Women and Morse Code
Origins of Female Codebreakers for the US
Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called dots and dashes, or dits and dahs. The employment of women in the codebreaking industry in the United States increased during the American Civil War (1861–1865) as male telegraphers were drafted or joined the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps of the Union army. A few women served in the Military Telegraph Corps. Louisa Volker the telegraph operator at Mineral Point, Missouri, provided important information on troop movements in her role as Military Telegrapher. It was a female code breaker who, in 1945, became the first American to learn that World War II had officially ended. When U.S. Army intelligence intercepted the Japanese transmission to the neutral Swiss agreeing to an unconditional surrender, the task fell to Virginia D. Aderholt to decipher and translate it. She was one of 10,000 US female codebreakers operating in WWII.
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