World|Julia Parsons, U.S. Navy Code Breaker During World War II, Dies at 104
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/world/julia-parsons-dead.html
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Soon after her officer training in Washington, she was recruited to a classified code-breaking team. She kept her work secret for decades, even from her family.
Julia Parsons, a U.S. Navy code breaker during World War II who was among the last survivors of a top-secret team of women that unscrambled messages to and from German U-boats, died on April 18 in Aspinwall, Pa. She was 104.
Her death, in a Veterans Affairs hospice facility, was confirmed by her daughter Margaret Breines.
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 Germans thought their machine was impenetrable. “They just refused to believe that anyone could break their codes,” Thomas Perera, a former psychology professor at Montclair State University who collects Enigma machines and has an online museum devoted to them, said in an interview. “Their submarines were sending their exact latitude and longitude every day.”
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 informa
7 Comments
CobaltFire
Fair Winds and Following Seas.
We have the watch.
https://youtu.be/jhwZwHaE5JE
adingus
Watching the last of the WWII veterans pass away brings me great sadness. Growing up they were always these men and women of such great legend it felt like they would be around forever.
trainedkiller
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alganet
An enigmatic machine with mysterious clockworks inside and a keyboard.
That description is something to think about.
antioxidant
[flagged]
benatkin
Julia is named for her as much as it is for anyone. RIP. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language)
metaphor
https://archive.is/Jqokr