Navy

It also is why it has taken decades and the declassification of documents to learn of their bravery and commitment. Many women, including Petrie, spent a lifetime keeping quiet. Even their families did not know their secrets.

After the war, Petrie resumed an ordinary, but rewarding life as a wife, mother and teacher.

But we can read the clues to decipher Petrie’s wartime assignment. The years then-Navy Lt. j.g. Elizabeth Ann MacDougall served, the location where she worked and her “communications” assignment, plus the shroud of secrecy she maintained until her death led most to conclude she was a code breaker.

More than 10,000 American women were recruited to break codes and intercept communications. They provided critical intelligence to the Army and Navy to protect American troops and defeat the Japanese and German militaries.

Petrie grew up in rural Stanislaus County, the daughter of Scottish immigrant Archibald MacDougall and Megdalena Breunig of Colorado. After graduating from high school in 1933, she attended the University of the Pacific in Stockton, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1937.

While she was teaching school in Salinas, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declared war. Many still debate why the nation was caught flat-footed by the attack, but the need to improve intelligence gathering was obvious.

With code breaking considered less prestigious than combat and akin to “secretarial work,” many men shunned the assignment. The nation turned to women, with the Army and Navy recruiting heavily among recent graduates and teachers with tested mathematics skills and the ability to sit for days staring at strings of nonsensical combinations of letters to find patterns that would decipher the enemy’s codes.

Women selected for the assignment, which had headquarters based in Washington, D.C., excelled at the task. By war’s end, they were supplying so much information about ships’ movements and supplies that the military could hardly keep up.

Liza Mundy, author of the 2017 bestselling book “Code Girls,” stumbled onto the women’s contributions while reading about the Verona project, a U.S. code-breaking unit staffed mostly by women that focused on Russian intelligence during World War II and the Cold War.

Mundy noted that many code breakers — both men and women — cracked under the pressure of their inside knowledge of the war’s triumphs and tragedies. They had to live “with the true knowledge of what was going on in the war … and the specific knowledge of their brothers’ (fates).”

On the homefront and in the military, the increasing number of women in uniform also brought hostility. Women were being recruited to free men from homefront jobs to fight. But some men and their families resented soldiers being put into harm’s way.

Rumors also abounded that the women were really uniformed prostitutes to keep up troop morale. And many high-risk jobs, including the jobs of aircraft ferry pilots, were classified as “civilian.” The female pilots were denied even basic benefits to protect and help them. By midwar, many of the jobs were absorbed into the uniformed services.

After her discharge in 1945, Petrie returned to California, studied under the GI Bill at a San Francisco business college and went to work for a major insurance company.

In 1947, she married Thomas Petrie, a Bank of America auditor and former Army captain. The couple lived for a few years in San Francisco, before Thomas’ transfer with the bank to Los Banos, Turlock and then Shafter in 1961. Thomas died in 1963. Petrie never remarried. The couple had one daughter, Sue Paxton, who now lives in Bakersfield.

Petrie taught kindergarten at Richland Primary School until her retirement in 1983. She also was active in community organizations, earning a community service award during the Vietnam War for helping send hundreds of care packages to soldiers. She was a member of St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, where she was known to attend daily Mass.

A voracious reader, Petrie also painted, sewed, knitted, did needlepoint and loved to travel, when she was not playing a mean game of bridge. Petrie loved to talk about family, friends and former students, but not about the war.

Petrie lived on her own until just a few years ago, when she moved to Brookdale Riverwalk assisted living in Bakersfield, where local veterans and dignitaries gathered in 2019 to honor her, when health issues prevented Petrie from flying to Washington, D.C., with Honor Flight Kern County.

“I have volunteered with Honor Flight for several years and we have had several women go on our flights,” said Cheree Linford. “As with their service, the number of women that have gone on Honor Flights are definitely outnumbered by men. They have been a delightful lot; very spunky to say the least.

“They had to be a tough lot. They were very much in a man’s world and there weren’t the safeguards we, as women, enjoy today to protect us from harassment. Any of them would say they just wanted to serve their country and help the war effort.”

Since the Revolutionary War, women have served in some capacity — as spies, in espionage and resistance, but mostly attending to wounded soldiers. According to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, at the end of World War II, more than 350,000 women wore American service uniforms. Although they were not assigned to combat roles, 423 women were killed and 88 taken prisoner.