>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Karen Lloyd: Good afternoon. Friends of the Library of Congress, students, staff, everyone who is joining us live on the Library of Congress' YouTube channel, I'm Colonel Karen Lloyd, I'm the Director the Veterans' History Project here at the Library of Congress. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to come see New York Times' best-selling author, Liza Mundy, who's going to discuss her book, Code Girls, the untold story of American women codebreakers of World War II. As many of you know, we were planning to hold this event at the beginning of the month. Mother nature intervened. So, we are here a few weeks later and more determined than ever to shine a spotlight on women who have made major contributions to our society. We know that it's never too late to celebrate the accomplishments of women, and I'd like to thank the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, and her entire leadership team for their commitment to helping us with this endeavor. I would also like to thank Doug Bennett [assumed spelling] for returning to Washington to be with us today. Today's events will focus, not just on women, but on women veterans, who raised their right hand, took an oath to support and defend our country, put on a uniform, and achieved some amazing accomplishments while during -- while enduring many sacrifices. You're going to hear their stories today, and hopefully you will learn about others in your studies, or through the many resources we have here at the Library of Congress. As you do, keep in mind that there are thousands more women veterans whose names and stories may never be heard unless you reach out to the veterans in your lives in your communities to listen, really listen to their story, and then donate it to the Library of Congress. The Veterans' History Project would also like to thank our cosponsor, the library's Young Reader Center. Devoted to the reading interests of children and teens, the Young Reader Center offers young people and their families the opportunity to experience the wonders and resources of the nation's library through ongoing programs and special events. They were instrumental in helping us reach out to schools so that their students will benefit from today's talk, and to develop a deeper appreciation for primary sources that are available to them here at the library, but especially the Veterans' History Project. With more than 105,000 collections in our archives, the Veterans' History Project collects, preserves and, most importantly, makes accessible the story of United States military veterans who served in World War I through the current conflicts so that future generations may hear directly from those veterans and better understand their selfless service. Our collections include video and audio oral history interviews, along with original photographs, letters, military documents, diaries, journals, and two-dimensional art. We are not -- we not only highlight our existing collections, but we continue to solicit volunteers like you, from across the nation, to gather their stories of veterans and their lives so that their first-person reminisces, personal philosophies, and creativity are preserved for posterity. In doing so, we all better understand our history. Today's guest presenter can attest to the value of our collections, because she used them when conducting research for her book. As a former longtime reporter at the Washington Post, Liza Mundy is no stranger to research. A senior fellow at New America, her exploration of issues related to women in war, resulted in her emerging as one of the nation's foremost experts on the subject. She is a frequent commentator on prominent national television shows, radio, and online news outlets. She has contributed to numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Time, The New Republic, Slate, Mother Jones, and Politico. Now, there's a range. In addition to Code Girls, Liza is also the author of The Richer Sex, how the new majority of female breadwinners is transforming sex, love, and family, and also, Michelle, a biography. After her presentation, Liza has graciously agreed to stay with us for little while to answer questions from the audience and to sign copies of her book, which are available for purchase outside this room. Now, please join me in welcoming to the podium our very special guest, Liza Mundy. [ Applause ] >> Liza Mundy: Thank you so much, Wendy [assumed spelling], for that great introduction. Thank you everybody who came for the rescheduled event. Thank you, Lisa Taylor. You've been incredibly hospitable and organized in both helping with my research and organizing this event. It's such a thrill to speak at the Library of Congress, obviously, one of the great research institutions in the world, particularly because the Veterans' History Collection here was so fundamental and crucial to my research. When I was getting started researching Code Girls, and when I was, in fact, shopping the book proposal to editors in New York, apparently one of the editors said that he thought that it was a great story, but that he felt that it might be thin beer, because so much time had passed since World War II. If there were any women codebreakers out there, they would be in their mid-90's, you know, maybe wouldn't remember much, maybe there wouldn't be much of a record since it was top secret work. So, I literally got up every day during my research and thought, I'll show you thin beer. And, fortunately, I had the help of allies, like the Veterans' History collection here. I literally just e-mailed through the website saying, I'm working on this book. Do you have anything? I instantly got a reply from Megan Harris saying, yes, we have wonderful records. We have oral histories. We have supplementary materials. She provided me with a list of the names of women that they had taken their oral histories from, incredibly well organized. I came here for, you know, several days and listened and read to the -- to the women who had told their stories, many of them are no longer with us but, fortunately, their stories have been collected and reside here, and many of them are available digitally. And, so, in the end, I was able to collect almost more material than I could cope with in reporting this book, both from living women and from wonderful archival resources, like this collection, and able to substantiate the recollections of women who are still alive with the paper record with oral histories of other women and other supplementary information. So, I'm so grateful to this institution for facilitating research, for making American history accessible to researchers, to citizens, to everybody, and then for holding events like this where, you know, we can continue to get the message out, and for supporting authors, which is very important. So, it's really thrilling to be here. It's also very thrilling to be here during women's history month. Originally, I was going to be speaking at the beginning of women's history month, and now we've managed to squeak in the rescheduled event when it's still March, and that's really very meaningful, because I think that we are at, really, a watershed moment in terms of receptivity to women's history. Of course, every month should be women's history month. It should be everybody's history month. But, this month does have a special meaning. And I do think we're at a great moment. I think books like Hidden Figures, that have been so successful in opening up the contributions that women have made to American military history, to American science, have really persuaded publishers that there's an audience for these books, that people are receptive to these stories. You may know that the New York Times has started a new series called Overlooked, in which they're going back through their archival record and they're realizing that incredibly important women passed from the scene and did not get obituaries, including Charlotte Bronte. Women of, you know, of that stature were not recognized during their time. And, so, the New York Times has this great new series in which they're going back and they're providing the obituaries of women who should've gotten recognition in their time, and I feel as though the publishing industry is doing the same thing today. And, so, it's thrilling to be part of it. And, so, when talking about Code Girls, about these thousands of women who came to Washington to join the U.S. military and support the war effort, I like to start with this -- with this slide, because it really illustrates the plight of the educated woman in 1942. This photo shows the May Court at Goucher College in the spring of 1942. Some of you may know, Goucher College, back then, was an all-girl school. The women who went there were called Goucher girls, and located in downtown Baltimore, D.C. It's now a coeducational University in suburban Towson. But, at the time, it was a city school. Many of the young women who attended there were city girls, who grew up in Baltimore, who walked to classes, in some cases couldn't afford to board because, of course, they had grown up during the depression, and who were very, very devoted and motivated to get a great four-year liberal arts education. Goucher was a very well-respected university. It's Dean, Dorothy Stimson, was a noted expert on Copernicus. The English professor, Ola Winslow, was the first American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her biography. So, top-notch faculty, very top school. And these young women were even more unusual than they would've known, because at this time in American life, only 4% of American women attained a four-year college degree. And the reason that percentage was so small was, in part, because so many schools were still closed to women. So, many campuses did not admit women. The Ivy league, for the most part, was closed to women. Many, many private universities, many state universities. In my home state of Virginia, the University of Virginia did not give full degrees to women really until the 1960's. And, so, there were -- there were not a lot of institutions to choose from. And, of course, these wonderful women's colleges had been founded in the late 19th century, at a time when many people believed that higher education was bad for women, that it made women sort of, you know, uppity and obnoxious. And there was actually a belief that education wasn't good for women, too much learning wasn't good for women. There was a Harvard physician who argued that too much education made women infertile, that it -- that it swelled their brains at the expense of their wombs. He literally our argued that, and people believed it. So, these women colleges, like Goucher, had been created at a time when they had something to prove. They felt that they had to prove that women deserved an education, that it was worth educating women, and that it was good for women to be educated. But, of course, another reason that the numbers were so small is that families realized that there was not an economic payoff to educating a daughter the way that there was for a son, because the professional fields open to educated women were so limited. If you were a woman who was motivated to become a doctor or a lawyer or an architect or a businesswoman or an engineer or a scientist, you would be lucky to find a spot in a graduate school. Many, many graduate schools were closed to women. Many fields were virtually closed to women. And, so, the only job you could expect graduating from a fine college really reliably was teaching school, and that's great if you want to be a schoolteacher. But, if there's another field that you're interested in, then it prevents a very narrow field of endeavor for women. And even then, only until you get married can you expect a school teaching job. Back then there was something called a marriage bar. And, so, if a woman got married she was required to quit teaching, you know, and to stay home with her husband and her family. So, there wasn't a great economic payoff to getting a college degree for women. And parents, again, coming out of the depression, you know, they made that calculation. Now, of course, the other reason for a woman to go to college, for which there might be an economic payoff, was to get the proverbial MRS degree, which was a thing back then. The idea that if you went to college then you can date men at neighboring men's schools. You could marry a man from a good family or with good prospects, you know, and you could get yourself situated in life. Maybe you would teach for a couple years to put him through law school or whatever, but that there would be an economic payoff to marriage. And, so, these young women, who were academically motivated, who were very challenged by their classes, were also very pressured, particularly in their senior year, to get engaged, you know, to get that ring, to have their future assured. And, so, these schools had ceremonies, like the May Court. Now, as far as I can tell, the May Court was some sort of remnant of a pagan fertility ritual in which the young women, you know, selectively, presumably because of their beauty or their personality or their family or their -- or their academic standing, would be elected to the May Court. You see the queen up there in the chair and they would be sort of symbolically ushered into the marriage market, and all of the women's colleges had rituals like this. Wellesley College in Massachusetts had the senior class Hooproll. And the -- and the legend of the Hooproll was that the winner would be the class' first bride. So, that was the great distinction. And, so, and I interviewed many of these women, and they remember the intense pressure to get married at the time. And Wellesley actually had a section of the yearbook that listed women and their engagements and who they were engaged to, as well as women who had gotten married even before graduating and had left college, in many cases, in order to get married. So, again, that gives you a sense of how hard these women had worked to get their schooling, but sort of the very limited field of life prospects that they were looking at upon graduation. But, what I love about this particular photo is that, unbeknownst to anybody, including their colleagues on the platform, two of these women, this is Jacqueline Jenkins, that was her name at the time, later on when she married she would be Jacqueline Jenkins Nye, the mother of Bill Nye the Science Guy. So, you can get a sense of her intellectual chops, as well as her friend, Gwyneth Geminder. These two young women had already been secretly selected and tapped by the U.S. Navy and they were receiving training in cryptanalysis, which was a field that they would never have heard of, that nobody had ever heard of. They were receiving weekly instruction in a locked classroom at the top of Goucher Hall taught by Ola Winslow, the English teacher who, doubtless, was only maybe a chapter ahead in the correspondence course that the U.S. Navy had compiled to teach them this arcane field that had been around since the time of Julius Caesar, or probably since the time that human beings learned to write or communicate at all, because, you know, it is sort of human instinct to send secret communications to somebody who you have an urgent message for, and not have anybody else be able to listen in. And, so, this field had been around really for centuries, but not so much in the United States, and nobody really in the mainstream had heard of it. And, so, they were being taught all of a sudden, in great secrecy, they couldn't tell their brothers, their boyfriends, their family members, they couldn't tell their roommates what they were doing. They were learning how to take frequency counts. They were learning the behavior of letters in English language, in the French language. They were learning how alphabets could be scrambled, tables could be constructed in order to disguise secret communications. And, the reason that was happening, of course, was because in December of 1941, on December 7, the Pacific fleet had been attacked at Pearl Harbor. It was a great shock and surprise to the nation, to the world. It was a surprise attack. We hadn't seen it coming. We lost thousands of young American servicemen. And, so, we were launched formally into World War II. World War II, of course, had been raging in Europe for several years. We knew that we were going to join the fighting at some point, but we didn't know that it was going to happen abruptly after December 7. The next day, of course, Congress declares war on Japan. Three days later Germany declares war on us. And, all of a sudden, the U.S. is launched into what was called total war. All the young men signed up to fight. Japan thought that the attack at Pearl Harbor would bring us to our knees, that it would demoralize us, that we would allow them to keep the holdings in the Pacific that they were conquering, even as they were bombing Pearl Harbor, and it had -- it had opposite effect on the American public. You know, we rose up in arms. Every family was determined to contribute to the war effort. Every young man wanted to be in military uniform. And, all of a sudden, all the young men were shipping out to the Pacific, to islands, you know, that most Americans never heard of, to the European theater. Men were sailing on convoys going to Europe. It was just an evacuation of the men at the -- so, at the same time that suddenly we're going to be fighting these battles, you know, strung out thousands of miles around the world, we know that we had no intelligence agencies. We have no way of knowing when there's going to be another enemy attack, where the enemy is located, if we want to attack. It's very hard to, sort of, believe this in a day and time when we have 17 intelligence agencies in Washington, D.C. We had none of those when we were entering World War II, when we needed intelligence more than we ever had. We didn't have a CIA. We didn't have an NSA. We didn't have a Director of National Intelligence. You know, we have intelligence agencies now whose job is to oversee other intelligence agencies. We didn't have anything like that back then. And, of course, we would form the OSS very quickly and begin to build a spy network overseas. But, the one thing we could do right away is, ramp up our ability to intercept the radio signals, the encrypted and encoded radio signals that military commanders, that politicians, that diplomats were sending through the airwaves, you know, thousands of messages on a daily basis announcing their whereabouts, announcing their plans, discussing their strategy. All of this was traveling through the airwaves, typically by radio, sometimes by telegraph, sent by Morse code, and encrypted the same way that our incessant Internet messages that we send every day, our texts, our e-mails, our Instagrams, our Tweets, are often encrypted. That was what was happening, is all of these militaries were strung out all over the world. So, Admiral Donitz, who was commanding his U-boat fleet, commanding each U-boat individually, sending messages to those boats every day, we want to learn how to snatch those signals and break them. We had very small code breaking operations, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy, before the war. So, we need to scale up, basically. We need to scale those operations in a massive way at exactly the time that the educated young men that the military normally would've turned to to do this work, were suddenly unavailable because they were fighting. And, so, the U.S. military makes a decision. If the educated young men are unavailable to us, let's give the women a chance. Let's open up some fields of endeavor to smart, motivated women. And, so, when I was doing my work also at the National Archives in College Park, which is a wonderful research facility, and it's the opposite of thin beer, I can assure you. There are thousands and thousands of records at the National Archives. I found this one, in which some bureaucrat at the U.S. Navy got the bright idea, the Navy had a small correspondence course going on for years in which they would recruit, sort of, dabblers in cryptology. They would -- they would try to bring in hobbyists, people who might join their civilian code breaking force in the 1930's. So, they had a correspondence course already, and they would periodically produce memos saying where they were looking for these kinds of people, these, you know, particular kinds of brains they wanted. And, so, you can see this memo says, new source, women's colleges. So, it's as though the light bulb went on in somebody's head. Let's see what the women can do and if they can do this work. And, the result of this memo and the decision, and the fear in the U.S. Navy that another attack would happen like Pearl Harbor, this was a great intelligence failure. The Navy knew that. Careers were ended. People felt enormous guilt. They couldn't let this happen. So, in a moment of desperation and crisis, let's be inclusive. Let's bring in the women. So, as a result of this, women not only at Goucher, but at the Seven Sisters Colleges in the northeast -- on the northeastern seaboard, the sort of elite women's colleges that were seen by the Navy as the counterpart to the male Ivy league, senior women, who were identified by their -- by their deans and their professors, often math professors and astronomy professors, would identify young women who were talented at math, at science, at languages, but who also showed grit, who showed persistence, who showed the willingness to overcome frustration. They would secretly tap these women who would be called in, to their great surprise, and would be asked two questions. Do you like crossword puzzles and are you engaged to be married [laughter]? And if I answered yes to the first and no to the second, they would be invited to take this secret Naval cryptanalytic training course, again, in great secrecy, during the course of their senior year. Many of the women were, in fact, engaged, because there was enormous pressure on women to get married as World War II started and men were shipping out. They wanted to have somebody waiting for them at home and they wanted to have somebody to write to. So, a lot of the women lied actually. Although they were engaged, whatever they were being invited to do sounded a lot more interesting than sitting around waiting to see if their brothers would be okay, or their boyfriends would be okay. They wanted to join the war effort. So, they lied. They said they weren't engaged. They took the course and they came to Washington, D.C. in -- to work as civilians in June of 1942, at exactly the time when the Battle of Midway, which was one of the great sea battles of all time, it was our first payback for Pearl Harbor, showed the U.S. military, secretly, because the public didn't know or shouldn't know, how important code breaking was going to be to the war effort. This was a time when we did not know that we were going to win World War II. It was not a for ordained conclusion. There was enormous concern that we might not prevail. You know, the Atlantic Coast was with besieged by U-boats. There was enormous fear in the American public, but the Battle of Midway was the beginning of a turning point in the Pacific, and it turned on brilliant code breaking that warned us that the Japanese were en route ambush us and, basically, finish us off. And, instead, we were able to ambush the Japanese fleet and win that battle. And, so, that signaled to the people who needed to know that code breaking was to be important. And the women started pouring in from the Seven Sisters Colleges at exactly the moment when we knew how important this was going to be. But, meanwhile, the U.S. Army also needs to compete for educated women, because the setup at our entry into the war is that the UK has lead code breaking responsibility for the Atlantic Ocean and the European theater. So, if you've seen The Imitation Game, you've heard about the other great code breaking success, which is our breaking of the enigma cipher, England's breaking of the enigma cipher and the ability to read the German messages that were controlling the U-boats, as well as the movements of the -- of the Air Force and the Army. So, when we enter the war we have a vested stake in the Atlantic as well, because we're sending our boys on convoys through the Atlantic, which is riddled with U-boats. So, we care, but we're going to -- we're going to be the junior partner in that code breaking efforts. But, meanwhile, we have lead and really sole code breaking responsibility in the vast, vast Pacific Ocean. So, the U.S. Navy, which has just recruited the women from the Seven Sisters School and Goucher and other schools, is going to be working primarily the Japanese naval fleet code, which is the major code system that is being used by the Japanese Navy. But, the Japanese army has a completely different system and they're now spread out all over -- all over the Pacific. They've taken the Philippines. They've taken islands around the Pacific, landmasses. And, again, they are communicating through signals. And our U.S. Army has responsibility for those signal systems, and they need to recruit women as well. So, they figure -- they make a different calculation. They figure, okay, our competitors in the U.S. Navy have the eastern seaboard, and so we're going to compete for school teachers. We're going to turn to teaching colleges, which were the other institutions that existed to educate women. So, for example, Dorothy Ramale, who I interviewed for my book, was out was at Indiana State Teachers College in Indiana, Pennsylvania. She had grown up in rural Pennsylvania. She wanted to be a math teacher. That was -- that was an ambitious aspiration for a woman, because women were not encouraged to go into math. They were sometimes not hired as teachers, but that's what she wanted to do, that was her passion. And she was called in by the Dean of Women and invited to take the Army's secret cryptanalytic training course. But, even women in teachers' colleges weren't going to be enough for the enormous code breaking operations that we were going to have to establish. So, the Army decided they would also go after school teachers, young women who were actually teaching school. They were going to be young. They were going to be hard-working. They were going to be single. They were going to be well-educated, and they were going to be underpaid. And, so, they were going to be extremely motivated to take better paying work with the war department. So, the Army's strategy was to, and I literally found oral histories in which commanders congratulated themselves for their strategy, they were thinking that -- they decided to send their handsomest young army officers out to lurk in hotels and post offices, at recruiting stations, particularly around the American south. They were recruiting women as civilians, and the bureaucratic rules can find them at first in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia. The thinking was that southern women were practically susceptible to the charms of a handsome man, and that all of these hard-working, smart, young school teachers would be motivated to come to Washington to do secret war work, thinking that they would marry a man who looked like the recruiting officer. And what I love about that thinking, about women's motivation, is that my [inaudible] character, Dot Braden, who is still alive and going strong, represents just sort of how wrong-headed that strategy was. Like many young American women, she was engaged, but unwillingly so. Her college boyfriend had sent her a ring from training camp in California. Women were told not to upset morale of the troops. She didn't want to get married. She didn't want to get married right out of college. She didn't particularly want to marry this guy. She liked him, but she didn't envision spending the rest of her life with him. Like she wanted an excuse not to have to get married and go to his training camp in California. And, so, the prospect of war work in Washington gave her an out from what would've been her for ordained sort of life trajectory. It gave her an excuse not to go to California. She also motivated, because she was the oldest daughter in a family of four. She had two younger brothers who were already in the U.S. Army, one of them right out of high school, literally the day he graduated from high school. So, like all American families, she had a very personal interest in the outcome of the war. The Braden family was typical in that they were volunteering everything they could to the war effort. People were donating pots and pans. They were picking up rubber bands from the street. The Braden family tried to donate their family dog, Poochie, to train to become a war dog. She still has the single spaced letter that they got back from the Army War Dog Training Center saying thank you for your -- for your contribution, or for your offer, unfortunately, we have an age camp on our -- on our war dogs, and Poochie was too old. So, Poochie had to stay home. But, that's how motivated people were to join the war effort. And, so, Dot was also in her first year of teaching at Chatham High School, all the male teachers had left, many of the female teachers had left to marry the man. So, she was teaching English, French, Latin, physics, something called hygiene. She was incredibly burdened by her teaching load. She was making $900 a month teaching school in Chatham. She came home to her mom in Lynchburg and she said, I just can't do that anymore. Her mom said, well, there are these recruiters at the Virginia Hotel in Lynchburg. Go see what they want. So, when Dot walked through the hotel door, she didn't care whether that recruiter was good-looking. She knew that this was war work, that it was important, that it was in Washington, D.C. Lynchburg was three hours away from Washington, D.C. She had never been there. She grew up during the depression. People didn't travel. She had never seen the big city. This was an opportunity to join the war effort, to try to help her brothers, and to make $1660 working for the war department, which was almost twice what she would make it as a teacher. So, like thousands of other southern school teachers, Dot got on the train one morning and came to Washington, D.C. and found herself in Union Station with a little bit amount of money in her pocketbook and no idea what she had signed up to do, because this recruiting of school teachers were taking place in public. They couldn't even tell the women what they had signed up for. She took a cab to Arlington, Virginia, and she found herself at what had, up until recently, been a junior college. And junior colleges were a thing back then. They were a way to give women some education without giving them too much education. So, they basically amounted to two years of high school and two years. The women could get some English, some math, maybe some French, some piano, and typing, some horseback riding. You know, the kinds of things that would prepare them for adulthood. So, the Army needed a big secure, off the beaten path compound for its code breaking effort. So, it kicked the girls out. It requisitioned Arlington Hall. It built enormous temporary buildings where the writing pads had been. And it routed these southern school teachers into these massive, hot, temporary buildings. The first day in Washington, Dot had no idea what she was signing up to do, but she had to sign a loyalty oath to the U.S. government, she had to sign a secrecy oath agreeing that she would never talk about it. It was wartime. The penalty for revealing top-secret work was death, and so knew that whatever she was going to be doing she would be shot if she told anybody about it. So, that was her welcome to Washington. All of the women who came to do this work would be told that if anybody asked them what they were doing in these compounds they were to say that they were secretaries, that they sharpened pencils, they emptied wastebaskets, they did unimportant work. Some said that they sat on the laps of their commanding officers. Everybody believed that, because they were women. The work they were doing had to be trivial. And, so, in that -- in that way they were the ideal intelligence officers of the time, because people just assumed that whatever they were doing inside these top-secret compounds it couldn't be really important to the war effort. But, instead, Dot joined classrooms where school teachers were very hastily instructed, in this case in the geography of Asia. These are women who would be receiving the messages that we intercepted from the Pacific. We would encrypt them with own encryption, send them to Arlington Hall. We would -- we would strip out the American encryption and then school teachers, like Dot, would get started on the messages. This is the room that Dot would've worked in. You can see all of these young women working at tables. She still has a hard time believing that she had joined what would be the third of the three most important code breaking triumphs of World War II. So, one of them was the Battle of Midway. One of them was breaking of the enigma cipher. But, the third, which doesn't get as much attention because it's not like a single dramatic moment, was our relentless shipping -- sinking of the ships that were supplying the Japanese army all around the Pacific. The Japanese were on islands, for the most part. they had to be regularly supplied with water, with food, with fuel, with medicine, with spare airplane parts, with reinforcement troops, all of that was brought by ship. Those ships were sending messages every day saying where they were coming from, where they were going to. It was a complicated system called an enciphered code system. A word like [inaudible] for supply ship would be rendered as a four-digit code group. Another four digits would be added to that to change the numbers, that was an early form of encryption, and that would be sent by Morse code through the airwaves. We would snatch that out of the air. The school teachers would start stripping out that encryption, stripping out the extraneous numbers, to get down to the code group, and then trying to figure out what they meant. Because they did their work so well, because they did it so rapidly, Dot remembers running to get the messages to the next stage, we were able to sink thousands of supply ships. The information in the messages would be sent to American submarine commanders, who would be waiting when the supply ships appeared. They were relentlessly sunk. And, the result of that, was that most Japanese army deaths were the result of starvation and disease. That's how well the school teachers did their job. Dot remembers that she would get the message along as far as she could, and she would take it to a woman called the overlapper. And she was very nervous about speaking that word, because the women were told never to even utter certain words on the streets of Washington. Overlap was a term of art, and if they spoke it on the street maybe somebody from the access would overhear. So, when I did my interview with her, or my many interviews with her, she had never even used the word overlapper, and she felt uneasy about saying it even now. But, what she remembered, and this is -- this is one my favorite parts of the story, is that the overlapper was a woman named Miriam, and she was from New York City, because there were women who were recruited from northern colleges as well. And Dot remembers Miriam as being the most condescending northerner she had ever met. And I'm from the same part of Virginia that Dot is, so I somewhat identified with this part of the story, I have to admit. And she recalled that Miriam would make fun of her accent, would make fun of her southern accent. And it's true that at Arlington Hall, you know, even as American GI's were going all over the world at great peril and risk to their lives, they were seeing the South Pacific, they were seeing Paris, these women were coming together, they were seeing Washington, and they were meeting women from other parts of the country. So, but they were also having to function with them in a workplace, and it was incredibly important work, but it was also a government workplace, and Miriam got on Dot's nerves because the women clashed. They were from different parts of the country. The northerners tended to see the southern women as being less well-educated. There were also men working at the code breaking facility who were too old for the fighting, so there were many distinguished men from publishing circles in New York City who came down to work in the code breaking operation as well, and one of them referred to the southern women as the jewels. And the reason he called them that was because he felt so many southern women were named Opel or Pearl or Ruby or Emerald. And, I have to admit, when I went through the rosters at the National Archives, there were a lot of women named Ruby and Emerald and Pearl, and there were also some Jewels. And one of the women that I interviewed for this book, Jewel S. Mocker [assumed spelling] in South Carolina, she was a graduate of Winthrop College in South Carolina. She was a high school band director when she was recruited to do this work. And musical talent is also a marker for code breaking ability, because it involves the ability to follow patterns. So, I have to -- I have to grant that there were a fair amount of southern women who had jewel-like names. I love this photo, because the woman that you see laughing down at her work sitting next to dead plant, she had been recruited as an English major out of Russell Sage College outside of New York. And she, working with a West Virginia school teacher named Wilma Berryman, those two women broke a separate code system that appended every Japanese army message. It was the address. It was the address of where it was coming to and where it was destined for, the person sending it, the rank of the person sending it, the person receiving it, the rank of that person, and a vast amount of useful information for our military to have because we want to know where the Japanese are, where they're going to, who they're communicating with. If a flurry of messages is going to new location, maybe something is being planned. So, thanks to their breaking of that particular message system we were able to provide the Pentagon every day with something called order of battle, that showed where the Japanese army was located and where messages, new messages, were being sent to. So, that was incredibly important intelligence. These women were generating intelligence, that the Pentagon was actually breathing down their neck to get that order of battle report every day. Just to give you a sense of how many code and cipher systems were in play during the war, the Japanese diplomats, who were stationed in Europe, in all the occupied countries, all the access countries, they were communicating back with Tokyo using a completely different cipher system. It was a machine that scrambled Romanized Japanese into, you know, unintelligible gibberish. We had broken that machine system before the war thanks to a woman named Genevieve Grotjan. We were reading all of those diplomatic communications. One of the most important bits of intelligence we got from the Japanese diplomats about Europe was when they were invited to tour the coast of France before D-day. They dutifully reported back to Tokyo on where the coast of France was well fortified and where it wasn't. So, we knew that when we were planning the Allied landing that Normandy would be a better place to land than other parts of the French coast. So, that's the kind of information that we were getting from these code breaking operations. Again, this just gives you a sense of the number of women who were doing this work. There was also an African-American code breaking unit at Arlington Hall. The U.S. Army was segregated during World War II. So, the code breaking operation was segregated as well. This was a secret unit. A lot of the white workers didn't even know about it. But, this group of very well-educated, very dedicated, probably former school teachers, who had attained their education in a -- in a segregated U.S. education system, were lending their talents to breaking the codes and ciphers of the private sector. So, just as banks and companies today encrypt all of their financial communication when they send it over the Internet, so, too, were they doing that back then. This unit was reading the codes and ciphers of banks and companies to see who was doing business with Hitler, who was doing business with Japanese companies like Mitsubishi, because, of course, they weren't supposed to be doing that. So, this was very important work, and this was a very unsung unit. They were also doing early cipher security, looking for -- to make sure that our encrypted traffic that we were sending was more secure than the code systems that we were reading. They were also planning deception programs, creating something called dummy traffic, that would persuade the enemy, just because of the signals we were sending, would persuade the enemy that we had troops stationed where none existed. And, again, before the D-Day landings, this dummy traffic persuaded the Germans that we had Allied troops ready to invade Calais. So, they thought the main landing was going to come in Calais. So, meanwhile, during World War II, this is the tipping point, this is the first really major experiment with admitting women into the military, and the decision was made in 1942 to admit women into the Army, and also to admit women into the Navy. It was a hard-fought battle. Many of the deans and professors at the women colleges really pressed the Navy to admit young women. They saw this as an opportunity, again, to expand opportunities for their graduates. So, the women who came to Washington, you saw them in those frilly dresses at the beginning, they ultimately -- the Navy wanted its female code breakers to be -- to be subject to military discipline and the military hierarchy. So, they were trained to become naval officers. So, you can see them here. Actually, they're crossing Nebraska Avenue. The Navy also needed a lot more space than it had downtown, so it commandeered Mount Vernon Seminary, which was on Nebraska Avenue where Department of Homeland Security is now. Kicked those girls out. The girls had to take classes at Garfinkel's Department Store while they were finding a place to study, and they set up a massive code breaking operation. The women were housed in barracks near American University. You can see them crossing the street. So, this was a great moment for women to join the military. It was also a moment when women, who had not had the benefit of a college education, could enlist, you know, could enlist as ordinary seamen. And when they took their aptitude tests, if they tested high for ability, you know, and for the sort of the right kind of intellectual skills like math and languages, they would be secretly routed into the code breaking operation. So, again, this was a great coming together of women from all over the country, women from Colorado. The Navy was looking for librarians, people who knew how to keep great records. So, women came from Colorado, from California, from Oklahoma. They got on troop trains. They traveled for days. They went to boot camp and officer training camp, and they came together, thousands of women working at these compounds. One of my favorite anecdotes about the coming together of these women, one of the women I interviewed for this book, Jane Case, actually came from a very affluent family in New York City. She grew up in Auburn, New York and then on the upper east side of New York City, a very -- a very sort of debutante kind of society that she was kind of expecting to have to be part of. When the -- when the war started she, again, wanted to do anything she could. She desperately wanted to enlist in the U.S. Navy. Her parents didn't want her to. There was a lot of stigma at first associated with these women. They were considered to be bad women. There were whisper campaigns against them. The thinking was, that they were being put into the military to service the man sexually. And, so, some parents didn't want their daughters joining up, but Jane was determined. So, she took the subway down to Wall Street where there was a naval recruiting station. She expected that she would go in with an officer, as an officer because she came from such an upper-class family, and she knew she'd have to pass an eye exam. So, she had -- and she was very, very nearsighted and she had memorized the eyechart in order to make it through the eye exams. She slipped her spectacles in her pocket. And she did make it through the eye exam, but she didn't know that there were going to be a lot of other medical stations, including a gynecological exam, which was a shock for a lot of the women. But, there was also a physical exam. And men, at the time, were forced to undergo a group naked physical to join the Navy. The Navy was trying to figure out whether, you know, it should sort of do the same things for women that it was doing for man. So, the women had a naked group physical as well, and Jane still remembers the shock of being told to disrobe, and then she remembers that a petty officer drew the number nine between her breasts and said, okay, go stand between eight and 10, and never had never seen another woman without her clothes on, and because she was so nearsighted, she not only had to look, she had to really peer in order to -- in order to figure out where she was supposed to stand. So, she remembers that fondly as sort of, you know, you're in the Navy now. And this was -- this was -- this was something quite different than the debutante society she had been raised to. And when she -- and she also found that, she had gone to music school after graduating from high school, the Navy didn't consider that to be equivalent of two years of college. So, she went in as an ordinary seaman. She went in as an enlisted woman, and because of her ability with math, her dad was a physicist, and because of her chops, she was routed into the code breaking operation as well, and she loved it. Her first roommate was from the Midwest and her dad was an undertaker and gave his daughter a music box in the shape of a casket. And, so, that was Jane's introduction to sort of other American decorating schemes that she had not grown up with. So, the Navy women worked at this huge compound. I found these photographs in the National Archives just kind of swimming around in files. As you can see, I had to get them declassified, but they're wonderful photos of the interior of the Navy code breaking unit. The women were working the Japanese naval fleet code. You can see on the table massive stacks of Japanese messages. Jane remembered, we could tell what was happening in the Pacific because the stack would get larger. They had to make decisions about which messages were important. They had to push them along as fast as they could. They, too, had to strip out numerical encipherment called additives in order to get down to the code groups. They were under incredible pressure. They knew that their brothers were in the Pacific. They were sometimes breaking messages that told the location and the -- and the whereabouts and the fate of their brothers' and their boyfriends' ships. They knew the stakes. I found memos in the National Archives in which their officers would say, you all recovered 2000 additives last month. We need more this month. You know, we're planning to push back across the Pacific. We want to retake the Philippines. This work is incredibly important. We need to know where the enemy is. And, so, we need you all to work harder and faster. And I would see memos congratulating them, for not only meeting their quota, but for exceeding it. So, this will show you, this is one of the worksheets. The Japanese naval fleet code was a five-digit enciphered code system. I just love these worksheets. Again, they're swimming in files at the National Archives, but they give you a sense of the brain work that the women had to do in order to recover these additives. I also love this table. Again, it shows you how many different code systems there were. This was a completely different system. It was a lesser system that the Japanese Navy, sort of an ad hoc system, they set up, completely different. It was letters, not numbers. There was a group of women from Wellesley who were assigned to work the interisland cipher. It had a key that changed every month, and they had to break back into the -- into the system. They had to determine the new key that was being used to sort of control the system every month. And they got so good at that, and I found records talking about how good they were at that, but they could sort of work really hard for five days and then go a little bit on autopilot for the rest of the month. And you remember, that these women were living unchaperoned for the first time in their lives in Washington, D.C. There was a lot of alcohol in Washington during World War II. And, if the women were naval officers, they could live in group houses. They didn't have to live in barracks. So, they could have parties. And the Wellesley women had big blowouts. And I found an oral history of their commanding officer, who very much admired their intelligence, but also admired their partying spirits. He would remember that one of the mathematicians in particular, a math major from Wellesley would come to him and ask, when is she going to have her next big party? And he would look at the wall map and he would say, okay, the key is going to change at X day of the month, you can have your party two weeks before that, because then you can recover from your hangovers for two weeks before you have to really apply your intellect. But, again, to give you a sense of the stakes, in April of 1942 we received messages in the Pacific saying that Admiral Yamamoto, who commanded the Japanese naval fleet, and was the mastermind of Pearl Harbor, was going to be making an inspection tour of the Solomon Islands. The interisland cipher was part of this set of communications. Men in the Pacific, American men in the Pacific, got busy on the naval fleet code messages. These women got busy on the interisland cipher. They put together his exact itinerary down to the minute so that we were able to send planes up and shoot his plane out of the air and basically make the decision to assassinate an enemy commander. And the women remembered that cheering went up in the naval code breaking compound when they knew that the admiral's plane had been shot down. Of course, the American public and the Japanese could not know that it happened as a result of code breaking, but the women knew. And it's important, I think, to point out that they felt great satisfaction at the time when they knew that their work had actually contributed to the sinking of a convoy or a fleet or to the downing of an important airplane. It was, you know, it was war. We wanted to win it. They knew that lives were at stake, again, of their brothers and boyfriends. They knew that America was at stake and freedom was at stake. So, they -- you know, they wanted to win and they wanted to do what had to be done. Later on in their lives they would come to have more complex feelings about the, you know, lethal work that they were part of, but at the time there were no second thoughts. So, just to quickly point out, we eventually really became the senior partner in the breaking of the enigma cipher that Admiral Donitz was using to command his U-boats. The Germans suspected that we were reading their code system. They changed the enigma machine that was being used by the U-boats. They added an extra rotor that scrambled the messages even more than they had been scrambled before. And, so, the American industrial resources had to get involved to build these giant machines that could handle a four-rotor enigma machine. The old one had been three rotors, and now we needed sort of more heavy-duty, faster machines. And, so, the Americans designed and built these machines that were secretly transported, again, to the naval code breaking compound. For me, one of the most moving, and, ultimately, it was really women who were working the German enigma cipher system. It involved a lot of math. It involved designing early computer menus in order to break into those messages. And one of the most moving chapters to me of the book was when the women join the midnight watch on the -- on the night of June 6, early morning June 5, and then going into June 6. They knew that the D-Day landings were going to happen. They didn't know when they were going to happen. It was a full moon. They assumed that was not ideal for a secret Allied landing, so they thought it wasn't going to happened on the 6th. But, they remember that at about 1:30 in the morning our time they started getting messages. You know, the machines started spinning. The German's started chattering. And it was -- they were experiencing -- these women were experiencing the D-Day landings from the point of view of the Germans. And the first messages were basically German, you know, officers saying -- seeing thousands and thousands of Allied ships on the horizon saying, oh my God, the landing is happening and it's happening in Normandy. And, so, the women remembered all that night just working as fast as they could to break the German messages. So, they were in the unique position of experiencing the D-Day landing from the point of view of the Germans, who were communicating about what was going on. So, they knew the landings were happening. They knew that they had brothers and boyfriends and fiances that were making the landing. They didn't know how it was going. You know, they couldn't tell from the German messages everything about the D-Day invasion. So, they were really overwhelmed by the enormity of what they were part of. And, at the end of their -- of their midnight shift they remember taking the bus to National Cathedral and then going into Saint Albans Chapel, which was open 24 seven during World War II, and praying because they didn't know, you know, what the outcome was. They didn't know how many lives had been lost. And a number of them had, in fact, lost their fiances in the invasion and they just didn't know that yet, because they hadn't got a telegraph. These are some photos of my central character. You can see Dot Braden behind the pole. At the same time, again, that they were doing this incredibly serious, urgent, stressful work, they were having a good time in Washington. They were writing lots of men. My central character was actually writing half a dozen men. She was, in some ways, more reluctant to confess that to me than she was to talk about her secret code breaking work. She disentangle herself from her engagement, and ultimately married one of the men that she was writing to. Had a very happy marriage. She became best friends with a school teacher from Bourbon, Mississippi, Ruth Weston, an incredible mathematician, who would go on to work for the NSA as a mathematician. The women remained best friends for the rest of their lives. You can see them there with their husbands. They remained such close friends. After the war they could never talk to each other about their code breaking work. They didn't even know that they were part of the same code breaking effort to break the supply ships. They knew they both worked in the same compound, but they were terrified of talking about their work either before or after the war. All of these women were told at the end of the war, thanks very much for your efforts. You saved thousands of lives. You shorten the war by at least a year. Now, never tell anybody what you did. And, so, they went into later life never talking about this work. Dot's brothers both survived the war. They -- both of her brothers would take jobs that involved top-secret security clearances. They would get together and brag about their secret security clearances. Dot could never tell them that she also had a top-secret security clearance. So, that's the kind of thing that the women had to put up with for decades and decades for the rest of their lives. But, they remained so close that their children, for a long time, thought they were cousins. Their children thought they were related to each other, because they knew that their -- that these two women shared a great friendship, as well as a secret, some secret about what they had done during the war. This is a group of Naval enlisted women who also remained great friends after the war was over. Only one of them is still alive, Ruth Mirsky, who you can see in the striped shirt. And her e-mail, when she communicates with me, it's Ruth the Wave. So, you know, at 95 she's on e-mail because they were code girls then and they're code girls now. And this work, although they couldn't talk about it for 75 years, remained so important to them that would, you know, that she chose that as her e-mail address. And I just wanted to end with a couple of quick videos that give you a sense of the women talking about their work, talking about what was important to them, and remembering, you know, some of their most memorable experiences. So, this is Dot. >> With my two suitcases, my umbrella, and my raincoat, I went down to the train. Now, my uncle had to take me down there. No car. And my mother and her sister were standing there crying when I got on the train. I was very secure that everything was going to be just fine. Washington would receive me with open arms. >> Liza Mundy: And, of course, the message she got in Washington was that she would be shot if she told anybody what she was doing. So, the next woman, Anne Seeley, was recruited out of Smith College in 1942, and she would work the Japanese naval fleet code. >> An additive is, obviously, something that you add, but what do you add it to. You add it to a five-digit code group. And the code group has a meaning, which is either a word or a phrase or a sentence or a Roman letter. Because we're dealing in Japanese now [inaudible] make much use of the Roman letters. But, they often did to spell names. >> Liza Mundy: Right. >> People like [inaudible]. >> Liza Mundy: So, her memory was so sharp. She had never talked about this in 75 years, and she remembered that the Japanese would have to have a different code group for every letter of the name Roosevelt, because they might not have, you know, an actual character that stood for Roosevelt. So, her memory was so sharp she actually showed me the math that she had to do in order to recover the additives. She got a little irritated when I seemed a little slow on the uptake. So, because I was saying, well, they had added it, so did you subtract or add? And she said, well, we would zeroize [phonetic] and add. I mean, you know, how hard is that? So, I just loved how precise her memory was of this work that she had never told anybody about. The next woman, Betty Bemis Robards, worked those -- helped build those machines that broke the German enigma cipher, and then remembers basically the thanks that they got for the great work that they did. >> We broke the code in August 1943, and everybody says, what did they tell you? I said, nothing. All that Commander Meater [assumed spelling] announced at supper one night, good job, girls. You did good. And that's all he said. >> Liza Mundy: And the last woman, Dorothy Ramale, you saw her photo earlier in the presentation, she was recruited out of Indiana State Teachers College, and she remembers why it was so important to the women to do this work when they were recruited. >> A bus came, and it was at two o'clock in the morning that the Army sent a bus to get these, oh, I don't know, it seemed to me it was all the men, you know, that there were no men left in the college at that time because they all had to go, I think, to Pittsburgh. You see, since I was taking mathematics, [inaudible] I was one of maybe two girls that were in the classes, you see. So, I knew so many of the fellows that were going on that bus. I'll never forget. >> Liza Mundy: So, Dorothy Ramale was such a -- was such a successful code breaker that the U.S. Navy actually stole her from the U.S. Army. She was that good. And what I love about her is that she became a math teacher after the war. She never told anybody what she did. She would end up teaching at the Public Middle School in Arlington, Virginia, that my own children would ultimately attend, Swanson, and then Yorktown High School. And I just love the thought of these middle school kids taking Miss Ramale's algebra one class and having no idea that this sweet woman, who people remember as an incredible math teacher, had been such a badass code breaker during World War II. And, of course, she never talked about it, you know, until I interviewed her. And she's also an example of the fact that these women walked among us, you know, for decades and decades, and in many cases, still walk among us. They never expected credit for what they did. In most cases, they never got any credit for what they did. They took the secret to their graves. I felt very fortunate, ultimately, to be able to find 20 women, living women, who could talk about their work. You see how excellent their memories were. And to be able to, you know, to try and get them some credit for the incredible contribution that they made to winning the war, and to American freedom and democracy. I mean, that's not an overstatement. And, again, never expecting credit. One of the -- I will say that by the time I was interviewing them, they knew that they had been left out of history. They knew that books that were written about Pacific code breaking and Atlantic code breaking during the '90s, you know, had pretty much not told their story, because the women had been so good about not speaking up. And one of the women I interviewed in an emergency room in Atlanta, because she had broken her wrist the night before, I learned that emergency rooms are good places to interview, because you have to wait a long time and they can't -- the person can't go anywhere. But, she said that, you know, I just hope that I live long enough to see the book published, and I am happy to say that she did. So, thank you so much for listening. It's been a great honor to work with the Library of Congress and trying to tell the story. [ Applause ] And I think we have time for a few questions. >> Karen Lloyd: I was going to do [inaudible]. >> Liza Mundy: Oh. >> Karen Lloyd: Thank you, Liza, for bringing to light the stories of these incredible women and the contributions they made to the course of war, technology, code breaking, and cyber security. Because of your work using primary sources, like those found at the Veterans' History Project, stories like these cannot be ignored. They will forever be included in the annals of history. When we first started planning this book talk, we were thinking how great it would be to have some of those code girls here with us today, but because they are generally in their 90's and a bit frail, we thought, well, let's do the next best thing. And Liza helped us reach out to those families and get some of those collections that we didn't have in our archives here. And in February we received a package containing an oral history interview, photographs, and a memoir that was written by Elizabeth McClure Bennett. And her son, George Bennett, Junior, when he found out what we were doing, rallied his family to collect these items and send them to us right away. In one of the e-mails he sent to our staff he wrote, my mother is still alive, but her health has been very poor over the last several years. Our family is very grateful to Liza Mundy for her great book featuring the code girls, and to you and the Veterans' History Project for preserving the story of these remarkable women. I'm very sad to report that Mrs. Bennett passed away on the 16th of March at the ripe old age of 96. I would suggest to you, she lived a good life. I understand that her family is watching live on YouTube, and her son, Doug, flew in from Indianapolis to be with us today. So, thank you, Doug. And -- [ Applause ] I want -- I want them to understand how grateful that we are to make sure that their mom's story is going to live on in perpetuity here at the library. And, so, again, thank you for that round of applause for Doug and his family. And in closing, if you're like the Bennetts and have a veteran in your life, living or deceased, no matter the gender, branch, service, or military assignment, please consider donating their story to the Veterans' History Project. We've got a table set up outside where you can get our field kit. You can go up our website, loc.gov/vets and hear some amazing stories, and this way you can preserve, you can ensure that loved one's story will be preserved and not lost or forgotten. So, again, thank you for joining us today. And now we have some time for questions for -- with you and with Liza. So, without further ado. >> Liza Mundy: Sure. >> Did any of the women demand proof that it was now unclassified and -- oh, sorry. Did any of the women demand proof that it was now unclassified and that they could talk about it? Or, did they just believe you? >> Liza Mundy: It did, in some cases, take persuasion. It took me about a half an hour to persuade Dot that she wouldn't be put in prison if she -- if she spoke. And I told her that if she was, it would probably a nice prison at her age. And, so, in some cases it did take some coaxing. And I will say, that they had been released from their oath of secrecy back in the 1990's, but nobody had tracked them down and told them. So, they were free to speak. >> Yes, your pictures of the crossing on Wisconsin Avenue, a number of years ago I had an opportunity to look at some photographs in the [inaudible] collection. And the first walk, don't walk pedestrian signals were installed in the District of Columbia at that site. So, I guess they were concerned about the safety of these women [laughter]. >> Liza Mundy: Yes, yes, and they were also -- yeah, there were also some neighbors who complained about noise and singing, as well as necking in the woods, so, yeah. >> But, in 1965 I was sent by the Army to Fort Meade and NSA for an eight-week training in the cryptography, and six of us were sent. We walked into the training unit that day and we were totally surrounded by women. And I'm wondering if NSA is like that today, and if there are studies if women are better wired for this type of work. >> Liza Mundy: Well, I don't know, I don't know when that was. But, I should've said that many of these women did stay on with the work after the war. We didn't roll up our code breaking after World War II, because the Cold War started. So, we would be breaking East German, Russian, Chinese, communist code systems, and many of the women did stay with the work and went to work, ultimately, for the NSA. So, you saw Ann Caracristi laughing down at her dead plant, she would rise to become the first female deputy director of NSA, and many of the first super grades at NSA were women coming out of the war. So, there was an important cohort of women who helped establish that agency. >> I was curious, how does the Navy steal someone from the Army? And, also, is that correspondence course in code breaking now public? >> Liza Mundy: Yes, so, the correspondence courses can be found at the National Archives. I mean, they still exist as paper records. I'm sure there is an updated modern version of it, but you can find the ones from 1942. I did study them when I was trying to sort of understand how it worked. And, the way that the Navy stole her from the Army was, they paid a little bit more money, because she had a -- she had a college degree, so she knew she could go into the Navy as an officer and she could get an officer's allowance. It wasn't that the salary was more, but she could get an officer's allowance for housing, and that bit more money, $50 a month or whatever it was, enabled her to buy a car. The other -- her other goal in life was to see all the continents in the -- in the world, which she did. But, she was -- with her car she was able, after the war, to drive to the west coast, and that was really thrilling for her. So, it was money. >> Hi. I just have a quick question. When an individual was given the code to break down, did they already -- were they working like from a template? So, they'd say, okay, if this is an X it means B? If this is a four it means a Z? Or, were they literally breaking down the code itself? >> Liza Mundy: They were breaking the message. So, they would get the message and they would see the message, but they were -- they were, you know, some of the -- again, some of the systems were numerical and they had to do math. Some of them were, they would be looking at letters. There was a lot of variation and they had to understand that particular system and break it in real time. So, the training courses that they had gotten at their colleges often really had nothing to do with the actual code systems that they -- that they had to work on. They had to really learn it on the job, because there was so much innovation and change taking place during the war. >> Were there any women that you wanted to interview, or that you wish you could have interviewed, but had already passed on? >> Liza Mundy: Oh yes, oh yes. And that's why I was so grateful for the oral histories and collections at the Library of Congress. And it was frustrating, because sometimes the oral history interviewer wouldn't ask the question that I would've liked to have known. And one of the women talked about the experience of losing her husband in the D-Day landing. He was a glider pilot. And it was clearly something that she wanted to talk about, and she couldn't even go to his funeral because she was working those big machines and they had to continue after the D-Day landing, because of course we were -- we were going to be chasing the Germans through Europe with the Battle of the Bulge. It was very important. They wouldn't release the women from their stations, so she couldn't even go to her own husband's funeral. And I felt like that interviewer was a little bit uncomfortable talking to her about that loss, because she said really that she loved him for the rest of her life. And, so, there were moments when I wish that, obviously, I could've talked to the women in person, but I was so grateful for the oral history collections. >> Did you ever hear back from the editor who said that it was thin beer? >> Liza Mundy: No, but I hope he's -- I hope he's regretting those words. I actually found them very motivating. And, so, if any high school students are listening, or college students, and if a teacher says to you, you can't do that. Or, you know, or if there's a young woman out there who says, you know, you shouldn't go into STEM, you know, don't listen to them and use it as a motivation, because I certainly -- I got up every morning thinking, again, okay, I'll show you thin beer. So, the book has been optioned, and I'm told that, you know, there a lot of stages that it has to go through. But, there is, you know, thanks, Hidden Figures has really been wonderful for women's stories, for convincing publishers, and also, I think, you know, studios that there is an appetite for women's stories. We have people like Reese Witherspoon, you know, talking about the importance of women fronted narratives. So, I'm optimistic. I mean, it would be -- it would be great to see. >> Hi, I was just kind of curious about your process. Like, did you find all the info before or did you have some kind of like narrative that it fit into? >> Liza Mundy: That is such a great question. So, normally I would've spent a lot of time reading books about code breaking. I would've spent a lot of time in the paper records to really educate myself, and then I would've gone to the women when I had a really thorough grounding. But, because of my actuarial deadline, because the women were in their mid-90's, I wanted to interview them first. And, so, I was -- while I would be talking to them, I would be wondering if I would be able to find an actual printed record that would substantiate their memories, and I didn't know whether it would be out there. And, again, I was amazed at how much there was in the National Archives and the Library of Congress that enabled me to substantiate. You saw Anne Seeley. She remembered something called a [inaudible] message, which was a noon position message. They would look for that. The Japanese naval captains would send a message saying where they were going to be at noon the next day, which is the best possible piece of information for an American submarine commander to have. And when I finally got to the National Archives, I found references to [inaudible] messages all over the place. It was remarkable how accurate their memories were. So, that's a great question. I had to -- I had to do it backwards. >> Are there lists of people who worked at those groups? I know a number of people probably wonder and -- >> Liza Mundy: Yeah. >> And would like to look up -- look up a name or so. >> Liza Mundy: That is such a great question. There aren't good -- there's not a single good roster. I wish that NSA had the resources, or The Cryptologic Museum had the resources. If they had more funding, I'm sure they would try to put together a roster. There are just scrambled files, in which I might see some of the women who came down in 1942, where they were living and, but there's no like one central place where you could look at the names. But, if there's somebody in your family, or even somebody you know who might have done this work, or who said she was a secretary during the war, that information, those personnel records are public, and I have a website, www.lizamundy.com. I have a tab called resources for code breakers and families. You can request anybody's wartime personnel record and you can find out. If it says they were a cryptographer or a cryptologist, then that means they did this work. And you can often get their background reports, their college transcripts. It's kind of remarkable, actually, what's available, and it's not hard. >> What was the seed or the idea that drew you to write this story? >> Liza Mundy: So, all -- many of our federal agencies have wonderful history offices and historians that generate and record the history of their agency. So, the NSA knew that its origin story included these wartime women. And, just as NASA knew that its origins story included the African-American women mathematicians of Hidden Figures, so I read a declassified history of a small code breaking project during the war that had been written by an NSA historian. It was out on the Internet, classified at one point that had been declassified, and it mentioned, this was the Russian code breaking, our small project during the war to break Russian messages. And it mentioned that a lot of the people working that project were women, a lot of them were former school teachers from the south, and that seemed really intriguing. So, I made an appointment to speak with an NSA historian named Betsy Smoot [assumed spelling], who was extremely helpful to me, and a -- and a curator at the Cryptologic Museum, which is attached to an MSA at Fort Meade, two women, and it was as though they had been waiting for somebody to come along who was interested in this story. And they sat with me for two hours and they explained, you know, the larger story that was -- that was the mostly women breaking Japanese and German codes during the war. And then I just had to figure out whether I could find people and find archival records. So, a a shout out to federal agency historians, because they are wonderful. [ Applause ] So, thank you so much. And I think we have some descendants of Code Girls in the audience as well, and I would just like to thank them so much for their mothers' service and their families' contributions to our history. [ Applause ] This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.