12 Jun Code Girls: The Secret Heroes Of World War II
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This week in cybersecurity from the editors at Cybercrime Magazine
Sausalito, Calif. – Jun. 12, 2026
– Watch the YouTube Short
During World War II, some of America’s most powerful weapons weren’t bombs or guns. They were women sitting in secret rooms breaking enemy codes, explains Taylor Fox, senior social media manager at Cybercrime Magazine, in a new YouTube Short.
More than 10,000 women, later called the ‘Code Girls,’ worked for the U.S. military decoding German and Japanese messages. Nobody could know what they were doing, and if they talked about their work, it was considered treason.
The military recruited women who were good at math, languages, and puzzles. A lot of them were college students and teachers. They worked in hidden offices around Washington D.C., running massive codebreaking machines and intercepting enemy radio signals all day and night.
By 1945, women made up around 70 percent of the Army’s codebreaking staff.
One of their biggest successes was helping crack Japan’s secret ‘Purple’ cipher. That intelligence helped the U.S. win the Battle of Midway and completely changed the war in the Pacific. The Code Girls also intercepted thousands of Japanese naval messages every month, helping Allied forces sink enemy supply ships before they reached the battlefield.
Before D-Day, they even helped spread fake radio traffic to confuse Germany about where the invasion would happen. The work of these women helped build the foundation for modern cybersecurity, cryptography, and intelligence agencies.
After the war, the Army and Navy’s secret codebreaking operations were merged into what eventually became the NSA. But once soldiers came home, a lot of these women were pushed out of their jobs and out of the tech world completely. Most of them stayed silent for decades because they were sworn to secrecy.
That silence meant many of their achievements were forgotten, or credited to men instead, and one of the most important intelligence operations in U.S. history was almost forgotten.
Watch the YouTube Short
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