A Living Legend

“Nobody in my family ever made it to 104 before,” said Concordia of Monroeville resident Julia Parsons. “It’s been a great life.”

The Forrest Hills native turned 104 on March 2, 2025, and her whole family celebrated with her at a party on campus. Her life is remarkable for many reasons, but the one she particularly enjoys talking about is her role in World War II as a code breaker.

A Student

When the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, Julia was close to graduating from Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University.

“When I started at Carnegie Tech, they asked me what I wanted to be,” Julia remembered. “I said I wanted to be an engineer, and they laughed at me. They thought it would be ridiculous for a woman to do that. That was my introduction to the difference in the sexes back then.”

Julia graduated with a degree in general studies in 1942, and she spent that summer in an Army ordnance lab checking the gauges on shells made in Pittsburgh steel mills for the war effort.

“I thought that would solve my problem of wanting to do something to help, but it didn’t,” Julia said. “It was an assembly line job, and I wanted to do more.”

An ad in the paper showed Julia another path: the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). She joined the program and went to Washington, D.C. for training.

“They asked us if we knew any German, and I was the only one to raise my hand,” Julia said. “They sent me to the Enigma section immediately.”

A Code Breaker

During World War II, the Germans were using the Enigma, a type of cypher machine that used rotors to encrypt messages. The Allies had acquired one of the machines and three months’ worth of planned codes, but once the three months were up, they were working every day to break the latest one.

Julia worked six days a week with many others in the Naval Communications Annex in Washington on the top-secret mission, specifically to break the coded messages going across the North Atlantic, North Sea and Bay of Biscay. German U-boat submarines were causing havoc, stalking and sinking thousands of Allied ships. If Julia and the other code breakers could decipher the messages correctly, the Allies could avoid or take out the U-boats.

“It was a test in logic and thinking, but we knew lives were on the line,” Julia said. “It was certainly an exciting time in my life, and I met some of the most fantastic people and great mathematicians.”

After struggling to break the coded messages they received every day, the group got a break – thanks to a spreadsheet Julia made, they realized that every night at 7:30 p.m., a German control center would send out a weather report for the Bay of Biscay. The wording at the beginning of the message was the same every single night, so once they received that weather report they could work backwards and decode the rest of the day’s communications.

Julia continued in her work until the end of the war.

A Veteran

“It wasn’t very pleasant to go back to scrubbing floors,” Julia said. “We had held such responsibility for such a serious part of the war effort, but all the men were promised their jobs when the war was over. We were frustrated at first, but then it seemed like we had made a breakthrough, because women just joined the workforce anyway.”

Like many others, Julia’s father came to realize the significant role women played in the war effort.

“He was so happy to have a Blue Star flag in the window,” Julia remembered. “He was very proud of me.”

Julia also dealt with the continued secrecy of what her role had been during the war, which she couldn’t even tell her late husband Don, who she met in the service. The two started a family, traveled, lived in different countries and eventually came back to Pittsburgh, and not once did she ever share any details about what she did in the war.

In 1997, one of Julia’s friends, who was also in the WAVES, asked her if she wanted to go to the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland. Unbeknownst to them, their work on the Enigma code had been declassified in the 1970s.

“We were so shocked when we found what we had done was now in the museum,” Julia said. “I said, ‘How can this be here when we haven’t told anyone?’ The museum staff explained it to us, and then we knew we could talk about it.”

A Centenarian

As Julia looks back on her 104 years of life and experience, she’s proud of her family and her service.

“I have three children, eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren,” Julia said. “I’ll be seeing some of the great-grandchildren for the first time at my birthday party. We’ll have a good time.”

For her service, Julia has been featured in many newspaper articles, documentaries, a video by WQED Pittsburgh and was even recognized on the field by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2022. According to the Veterans Breakfast Club, she is the last surviving code breaker of World War II.

“I loved what I’ve done in my life,” Julia said. “If I could do it all over again I would.”

From everyone at Concordia, Happy Birthday Julia! If you would like to learn more about the personal care, short-term rehabilitation and long-term nursing care offered at Concordia of Monroeville, call 412-373-3900 or send us a message through our online contact form.