Connie McCanless of Fountain Hills has a newfound freedom. After more than 70 years she finds that she can now talk about what she did during World War II to serve the country.

“Code Girls,” a recently released book by author Liza Mundy, has revealed the secrets kept by thousands of women about their work breaking enemy codes during the war.

McCanless was one of those women who finally can receive some recognition for the work that saved untold lives on the battlefield by giving the Allies an upper hand with insights into the intentions of the enemy.

Sworn to secrecy McCanless said she never even told her husband about her wartime work. After decades of marriage, he passed before she was able to talk to him about it.

Mundy’s book tells how the government secretly recruited women from elite colleges and then, as more minds were needed, lesser known teachers colleges. They poured over intercepted Axis communications with the goal of breaking the cyphers used to encrypt the messages. They often came from small towns.

McCanless was raised as a farm girl in Minnesota but, after that, her story varies from the many women involved in code breaking. After graduating high school McCanless made her way to Minneapolis and was working in the office at a Sears department store.

She recalls making a weekend trip home to the farm and spending some time gathered around the radio with family members listening for war news and other programs.

During one broadcast, a story told how they were looking for young women to go to Washington, D.C. and work for the government. McCanless said she was urged to look into the potential job opportunity.

“There was a lot of testing involved in becoming a government employee,” McCanless said.

As she went through the battery of tests she didn’t talk about it with other Sears employees. She did discover there were several others from the store who had applied, but only she and one other girl were accepted.

“I went home to tell my parents and prepare to go and came down with the measles,” McCanless said. “I was really sick.”

She was somewhat surprised to learn that she apparently had done well enough on the tests that the government was willing to wait until she recovered. They also held the second woman back so they could travel to Washington together.

The pair switched trains when they reached Chicago, and soon discovered they were the only two women in the whole car they were traveling in. The rest of the passengers were young Army officers who had just completed training and were headed to Washington for assignment.

It was in the spring of 1944 when 19-year-old McCanless arrived at Union Station in Washington, D.C.

“[The city] was just beautiful with trees and flowers blooming everywhere,” McCanless said.

They were met at the station by a Women’s Army Corps representative and taken to Arlington Farms, a temporary residential complex for 7,000 young women. According to Mundy, it was often referred to as “28 acres of young women.”

McCanless was assigned to Maine Hall – buildings were named after states – and the next day she was taken to Arlington Hall for her first day of work.

Arlington Hall was a former women’s finishing school with ivy covered buildings and ponds. It had fallen on hard times when government officials discovered it while searching for a secure location to set up the American version of Britain’s Bletchley Park outside London.

McCanless said the facility had Army, Navy and Signal Corps personnel along with civilians all working at the same site.

“We were sworn to secrecy when we started working there, and took the same oath of secrecy when we left,” McCanless said. “I didn’t know what to say when people asked what I did for the government. I just started telling people that I was camouflaging pigeons.”

In fact, McCanless said she was just one small part of a larger operation, with her role just one piece of a larger puzzle. She was not pouring over dispatches trying to solve the hidden encryption.

By the time McCanless arrived the operation had acquired room-sized machines. They would be called large computers today but, at the time, they were just machines that sorted through data searching for hidden answers.

McCanless said she was taken into a room with the door locked behind her. Her job was to use a diagram to wire circuit boards that were then put into the machine, sort of an archaic version of programming or coding.

Since no one talked about their job, even to one another, she never knew what came out of her efforts.

“It wasn’t hard to keep a secret, since we didn’t know what we were doing anyway,” McCanless said.

Since it was spring of 1944 McCanless can speculate their work was helpful in Operation Overlord on the D-Day invasion.

Remarkably, in light of the level of secrecy, the women were not sequestered. They were free to move about as they pleased when not at Arlington Hall. They were not required to live at Arlington Farms. And when they could find a way most left, as McCanless did.

She had made some good friends of women her age working at various government jobs, though not at the super-secret Arlington Hall. Together she and several others rented a row house on 14th Street in Washington. They had a great time together in off hours. It was an outing to the movies with her friends that led McCanless to meet her husband. He went to work for the IRS, as did she, and they stayed in Washington, D.C. until long after the war.

Her friendships remained long after the war also, but McCanless never broke her vow of secrecy. She never told her closest friends what her work involved.

“That is one regret I have,” McCanless said. “We became so close and stayed in contact for years, but they are gone now, and I was never able to talk about this with them.”

Now 93, McCanless wonders about her memory, but she tells this story with clarity. Her daughter has purchased Mundy’s “Code Girls” for her and she is acquiring copies to send to other family members who have wondered over the years what she meant by “camouflaging pigeons.”