Women’s History Month — Remembering Winnie Breegle, WWII WAVE and Code Talker

Posted on by March 6, 2023

During Women’s History Month, it is a good time to honor Winnie Breegle who served in World War II as a WAVE (Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) cryptographer and a Navajo “Code Talker”, who didn’t happen to be a Navajo. Ms. Breegle passed away at the age of 100 on January 3, 2023.

In 1941, Winnie Breegle, a 21-year-old farm girl from Ohio taught Latin, Spanish, and English in high school, and women with such backgrounds were highly sought after for work as coders. When she enlisted in the Navy, she was trained as a cryptographer.

Winnie first worked in the Baltimore Port Director’s office supporting warships in the Baltimore Harbor receiving and sending encrypted messages for the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. Encryption codes were quickly deciphered by the enemy and new codes had to be developed and learned. Winnie became the group focal to learn new encryption codes and would return to her unit and teach the codes to the others. Sometimes she would not sleep at night so as not to forget the new code until she could teach others in the unit. The stress of the operations was intense with the cryptographers working 24 hours a day, 4 days a week. Through all of this, Winnie eventually learned the Navajo “Code Talker” language.

The code talkers were largely a group of more than 400 Marines who were bilingual Navajo speakers. By using a spoken Navajo code, they were able to dramatically speed up communications while being indecipherable to the Japanese. Most code talkers were Navajo, but as there were too few Navajo speakers, a program was set up to train WAVES to understand the code talkers. Winnie Breegle was one of the WAVES to become a code talker.

The initial Code Talker language consisted of 211 words and eventually evolved to 411 words over the course of the war – all verbal language – no written language. During the battle of Iwo Jima, more than 800 messages were transmitted. Winnie was involved with over 400 of those messages, all of which were transmitted without error.

Winnie served as a Navy WAVE from Feb. 19, 1944, to 1946, and in the regular Navy from 1946 to 1949.

Winnie Breegle has been called an American hero. She has replied, “Those Navajo men were heroes. You won’t read about this in school books, and that’s a shame. They are the reason we won the war. The atom bomb and the Navajo Code Talkers are what won the war in the Pacific.”

On February 6th, 2022, Winne Breegle celebrated her 100th birthday at Spring Hill at The Reserve of Spring Hill, TN.

 

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