(inspirational music) - There we go.

- The Veteran's Breakfast Club has organized this wonderful parade and celebration for Julia Parsons on the occasion of our 100th birthday.

(sirens wailing) Julia was one of these rare code breakers in the Navy during World War II.

She did really important top secret work, decoding the German military code Enigma.

- It didn't lead to the end of the World War II directly, but it did save thousands and thousands of lives, to be able to read the Nazi's secret communications.

(uplifting music) - Everybody's making a big thing of this.

I'm almost embarrassed by it.

I don't know how I've lived so long.

- There are not very many World War II 100-year old women, and we are losing a lot World War II people.

World War II has very special people.

- The war was the beginning of the fact that women realized they could do stuff just as well as men and sometimes better.

(tense music) (cannon blasting) The war had broken out in the Fall of '41 with Pearl Harbor and I was due to graduate in the Spring of '42 from Carnegie Tech.

The whole graduating class was in the ROTC and they zoomed off.

They were gone.

Everybody we knew has gone.

And we can sit here and roll up silver paper and knit booties or something.

I knew I could do more.

I had to find a job somewhere and in the paper I saw that the Navy has started to take in women.

And I thought, that sounds interesting.

So I applied and they said if you were a college graduate, you could go directly to officer training school.

I was sent to Northampton to Smith College for three months, where they gave us some basic Navy type training.

We had all kinds of subjects, but nothing to do with decoding.

And we ended up in the communications annex Northwest in Washington.

- The Borough of Forest Hills congratulates Julia Parsons upon the occasion of her 100th birthday.

- [Woman] Happy Birthday.

- Julia, this is a present.

This is from the Borough of Forest Hills.

- Oh my goodness.

- Yeah.

- 350,000 women served in uniform during World War II, and women played really important roles in the home front during the war.

They were doing jobs that normally men did.

And it was a transformative experience for that generation of women.

I mean, Julia will tell you it was the most important work she ever did in her life.

- We all sat in a room waiting for the assignment that we were to be given.

And a woman came in and said, "Does anyone speak German?"

And I said that I took two years of it in high school, and I ended up in the German U-boat decrypter section.

This Enigma machine was so complicated.

It was like a large typewriter, but it had the same keyboard that we have now on computers.

And any letter that went in, came out something else.

And then it went into the second wheel and came out of, went into the third wheel, so it was decoded four times.

- My name is Sam Lemley.

I'm the curator of Special Collections at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries.

We have two Enigma machines in the collection.

One 3-rotor model, which is the earlier one and one 4-rotor model.

This is the 4-rotor Enigma, and it's the one that Julia Parsons worked on during World War II.

And it's the more complex of the two models because they added the fourth rotor.

So they were invented actually by a man named Arthur Scherbius.

He was a German inventor/businessman in the 1920s.

Because their original purpose was actually to disguise business communications and Nazi military very quickly realized the power that they would lend to their ciphering.

And why it was considered almost unbreakable is because you had a combination of encryptions.

A plain text letter was encrypted multiple times.

That's really the secret of its power, right, it's effectiveness.

- The Germans had the machine and we did not.

But we finally did get it and got a copy of it.

And then everybody used it, all was ships at sea and airplanes.

They were so conceited.

They thought nobody could break into their setup.

I don't remember anything remarkable coming through other than rendezvous points for the submarines to attack a convoy or whatever.

- So the machine was used for everything, every kind of communication from something as mundane as the weather report the beginning of every day, to troop movements, tactics, things like that.

But the 4-rotor model, which was more complex, was used by the Navy.

And specifically, the Nazi's U-boat fleet.

They're fascinating devices, a mean of unspeakable sort of electromechanical complexity.

I often point out that they're also fairly dark.

They have this dark history.

(car honking) - Her project gathered mathematicians from around the world, code breakers from around the world, and she did that work at Washington DC, and she couldn't talk to anybody about it for 50 years after her service.

And it's just so wonderful to celebrate her today, is a kind of a delayed thank you for the service that she did for our country 75 years ago.

- [Julia] That's lovely.

Very nice, thank you.

- Work on the Enigma machine wasn't declassified until the 1970s.

And then after that, it wasn't very widely shared.

So some, even people like Julia Parsons who were working on decoding directly, weren't aware of it until even into the nineties, early 2000s.

- That was quite a shock to me because I could have talked about it a lot sooner.

- Well, if we had failed to decipher Enigma, I don't think there's any doubt among experts that the war would have been protracted considerably because the strategic advantage that we gained by being able to read Nazi communications really helped us.

(jazzy music) - It was a great time to be alive and living in Washington, DC, I loved it.

And I met my husband there at a party and we were married for 62 years and he died about 15 years ago.

I was married in 1944 and I got pregnant in the Spring of '45, but I didn't tell anybody because I didn't wanna leave the service.

By then, the war in Europe was over and they were trying to find a place for me to replace the job because obviously I wasn't needed.

Nobody was needed in that section anymore.

And I would have loved to stay in.

Went back to Carnegie Mellon when my youngest daughter was in fourth grade and got my teaching certification in high school English.

So then, I taught at North Allegheny for five years.

I had three children, eight grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, and more to come.

- Just started talking to vets about their service, and they would tell me these wonderful stories that were better than anything I had to say when I was giving a lecture.

And not only that, but they wanted to share their stories.

- We've just had a wonderful parade and more people than we ever imagined are here.

It's really a wonderful celebration.

And the Veteran's Breakfast Club has just been fabulous for her.

She was going into schools, especially with young school girls, she'd love that because she really inspired them as to what women could do.

- My husband said one time.

He said, "Unfortunately for you, you were born a woman."

And I said, "Yes, but I can do things."

"I don't wanna just scrub floors", and said that, "I have nothing against housekeeping and being a mother and all that."

But I said, "I wanna really do something in this world, now that I know I can.

I didn't really join just to serve the country, I wanted to end the war.

This was part of my goal and I helped.

(uplifting music)