Signal Moon(15)
Matt cuffed at his eyes, then hailed the nearest tour guide. “Sir? How do you buy a brick for the wall?”
“For a veteran, you mean? Do they already have a brick?”
Yes, but Matt wanted to buy another. And he knew what he wanted it to say.
LILY BAINES, 2023
MY SIGNAL MOON
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As the author of The Rose Code, I’ve already written hundreds of pages about the women codebreakers of legendary Bletchley Park—that isolated English country manor where the best and brightest minds in Britain labored during World War II to break the supposedly unbreakable Axis military codes. But The Rose Code doesn’t cover one key stage in the codebreaking process: the Y Station listeners.
Y Stations were signals-intelligence hot spots. Dotted all over Britain, they were staffed at first by men, but as more and more Englishmen headed to the front lines, recruitment shifted toward young women with good listening skills and if possible, fluent German. These ladies came from all walks of life, spending their war glued to clumsy Bakelite headphones and bulky radio receivers, listening round the clock for scraps of German naval transmissions and blips of Morse code. They wrote down every intercepted enemy communication with frantic speed, and their scribbled transcriptions were bundled off (via teleprinter or motorcycle saddlebags) for decryption. Without the keen-eared women of the Y service, the codebreakers of Bletchley Park would have been out of a job.
Lily Baines is fictional, but her wartime career is closely based on that of Pat Owtram, a petty officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service who was posted to Withernsea in Yorkshire as a special duties linguist. Like Lily, she was billeted in a requisitioned seaside hotel and intercepted German naval communications across the Baltic and the North Sea, working under the severe Wren Fiddian. Pat’s crystal-clear accounts of her work—from the bandwidth where she did her hunting to the procedure of sending messages on to Bletchley Park—are detailed in Tessa Dunlop’s splendid book The Bletchley Girls. To my knowledge, Pat never intercepted any transmissions from the future . . . that, of course, is my embellishment!
Matt Jackson is fictional, and so is his job—the United States Navy does not have a rate called signals technician. But there are many modern-day servicemen and servicewomen like Matt, who work on ships and in naval listening stations, mostly in little cold rooms full of computers, and their work is directly descended from that done by the Bletchley Park codebreakers. Their official rating isn’t classified, but much of their work certainly is, so I fictionalized Matt’s rate and left the technical details of his decryption on the also-fictional Colin Powell deliberately vague. Many thanks to my active-duty navy husband, who fine-tuned the military-ese to sound more realistic. He also put me in touch with some naval intelligence colleagues who told me as much as they legally could about the work that they do in those cold little rooms, and honed all the ship-to-ship radio chatter to sound authentic (as well as terrifying—localized conflicts and shooting wars really have started over communication mishaps in the field!).
I’ve never written anything with a modern-day plot thread, so Signal Moon was a fun departure from my usual strictly historical territory. I owe big thanks to independent researcher Kerry Howard, who came to my rescue during the researching of The Rose Code, and did so again when I was digging for details about Y Station listeners. And of course, I owe the biggest thanks of all to the men and women who labored during World War II, and those who continue to labor today, in the little-known, high-stress, high-stakes world of signals intelligence. Then and now, they change the world.
More from Kate Quinn
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
The author of The Rose Code returns with an unforgettable WWII tale of a quiet bookworm who becomes history’s deadliest female sniper…based on a true story.
In 1937 in the snowbound city of Kiev (now known as Kyiv), wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son—but Hitler’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper—a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. When news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, Mila finds herself torn from the bloody battlefields of the eastern front and sent to America on a goodwill tour.
Still reeling from war wounds and devastated by loss, Mila finds herself isolated and lonely in the glittering world of Washington, DC—until an unexpected friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and an even more unexpected connection with a silent fellow sniper offer the possibility of happiness. But when an old enemy from Mila’s past joins forces with a deadly new foe lurking in the shadows, Lady Death finds herself battling her own demons and enemy bullets in the deadliest duel of her life.
Based on a true story, The Diamond Eye is a haunting novel of heroism born of desperation, of a mother who became a soldier, of a woman who found her place in the world and changed the course of history forever.