The New York Times reported last week that Julia Parsons passed away. (The Seattle Times has a copy not behind a paywall.) She was probably the last living member of the WWII Naval Communications Annex team responsible for deciphering Enigma messages sent to and from German U-boats. She joined the WAVES in 1942, right after graduating from Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University), and was assigned to work in the unit from 1943 through the end of the war.
I don't recall if she was mentioned by name in Liza Mundy's Code Girls, but she was definitely part of that crew. If you haven't read that book, you really should.
As one of the youngest members of the group, her initial task was to work directly on the deciphering of the messages from the U-boats. She worked with the US Navy Bombe, feeding it possible plaintext and ciphertext. The Bombe would then produce a "menu" of possible Enigma wheel settings that had to be checked to determine which (if any) of them would correctly decrypt the message. The Wikipedia article has an excellent description of the workflow.
Because the work she did was classified, she didn't talk to anyone about it until 1997, when she discovered it had been declassified in the 1970s. We probably lost a lot of history that way, as even by the 1970s many of the senior people involved had doubtless passed away.
Thank you, Ms. Parsons, for what you did for democracy and freedom. I know it came with a cost.
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