In 1940 England, teenaged girls were called, individually, to mysterious personal interviews with high-ranking British military men. Each girl was
good at math or languages. They were told to report to Bletchley Park, a subway stop south of London, in “The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win World War II” (2024 Scholastic) by Candace Fleming.
Nearly every Brit wanted to stop Hitler from taking over Europe, so the girls went unquestioning to their interviews. Fleming follows each of ten interviewed girls who is advised that “you will be told only what is necessary for you to know, and you will never, never seek to find out more.” They signed oaths to keep their work secret—to not tell their parents or their fellow workers.
The girls arrived at Bletchley, one by one, to find a mansion and many recently constructed out-buildings or “huts.” They would be working alongside the “geniuses,” the men who were working to decipher messages. The girls would feed the geniuses their niche information so that together they could crack the military communication among Hitler and high-ranking Nazis in the field. What were the Germans planning? What did they know about the Allies’ plans?
Germany’s Abwehr, their intelligence-gathering organization, used Enigma machines with four rotors rather than the standard three rotors to encode their communications. Each rotor turned over a new code, frequently, making the ciphers impossible to crack, or so the Nazi’s thought.
The various girls worked in the many huts where cryptographers “had unsuccessfully wrestled with [intercepted Nazi communications] for months.” The girls arrived and each worked on small aspects of each cipher, each day. Fleming gives examples of the puzzles the girls might have worked on and shows how they could, bit by bit, assume, guess, try, conquer, and decipher. Note that deciphering is more complicated than decoding which exchanges one word for another. The most common cipher is an alphabet cipher. Morse code, in spite of its name, is a simple cipher—each letter is encoded in dots and dashes.
Once a cipher is broken, all the messages of that day could be read. But only the highest-ranking British officials could read the complete message. The Nazis clearly did not know that their messages were being deciphered. That was important. For example, Bletchley knew that Germany thought the Americans would land at Calais for the huge invasion. Bletchley officials counted on the Nazi’s ignorance and advised the Allies to land elsewhere. They landed at Omaha Beach, much further south, in June 1944, and took the enemy by surprise.
Whereas the girls didn’t know the details, they felt the excitement in the air and knew they’d helped to make possible the Allies’ ruse.
At the end of the war, the girls, as they had vowed to do, kept their secret. Their friends and families—even their husbands—thought they were just regular people, not the heroes they were. Only recently have they been allowed to tell their stories. Fleming, a great researcher, was able to read the women’s stories and write this suspenseful page-turning true story. This is a book for many ages.
Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore. Her forthcoming books are about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, Ella Fitzgerald, as well as poems about waterfowl. talesforallages.com
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