In November 1941, not long before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a handful of letters began materializing in student mailboxes at America’s top women’s colleges. The messages were cryptic and brief, inviting their mystified recipients to private interviews in which the students might be asked only a couple of similarly cryptic questions: Did they like crossword puzzles, and were they engaged to be married? The correct answer to the first question was yes; the desired answer to the second was no.
For more than a year, the U.S. Navy had been quietly recruiting male intelligence officers—specifically, code breakers, or “cryptanalysts”—from elite colleges and universities, and now it was embarking on the same experiment with women. Educated women were wanted for the war effort, and with all possible haste.
In early meetings, the chosen women were issued manila envelopes containing a brief introduction to the arcane history of codes and ciphers, along with numbered problem sets they were to complete every week. In the late spring of 1942, the first wave of women recruited by the Navy finished their secret courses and turned in their final problem sets. Those who had stuck with the course and answered enough problems correctly—less than half of those recruited—arrived in fresh cotton dresses, prepared to start their duties, working in the Navy’s hot and cramped downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.
Around the same time, another meeting was taking place. Twenty women’s colleges sent representatives to the elegant Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Army’s own code-breaking operation was working to forge ties with institutions that schooled women, scrambling to recruit their top seniors before the Navy, or any other agency or service, did. The inspector general of the Department of Labor noted that adult civilians would not be sufficient to stock an economy bereft of its male workers, many of whom had shipped out to battle. And so, in the intense and chaotic atmosphere of wartime America, another, smaller war was taking place: A war in which female college students, for the first time in U.S. history, were not only recruited by employers, but competed for.
Disparate as their backgrounds were, the women who answered the Navy’s and Army’s code-breaking summonses had a handful of qualities in common. They were smart and resourceful, and they had strived to acquire as much schooling as circumstances would permit, at a time when women received little encouragement or reward for doing so. They were adept at math or science or foreign languages, often all three. They were dutiful and patriotic. They were adventurous and willing. And they did not expect any public credit for the clandestine intelligence work they were entering into.
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Originally Posted by Beevee
