Codes of Honor: During WWII, Dorothy Bruce was a secret weapon

Liza Mundy's "Code Girls" was reviewed in the Chesterfield Observer: 

Making her way through the crowd at Washington’s Union Station, Dorothy “Dot” Braden was astonished by the scale of the place.

A native of Southside Virginia, Dot had never seen anything like it. Nervously, she hailed a cab for the first time in her life, giving the driver the Arlington County address where she’d been instructed to report. As the Washington Monument passed by her window, she still wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing.

It was only after arriving at a former girls’ school called Arlington Hall that Dot was informed she’d be practicing something called cryptology, a word she’d never heard before. Soon, she learned, she’d be breaking Japanese codes. Soon, she’d be sinking ships. This scene is one of many from Liza Mundy’s engrossing and heavily researched new book “Code Girls,” which highlights the codebreaking contributions that more than 10,000 American women made during World War II. Now, after more than 70 years of being ignored, the role these women played in the war effort is finally being recognized through Mundy’s book, which has received favorable reviews from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.