They told us at boot camp: 'You're here because we need you, but nobody is going to admit it.' That was 1943. I was a radar operator at a station on Cape Cod — 14-hour shifts, seven days a week, watching a green screen for blips. We tracked German U-boats in the shipping lanes off Cape Cod. Yes, U-boats. In American waters. In 1944. Most people don't know that. I saw blips every week. We coordinated with the Coast Guard. On two occasions, the blips disappeared — probably because the subs heard our radio chatter and dove deep. We never sank a submarine. But I like to think we deterred them, just by being there, watching. After the war, they gave us our records and told us not to talk about it. I didn't talk about it for sixty years. Then my grandson joined the Navy and I thought: why am I protecting a secret that nobody cares about anymore? So I told him. He cried.

I worked in the same building where the Room 40 codebreakers had worked during World War I — the Old Building of the Admiralty in London. In WWII, we were a combined British-American operation working on German and Italian naval codes. I had a degree in mathematics from Cambridge — rare for women in 1940 — and I used it to break a cipher system that the Italians thought was unbreakable. We called it 'the Admiral's system.' In 1941, my work contributed to the intelligence that helped sink the Italian fleet at Taranto. That raid was the model for Pearl Harbor. Sometimes I think about that — the irony of British women codebreakers inadvertently inspiring the attack that brought America into the war. I worked 16-hour days, seven days a week. I couldn't tell my mother where I was. She thought I was a secretary in Bristol. I was reading German naval traffic, saving lives, and pretending to type memos. When the war ended, they said 'thank you' and gave us all a tea service. I'm still using the teapot.