With today being Sunday, it is a real treat for us to spend some extra time enjoying the book Code Girls by Liza Mundy; it is especially of interest as there are many references to old written letters from during World War II.
I’m including a sixty-nine minute video presentation of Code Girls by Liza Mundy that the US National Archives included from their streaming from last October as part of the McGowan Theater Book Lecture Series.
So grab your favorite Sunday morning beverage, put the smartphone on mute, and enjoy! Thank you Nancy for highly recommending this book; I’ll have more on that story at the end of this post.
The Title of the book is “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II.”
“Recruited from settings as diverse as elite women’s colleges and small Southern towns, more than ten-thousand young American women served as codebreakers for the U.S. Army and Navy during World War II. While their brothers, boyfriends, and husbands took up arms, these women went to the nation’s capital with sharpened pencils–and even sharper minds–taking on highly demanding top secret work, involving complex math and linguistics. … Their achievements were immense: they cracked a crucial Japanese code, which gave the U.S. an acute advantage in the Battle of Midway and changed the course of the war in the Pacific Theater; they helped create the false communications that caught the Germans flat-footed in the lead-up to the Normandy invasion; and their careful tracking of Japanese ships and German U-boats saved countless American and British sailors’ lives.”
Liza Mundy has masterfully woven old letters throughout the book. One of the reasons I love this book is I can skip around and still follow the plot; my plans are to read it all sequentially but I was wanting to “read ahead” for writing today’s blog post. The photos in the center of the book she has gathered are fantastic!
As we wrap up, my sincere thanks to Nancy for recommending this book to me. The book had just come out last October. She was wonderful about encouraging me to get this book, to which I promptly ordered the hard back. This past week I’ve finally been getting to read it and am finding it a delight. I hope you will make the time to read it too. Happy Sunday!
Anchors Aweigh,
Helen
Code Girls by Liza Mundy Attribution & Thank you to the following who are referenced today
Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II, US National Archives Streamed live on Oct 18, 2017
Book Cover, excerpt, links above, LizaMundy.com
You may also enjoy AnchoredScraps blog post: WWI Letters Dear Boys In Service by Frank Skidmore 4-09-2017
P.S. One of the things I wonder about is were any of them alumni of Cottey College? I’m going to bring this with me to my next P.E.O. meeting and see who has already read this book!
