[CW] She decoded Nazi messages and helped win World War II. Now she’s 101.

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

She decoded Nazi messages and helped win World War II. Now she’s 101.
[image: image.png]

In the dark days of World War II, the secretive staff at a large building
on Nebraska Avenue NW in Washington kept a scoreboard of its success. Each
time a German U-boat was sunk by the U.S. Navy, cheers would erupt and
another mark was added to a list tracking this deadly cat-and-mouse game
playing out in the North Atlantic.

The women working in that office had an important though clandestine
mission: to decode Nazi Enigma messages so Allied navies could locate enemy
submarines and prevent them from sinking ships carrying troops and
munitions to the front. They were code breakers in the Navy’s program
called Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES.

“We got several messages a day and had to figure out what they were
saying,” recalled Julia Parsons. She was a WAVES lieutenant in the office
known as OP-20-G
<https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/2103832/the-legacy-of-women-in-american-cryptology-part-1/>,
short for Office of Chief of Naval Operations, 20th Division of the Office
of Naval Communications, G Section/Communications Security. “We knew some
of them were dummies and some were personal messages. We usually had an
idea that something was up that day, so we would try to figure if any of
the orders related to that.”


Now a spry 101 and living in Pittsburgh, Parsons described the vital
mission she and other female cryptologists performed 80 years ago in
deciphering enemy messages. Her section in OP-20-G focused on German
communications while another worked on Japanese codes. Members of the
Women’s Army Corps (WAC) also worked on breaking the ciphers used by
Germany and Japan.


During World War II, women were not allowed to serve in combat roles.
However, the military had a desperate need for people to assist with all
sorts of work while able-bodied men served on the front lines. In 1942,
Congress created the WAVES, Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (which became
WAC), Women Airforce Service Pilots, Marine Corps Women’s Reserve and Coast
Guard Women’s Reserve. Some 350,000 women served as cryptologists, nurses,
pilots, mechanics, office workers, drivers, telephone operators and in
other roles to help with the war effort.

The women in Parsons’s office focused on cracking the daily codes sent by
the German navy. Using Enigma machines, German sailors would encode
critical communications before broadcasting them to the “wolfpacks” —
groups of German submarines that attacked American convoys in the Atlantic.
The Nazis believed the system that used three (and later four) rotors to
encode messages multiple times was too complex to be broken. It wasn’t.


“We didn’t break it,” said Parsons. “Alan Turing
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alan-Turing> and his staff in England
did that. We had one of his computers, the Bombe
<https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bombe>, at the building where I worked.
We tried to figure out what the message was saying, then we drew up what we
called a menu showing what we thought the letters were. That was fed into
the computer, which then spat out all possible wheel orders for the day.
Those changed every day and the settings changed twice a day, so we were
constantly working on them.”

Once messages were decoded, the information would be relayed to naval
intelligence. When a submarine’s location was discovered, it was added to a
large chart showing the movements of Allied and German ships across the
Atlantic.


[image: image.png]

Enigma code breaker Julia Parsons enlisted with the WAVES unit of the U.S.
Navy in 1943. (World War II Foundation)


The role of Parsons and other WAVES women and cryptanalysts cannot be
overstated. In 1942, German submarines sank more than 500 ships in the
Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. By the end of the war, American forces
had destroyed nearly 500 U-boats, thanks largely to breaking the Enigma
code. Prime Minister Winston Churchill is said to have believed that
success was the greatest single contribution to defeating Nazi Germany in
World War II. Some historians have suggested that breaking the Enigma code
shortened the war by as much as two years and saved millions of lives.


“We continued the work of Turing and the staff at Bletchley Park
<https://bletchleypark.org.uk/> in England in deciphering the codes,”
Parsons said. “When we started doing it, the British were running short of
manpower, so they asked the Americans to help.”


The goal of the WAVES women was to save American lives by sinking German
subs before they could attack Allied shipping. At first, news of a
destroyed U-boat was cause for celebration. But it became more painful as
the war dragged on and its human cost became more evident.

Once, Parsons helped decode a congratulatory note to a German sailor at sea
upon the birth of his son back home. A few days later, she learned the
father’s submarine had been sunk, with no survivors. “To think that we all
had a hand in killing somebody did not sit well with me,” she said. “I felt
really bad. That baby would never see his father.”

In 1943, when she was 22, Parsons had volunteered to serve in the WAVES.
She was transferred to OP-20-G when the Navy discovered she had taken two
years of German in high school. Those classes enabled her to read and
understand the messages after the code had been broken.


[image: image.png]
The Enigma machine coded messages, thought to be unbreakable, from the
German military during World War II. (World War II Foundation)

During the war years, Parsons lived in D.C. She shared an apartment with
another code breaker in a rowhouse at 1633 Q St. NW, which became a crash
pad of sorts for members of the military and others without a place to
sleep.

“We had several beds and couches,” she recalled. “If somebody needed a
place to stay overnight, we put them up. There were so many people
traveling through Washington during the war, and hotel rooms were hard to
find. Our apartment was like a hostel. When somebody got out of bed,
another person took her place.”

Because she was sworn to secrecy, Parsons never spoke of her time as a code
breaker. She didn’t even tell her husband, Donald, until she learned that
her work had been declassified. Married in 1944, Parsons finally divulged
her secret to him about 30 years ago.

“My husband would say we had a marriage based on lies,” she said, laughing.
Parsons and her husband, who died 16 years ago, raised three children.

Because of her connection to the Enigma machine, Parsons has found fame
among a new generation of code breakers. She is a member of the
International Conference on Cryptologic History, and younger members ask
her about her work.

She is also one of several surviving women featured in “Her War, Her Story:
World War II,” a new television documentary on women’s roles in the world’s
deadliest conflict. The film was produced by Tim Gray of the World War II
Foundation <https://wwiifoundation.org/> and is narrated by actress Jane
Lynch. It opened at the Military Women’s Memorial in Arlington, Va., on
Sept. 20 and is airing on public television stations around Veterans Day.


“Julia Parsons and many other women were as important to winning World War
II as any general poring over a map or any GI carrying a rifle into
combat,” Gray said. “What these women accomplished, witnessed and, in many
cases, lived through, is paramount to any telling of the overall story of
the war.”


Parsons did not attend the documentary’s premiere. She had visited
Washington over Memorial Day and said that at age 101 she was not up to
making the trip again, though she was excited to see the documentary on TV
and relive that thrilling time eight decades ago.

“It’s been a fascinating trail for me,” she said. “I enjoyed it thoroughly.
I loved it.”


=30=

On Fri, Nov 11, 2022 at 1:56 PM Jerry Proc <jerry.proc at sympatico.ca> wrote:

> *From:* cryptocollectors at groups.io [mailto:cryptocollectors at groups.io] *On
> Behalf Of *Tom Perera
> *Sent:* Friday, November 11, 2022 11:01 AM
> *To:* Cryptocollectors at Groups.io
> *Subject:* [cryptocollectors] Happy 101st Birthday Judy Parsons !
> (Washiungton Post)
>
>
>
> Happy 101st. Birthday to our wonderful Judy Parsons !.
>
>
>
>
> Julia Parns, a code breaker in the Navy’s WAVES (Women Accepted for
> Volunteer Emergency Service) program, helped decode Nazi Enigma messages so
> the Allies could locate enemy submarines. Here is today's Washington Post
> article honoring her:
>
>
>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/11/11/julia-parsons-woman-codebreaker-wwii/
>
>
>
> Best regards.... Tom
>
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