The Woman Who Smashed Codes

Elizebeth Smith's story is incredible. She is truly one of the many unsung heroes of WWII. The book was captivating and well-written. At times, it did feel a bit embellished or crowded with too many details, but overall, it was an enjoyable read. I would recommend it for anyone with an interest in early cryptography and/or interesting women.

This is a crazy romp of a story: Elizebeth Smith, bored of women's work and afraid she'll never be taken seriously as a scholar first gets taken in by a larger than life self-made millionaire and self-declared colonel, where she joins his intentional community as one of several women looking for secret messages in the Shakespeare folios, to prove that they were indeed written by Sir Francis Bacon. However, once the Great War starts, she finds herself the only person in the country with any serious expertise in codes. So she, and her future husband forge the field of cryptanalysis. Following the war, mostly discarded by the military, she continues to work for the coast guard to decrypt coded messages by the mob as they traffic moonshine. So she is well-poised to lead the American effort when WWII truly becomes the war of codes.

Despite my obsession with the British female codebreakers of Bletchley Park, I knew less about the American side: we decrypted Engima! And defeated a bizarre secret South American-takeover plot!

If I had one complaint it's that the book to some extent sidelined her husband, William Friedman. This bothers me not just because “The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies And Her Husband, the Brilliant Jewish Geneticist, Who Also Smashed Codes” is EVEN more likely to be mistaken for a Markov Chain generated specifically from Becca's Interests, but also, Elizebeth and William made clear that they saw themselves as equals and I think they would have preferred it that way.

Nonetheless, this is a fascinating piece of history, well told by Fagone.