The Enigma Girls by Candace Fleming

In The Enigma Girls, the secretive behind-the-scenes story of the contributions made by teenage girls at Bletchley Park during World War II are featured.

Their story begins with the start of World War II which began with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. This came as a shock to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who had brokered what he believed was a permanent peace with Hitler. Germany was not to invade any other European countries after annexing Czechoslovakia in 1938. But when Germany invaded Poland, breaking the treaty with Britain, Chamberlain was forced to declare war on Germany.

With the declaration of war, many government agencies were moved to the countryside to protect them. One such agency was the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS), part of the Secret Intelligence Service. Their new location was a country estate fifty miles from London, called Bletchley Park. It was given the code name, Station X. It's purpose was to break German codes and ciphers so as to learn the German military plans. Thousands of lives were at stake.

It all began at the coastal village of Withernsea with the arrival of a dozen young women at St. Leonard's Hotel. One of those women was eighteen-year-old Patricia Owtram who was stationed there as a wireless radio operator to listen to German naval traffic in the Baltic and North Seas.

In 1940, eighteen-year-old Jane Hughes, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Lord and Lady Hughes was to be a debutante. But Jane did not want the parties, dances, or dinners. What she wanted to was to be a part of the war effort. It was a letter from a former classmate inviting her to join them at Bletchley that changed everything. After being sworn to secrecy, Jane was assigned to Hut 6 where she worked to break Enigma codes sent by the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht.

Eighteen-year-old Mavis Lever quit school to help in the war effort. Fluent in German, she was assigned to Cottage 3 at Bletchley, breaking Enigma ciphers from the Italian Navy Alfred "Dilly" Knox figured if she could speak German, she could learn Italian. He was a Greek scholar and pioneering cryptographer.

Sarah Norton, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the 6th Lord Grantley received a mysterious letter requesting her to Station X at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire in four days from an unknown Commander Travis. Sarah had been sent abroad two years earlier to learn German in Munich and was familiar with Hitler and his Nazi party. Now at Bletchley Park, and sworn to the utmost secrecy, Sarah was assigned to Hut 4, part of the German Naval Section, working as an Indexer in the Index Room. She scrutinized decrypts from the Kriegsmarine and wrote key information on index cards.

By 1942, the war office now required all able-bodied British women to do war work. Seventeen-year-old Diana Payne was sent to the Wren (Women's Royal Navy Service) training camp in New College, Hampstead and then on to Bletchley Park. There she was assigned to Hut 11A which held the Bombes - machines designed by Alan Turing to break each day's new Enigma setting. The Bombes required two tall girls to attend to them, using a menu which described how the machine was to plugged up and the order of the wheels. It was tiring and difficult work.

Gwen Davis, an eighteen-year-old from Bournemouth, joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in 1942. She was sent to Hut 10, Block A to work on deciphering Luftwaffe's communications not encrypted by Enigma. Instead these messages were encrypted using a cipher book.

By June of 1943, twenty-year-old Ann Williamson had completed her degree in mathematics. She was required to do war work and eventually ended up at Bletchley Park in the Machine Room converting cribs (or guesses at the Enigma's settings for the day) and cipher text into a diagram. These diagrams, called Menus, required the ability to solve puzzles. The Menu was then sent on to a Bombe outstation.

Near the end of June, 1944, eighteen-year-old Joanna Chorley along with nineteen other WRENS arrived at Bletchley Park. She was assigned to work in Block F with Colossus I, the world's first electronic computer. It was used to determine the first half of a FISH setting. FISH were the most important top level Nazi communications enciphered by the more complex Lorenz SZ40/42 machine.

Marion Graham was sent to work in Japanese Section I in Block F, typing up Japanese messages that were decrypted and translated into English. These were sent to American cryptographers in Washington, D.C. Private Charlotte Vine-Stevens was also sent to Block . A member of the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), she was to paraphrase translated Japanese messages which were then passed on to commanders in the field.

 By 1944, almost seven thousand people worked at Bletchley Park, deciphering 2500 army and air force messages every day including some 2000 naval messages. The contributions of the young women, who constituted about three quarters of the workforce cannot be overstated. They were vital to the success of D-Day and the winning of the war.

Discussion

The Enigma Girls is an informative book about the contributions of ten British teenage girls at Bletchley Park during World War II. Since The Enigma Girls covers the war period from 1939 to 1945, Fleming profiles ten young women working at Bletchley Park,  against the backdrop of war. Major events of the war are described including the invasion of several European countries and the Blitz in 1940, the sinking of the German boat Bismarck, the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaign in 1943, and D-Day in 1944. Oddly, the events of Dunkirk in 1941 are not mentioned.

Fleming opens with the back story of World War II and the declaration of war by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1939. Chamberlain had hoped to avoid war by signing an agreement with Adolf Hitler after he annexed Czechoslovakia in 1938. Life in Britain suddenly and drastically changed as Fleming goes on to describe. One such change was the moving of GC&CS to Bletchley Park, code-named Station X.

Much has been made of the significant contributions of Alan Turing, Dillwyn Knox and others in breaking the Enigma code and their work at Bletchley Park. However, there were over seven thousand people working at Station X, many of them young women who made significant and mostly unrecognized contributions. Beginning with Patricia Owtram, who entered the war effort in 1930 as a wireless operator, Fleming highlights ten young women who were part of thousands would keep Station X functioning through the war. Some were the daughters of aristocracy while others were university students or recent high school graduates looking for something different. The young women are profiled in chronological order, as the war continued. Fleming describes their responsibilities,  how their work was, unknown to them, interconnected to one another and what life was like for them during the war. 

It is evident that many sacrifices were made for the war effort by these young women. The work was exhausting and often depressing. For example, resetting the Bombes was exhausting. They were noisy and smelly because of the oil used to lubricate the Bombe's spindles. Diana Payne soon had calloused hands and fingers covered with small cuts. Her work made her feel exhausted and lonely. "Many others experienced sleeplessness, hand tremors, loss of appetite, and nervousness. Some had breakdowns. Most worked on the edge of mental exhaustion. The long hours, the noise of the rotating wheels, and the intensity of the work put an enormous strain on the Wrens." 

Not only could the work be difficult, but even life outside of Bletchley Park could be challenging. The young women who arrived at Bletchley Park were assigned billets or temporary housing. The quality of these billets varied; they could be comfortable and the family welcoming, or noisy, unfriendly and lacking in even the most basic amenities. 

The young women working at Bletchley Park weren't able to see the entire picture and how their work helped others. The path of an enemy message from when it was sent by the enemy, to being intercepted and sent to Bletchley Park where cryptographers worked to decipher them is outlined by Fleming, midway through the book. With each profile, Fleming explains the tasks crucial to their work at Bletchley Park. Readers will learn about wireless, Morse code, the German Enigma machine, codes and ciphers, the British cipher machine called a Typex, how to break a cipher, indexing at Bletchley, decipher a message, the Bombes and how they worked and were reset each day, cribs, creating a Menu, enciphering a cipher, the German Lorenz SZ40/42, and the Colossus I - the first electronic machine. The work was complex, vast and crucial to the war effort. Fleming includes a wealth of black and white photographs of significant events in the war but also the few existing ones of Bletchley Park, and the machines used in the war effort. 

Fleming definitely highlights not only the contributions of these ten young women in particular but of all the women who joined the war effort in Great Britain, as well as their personal sacrifices. The Enigma Girls is a thoroughly researched book that will engage not only those interested in World War II history, but also the many contributions made by women in the war, as well as codes and ciphers. Fleming has included an Author's Note, an extensive Bibliography, Source Notes for each of the chapters, Photograph and Illustration credits, and a detailed Index.

Book Details:

The Enigma Girls by Candace Fleming

New York: Scholastic Focus     2024
371 pp.

Black Birds In the Sky by Brandy Colbert

In Black Birds In The Sky, Brandy Colbert describes the events leading up to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the aftermath of that tragedy on the Black community and America as a country.

The story begins with the events of May 30, 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Many stores and businesses were closed for the parade scheduled later that morning. However, the shoeshine business that employed nineteen-year-old Dick Rowland was open. Rowland had been born Jimmie Jones. His early life had been difficult, as he and his three sisters were homeless and orphaned. He was eventually taken in by Damie Ford, a divorced black woman. Damie moved to Tulsa to be closer to her family, the Rowlands and to take advantage of the better job prospects in the booming city.

They eventually moved to the Greenwood District, a prosperous Black community that included many different Black professionals. These professionals supported one another and the Black community, with the area becoming so prosperous that it was given the nickname, Black Wall Street. When Jimmie started elementary school, he took on the name of Dick Rowland. Initially a good student, Dick dropped out during high school and began working at a shoe shine business owned by a white man. 

On that May Memorial Day in 1921, Rowland needed to use the bathroom, but because of the Jim Crow laws, he was required to use a "colored" bathroom. However, there was no "colored" washroom in the white shoe shine parlor, so Rowland went to use the bathroom in the Drexel building, something he had done many times previously. When he went to step into the elevator, operated by a young white woman named Sarah Page, it is believed Rowland tripped and grabbed her arm to steady himself. Page screamed in surprise and police were called by a clerk on the first floor who had heard her scream and saw Rowland leaving the building. Very quickly, Rowland became a suspect for attempted rape. This event became the trigger for the what would become one of the most horrific acts of racial violence in America.

 Discussion

Black Birds In The Sky is the heartrending story of the race riot in 1921, that saw hundreds of Black Americans injured or killed and their thriving Black community in the Greenwood District almost completely destroyed, razed by fire and looted.

Brandy Colbert begins by describing the events that were to ignite the Tulsa Race Massacre on September 1, 1921, namely the alleged interaction between Dick Rowland and Sarah Page. From there she goes on to describe the history of the land that would eventually become the state of Oklahoma. Colbert begins with the early Indigenous peoples who lived on the Oklahoma land, the European colonizers who explored and fought over ownership of the lands, and the forced settlement of Indigenous peoples (the Five Tribes which included Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole) from their ancestral lands in the eastern and southern United States onto the lands of Oklahoma and Kansas. This history emphasizes the deceitful manner in which European settlers and the American government dealt with various non-white peoples.

This deceit continued with the land runs in Oklahoma and Kansas. Now settled onto new lands, the Five Tribes were further subjected to traitorous land runs in which Americans and Europeans could simply claim "empty" land as their own. Colbert describes the land runs, which also included the migration of Black people to Oklahoma land and their eventual re-settling into towns. Despite these new areas of the continent not having a history of slavery, racial discrimination and segregation became entrenched.  By the time Oklahoma entered the Union in 1907, Jim Crow laws, which forced the segregation of Blacks, were already being enacted.

Colbert also describes what it was like to be Black in America during the post-Civil War period. The author discusses the Fifteenth Amendment which allowed Black men to vote and saw the election of Blacks to political office, the failure of Reconstruction,  and the rise of the Klu Klux Klan. The corruption of law enforcement towards the Black community is detailed. This includes the connection of American policing to slave patrols in the pre-Civil War period, and the rise of vigilantism and lynching towards Black men who were almost always assumed to be guilty of assault, rape or murder. 

The attitudes of white people towards Black Americans, even those who fought valiantly for America in World War I, was one of superiority and fear of social change. White Americans believed that Black veterans would demand equality and would use their weapons to obtain it. As a result, white Americans used political and justice systems to re-instate a new kind of slavery, one that denied Blacks their rights even when the Supreme Court ruled in their favour.  

 

Before she recounts the events of the Tulsa Race riot, Colbert explains the history of the Greenwood District, its founders Ottowa W. Gurley and John the Baptist (J.B.) Stradford. "By 1921, Greenwood was home to a Black hospital, a Black public library, two Black schools, two Black newspapers, two theaters, three fraternal organizations, five hotels, eleven boardinghouses, and about a dozen churches." In Deep Greenwood, the commercial district, "...one could find just about anything they needed in Deep Greenwood, with reportedly six hundred businesses within its thirty-five city blocks by 1921." Colbert writes, "...Greenwood was beginning to resemble neighborhoods in big cities like Chicago and New York, with its doctors and attorneys, theaters and restaurants, booming real estate market, and millionaires in the making."

According to Colbert, Greenwood was unique among other Black communities. "While Black people were still being disenfranchised in the Southern states from which many Greenwood residents had migrated, Greenwood was absolutely thriving. The community's focus on businesses that were Black-owned, Black-operated, and patronized primarily by Black people meant that each dollar spent in Greenwood would circulate throughout the businesses and people there around thirty times; the wealth stayed in the community and continued to grow it."  This all made for a great deal of resentment by white Tulsans who believed the Black community had no right to such success and wealth. 

All of these factors came together on May 31, 1921, to create a terrible firestorm of hatred and murder. From this point on, Colbert describes the events of the riot and its aftermath. Not surprisingly, "Black people were blamed for the massacre and punished for crimes they did not commit" while "...no white people were ever imprisoned for the murders and property destruction over the eighteen hours they terrorized Greenwood." What is perhaps even worse, was the erasure of the Tulsa Race Massacre from public discourse and from social memory. It would be fifty years before someone would publish an article on the massacre, bringing the events of the past to light once again. Today Black Tulsans focus on achieving a resolution to this tragedy, something that remains challenging to date.

Colbert's account is detailed, interesting and connects the many facets of American history to show how the groundwork was laid for the massacre and how Americans simply refused to acknowledge the tragedy afterwards, nor accept responsibility for what happened. Black Birds In The Sky is an important book in that regard, because it breaks that barrier of silence, informing a new generation and demonstrating the harm hatred does to people, communities and a nation. The book takes its title from the airplanes that were flown over Greenwood during the riot, firing on groups of Blacks. They appeared to those looking up, like black birds in the sky.

The Afterword explores the parallels between the events of 1918 to 1921 with a pandemic and race riot and the events of 2020 with the U.S. Election, the killings of Black Americans by police, and the Covid pandemic. Colbert notes "...how many harmful elements of US politics and culture have endured despite the progress we have achieved." The back matter contains a detailed Source List and Image Credits as well as an Index.  Black Birds In The Sky is a must read for all teens.

Book Details:

Black Birds In The Sky by Brandy Colbert
New York: Balzer + Bray      2021
216 pp