Real Life Code Breakers

Janice Bernario celebrates her 91st birthday this week.  She was called into service as a real life codebreaker 70 years ago.  Ms. Bernario will attend Sunday's performance and stay afterward for an audience talk back with the cast.  

The article below appeared in the November-December, 2013 issue of the Paideia School Newsletter. The video clips are from the presentation Ms. Bernario made to the cast of the play about her experience breaking codes during World War II.


REAL LIFE CODEBREAKER ENHANCES READING EXPERIENCE

by Anna Dukes, Communications Assistant

Martha Caldwell and Greg Changnon’s junior high class got a first- hand account of codebreaking while studying World War II when they visited Janice Martin Benario, a local woman who had been a code breaker for the Navy in Washington, D.C. during the war. The class’s plan to write a play based on information from their World War II curriculum led to the visit and other enriching activities as well.

The first activity was reading the New York Times best seller Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. This page turner tells the story of teenage code breakers in WWII. So riveting is the tale that the New York Times called it “A fiendishly plotted mind game of a novel.” The book focuses on teenagers who are fighting in the World War II effort. This reading added to the creation of the story line of the class play–called “Station X.”

“The play will have two parts, one focusing on engaged teenagers like the ones in the book, and another part with teenagers unconnected with anything, and their habitual apathy,” said Greg. The play is scheduled to be presented Feb. 22 and 23. During the time period when the class was reading the book, Greg learned that author Elizabeth Wein was coming to Atlanta to promote her new novel Rose Under Fire and would be doing an appearance at nearby Little Shop of Stories book store. He contacted her and asked her to visit the class. She came and talked and signed books for some of the junior high students.

Following that experience, the class was able to visit Benario, who had been a codebreaker. Molly Winston Barrow, parent of Paideia alumni Emily ’06, Jack ’09 and Tom ’11, is Benario’s oral surgeon, and put Greg in touch with Benario, who lives nearby. Benario’s real life story rivaled the fictional world of Code Name Verity, the students learned as she talked about her past. Because of a confidentiality agreement she signed during the war, she could tell no one about her service until 2010. But this fall, she was free to tell about how she had been a student at Goucher College when she was singled out with a few of her peers to take a cryptology course.

Hear Mrs. Bernario tell the story of how she found out she was selected in the video below:

At the time, in 1943, the national security goal was to develop code breakers to help the Navy learn of German U-boat activities in the Atlantic Ocean. After completing the course, Benario was inducted into the Navy, in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service). The code breaking operation of the British and American navies that cracked the German Enigma cryptographic system was called ULTRA. 

Hear Mrs. Bernario describe the top secret nature of her mission in the video below.

Benario told the students about some of the many missives that she worked on. In fact, during one of her eight-hour shifts, she found out that the D-day invasion at Normandy had happened when she cracked a German coded message. Benario graduated from Goucher with a degree in Latin. Later, she married, moved to Atlanta and taught Latin and Greek at

Georgia State University. 

She still revels in the story she told Paideia students and is proud of her ability to keep a secret— even her husband didn’t learn of her wartime activities until 25 years after the fact. For her service, she was awarded the World War II Victory Ribbon, the Atlantic Theater Ribbon and the Navy Unit Commendation Ribbon. In May 2010, she returned to the campus of Goucher and was given the Doctor of Humane Letters in recognition of her wartime role.