Born: 31 March 1912, United States
Died: 10 December 2001
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Wilma Berryman, Wilma Mason, Wilma Davis
The following is republished from the National Security Agency. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
With a degree in mathematics and a Navy correspondence course on cryptology Wilma Davis was hired to work in the Army’s Signal Intelligence Service in the late 1930s. Her first assignment was with the Italian diplomatic codes which she exploited until 1942 when she transferred to the Japanese problem. Within two years she was the head of the department that solved and processed intercepted Japanese Army code messages. At the end of the war she moved on to the Chinese team and then to the Venona Project trying to break Soviet messages.
Ms. Davis left the cryptologic field a few times during her career but she could not stay away. She returned to work on Venona and returned a second time during the Vietnam War finally retiring in 1973.
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