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 information with British authorities.
In 1941, during an operation that was among the war’s most closely held secrets, the Royal Navy captured a German submarine with an Enigma machine on board. The British mathematician Alan Turing — working secretly with intelligence services in England — used it to refine the Bombe. British authorities sent instructions for building the Bombe to the U.S. Navy.
At the U.S. Naval Communications Annex in Washington, Mrs. Parsons and hundreds of other women used the Bombe to decipher German military radio transmissions, revealing information that was instrumental in shortening and winning the war, historians have said.
“We tried to figure out what the message was saying, then we drew up what we called a menu showing what we thought the letters were,” she told The Washington Post in 2022. “That was fed into the computer, which then spat out all possible wheel orders for the day. Those changed every day and the settings changed twice a day, so we were constantly working on them.”
She joined the war effort in the summer of 1942, after reading a newspaper article about a new U.S. Navy program called Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES. “There was nothing for women to do but sit at home and wait,” she told The Uproar, the student newspaper at North Allegheny Senior High School, in 2022. “I knew I wasn’t going to do that.”
More than 100,000 women joined the WAVES during the war. In 1943, she left Pittsburgh for officer training at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she took courses on cryptology, physics and naval history. After her training, she was sent to the Naval Communications Annex, in Washington.
One day, an officer there asked if anyone could speak German. She had taken two years of the language in high school, so she raised her hand.
“They shot me off to the Enigma section immediately, and I began learning how to decode German U-boat message traffic on the job, Day 1,” Mrs. Parsons said in an interview with the Veterans Breakfast Club, a nonprofit organization. “Enemy messages arrived all day from all over the North Atlantic, plus the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay.”
Her cryptological handiwork saved some lives while simultaneously ending others, presenting her with a moral quandary as she parsed the day’s messages.
She recalled decoding a congratulatory note transmitted to a German sailor following the birth of his son. His submarine was sunk a few days later.
“To think that we all had a hand in killing somebody did not sit well with me,” Mrs. Parsons told The Washington Post. “I felt really bad. That baby would never see his father.”
Still, she was proud to serve.
“This was a very patriotic time in the country,” she told HistoryNet in 2021. “Everybody did something. Everybody was patriotic. It was a beautiful time for that kind of thing.”
Julia Mary Potter was born on March 2, 1921, in Pittsburgh. Her father, Howard G. Potter, was a professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now known as Carnegie Mellon University. Her mother, Margaret (Filbert) Potter, was a kindergarten teacher.
“Her family was always a puzzle family,” Mrs. Parsons’s daughter Barbara Skelton said in a 2013 interview with WESA, a public radio station in Pittsburgh. “It’s always crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, so the fact that she was involved in decoding certainly makes perfect sense — and she’s very good at it.”
After graduating from Carnegie Tech in 1942, Julia worked at an Army ordnance factory.
“We were checking gauges,” she told WESA. “The steel mills were making shells and all that kind of ordnance equipment, and they were hiring all the Rosie the Riveters to work there, which was the first time women had been in the steel mills. It was considered very bad luck to have women in, so they did not accept Rosie gracefully.”
The WAVES program provided an escape — a clandestine one. She told people she was doing office work for the government. She married in 1944, but didn’t spill the secret even to her husband, Donald C. Parsons. She didn’t tell their children, either.
In 1997, Mrs. Parsons visited the National Cryptologic Museum near Washington, just another tourist interested in American history.
“The exhibits there astounded me,” she said in the Veterans Breakfast Club interview. “Here was every sort of Enigma machine — early models, late models — on display for all to see, with detailed explanations of how they worked.”
She asked a tour guide why the machines were on display. The guide replied that the Enigma work had been declassified in the 1970s. Mrs. Parsons hadn’t known. She spent rest of her life visiting classrooms and giving interviews, eager to tell her story.
“It’s been good to break the silence,” she said. “Good for me, and for history.”
In addition to Ms. Breines and Ms. Skelton, Mrs. Parsons is survived by a son, Bruce; eight grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2006.
Mrs. Parsons was one of the last surviving code breakers, but she may have had another distinction — as perhaps the oldest Wordle player in the world. She played The New York Times puzzle every morning on her iPad and then texted the result to her children.
It was a sort of code.
“That’s how we knew she was up and about,” Ms. Breines said in an interview. “And if we didn’t hear from her, we’d call and say, ‘Where’s your Wordle?’”
