announcer: "Heroines in the Storm" is funded by Niagara-on-the-Lake Museum, the Mislom-Ferrabee Family, Royal Canadian Legion Branch 458 Tamworth, Royal Canadian Legion Branch 105 Cardinal, and Roger and Sandra Harris.

Catherine Walker: By the summer of 1940, World War II was almost a year old, and Nazi Germany was cementing its hold on Europe.

England faced trial by Blitzkrieg while France had already fallen to German forces.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill looked to wage a clandestine war against the Nazis, one of code breaking and secret agents.

In doing so, he declared this new warfare would set Europe ablaze.

Outside London, a country estate recently acquired by the government became a bustling hub of clandestine activity known at the time as Station X. Bletchley Park would go on to be one of the most important code breaking centers of the war.

Dorothy Lincoln: By the end of the war, we were cracking 90,000 messages a month.

Catherine: Also in the summer of 1940, the Secret Operations Executive, or SOE as it would be known, was set up to recruit and train amateur spies and saboteurs.

Robert D'artois: They were blowing up bridges, they were blowing up munition depots.

They were involved in a lot of sabotage.

Catherine: Just over a year later, a secret training school sprang up in Canada on the north shore of Lake Ontario.

Lynn Philip Hodgson: The Reader's Digest version in Camp X very simplistically was a World War II spy training school where they trained over 500 secret agents to go in behind enemy lines and create havoc in what was called ungentlemanly warfare.

Catherine: In this new secret war, women played an increasingly important role, while the traditional way society viewed them would be challenged and forever changed.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Catherine: During the 1930s, newlyweds Marion and Chaz de Chastelain were living in Romania and carving out a comfortable life for themselves among Europe's upper crust.

Chaz, an executive with a Romanian oil company controlled by Phoenix Oil and Transporter London, was a petroleum engineer and sales manager for the oil interest.

He was charming with a love of fast cars and racing.

Marion was born in New Jersey to a father who was an executive to Standard Oil.

She ended up in Romania as a child when her father transferred there for work.

Marion attended Swiss schools, spoke five languages, was fearless at luge, and by 21 graduated the Sorbonne with a degree in international law.

Little did they know their backgrounds and location would combine to make each ideal to play a secretive role in the conflict that was brewing.

John de Chastelain: I knew that he had a good war in the sense that in the first place he had survived it.

Secondly, he was decorated twice.

Third, what he had done was important to the war effort as had been my mother had been and that they were held in high esteem by those people in that community, the Quasi Espionage unit organization community.

Catherine: As the de Chastelain family grew, daughter Jacqueline was born in 1936, followed by son John in 1937.

Rumors grew in other parts of Europe about a German machine that could encode messages Enigma.

First developed in 1919, the machine was marketed to German businesses as a clerical tool.

As early as 1931, the British government heard about the machine and was offered a chance to buy an Enigma and its blueprints from a German clerk looking to make some extra cash.

Failing to see the importance of the machine, the British turned him down.

Sherry Pringle: They were on the market, widely known about well before the war.

And it was sort of noted that they might come back, might come back to haunt them kind of thing, and they didn't pay any attention to it.

Catherine: Only when Enigma was pulled from the market in the early 1930s was its true potential explored and realized.

German engineers refined it, and by 1937 all Nazi messages were coded by Enigma.

male announcer: Germany's theft of Czechoslovakia had made Poland's strategic position even worse.

Catherine: In July 1939, Germany continued to threaten Poland.

A secret meeting took place in a wooded area outside Warsaw.

Polish officials, waiting nervously in the woods, had a prize to offer their British counterparts, an Enigma code machine.

Unlike the English years earlier, the Polish government saw the value of obtaining an Enigma.

Fearing a German invasion was imminent, they now looked to the British to smuggle the machine to safety.

announcer: During the last two weeks in August, the German armies moved toward the Polish border where they assembled 70 divisions, many of them armored.

Catherine: Enigma was smuggled out of Poland and whisked away to England.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. announcer: This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock, that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

Catherine: On September 3, England and France declared war on Germany.

One day later, the brilliant but troubled mathematician Alan Turing joined Station X at Bletchley Castle north of London.

Sherry: Bletchley was a lovely ancient manor, a state far from the city, and the government acquired it in 1938.

And by 1939 it was a ciphering school.

Catherine: Turing along with a small group of experts were tasked with cracking the Enigma machine.

Pressure continued to mount daily as the tiny island nation found itself growing more isolated and increasingly at the mercy of the German Navy.

Sherry: They needed to depend on the intelligence, the British intelligence to locate the ships in the channel that were just annihilating the British ships filled with supplies.

Dorothy: Over London they had great big balloons floating that was so that the planes couldn't dive down and dive bomb the important landmarks and buildings.

Catherine: Dorothy Lincoln was born Dorothy Shears on May 7, 1925 in Sydenham, a suburb of London where she lived until she was five.

The tragic death of her younger brother caused her father to move the family to her grandmother's home in Beckenham, Kent, also near London, in an effort to escape the memories and pain of the loss.

Dorothy: We had a good life and then of course, everything changed when war was declared, because for the first thing we had to all start carrying around a little cardboard box with a gas mask in it.

And at the end of our street was a little board up on a little pedestal.

And it would have changed color if there was a gas attack, so then we'd all have to adopt these gas masks, and they were a big nuisance.

They got in the way 'cause you had to have them strapped around your neck hanging on you.

Anyway, after about a few months of this, they realized that this wasn't going to come about because the Germans had as much to fear from us spreading gas over there, so that was good.

We didn't have to carry those around anymore, but then many people thought the war was gonna be all over by Christmas, that would be Christmas of 1939.

Catherine: Christmas 1939 came and went and the war continued.

From the fall of 1940 to the spring of 1941, conditions grew worse for British civilians as Hitler turned his attention to the island nation.

Especially hard hit was London.

The blitz began at about 4 p.m.

September 7, 1940 when German planes appeared over London.

For two hours, 348 German bombers and 617 fighters targeted the city, dropping high explosive bombs as well as incendiary devices.

Later, guided by the raging fires caused by the first attack, the second group of planes began another assault that lasted until 4:30 the following morning.

In just these few hours of Black Saturday, the first day of the Blitz, 430 people were killed and 1600 were badly injured.

Dorothy: Germans who had been caught by the fighters, they would get over the balloons, the last of the balloons, and then they dropped their loads.

So we got our share.

It wasn't anywhere near as bad as the City of London, but we got our share of bombings.

Catherine: While the crew at Bletchley raced to crack Enigma, the de Chastelains found their blissful existence upended by war.

With Hitler's forces pushing across Europe, Chaz put Marion and their children on the Orient Express in Bucharest headed for Paris.

Once in France, she booked passage to England by way of the English Channel.

Leaving her children with their British grandparents, she hastily returned to Chaz.

Meanwhile, he was asked to serve his king and country.

Sherry: There was an agreement between Romania and Britain that should the Nazis invade Romania that they wanted their oil wells destroyed.

Catherine: Chaz's first mission was a resounding success, and after some rest and relaxation for him and his team in Istanbul, he was sent on to a second more daring mission to convince the controlling government of Romania to oust the Germans.

It didn't go as planned.

John: They were dressed over their uniforms as members of a shooting beating party to look like beaters and the people who were to meet him on the ground from the resistance were dressed as a shooting party to shoot birds or deer or whatever.

That was the circumstance and there were to be--lights would be lit for the drop and they would then land on those lights.

But the weather was bad and my father complained to the, well, complained, but just the pilot that are you sure this is gonna be all right?

And the pilot said, "Piece of cake."

Well, it wasn't.

They dropped a long way off the drop zone, were captured and one of the things my father did to pass the time while he and the other two were in jail, where as I said, they were well treated.

They had a two-way radio that kept them in touch with Ankara, which I think was something that the Romanians found helpful.

They were given sweet curd and plum brandy and they were not suffering from that point of view, but one of the things he did to pass the time was embroider a handkerchief.

And on the handkerchief there is a piece of cake which was to indicate what the operation was supposed to have gone like but didn't.

My sister has the handkerchief.

Catherine: Marion packed their young children and left England for the safety of America.

Once settled in New York, Marion was approached by Sir William Stephenson of the Secret Intelligence Service.

His office was one floor above the SOE's operations at Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Stephenson asked, "Would you like to do something for your king and country?"

"Why not?"

Marion replied without hesitation.

Her language skills were about to come in handy.

John: Well, I think she had two roles.

The primary one was to get the material and translate it and do it quickly enough that it could be then put back into the safe where it had been taken from or wherever it had come from initially.

And that was in the languages that she was familiar with German, French, Romanian, a little bit of Italian.

Catherine: The secrets Marion translated came to her thanks to the daring exploits of secret agent Elizabeth Pack, who operated under the alias Cynthia.

Cynthia's job with the help of a French Canadian safe cracker was to access the secret documents locked in the Vichy French embassy in Washington and get them under the cover of darkness to Marion.

John: And she would fly down special aircraft from New York to Washington.

Take a circuitous route to get to the place that they would meet and a different route back out, translate the stuff, get it back to her and then come back to New York and normally that would take a weekend.

So we didn't see that much of them--of her.

Catherine: In another life before the war, Cynthia was Amy Betty Thorpe, born and raised in the American Midwest, she moved to Washington, DC with her family in the mid-thirties, where Betty soon became a regular member of the diplomatic core social scene.

A whirlwind romance and marriage of convenience to Arthur Pack of the British diplomatic service, and Betty was whisked to Europe where her abilities and looks caught the eye of William Stephenson.

Sherry: And Cynthia's job is to get the secret naval coded messages from the Vichy embassy in Washington.

Marion's job was to get them from her in Washington.

They would meet at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington.

She would get the messages and she would translate them, then give them back to Cynthia and Cynthia would get them back into the safe before they were missing.

And those messages contained highly sensitive naval information.

In fact, it would give the whereabouts of where the French fleet was in the Caribbean because they were located around Martinique, the island of Martinique.

John: I think a secondary role, particularly as far as Cynthia was concerned, was to act a bit as a mother confessor, if you like, to try and keep her stable in the sense that I mean what she was doing was dangerous, and I think was emotional.

She married the Vichy French military attache, a naval attache after the war.

I mean, they really were a couple.

And I think she was there to bolster her spirits as much as anything else at the same time as get whatever material it was that she had wanted.

announcer: The Germans broke through the charge of hurricanes and spitfires that went out to meet them.

Gone was any pretense of aiming at military objectives.

This was just savage destruction.

Catherine: When World War II broke out, the world of espionage was a stuffy old boys' club dominated by upper crust men.

Maxwell Knight, an officer with MI5, Britain's domestic counterintelligence agency, wondered if it was time for the old ways to change.

He jotted off a memo titled "On the Subject of Sex" in connection with using women as agents.

Knight believed a female spy could be handy as long as she was a certain type of woman, one that was not oversexed to the point of being intimidating or undersexed to the point of lacking charisma to woo her target.

The special abilities of a woman spy or secret agent came down to a strategic ability for batting eyelashes, soliciting pillow talk, and of course maintaining files and typing reports.

This was the world Marion De Chastelain inhabited early on in the war.

Sherry: The intelligence community, I thought it was a good idea sometimes when one of a couple were involved to also involve the other, so it was not number one, Marion was very well versed in five languages which she spoke fluently.

So she was and besides she knew the workings of the intelligence operations, so she was a natural for the British intelligence to approach to work for them.

John: So we didn't see that much of them of her, but my grandparents were looking after us.

We were at school and at least from the age of about five on I was at school.

Catherine: On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, crippling or destroying nearly 20 American ships and more than 300 airplanes.

Dry docks and air fields were also destroyed.

Along with the destruction, some 2000 soldiers and civilians were killed, with roughly 1000 others wounded.

announcer: Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

Catherine: The attack brought the United States into the war.

It also brought a sudden end to Marion de Chastelain's time as an operative in America.

John: I remembered much more about my mother of course, because she had brought us over.

Well, first of all, we were living with her in New York.

And then she had accompanied my sister and me by train up to Halifax and then on the ship crossing the Atlantic when she and my sister spent most of the time in the cabin because it was a fairly rough crossing and this was a cargo vessel that was fairly heavy in the water because we're carrying tanks and armored guns and armored vehicles.

Of course, I spent most of the time on the deck running around blowing my whistle and keeping my light flicking off and on and making myself a nuisance.

Catherine: After safely navigating the Atlantic, no easy task during the height of the second World War, the de Chastelains arrived in London, a city still under constant threat of bombardment from German forces.

The de Chastelain children didn't know it at the time, but they were part of Operation Pied Piper, one of the largest wartime evacuation schemes undertaken.

Under the oddly named government program, more than two million British children were sent away from their family homes over the six years of the war.

The hopes were they would escape the bombs for safer countryside surroundings and return home at war's end.

John: My sister and I were going home with this farming family from County Durham just across the border.

Sheep farmer who had fairly extensive holdings around the Dales, Yorkshire Dales and out by the marshes near Middlesbrough.

And that was as much as anything a second home.

You know, we rode horses and went and did gymkhanas and fed the chickens and that kind of stuff.

So I knew more about that other family up until about 1945 than I did really about my own 'cause I was spending much more time with them, but.

Catherine: Churchill called the women who worked at Bletchley the geese who laid the golden egg and never cracked.

Dorothy Lincoln found herself at Bletchley in the fall of 1943.

She and 200 recruits had only just signed the Official Secrets Act the day before boarding a bus for Woburn Abbey, the residence space near Bletchley.

Sherry: She had gone to be interviewed in London and assigned the Official Secrets Act.

And I guess she proved her worth with her secretarial skills and when she worked at the insurance company and was asked did she want to do something important that was highly secretive.

And when she asked, "Well, you know, is it safe and what do I tell my family?"

And they said, "Well, it's in a very lovely pastoral setting outside of London."

Dorothy: They said, if you do tell anyone, if you break your promise, you will be fined £2000 and you'll go to prison for two years.

Well, of course, we were all horrified.

We were scared of even talking in our sleep.

Catherine: The previous summer Dorothy and her friend May vacationed in the seaside town of Bournemouth on England's south coast surrounded by sea, surf, and sun, as well as handsome fighter pilots on leave, Dorothy struck up a conversation with an RCAF navigator, newly arrived from Canada.

The chemistry between her and the navigator Edward Lincoln was instantaneous.

Their friendship would eventually lead to marriage, but not before causing some headaches for the security conscious Dorothy, who was all too aware of her secret role in the war.

Dorothy: My husband was, I mean, he was very smart and he used to come and meet me if he had to leave and I didn't, and he'd come to the gates of Bletchley.

And he would see the guards on the gate.

Every time we went in, they'd board our buses, British soldiers, fully armed, look us all over as long as we were all in uniform, and there was an officer to vouch for us.

We'd be cleared and then the bus would advance into the park, to the parking lot, and he was sort of said, "You know, I figured out what you're doing in there."

He said, "There's Army, navy, Air Force, civilians.

I think you're decoding."

Well, I nearly died on the spot and I thought, "Oh my God, what am I gonna say?"

And then I said, "Now how could I be doing that?

I don't speak German."

Catherine: Dorothy wasn't entirely bluffing.

She, along with other wren code breakers, saw little more than the codes they broke.

Working under the watchful eye of Professor Newman in one of four watch groups, the women became known as Newman's girls.

They worked eight hour shifts, and when not on duty, they billeted a half hour away.

Sherry: It was like a dormitory.

The girls all had bunk beds and huge rooms, and the wallpaper was so precious that they had erected a phony wall to protect it, and from there they would be bussed every day to Bletchley.

They were given a couple of days to relax and collect their thoughts around where they were and what they were doing.

Dorothy: Well, no, we--all of us a bus would come.

They'd say there's going to be a dance at the American air station.

So we need so many volunteers and so they'd send a truck, we'd clamber in the back, we'd all go off to this some place, you know, where the Americans were stationed.

I remember once, I heard Glenn Miller.

Catherine: Bletchley Park and the women who worked there faced skepticism early on.

That skepticism faded quickly when in 1941 19-year-old Mavis Lever decoded a message revealing most of the Italian fleet was anchored off Cape Madigan on the coast of Greece, situated in Alexandria.

The British naval force sailed after the Italian fleet under cover of darkness and sank the enemy.

The Italian navy lost 3000 sailors in the attack.

Even after this resounding defeat, the German military command believed the loss was a result of information passed along by a double agent.

They had no clue their code had been broken.

announcer: The women of Britain refused to be left out.

Catherine: The totality of World War II changed the way women were viewed.

It was a necessary change brought on by the number of men pressed into active service.

State Side, Wild Bill Donovan recruited blue-blooded women for his Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA.

Among the recruits was future chef Julia Child.

Most OSS women were consigned to clerical work.

The few who went beyond the typing pool got little recognition.

Wild Bill's secretary Eloise Page helped plan the invasion of North Africa.

Nobody knew who she was at the time or what she contributed.

Europe meanwhile presented more opportunities and more dangers as well.

Robert: They were also preventing the Germans from moving forward towards the Allies, so they were blowing up bridges, they were blowing up ammunition depots.

They were involved in a lot of sabotage, getting information from Germans.

This woman, my mother, at 2019 or 20 years old, was slim, blonde, and beautiful.

And so a slim blonde beautiful woman in a restaurant or in a bar attracts attention from the Germans or even the French, but here she was working through that environment restaurants and bars getting information from Germans.

Catherine: Sonya D'artois was born Sonya Butt in 1924 in East Church, England.

After her parents' marriage fell apart, she and her mother ended up in France, where Sonya was educated.

When war broke out in 1939, she and her mother managed to escape back to Britain.

Anxious to be part of the war effort, she was instead met with disappointment.

Robert: She decided to get involved somehow.

She wanted to.

So she worked her way up from the south of France to Calais then was able to somehow get a passage across to Dover.

And it was then that she went and she registered to become what they called a member of the Fany, F-A-N-Y it's something to do with Yeoman.

And that for her was her entree into getting involved with the war, but she found herself involved with secretarial work, typing, peeling potatoes, you know, doing things that she didn't really like to do.

She was full of adventure.

She was excited and wanted to get more deeply involved with activity.

Catherine: Selwyn Jepsen was tasked with recruiting for the independent French section of the Special Operations Executive.

The son of an author, Jepsen was himself an accomplished writer as well as a veteran of the British Tank Corps from the Great War.

He saw potential in using women as part of the SOE.

According to Jepsen, women had a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men.

Robert: So as it turned out because of the fact that she could speak perfect French, one of her friends had said to her, "I think there's an opportunity for you with the SOE, the Special Operations Executive," and she applied, she was accepted.

But acceptance meant that you have to go through training.

Training means you're being tested and could you actually really be successful through the training program?

Catherine: Women who spoke fluent French were in great demand at the SOE.

The belief was they would better blend in with the mostly female population of France as many Frenchmen had been sent to labor camps.

Robert: There was a time while she was in her training that she kind of connected with this French Canadian fellow who was also there for training for SOE.

He and she kind of clicked.

They liked each other.

And in their training and being together it came to a point where liking became in love and they decided that they wanted to be together.

They were programmed in their training to be a team to be dropped into France.

They decided at one point, let's get married.

So they took off from Scotland, went to London on a weekend, got married, and then returned to Scotland.

When the head of the F section of SOE, a fellow called Colonel Buckmaster, when he found out that they got married, he was most upset.

This was not to be 'cause you can't send a team together who are married.

So he said to Sonya, "Guess what?

You guys aren't going together anymore.

Gee, you're going off to this section in France, and you're not going anywhere."

Catherine: Sonya's husband Guy was sent on his mission to France.

Sonya spent two weeks complaining to any supervising officer who would listened to her.

Robert: She b--ed for about two weeks.

"I wanna go, I wanna go, I wanna go."

And he finally let her go and she was parachuted into Lemont, that section of France, which is actually not too far from here.

And then for, I wanna say a period of time, like maybe five or six months, neither knew if the other was still alive.

Catherine: German ideas about women and domesticity blinded them early on to women spies in their midst.

Sonya and others used that to their advantage as they worked long hours as coordinators for attacks, saboteurs, setting up safe houses, establishing networks, and of course seducing German officers for information or just blending in to better overhear informative conversations.

Robert: This woman, my mother, at 20, 19 or 20 years old was slim, blonde, and beautiful.

And so a slim blonde beautiful woman in a restaurant or in a bar attracts attention from the Germans or even the French.

But here she was working through that environment, restaurants and bars, getting information from Germans.

Catherine: Of the 39 women SOE agents sent to France, a third never returned.

By 1943 German command started to crack down on saboteurs.

Hitler wrote a memo stating saboteurs should be annihilated without exception.

Klaus Barbie, known as the butcher of lions, took particular joy, weeding out and destroying the saboteur network.

Under his direction, scores of agents were arrested and tortured.

Women were special targets of his cruelty.

Some women SOE agents and saboteurs ended up in Ravensbruck concentration camp for women.

Others were shot while some were poisoned.

If women were captured, they were tortured in an effort to gain information.

Their faces were burned, toe nails were pulled out, breasts were burned with cigarettes, their hair was shaved, and it wasn't uncommon for them to be raped.

Robert: I believe it was in another restaurant and there was suspicion about her and what she was doing.

So there were two or three Germans who took her into another part of the restaurant into a back room, locked her in there.

And I only know this particular story because Sydney Hudson wrote a book called "Undercover Agent" and when the book was being published, my mother knew about the fact that it was being published.

She called my wife to ask her to tell me something about an incident that's reported in the book by Sydney Hudson.

Something that I never knew.

And that had to do with what happened to her in the restaurant when the three Germans put her into the back room.

They took advantage and raped her at this 19 or 20-year-old girl.

So then she was let go, all right.

So there there was no question about holding her prisoner she was, but they took advantage of the situation and did that.

Catherine: On a windswept plot of land on the north shore of Lake Ontario straddling the border between Oshawa and Whitby, Ontario, sits Intrepid Park and a monument to a top secret World War II camp.

The brainchild of Sir William Stephenson, the camp came to encompass roughly 275 acres of rolling fields.

Lynn Philip Hodgson: It was perfect for the bounce, the triple bounce across the Atlantic, and it would hit like Ontario, which was wide open so they could pick up the signals very easily.

And of course, it was easy to to access from the United States.

So when they were going to send over agents from Rochester under the cover of darkness, they would be able to come in and land right on the shores of Camp X. Catherine: When it was first created, Camp X was mainly responsible for training secret agents in all aspects of what would be required to survive behind enemy lines during the war.

Some 500 agents were trained at Camp X before heading off to Europe to create havoc behind enemy lines.

Lynn: And the second thing was, of course, was the signals setting up the signal space, the radio station that would communicate with Bletchley Park in England and Intrepid in New York and while Bill Donovan of the OS in Washington and ultimately President Roosevelt in Washington as well.

So that was the main purpose of setting up the camp in the first place.

Catherine: Early on in its role as a communications center, Camp X picked up coded messages from German U-boats in the Saint Lawrence River or German spies operating in Toronto and sent the intercepts to Bletchley for decoding.

Lynn: The first thing they did under Stevenson's operations, they confiscated all the ham operator's equipment in the Toronto area, the GTA, what we call GTA today, and of course the reason for doing that was so that they wouldn't have interference out there and have to try to figure out who's talking to whom and what's the information going back and forth is it something we need to know about or is it just somebody local?

So by confiscating all that equipment, they knew that if there were signals out there, they were coming from, very likely coming from the enemy.

Evelyn Davis: Our work was all code, it was all in code.

All in five-letter groups and that and we sent to New York and we were transmitting to New York and we were transmitting to England, which we now know as Bletchley Park.

Catherine: Evelyn Davis was born Evelyn Jameson on a farm north of Coburg, Ontario.

That rural setting helped Evelyn and her family weather the most severe effects of the Great Depression.

Evelyn: Living on a farm, you have food.

Yeah, and as long as you have food, you don't really require that much clothing.

I don't think actually we knew that we were in depression, not like my husband who lived in Hamilton.

Catherine: When not in class at the high school in Port Hope, Evelyn worked on the family farm and picked up part-time hours as a clerk at a nearby corner store.

She graduated high school at the age of 19 and moved to Toronto to work in the offices of Goodyear Tire, typing direct mail advertisements.

Evelyn's time in the typing pool was short lived.

On March 15, 1943, she reported to Kitchener for basic training in the army.

Evelyn: And then you go back to Toronto to the barracks there and then you were posted and my posting was Auriga.

And then from there I went to Kingston, Barryfield at Kingston.

And then I went back to Toronto and I was posted to the Camp X. Lynn: Yeah, they were called, later on we're called the BSC ladies, the British Security Court ladies, established by Intrepid.

And some of them were sent to New York, some of them stayed at Camp X. About 45 to 50 of them were at Camp X all during the war years, sending and receiving 12,000 messages per day.

Evelyn: We worked 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.

We never used plain language.

It was always in five letter code groups.

Catherine: On Canada's west coast, another listening station tracked coded messages.

On Gordon Head Island off the coast of Vancouver Island, wireless telegraphists like B. Corbett worked long hours in cold, cramped conditions, listening for Japanese coded messages.

Beatrice Corbett: Channel 124 was the one that it would be silent for an hour and then went, and it was always an important message on that.

So you just, but it's very hard to sit still for an hour and just concentrate and nothing's happening.

Your mind tends to wander.

We just had to be ready.

Catherine: Bea Corbett was born Beatrice Grant in August 1922 in Kingston, Ontario.

Her father was an instructor at Royal Military College.

Bea attended Havergal College in Toronto before returning to Kingston to pursue an arts degree at Queen's University.

When she returned to Kingston to attend Queens, Bea found her hometown was bustling with wartime activity.

Beatrice: Well, there was a great influx of people from all over Canada.

Catherine: By the summer of 1943, Bea was in her last year at Queens.

She left school to enlist in the navy.

Beatrice: And I grew up sailing before I could walk, and I just loved about in and but we had some disastrous times, but it was just something I still loved.

Catherine: The Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service was founded in July 1942 and was the last of the three services to open its doors to women.

Women who joined this branch were better known as Wrens.

The first class of Wrens consisted of 67 women.

By the end of the war, some 7000 women had enlisted to become Wrens.

Bea's hopes of serving overseas were soon dashed.

She was assigned to Saint Hyacinth, Quebec for training.

Beatrice: And it was a disappointment that we didn't, but looking back on it, I learned so much on the west coast and so many other things.

It wasn't a disappointment from the wrong point of view.

Catherine: While Bea trained with recruits at Saint Hyacinth's Communications School, other Wrens trained at land ships in Halifax and Galt, now Cambridge, Ontario.

"Some of their jobs are routine," noted a Royal Canadian Navy press release from August 1943.

"But they're jobs that must be performed efficiently to make sure that naval personnel is well fed or paid on time, that navy families are taken care of," continued the release, "and that ships are built and ready for combat as soon as possible, that the men are trained to fight on these ships, and that the ships are there to meet the enemy."

Wrens worked as cooks, mailroom workers, drivers, visual signalers, and plotters locating and tracking the positions of vessels.

On the west coast at her listening post, Bea and other Wrens worked tirelessly.

Beatrice: Let me say there was a chain of listening posts directing from--this is during the war, from Alaska right down to California and we were the only Canadian station which we didn't realize it but a great honor.

And the rest were all Americans and apparently the work that we did in this chain shortened the Pacific War by two years.

But we couldn't say anything about that at the time.

Catherine: On Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945, Bea and other Wrens paraded down Douglas Street in Victoria, British Columbia.

When VJ Day was declared on August 14, Bea was home from her honeymoon, having married Lieutenant Keith Corbett, a recently released prisoner of war.

The happy couple met before the war while both studied at Queen's.

Keith was captured during fighting in Sicily as part of the Italy campaign.

By the end of September 1945, Bea was demobilized from the navy.

She and Keith lived briefly in Toronto before settling in Kingston, Ontario, where they raised four children, and Bea eventually became a contributor for the daily newspaper.

Women who were code breakers and secret agents remained silent about their adventures during the war years after the conflict ended.

They felt compelled to obey the Official Secrets Act.

Most women at Bletchley gave up their careers after the war.

They got married and had families.

Dorothy: Everybody did something.

There wasn't--women just helped to take over.

Catherine: In February 1953, Maclean's magazine published a feature story on Sonya, noting that pretty Sonya D'artois, like thousands of other Quebec City housewives, works happily at home with her four children.

Even her neighbors don't know that at 19 she parachuted into occupied France and brushed death every day for five months as a British secret agent.

Robert: She was not somebody who was likely to brag about what she did.

Never once did I hear her talk about her exploits in a way.

Now, reporters used to come to the door, bang bang bang, knock on the door.

"What can I do for you?"

She'd say, "Well, we'd just like to interview you."

Bang, close the door.

Gone, I don't wanna talk about it.

And that's how she was right up until she died.

Catherine: Slowly with every memoir and novel published, the bonds of the Official Secrets Act were shed.

By the late 1970s, most of the secrets were laid bare.

Alan Turing, the troubled genius whose work made much of Bletchley's success possible, committed suicide in 1954.

Dorothy Shears married her Canadian Air Force navigator in 1945.

She and Ted moved to Paris, where he studied piano on scholarship.

In 1951 Ted moved Dorothy and their growing family back to Canada, where he became a nationally recognized concert pianist.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Catherine: Having survived the war in Britain with its 57 consecutive nights of air attacks and making contributions to the war effort, Dorothy grudgingly settled into domestic life.

Dorothy: And then after the war was over, they said, "Oh well, now you've got to leave and just go back to your little houses because, you know, you've got to--the jobs have got to be for the men now."

So that's why they started to rebel a bit and quite a different world now for women.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Catherine: Bletchley, long forgotten about, was threatened with redevelopment during the 1990s before being saved and turned into a museum.

Tim Reynolds: Because it's building on the innovation and the work that took place in the Second World War, bringing it up to date and making it relevant again.

Catherine: Today, it is home to the largest public display of Enigma machines in the world.

Tim: The impact of the work that happened at Bletchley Park, some think shortened the war by up to two years.

Catherine: Camp X didn't escape the same fate.

All that remains is a modest memorial, part of a small park named for Intrepid.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ announcer: More information on this program can be found at wanderingjournalist.com/ heroines-in-the-storm.

announcer: "Heroines in the Storm" is funded by Niagara-on-the-Lake Museum, the Mislom-Ferrabee Family, Royal Canadian Legion Branch 458 Tamworth, Royal Canadian Legion Branch 105 Cardinal, and Roger and Sandra Harris.