bookheaven | Keeping the Secret: The WAVES & NCR Dayton, OH 1932-1946

Keeping the Secret: The WAVES & NCR Dayton, OH 1932-1946 by Curt Dalton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Picked this up in a Dayton museum and it's a nice, short look at the WAVES and what they were doing in National Cash Register company's camp: i.e. building code busting machines. It's a quickie examination of what life was like there, how they were recruited, dressed and trained. However it's done with very little depth.

Instead it hinges on personal antecedents from the ladies themselves and that made it special. It was a little heartbreaking to read one of them thought she was a failure forced to do a silly menial job when in fact she was helping to build parts of the code buster (because they didn't let the ladies know what they were doing for the safety of them and the program)

I did know some about this project, learned some stuff I didn't and still wish, however that we had more of the ladies' stories, that this was just a bit longer.

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