One of the more fascinating aspects of World War II is the work of brave young women as code-breakers who decrypted messages from German and Japanese transmissions — including the Enigma machines that the Nazis thought were unbreakable. Women on both sides of the Atlantic deciphered messages and greatly assisted the Allied war effort, and two recent obituaries revealed the moral challenges these women faced.
At the end of March, Betty Webb died at the age of 101. Her obituary demonstrated how committed she was to the silence that the British government swore her to:
She knew the woman only as Biddy, but quite often, on the street in Birmingham, their paths would cross. They would give each other a nod of recognition then, since years ago they had worked at the same place. There was no occasion or reason to talk longer. Betty Webb was therefore profoundly shocked when, one day in 1975, the woman shouted across the road: “It’s out!” “What’s out?” she asked. “We can talk,” said the woman; and Betty’s first thought was, I don’t want to.
Secrecy about her job had become an utter habit. It had to be so from the first, that day in 1941 when a very severe-looking captain made her read and sign the Official Secrets Act. The penalty for infringing it, he told her and the other girls with her, was death. He had laid his service revolver on the table, which rather added to the atmosphere.
Even though she spoke near-fluent German, Webb only worked on German communications for a short time before the British moved her over to Japanese communications. Part of her job was to take the decoded transmissions and paraphrase them so that the Japanese wouldn’t discover that their code had been broken.
“Her mother had taught her to put verses from the Bible into her own words, so it came easily,” the obituary explained. “She did so well that she was chosen to go to the Pentagon for five months in 1945 to do the same work there.”
The moral quandary of maintaining secrecy weighed on Webb. She couldn’t tell boyfriends, friends, or even landlords what her job was, and she had to keep that secret for three decades.
Her parents and husband never knew about her espionage work. She didn’t speak out publicly about her work at Bletchley Park until the ‘90s, but she eventually gave around 200 speeches.
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A New York Times obituary from the end of April announced that Julia Parsons (née Potter) died in a VA hospice at the age of 104. Parsons was one of the last surviving American code-breakers.
A lover of puzzles and crosswords while growing up in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression, Mrs. Parsons deciphered German military messages that had been created by an Enigma machine, a typewriter-size device with a keyboard wired to internal rotors, which generated millions of codes. Her efforts provided Allied forces with information critical to evading, attacking, and sinking enemy submarines.
Parsons experienced her own tough moral situations. One of them involved deciphering a transmission of congratulations:
She recalled decoding a congratulatory note transmitted to a German sailor following the birth of his son. His submarine was sunk a few days later.
“To think that we all had a hand in killing somebody did not sit well with me,” Mrs. Parsons told The Washington Post. “I felt really bad. That baby would never see his father.”
Parsons didn’t tell her husband or her children what she did during the war, and a museum visit in Washington, D.C. in the late ‘90s provided her with a surprise. The museum displayed one of the Enigma machines that she worked on, and she asked why the classified device was on display. It was then that she learned that the information had been declassified in the ‘70s.
“It’s been good to break the silence,” she admitted years later. “Good for me, and for history.”
“I think it’s very touching that both of these women who served with so much distinction were clearly willing to take these secrets all the way to the grave until they understood that their own governments had released the secrets,” Dr. Albert Mohler said about these women in his podcast on Friday. “It was safe now.”
It’s easy to think of the work that women like Webb and Parsons did as heroic and not know the moral dimensions of their work. It goes to show that espionage can be even more complex than we realize.
