Whipped Cream Difficulties

Julia Parsons passed away on April 18th at the age of 104.

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.

…

The unraveling of the Enigma puzzle began in the late 1930s, when Polish mathematicians, using intelligence gathered by French authorities, reverse-engineered the device and began developing the Bombe, a computer-like code-breaking machine. The Poles shared the information with British authorities.

…

At the U.S. Naval Communications Annex in Washington, Mrs. Parsons and hundreds of other women used the Bombe to decipher German military radio transmissions, revealing information that was instrumental in shortening and winning the war, historians have said.
“We tried to figure out what the message was saying, then we drew up what we called a menu showing what we thought the letters were,” she told The Washington Post in 2022. “That was fed into the computer, which then spat out all possible wheel orders for the day. Those changed every day and the settings changed twice a day, so we were constantly working on them.”

…

More than 100,000 women joined the WAVES during the war. In 1943, she left Pittsburgh for officer training at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she took courses on cryptology, physics and naval history. After her training, she was sent to the Naval Communications Annex, in Washington.
One day, an officer there asked if anyone could speak German. She had taken two years of the language in high school, so she raised her hand.
“They shot me off to the Enigma section immediately, and I began learning how to de­code German U­-boat message traffic on the job, Day 1,” Mrs. Parsons said in an interview with the Veterans Breakfast Club, a nonprofit organization. “Enemy messages arrived all day from all over the North Atlantic, plus the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay.”

…

In 1997, Mrs. Parsons visited the National Cryptologic Museum near Washington, just another tourist interested in American history.
“The exhibits there astounded me,” she said in the Veterans Breakfast Club interview. “Here was every sort of Enigma machine — early models, late models — on display for all to see, with detailed explanations of how they worked.”
She asked a tour guide why the machines were on display. The guide replied that the Enigma work had been declassified in the 1970s. Mrs. Parsons hadn’t known. She spent rest of her life visiting classrooms and giving interviews, eager to tell her story.“It’s been good to break the silence,” she said. “Good for me, and for history.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2025 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Cryptography, History, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.