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kareilaI recently stumbled across a PBS documentary about Elizebeth Friedman, a pioneering cryptanalyst who assisted the US government during both World Wars as well as Prohibition. Fascinating as it was, that documentary made her sound like a lone oddity of her era, mostly forgotten due to the top secret nature of her military work. This book pulls back the curtain a little more on the recruitment of women by the hundreds as code breakers for the US Army and Navy during World War II, specifically.
Elizebeth Friedman and her rival Agnes Driscoll are mentioned briefly, but as the title suggests, the main focus of the book is on the young unmarried women who volunteered to work for the military without even knowing what they were signing up for until after they arrived -- what their lives during wartime were like, their backgrounds, what projects they worked on, and eventually, what happened to them after the war was won. There is also a welcome amount of attention spent on the fascinating subject of how the many foreign encoding systems worked and how they were cracked.
Elizebeth Friedman and her rival Agnes Driscoll are mentioned briefly, but as the title suggests, the main focus of the book is on the young unmarried women who volunteered to work for the military without even knowing what they were signing up for until after they arrived -- what their lives during wartime were like, their backgrounds, what projects they worked on, and eventually, what happened to them after the war was won. There is also a welcome amount of attention spent on the fascinating subject of how the many foreign encoding systems worked and how they were cracked.
