Enigma Girls and filling it with rich photographs to capture this historic time, Fleming memorializes the heroic contributions of these young women who dedicated themselves to hard work and secrecy.
Although names like Alan Turing, Alfred “Dilly” Knox, and Tommy Flowers may be more widely known, these men weren’t the only key players in crucial cipher and code breaking operations during the war. “Others with unique talents and skills—mathematicians, Egyptologists, those good at crossword puzzles, language specialists—had also been secretly recruited to work at the Park” (42). One of those, eighteen-year-old Patricia Owtram decided to join the Women’s Royal Naval Service, commonly called the Wrens. At Bletchley Park, occupied for grueling hours at a time as a message interceptor and Morse code recorder, Patricia “listened for Nazi torpedo boats and destroyers that laid sea mines and attacked British ships” (1).
Another cryptographer, seventeen-year-old Jane Hughes worked with recruits to crack codes using a Typex machine, and Mavis Lever used “chopped logic” to pit her brain against the Abwehr Enigma. Although Mavis had “pictured herself parachuting behind enemy lines to steal top secret German documents” (55) when she decided to contribute to the war effort, Mavis instead followed the advice of Greek scholar Dilly Knox and looked at things from a new perspective to translate “gibberish.”
Likewise, Sarah Norton catalogued thousands of index cards of information, scanning for key words, names, and locations. This information was cross-referenced to create an in-depth picture of the enemy’s movements.
Because the code-breaking talents of those at Bletchley Park sent many people to their deaths, the girls wrestled with the consequences of their actions. In order to cope, they reminded themselves that “this is war and this is the way we have to play it” (120). Winston Churchill referred to the intelligence he received from their labor as “eggs” and called the workers his “geese who lay the golden eggs and never cackle” (123).
In 1942, Diana Payne joined the Wrens, hoping for action at sea with other sailors. Instead, she found herself at the Park operating a Bombe, a mechanical monstrosity that could transcribe secret codes. Despite the clattering noise, the electrical shocks, the acrid smell of warm oil, the callouses and cuts, and the other occupational hazards, Diana reminded herself that her contributions were vital to national safety.
On the other hand, eighteen-year-old Gwen Davies, who had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) envisioned herself working on plan engines or learning to fly. Instead, she was assigned to Hut 10, Block A, where she worked at unraveling communications encrypted by a cipher book. Using their language skills, as well as their intuition, a team brainstormed to translate these messages. To Gwen, the exercise “was all rather fun, like an endless game of hangman” (180).
Another lover of “math’s order, logic and elegance” (209), Ann Williamson “lived for a dusty chalkboard full of equations and could happily spend days solving formulae” (209). She, too, would use this talent to break ciphers and crack codes. Likewise, Joanna Chorley applied her skill with early computers. She was immediately drawn to the “magic and science” of Colossus I, the world’s first electronic computer.
The final two young women in Fleming’s account are Marion Graham and Charlotte Vine-Stevens. Fresh from secretarial school, Marion typed Japanese messages that were shared with American cryptographers in Washington, DC, and Charlotte worked as an indexer before moving on to translate and paraphrase Japanese messages before they were transmitted.
With this talented group, the GIs were not fighting alone. “Every one of their maneuvers was matched—by Patricia’s keen eyes and Jane’s clicking teletype keys; by Mavis’s cipher breaking and Gwen’s word games; by Sarah’s translation skills and Ann’s complex menus; by Joanna’s devotion to Colossus and Diana’s cantankerous Bombes as they clacked their way to vital ‘stops’” (282). While much of this work was soul-sucking and monotonous, these combined efforts led to Allied successes. Whether this group was crazy for taking on their occupations or because their minds worked so differently–sometimes bordering on genius-levels, these individuals were often seen as odd or as misfits, and as a consequence, Bletchley Park came to be known as “the biggest lunatic asylum in Britain” (176).
Besides writing a long-overdue tribute to these youth sworn to secrecy and silence, Fleming periodically includes chapters that invite readers to “play along” and relive the experience of this grueling task performed under pressure with lives at stake. Labelled “Top Secret,” these chapters pose situations to solve “If You Were a Code and Cipher Cracker/Breaker.”
- Posted by Donna