Secret army of women who broke Nazi codes recognized for their work during World War II

During the Second World War, dozens of Cambridge University students worked day and night in complete secrecy to crack Nazi codes, but only now are the unsung heroes gaining recognition.

At least 77 students from the all-female Newnham College were recruited Bletchley Parkthe code-breaking center north of London, during the conflict.

It was there that mathematician Alan Turing deciphered messages encrypted by the Nazis’ Enigma machine, particularly those sent by German submarines in the North Atlantic. Enigma figures They were used by the Germans during World War II to encode military communications and intelligence, to such an extent that they were confident their code was unbreakable.

Bletchley is widely acknowledged by historians to have played a key role in the overthrow of Adolf Hitler. The team that worked at the secret facility outside London is credited with not only deciphering Enigma, but also the Lorenz, another device that the Nazi high command used to send coded messages.

But the story of the Cambridge women has only recently been revealed, thanks to research started by Sally Waugh five years ago. She worked with historian Gillian Sutherland and archivist Frieda Midgley to discover the names of Newnham College’s Bletchley Park recruits. the BBC reported.

Waugh, a 69-year-old former Newnham student and teacher, said she wanted to highlight the role of women during the Second World War, often ignored in history books.

“No one could ever thank me,” he told AFP. “I had no idea people from Newnham went to Bletchley Park to work.”

Then one day, she found an article that mentioned the name of an old friend, Jane Monroe, who died in 2005.

When Monroe, a mathematician from Newnham, was asked what she had done during the war, she replied unperturbed: “Oh, I made tea,” Waugh said.

“She was actually a code breaker. She was a friend but she didn’t tell me,” Waugh explained.

Monroe could not speak about her role because she had signed the Official Secrets Act, which restricts the publication of government information considered confidential.

The article mentioned three other women, whom Waugh located in the university archives.

“I thought, if there are four, I wonder if there are more.” she remembered.

In fact, Waugh found around 20 names and then compared their information to Bletchley Park.

Together they were able to identify almost 80 women.

“It was all pretty crazy, really.”

The only one whose name has reached this far in history is the mathematician Joan Clarke, who was recruited in 1940 and worked with the famous Enigma decoder and computer scientist Turing, to whom she was briefly engaged.

She became deputy director of her unit and after the war continued to work in intelligence. Keira Knightley earned an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Clarke in the 2014 film “The Imitation Game.”

Also on the list is Violet Cane, another mathematician with a gift for statistics. She worked in the naval section of Bletchley between 1942 and 1945. Another codebreaker, Mavis Batey, spoke with CBS News in 2008, when he was 87, about working at Bletchley Park.

“It was all crazy, really,” said Batey, who was responsible for decoding a message that revealed the date of a planned Italian naval attack and, in turn, allowed the British to prepare.

German orator Elizabeth Langstaff was tasked with reconstructing German messages from raw decryptions, interpreting abbreviations, and analyzing the results for months.

Three women, Alda Milner-Barry, Pernel Strachey and Ray Strachey, helped recruit women from Newnham College to Bletchley Park, the BBC reported. By then Milner-Barry had been a classmate and deputy headmistress at the school, and her brother belonged to one of the government’s code and cipher school groups at the Bletchley code-breaking station. Pernel Strachey was the headmistress of Newnham and her brother was an expert at deciphering coded messages, according to the BBC.

In late 2023, a letter dated 28 January 1939 was discovered, in which the principal of the college confirmed to Bletchley Park that “in an emergency we should be able to find you about six students competent in modern languages.” , so that work can be carried out in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

Newnham, founded in 1871, eventually sent mathematicians, linguists, historians and even archaeologists to Bletchley to analyze aerial photographs.

“Newnham women were represented in most of the key areas of Bletchley Park’s work,” Jonathan Byrne, head of oral history at Bletchley Park Trust, told AFP.

That included deciphering Enigma-encrypted German signals, producing intelligence reports, understanding Nazi activities by analyzing signal networks, and studying diplomatic signals.

Around 50 women were believed to be on duty on June 6, 1944, “D-Day,” when Allied forces landed on the beaches of Nazi-occupied northern France.

“Although the work they participated in contributed to Allied planning for the liberation, most did not know when the invasion was occurring,” Byrne explained, although some may have suspected it.

“German signal traffic in France increased in response to the invasion, making early June 1944 very busy at Bletchley Park,” he explained.