Review of Code Girls

When my cousin Joann called from Syracuse to tell me I had to read Code Girls, I was under the impression that it was historical fiction. I jotted down the title and author and then we moved on to the important stuff - who in the family was up to what. That title was on my TBR list for months before I finally remembered to look it up at my local library. Turns out it's a historical book that is perfect for National Nonfiction November.

I've got just two words: Thanks, Joann!

More About Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

Recruited from settings as diverse as elite women’s colleges and small Southern towns, more than ten-thousand young American women served as codebreakers for the U.S. Army and Navy during World War II. While their brothers, boyfriends, and husbands took up arms, these women went to the nation’s capital with sharpened pencils–and even sharper minds–taking on highly demanding top secret work, involving complex math and linguistics. Running early IBM computers and poring over reams of encrypted enemy messages, they worked tirelessly in a pair of overheated makeshift code-breaking centers in Washington, DC, and Arlington, Virginia, from 1942 to 1945. Their achievements were immense: they cracked a crucial Japanese code, which gave the U.S. an acute advantage in the Battle of Midway and changed the course of the war in the Pacific Theater; they helped create the false communications that caught the Germans flat-footed in the lead-up to the Normandy invasion; and their careful tracking of Japanese ships and German U-boats saved countless American and British sailors’ lives.

Through extensive archival research and numerous interviews conducted with the surviving code girls (now in their nineties), Liza Mundy has constructed a dazzling narrative in Code Girls that expertly conjures up the war years–the battles abroad and the uncertainty and excitement on the home front. Mundy hones in on the lives and labors of several exemplary code-breakers, including Ann Caracristi and Agnes Driscoll, while providing a broader portrait that celebrates the entire cohort of talented women, whose top secret has went without public recognition for nearly seventy years. She expertly weaves the story among the larger events of the war and the daily activities of the codebreakers, anchoring the story to the figure of Dot Braden, a schoolteacher recruited by the Army, who–before her arrival at Arlington Hall–had scarcely left Virginia (Dot is still living today at age 96 and open to doing limited publicity alongside Mundy). For many of these young women, breaking codes was one of the most thrilling times of their lives: they were engaged in stimulating, truly essential work–enjoying challenges and opportunities that had never been open to them before—while, in many cases, getting their first taste of big city life, falling in and out of love, amid the excitement and heartbreak of wartime.

Ordered by military officials never to reveal the scope of their war work, these women and their incredible stories and accomplishments were all but written out of history until Mundy discovered a cache of recently declassified documents at the archives of the NSA. Based on these documents, other rich archival sources, and interviews with the women themselves, Code Girls offers a page-turning narrative of broad popular appeal while establishing a vital new historical record; and it brings to life this riveting story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.

More about Liza Mundy

Liza Mundy is an award-winning journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of five books including her latest work, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA (2023). Her narrative non-fiction aims to engage, delight, and inform readers by providing a compelling take on important parts of American history that have long been overlooked, expanding our collective understanding of our past by telling true stories of the people, often unsung, who shaped our world. Her previous book, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II (2017), was a New York Times best-seller, a Washington Post best-seller, and a Wall Street journal best-seller. It won awards including “Best General Audience Intelligence Book” of 2018 from the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, which said that “Code Girls does for women of that era what Hidden Figures did for African American women of the 1960s and Windtalkers did for the native American code communicators of World War II.”  

A former staff writer for the Washington Post, Mundy is also the New York Times-bestselling author of Michelle: A Biography, a 2008 biography of former First Lady Michelle Obama; and The Richer Sex, which explored the forces behind women’s rising economic power. She has appeared on television and radio shows including The Colbert Report, The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, MSNBC, CNN, C-Span, Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. A former staff writer for The Washington Post, she writes for the Atlantic, Politico, and Smithsonian, among others. She lives in Washington, DC–not far from the sites of both the Army and Navy WWII codebreaking operations–and in Los Angeles, CA. At various points in her life as a working parent she has worked full-time, part-time, all-night, at home, in the office, remotely, in person, on trains, in the car, alone, in crowds, under duress, and while simultaneously making dinner. 

Thoughts About Code Girls

If you are interested in World War II or women's history, don't miss Code Girls. I thought I knew all about women and their involvement in code breaking but what I knew didn't even scratch the surface. This books goes beyond the codes they broke to give you a large overview of these women's lives that begins before World War II and continues to their lives after their war service. Their accomplishments seem even more impressive after you learn about the societal constraints they overcame to achieve what they did.

In addition to showing you the Code Girls on the job, this book gives you a peek at their families, education, professional life pre and post World War II, romances, friendships, entertainment, fears. Learning all these pieces of the puzzle made me see them as unique individuals apart from their accomplishments. It also raised so many questions to consider. How would I feel if I knew a loved one was in danger but couldn't warn them? Could I lie to everyone I knew? Could I choose my job over everything - including a parent's funeral?

I must confess that some of the explanations of how exactly they solved the codes went right over my head and left me thinking, "How smart are these women and how dumb am I?" But it was fascinating to see what a large part code breaking played in Allied successes and how many different sections there were involved in code breaking. It went so far beyond the straightforward reading of an enemy communication. There were plenty of excerpts from official documents but the most powerful parts were the interview or oral histories of the men and women who were code breakers.

A Little Extra

View some videos of the Code Girls telling their stories about constructing bombe machines, breaking codes and life in DC HERE.