The Incredible Story of Elizebeth Friedman, One of America’s Best Codebreakers

Elizebeth Smith Friedman (spelled that way by her mother, who reportedly disliked the name ‘Eliza’) was born the youngest of 9 children in 1892. From a young age it was clear the girl was bright, displaying an impressive talent for languages. She wanted to go to college, so badly that she borrowed the money from her father at a 6% interest rate when he refused to pay for her schooling outright.

She finished school at Hillsdale College in Michigan, earning a degree in English Literature while also studying German, Greek, and Latin and discovering a love for Shakespeare that would last the rest of her life. It turned out that a career in education wasn’t for Elizebeth, who grew bored and quit her job as a principal before traveling to Chicago in 1916.

Photo Credit: Public Domain

While there, she visited the Newberry Library, where Shakespeare’s First Folio was on display, and she ended up with a job at a nearby research facility, Riverbank. It was run by eccentric George Fabyan and already employed Shakespeare scholar Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who was working to prove that Sir Francis Bacon actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

Gallup was in need of a research assistant, and our Elizebeth was happy to take the job. She worked on a cipher that Gallup claimed was hidden in Shakespeare’s sonnets that proved they were written by Bacon, but perhaps more auspiciously, she met, fell in love with, and married geneticist William Friedman while there. A month later, the United States entered World War I.

Riverbank was one of the first institutes in the country to focus on codebreaking, or cryptology, and was essential in the early days of the war. It would transform both of the Friedman’s lives, with William becoming one of the biggest names in cryptanalysis (a word he coined himself) while his equally-as-talented wife was often deliberately kept from the spotlight.

Photo Credit: Public Domain

“So little was known in this country of codes and ciphers when the United States entered World War I, that we ourselves had to be the learners, the workers, and the teachers all at the same time,” wrote Elizebeth in her memoir.

One of their more famous wartime accomplishments actually involved cracking a code for Scotland Yard – a trunk of mysterious, coded messages turned out to contain the secrets behind the Hindu-German Conspiracy, in which Hindu activists living in the United States were shipping weapons to India with German assistance.

The resulting trial was one of the largest in U.S. history (at the time) and ended sensationally as a gunman who believed one of the defendants had snitched opened fire in the courtroom.

After the war, the Friedmans moved to Washington D.C. and continued working for the military full-time. Elizebeth stayed home for a time to focus on raising the couple’s two children, but she returned to work for the Coast Guard in 1925 when they asked for help on Prohibition-related cases. There, she proved to be an invaluable asset, and was called to testify in a 1933 trial following the bust of a million-dollar rum running operation in the Gulf of Mexico and on the West coast.

Photo Credit: Marshall Foundation

During the trial, attorneys asked her to prove how a jumble of letters could possibly be determined to mean “anchored in harbor where and when are you sending fuel?” Elizebeth asked for a chalkboard and proceeded to give the court a lesson on simple cipher charts, mono-alphabetic ciphers, and polysyllabic ciphers, then reviewed how she had spent two years intercepting and deciphering the radio broadcasts of four illicit New Orleans distilleries.

Special Assistant to the Attorney General Colonel Amos W. Woodcock wrote that Elizebeth’s proficiency “made an unusual impression.”

A year later, Elizebeth used her skills to avert a court case between Canada and the United States when her codebreaking abilities proved that a “Canadian” ship sunk by the U.S. Coast Guard was actually a ship owned by an American bootlegger and simply flew the Canadian flag to avert suspicion. The Canadians were so impressed with her that they hired her to help catch a ring of Chinese opium smugglers, and her testimony in that case led to five convictions.

When WWII began, Elizebeth was recruited by the Coordinator of Information, an intelligence service that preceded both the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and the CIA. While her husband, William, was lauded for leading the team that cracked Japan’s Purple Encryption Machine, Elizebeth’s accomplishments breaking German codes and working closely with British intelligence to disrupt Axis spy rings all across Europe. For years, researchers hit brick wall after brick wall trying to uncover her contributions, largely because J. Edgar Hoover wrote her out of history (or tried to) by classifying her files as top-secret and taking the credit for himself.

Photo Credit: Public Domain

We do know, however, that she was instrumental in solving the “Doll Woman Case” in 1944, in which Velvalee Dickinson, a New York City antique doll dealer, was found guilty of spying on behalf of the Japanese government. Her work helped prove that the letters the woman had written about the condition of antique dolls were actually describing the positions of U.S. ships and other war-related matters. In the newspaper accounts of the day, however, Elizebeth’s name was never mentioned.

She retired in 1946, a year after the war ended, and her husband followed suit a decade later. Their relationship was uniquely bonded by their shared fascination for codes and codebreaking, which they brought into their person life as well – they used ciphers playing family games with their children and would even encode menus at dinner parties, encouraging their guests to solve them in order to earn the next course.

Together, they published The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, a masterwork that won awards from several Shakespeare research facilities, and believed that they disproved the theory that Sir Francis Bacon was the real author of the plays.

Photo Credit: Public Domain

William passed away in 1969 and Elizebeth spent her remaining years compiling and documenting her husband’s work in cryptology instead of going back over her own extraordinary achievements. Her writings are now part of the George C. Marshall Research Library.

Elizebeth died in 1980 and is buried next to her husband. On their double gravestone is a quote commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.”

Photo Credit: Find A Grave

The quote is, of course, a cipher that, when decrypted, reads “WFF,” William’s initials.

There’s no doubt that the field of codebreaking wouldn’t have come as far as fast as it did without William’s efforts, but Elizebeth’s deserve equal, if not more, credit.

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Here’s How 3 U.S. Soldiers Fooled 15,000 Nazis into Surrendering During WWII

There were some truly awesome war stories that came out of World War II, but the story of a  U.S. soldier named Moffatt Burriss might be one of the absolute best.

In April 1945, Burriss was in Berlin as the war was winding down. He received orders from none other than General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself that he needed to stand down and let Russian troops take control of the city.

Photo Credit: Public Domain

By this point, Burriss had seen heavy combat in the Battle of the Bulge and in battles in Italy and the Netherlands, and he didn’t want to let the Russians take all the credit in Berlin.

Burriss recalled, “I said: ‘I can’t stand this any longer.’ I got in my Jeep with the lieutenant and sergeant and said, ‘Let’s go across the river and see what we can see, see if there are some [krauts] still over there…’”

That’s just the beginning of the tale. Watch the video of Burriss telling the rest of the amazing story in the video below.

After World War II, Burriss went on to become a successful businessman and a politician. He served in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1977 to 1992. Burriss died in January 2019 at the age of 99.

A true American hero!

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Mysterious Skeleton of Powerful Viking Warrior Confirmed to be Female

Back in 1878, archaeologists came across a Viking burial chamber in an important trade center known as Birka. Judging by the way the body had bee placed into the grave, they assessed that it must have belonged to a prominent Viking warrior.

The body was found buried with their weapons, fancy clothes, and two horses. The assumption at the time was that the remains must have been those of a man,but a DNA study concluded that the remains were biologically female.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Critics of the findings argued that the weapons could have belonged to her husband or that there could have been two skeletons in the grave and the analysis was done on the wrong one. They argued that thinking that women were Viking warriors is wishful thinking and that we don’t have enough historical evidence to support the claim.

Researchers, though, are defending their findings in the journal Antiquity, saying the remains buried in the chamber are “unassailably female.” They confirm that there was only one skeleton in the grave, so they couldn’t have mixed up the remains, and asserted that all documentation was correct.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

“Grave Bj.581 had only one human occupant,” confirms Professor Neil Price to IFLScience. “An extra thigh-bone in the Bj.581 museum storage box – much hyped by our online critics – is clearly labeled as coming from another grave and had just been misplaced in the wrong box (the possibility of which is why bones are labeled to begin with!).”

He also continues to make an even finer point:

“To those who do take issue, we suggest that it is not supportable to react only now, when the individual has been shown to be female, without explaining why neither the warrior interpretations nor any supposed source-critical factors were a problem when the person in Bj.581 was believed to be male.”

Ideas about gender, of course, are not set in stone and vary between cultures, so it’s fair to say the skeleton could belong to a person who was both a female and a warrior, and also to accept the fact that being a woman might not have meant the same thing in that culture as it does in ours today.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Professor Price agrees.

“The body’s XX chromosomes revealed in the genomic study provide an unambiguously female sex determination, but the gender of the Bj.581 individual is a different matter. There is, of course, a broad spectrum of possibilities, many of them involving contested contemporary terminologies that can also be problematic to apply to people of the past.”

The archaeologists on the study expect that, in the future, we’ll probably find more and more Viking Age female warriors, whether they’re new finds or reassessments of remains already catalogued.

The future – and the past – is female, it would seem.

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Here’s How Some of History’s Most Successful People Started Their Mornings

Everyone has their morning routines, and starting your day off on the right foot is vital to the success of your day. Some of us find it a lot harder to start our days out productively, but it’s a new year so what better time than now to get inspired for a little self-improvement?

And, what better place to get started than taking advice from some of history’s most successful people? Here are morning routines from some names you will definitely recognize. It might be time to incorporate some of these tasks into your daily routine.

1. Meditate.

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Morning meditation can help get your head on straight and help you focus on what you need to achieve throughout the upcoming day. It also helps reduce anxiety.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant was a huge proponent of meditating each morning before he began his work day.

2. Treat yourself.

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Even though it may feel like you’re procrastinating, doing something that you enjoy or that helps you relax each morning is very important. Before jumping into their work days, Freud had a barber trim his beard each morning, and Napoleon and Mozart spent a good amount of time primping and getting dressed.

3. Make a new resolution each morning.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Let’s look to Benjamin Franklin for this one. One of America’s greatest figures followed the same routine each day: He arose at 5 a.m. and said to himself, “What good shall I do this day?” Make each day count, just like Mr. Franklin did!

4. Take a walk.

Photo Credit: Public Domain

Is there anything more relaxing and mind-clearing than taking a long walk? I think not, and I’m in good company. Charles Darwin and Georgia O’Keeffe are two examples of brilliant minds who took morning walks in order to get the creative juices flowing.

5. Work from your bed.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

This one may sound a little odd, but look at the proof: The legendary French writer Voltaire regularly worked from bed and he was incredibly productive during his life, writing more than 50 plays. He was known to work 18 hour days, too, so he was clearly not a lazy guy.

Winston Churchill was also a prolific bed worker, working from there for hours each morning.

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Viking military tactics succeeded…

Viking military tactics succeeded mainly because they disregarded the conventional battlefield tactics, methods, and customs of the time. They ignored unspoken rules, like not attacking holy sites. To the contrary Vikings intentionally targeted religious sites for their vulnerability and wealth.

In 1951, 650 British soldiers…

In 1951, 650 British soldiers were being overwhelmed by 10,000 Chinese. When an American general asked for a status update, a brigadier responded “things are a bit sticky down there.” No help was sent and almost all of the troops were killed because the general did not get the understatement.

Guards at the Tomb of the Unknown…

Guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier take an average of six hours to prepare their uniform. They are also required to memorize 35 pages of information about Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, including the locations of 300 graves and who is buried in each one. 00

At the start of Operation Good Hope…

At the start of Operation Good Hope, US forces were supposed to land on the beaches of Mogadishu under the cover of darkness. Instead, they were met by CNN who was covering the landing live on television. 10

Sailors aboard submarines work…

Sailors aboard submarines work 6 hour shifts so that it is easier for them to give their undivided attention to the equipment they operate during a shorter shift. The military also switched submarines from an 18-hour work day to a traditional 24-hour one, improving morale significantly. 00

During the Austro-Prussian War, Liechtenstein…

During the Austro-Prussian War, Liechtenstein had an army of 80 men. During the conflict no men were injured or killed and they returned home with 81 men because they’d made an Italian friend along the way. The army was then disbanded and Liechtenstein hasn’t had a military since. 00