Book: The Woman Who Smashed Codes

Elizebeth Smith (and her husband William Friedman) pioneered a lot of cryptanalysis in the First World War, and were instrumental in breaking German and Japanese codes in the Second (even though, at the start of the war, neither spoke German or Japanese).  As a woman, Elizebeth was always in her husband's shadow but by most accounts she was the more clever.  

A well written 2017 book on various codes and the neurotics who broke them, solving military puzzles and creating unbreakable codes of our own, uncovering and putting away bootleggers and Mafiosos between the wars, and attempting to decipher such mysteries as the Voynich Manuscript and Francis Bacon's purported authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

Fascinating history.

At one point Elizebeth trained both Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl in crytography.

The cryptanalysts knew there’d be a Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 but they thought it’d be on the US base in Manila. This wasn’t widely disseminated because they didn’t want the Japanese to know they’d broken their encryption.

The death toll at Pearl Harbor horrified the crypto team. For years they blamed themselves.

Clark Field was in fact attacked the next day.