Mavis Batey, 1921–2013

In 1999, acquaintances of Mavis Batey were shocked to see their friend appear in a TV documentary about World War II code-breakers. The gray-haired English grandmother—whom they knew as a respected garden historian—explained how she had worked at Britain’s cryptography headquarters at Bletchley Park during the war, and had cracked codes that helped the Allies cripple the Italian navy in 1941 and invade Normandy in 1944. Sworn to secrecy, Batey and her cryptographer husband, Keith, kept quiet about their wartime role for decades. Even their children grew up knowing nothing about their work at Bletchley—although, said Batey, “they were rather suspicious that we could always beat everybody at Scrabble.”

Batey was studying German at a London university when World War II broke out. The 19-year-old volunteered as a nurse but was told that her fluency in German could be more usefully deployed, said BBC.com. “This is going to be an interesting job—Mata Hari, seducing Prussian officers,” she recalled thinking years later. “But I don’t think either my legs or my German were good enough because they sent me to the Government Code and Cipher School.” In 1940 she began working at Bletchley, and was tasked with decoding messages encrypted by the Nazi’s fiendishly complex Enigma machines.

Her “first major contribution came in March 1941, when she helped decipher Italian naval communications revealing an impending attack on British ships” in the Mediterranean, said The Washington Post. Britain’s navy launched a preemptive strike, devastating the Italian fleet. “The code-breakers, Batey recalled, shared two bottles of wine in celebration.” She later helped crack even more complex codes used by German intelligence, allowing the Allies to confirm the success of an operation in which false information was fed to Nazi spies about the upcoming D-Day landings. As a result, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.), Hitler was tricked into diverting two key divisions away from Normandy to the English Channel port of Calais, where he believed Allied forces would land.

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Batey always downplayed her contribution to the war effort, insisting that the “chaps” who stormed Normandy’s beaches were the real heroes. “When my local paper came to interview me,” she said in 2008, “I told them that I don’t want to see a headline saying, ‘[Local] Woman Won the War.’”