From award-winning author Candace Fleming, comes the powerful and fascinating story of the brave and dedicated young women who helped turn the tides of World War II for the Allies, with their hard work and determination at Bletchley Park.
Scholastic Focus is the premier home of thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and thoughtfully designed works of narrative nonfiction aimed at middle-grade and young adult readers. These books help readers learn about the world in which they live and develop their critical thinking skills, so that they may become dynamic citizens who are able to analyze and understand our past, participate in essential discussions about our present, and work to grow and build our future.
"You are to report to Station X at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, in four days time....That is all you need to know." This was the terse telegram hundreds of young women throughout the British Isles received in the spring of 1941, as World War II raged. As they arrived at Station X, a sprawling mansion in a state of disrepair surrounded by Spartan-looking huts with little chimneys coughing out thick smoke―these young people had no idea what kind of work they were stepping into. Who had recommended them? Why had they been chosen? Most would never learn all the answers to these questions.
Bletchley Park was a well-kept secret during World War II, operating under the code name Station X. The critical work of code-cracking Nazi missives that went on behind its closed doors could determine a victory or loss against Hitler’s army. Amidst the brilliant cryptographers, flamboyant debutantes, and absent-minded professors working there, it was teenaged girls who kept Station X running. Some could do advanced math, while others spoke a second language. They ran the unwieldy bombe machines, made sense of wireless sound waves, and sorted the decoded messages. They were expected to excel in their fields and most importantly: know how to keep a secret.
Candace Fleming is the award-winning and highly acclaimed author of Crash from Outer Space, The Curse of the Mummy, and many other nonfiction books for young readers. With her canny and compelling narrative voice she makes history come alive. Thick with tension and suspense, this is an extraordinary and relatively unknown story of World War II that will fascinate readers who will be thrilled to see young people playing such an important role in the wartime effort.---from the publisher
384 pages 978-1338749571 Ages 8-12
Keywords: narrative non-fiction, girls and women, women's history, world history, World War II, codes and cyphers, secrets, 9 year old, 10 year old, 11 year old, 12 year old, Social Studies Curriculum
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“Listen
Do you want to know a secret?
Do you promise not to tell?”
– Lennon/McCartney (1962)
“A MYSTERIOUS SUMMONS
The letter arrived in an ordinary brown envelope. It did not have a return address. And inside there was just a single piece of paper that read:
You are to report to Station X at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire in four days time…That is all you need to know.
Signed
Commander Travis”
This morning I shared an enciphered message with author Candace Fleming::
AHERL FHDXL VTGWR MAXXG BZFTZ BKELB LYKBZ ZBGTF TSBGZ
And I’m not kidding!
THE ENIGMA GIRLS is a jaw-dropping true story detailing how British girls with smarts and trustworthiness secretly worked for the government, as part of a vital war operation–intercepting and deciphering enemy messages during WWII. By the end of the book’s first section (1940), you should have a good shot at deciphering my message to the author in a reasonable amount of time. By that point in the book, you may well be glued to your seat the way I was.
“Let’s start with the basics. There are two kinds of secret writing: codes and ciphers. A code is a form of writing in which each individual word is written as a secret code word, code number, or code symbol…A cipher is a system of secret writing in which every letter, instead of every word, has its own secret symbol.”
In order to decipher an enciphered message, one needs to first have or determine the key to the cipher. What is the relationship between the letters in an enciphered message being transmitted, and the letters making up the real message. In order to prevent the enemy from understanding any of the stream of Morse code messages being sent out, Hitler’s military people were creating new keys for enciphering messages on a daily basis.
This led to England enlisting a group of British brainiacs, including Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science. They were ensconced at Bletchley Park, an estate in Buckinghamshire near the east coast of Britain. Radio operators at Britain’s various secret listening bases (Y stations) would scan the radio frequencies around the clock in order to intercept messages being sent by the Germans and their allies. They would forward these intercepted, enciphered messages to Bletchley Park. There, the brainiacs feverishly worked to determine the key to that day’s enciphered Morse code messages.
Then, “Enigma girls” took over, utilizing that day’s cracked cipher key to decipher all incoming messages as quickly as humanly possible. The tasks those young women worked so hard to complete could and did save countless lives. Arguably, they were key to the war being won.
The next day, the Germans would begin using a new key for enciphering messages, and the work at Bletchley Park would start all over again.
We learn about a number of mechanical proto-computing machines being employed at Bletchley Park that radically sped up the processes. Thus, the title of the book.
A wonderfully useful chapter in the middle of the book summarizes the steps involved in the process as German messages are transmitted, intercepted, deciphered, translated into English, and sent forward to the military brass and government leaders.
As we learn, many of the young women engaged in this work were daughters of the crème de la crème of British society. It makes sense, since these were young women who were often well educated, frequently spoke multiple languages, and who thoroughly understood the need for secrecy. They were also the sort of women who–once word got out about Bletchley Park, many decades later–would write memoirs that would provide rich primary source material for this book. It’s amusing to read about their receiving notes to report to Station X, not having the faintest idea what they were actually going, or what they would actually be doing to help the war effort. We see them struggling, in the little time they had, to somehow choose what to pack themselves for an extended period of time..somewhere.
Above all, this is a female empowerment tale of the first order. Despite the fact that the soldiers with guns and grenades and fighter planes were all men, and despite the limitations otherwise put on British women, who’d only gotten the right to vote a decade earlier, THE ENIGMA GIRLS vividly depicts how intelligent, patriotic, young British women worked right alongside the men, playing essential roles in winning WWII. They were not sitting around eating bonbons, keeping the home fires burning, and nursing babies.
The part of the book that choked me up the most was near the end where the jubilation I felt as a reader, resulting from the successes of D-Day, was severely tempered by the author’s recounting the unimaginable statistics of American and Allied lives lost and shattered in the process.
It’s for that reason that I most strongly recommend that this book be paired with the author’s THE RISE AND FALL OF CHARLES LINDBERGH. Winner of the 2021 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction award. Ms. Fleming’s bio of Lindbergh details how Lucky Lindy sucked up to Hitler and preached American isolationism. There is no doubt that Lindberg’s advocacy emboldened Hitler and contributed to millions of lives lost when, instead, the civilized world should have shut down Hitler before he got going.
Never again.
Recommended by: Richie Partington, MLIS, California USA
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