Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II by Liza Mundy

I listened to this book because it was our book club book for September, but then after I was about halfway done with it book club ended up getting canceled, so we aren't even talking about it at all. I probably wouldn't have bothered listening to it if I hadn't had it for book club, because there are just so many good books that I want to read/listen to. And this one was so long! It was maybe 14 hours? And 14 hours of history, not a novel. I really did enjoy it and get caught up in it, but I felt like it could have been condensed wayyyy down. This book reminded me a lot of Hidden Figures--they are pretty much the same book, just about two different groups of women working in a field where they usually wouldn't have been admitted and where they made enormous strides. It also reminded me of Hidden Figures because I had some of the same complaints about it--it just seemed like it should have had more of a cohesive storyline. But it was about a bunch of disparate women characters, so it was hard to keep each of them straight and to really get invested in any of their lives or their choices. I know it was about the group as a whole, and it was really amazing and interesting to learn about the codebreaking units of WWII and what they accomplished. But it was hard to care too much about any one girl's fiancee dying or something like that when you don't remember if you've heard her name before or not. It was also hard to understand or keep track of all of the different types of codes and codebreaking skills the girls had to learn, but that was mostly because I was listening to it as an audiobook--it probably would have been much easier to read. But I didn't really need to understand each of the specific codes to understand the achievements of these women.

I am glad to have learned about this small pocket of history, and especially to have learned more about the war and how codebreaking played a role in it. It was fascinating to learn about how during WWII, the radio messages and the radio traffic were such an enormous way that each side was keeping track of the enemy. There were no satellites or any way to check up on how large the armies were, so the main way that they got intelligence about each other was by intercepting and breaking each other's codes and reading about their armies and navies. I loved the part about D-Day, how the Allies kept D-Day a secret by convincing Hitler that there were several huge and nonexistent armies stationed in different parts of England that were going to be striking in Norway and Calais, and the Normandy invasion was just a distraction. They made him believe that by spending months and months sending fake radio traffic to and from these false armies, in the same patterns and types of messages that a real army would be sending. They did it so well that the Axis powers really did believe that whole armies existed that really didn't. I love that and how that could never happen today because of satellite surveillance. So fascinating!