Community Chat

[THEY CallMe Mr Wilkes]

I recently saw this story on Willie Geist's NBC Sunday show and was fascinated and moved.  I never heard it.

Julia Parsons passed away several weeks ago at 104.  

From Pittsburgh,  she joined the naval WAVES in the summer of 1942.  With some knowledge of German,  she was immediately sent to Washington to work in a highly secret unit of all female cryptoanalysts.  They were known as "The Code Girls."

They worked in shifts around the clock to decode intercepted German U-Boat messages and she was the last surviving member of her group.  The work is considered instrumental in shortening and winning the War.

She took her oath of secrecy to heart, not disclosing her work to family until 1997 (although it was declassified in the late 1970s)!

At the time she told her husband she was doing general secretarial work for the Navy.  After the War she left the Navy to raise her family and teach English. 

A Life Well Lived Indeed!

[MoonieBaby]

STILL A BEAUTY

[beckyb1012]

She was remarkable, what a woman!

[THEY CallMe Mr Wilkes]

Julia's Carnegie Institute graduation photo, 1942.

She volunteered for the War effort almost immediately after!

[THEY CallMe Mr Wilkes]

The earliest of computers that the women worked with to break the German codes:

[on the bay]

I think this is what the series The Bletchley Circle taken from the true story of a group of women operating computers used as codes-breakers during WW2 at Bletchley Park.

They later went on to help solve crimes after the war ended.

The were sworn to the "Official Secrets Act" so only told even their families that they worked as secretaries, clerical work.

[THEY CallMe Mr Wilkes]

Julia and her husband Don, also in the military:

[beckyb1012]

@THEY CallMe Mr Wilkes your making me want to read her autobiography and there probably is not one but there should be.  

[THEY CallMe Mr Wilkes]

From an interview with Julia; so poignant. 

"Some girls—and we were called “girls” in those days—had fathers who weren’t too happy about their daughters joining the Navy. But my father, a professor at Carnegie Tech, had no boys, and he was proud of me and proud, too, to hang the blue star service flag in our window to show that we were doing our part.

It’s sad that I never got to tell him about what I did as a WAVE, which was declassified only after his death. I could tell him only that I did “office work.” He’d have been fascinated by the truth. And proud."

[THEY CallMe Mr Wilkes]

Julia remembered the importance of The Code Girls:

"From 1939, groups of German U­ boats—“wolfpacks”—stalked and sank thousands of Allied ships. American soldiers and sailors, as well as millions of tons of supplies and equipment destined for Great Britain and the Soviet Union, went down in the Atlantic, greatly harming the war effort.

If we couldn’t win the battle of the Atlantic, we might not be able to win the war."