Beyond the Enigma: Insights from Julia Parsons, WWII Codebreaker

Julia Parsons, a 102-year-old cryptologist and World War II codebreaker, single-handedly captured the audience’s attention when she shared stories during a Nov. 6 Veterans Week panel at Pitt-Greensburg. 

Despite the fact that she was coming to the viewers over Zoom, Parsons was a highlight of the event, which spotlighted the experiences of women veterans. 

Parsons graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology, which is now Carnegie Mellon University, in 1942, right after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“My class was the first to graduate right after the war started and all the male engineers practically all joined R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) and then they were gone and I was so upset. The women had absolutely no part in the war at all,” Parsons said. “All we could do was sit at home and knit. I guess I don’t know what they expected of us, but at any rate, we were lucky in one sense because the men were gone and somebody had to replace them.”

Then in 1943, Norman Rockwell introduced his cover for the May 29 issue of “The Saturday Evening Post” magazine featuring Rosie the Riveter based on a song composed the previous year by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. A campaign ensued using her image as a promotion leading to the recruitment of more than two million women in joining the workforce as a patriotic duty to their country.

“The industry people said that the women did as good a job as the men in some cases,” Parsons said. “And the women were more docile and accepting of things. So I took a job with the army group that checked the gauges that the steel mills were now putting in, producing shells and ammunition and missiles and all kinds of things. They sent the gauges up periodically and we tested them to 1/1000 of an inch to make sure they were good.”

“All we could do was sit at home and knit.” 

During the early 1940s, it was common for educational institutions, such as Carnegie Institute of Technology, to limit what classes and majors were available to women. There were gender-specific restrictions in certain studies, so women were encouraged to pursue courses related to traditionally “feminine” roles such as home economics, nursing, teaching, clothing, and more.

“It was pathetic,” Parsons said. “There was nothing interesting that I could find.”

With a large number of men leaving with the military to go overseas, industries such as the steel mills faced labor shortages. This led to companies filling these gaps by encouraging women to take on new responsibilities. Regardless of the necessity of the women’s presence, resistance and skepticism were still present among the remaining men left to work alongside these women.

“It was bad for women to be in the steel mills, because the men didn’t want them there,” Parsons said. “By the time we got to the steel mill, the men were already working on the lathe and the cutters and all different kinds of instruments, which looked amazing to me. But I realized this was not exactly what I wanted to do because it was too much of the same thing all the time.”

Enter the W.A.V.E.S. 

The U.S. Navy then established the W.A.V.E.S. program (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), which allowed women to serve in the Navy in non-combat roles. These recruits underwent basic training at their specific assigned naval training centers.

“We learned to march and there was this resort area that we got to stay in with a hotel, which was very nice,” Parsons said. “They would put people in the bridal suite, which was no longer recognizable, as it was stuffed full of women, but they were eager young women that did really good jobs. People came from all over – all the states were represented. Women were really taking advantage of this offer, which was great. There didn’t seem to be any other goal in their lives.”

Since the W.A.V.E.S. program was government-operated, members were sometimes briefed on confidential and sensitive information that involved pertinent details about their work, locations, and activities.

“We never talked about it,” Parsons said. “We were sworn to secrecy. In fact, I didn’t tell anybody what I did till the nineties when the National Security Agency opened the National Cryptologic Museum and I went in with one of the ladies that I had worked with. This was long after the war as they had all these machines there and we couldn’t believe it because we still weren’t talking about it. I asked the woman in charge how they could do this when it was still classified material. She said that they declassified it in the sixties when the computers took over and the Enigma machine was still in use, but not relied upon as much as before.”

“We never talked about it. We were sworn to secrecy.” 

The Enigma machine was a device used by the Germans to encrypt their military communications with what they believed to be an unbreakable code. However the Allies were eventually able to decrypt these messages thanks to the success of the codebreakers.

“They wanted to know if anybody knew German and I had taken some in high school, so I was sent down to that section,” Parsons said. “We tried to decode the German submarine traffic, because the submarines were sinking convoys of ships and people were dying by the droves. We just didn’t know exactly what we were doing. We had the name of the machine in the office and it was the most complicated machine I had ever seen. The Germans had no idea that the British had gotten hold of it, though. So, we worked six days a week and every holiday. The midnight shift was a deadly one because it was hard to not fall asleep. We had no air conditioning in those days and it was pretty hot in the summer. An original computer was the size of an upright piano. It was huge and it was loud and us girls working there didn’t have it so easy. We were hot and it was in a basement room in this old school.”

After capturing the encrypted message, the codebreakers then had to be able to understand the Enigma machine in order to decrypt it, which required a lot of time-consuming guesswork. Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computer scientist, developed a machine called the Bombe, which assisted in speeding up the decryption process.

“The machine was not always right, but we were lucky sometimes. Unfortunately some of the submarines had to surface to recharge their batteries. That meant that we had missed the messages from when they came up again,” Parsons said. “The Germans did not send dummy news, greetings, or personal information such as ‘happy birthday’ or ‘you have a new son’ or something of that nature. None of that was repeated. So we knew that anything that was repeated, which we had copies of the unbroken code, were important messages. And if we had failed to break that code, we were lucky, because the Germans were a bit careless there and repeated the messages, word for word. The Germans were still very human, too.”

“I had no idea at that time that we were considered part of the women’s movement.” 

The Allies had found a successful way to decipher encrypted messages from the Enigma machine, but the German High Command was confident in its system’s security. No matter what efforts the Germans used to try to improve their communications, the codebreakers were able to break through, which had a significant impact on the speed and outcome of World War II.

“I met my husband at an R.O.T.C. party before the men got redeployed and before I knew it I had gotten pregnant,” Parsons said. “I came back to Pittsburgh and going back home was not an easy thing, because this job was exciting and so much better compared to checking those gauges.”

World War II officially ended in 1945, but it wasn’t until a few years later that greater steps were taken towards equality and integration in the United States military. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed into law the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act and Executive Order 9981, which ended segregation in the armed forces.

“I had no idea at that time that we were considered part of the women’s movement,” Parsons said. “But now everybody keeps saying we were, so I’ll definitely take credit for it.”