BREEGLE-WINIFRED

A  HISTORICALLY  SIGNIFICANT

WAVE  OFFICER  OF  WWII

Winifred Moore “Winnie” Breegle was a farm girl born on February 22, 1922 in southern Ohio.  She graduated from high school in 1938 at the age of 16 and became a graduate three years later of Indiana University with a teaching degree, with majors in English, Spanish and Social Studies, and a minor in Science.  In 1940 she began teaching but early in World War II she decided to become a Wave.  Although she had married, she obtained permission from her husband, who was then serving in the Army Air Corps as a radio operator in the Pacific, with the promise she would not serve outside the U.S.  Thus, in 1943 she joined the Navy at Pittsburgh and earned her commission in February 1944 as a naval officer at Smith College followed by training at Mount Holyoke College where she underwent intense training to become a Cryptographer-Coding Officer. 

Breegle’s first assignment was to the office of the Port Director in Baltimore, Maryland, where she coded and decoded messages from ships operating in the Atlantic and Pacific.  After about a year she was transferred to a small group of Cryptographers located at the Navy Department Headquarters in Washington, D.C.  Here she became exposed to a top-secret code which has become known as the Navajo Code.  Navajo is an all-verbal language which has no written form.  Breegle became proficient in the code and would sometime not sleep at night because she feared she might forget the code before she could teach it to others with whom she worked.  During the Battle of Iwo Jima, more than 800 messages transmitted in the Navajo code passed through Breegle’s office in Washington and she was involved in at least half of them, all without error.

In addition to office work as a cryptographer, Breegle was often assigned courier duty to deliver top secret messages to the White House and the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.  These duties required that she be accompanied by a Marine guard and she was also required to carry a .45 caliber gun with instructions to “shoot and ask questions later” if anyone attempted to interfere with her work.

Breegle’s work was so top secret that when World War II ended, she and other code talkers were given a 25-year non-disclosure agreement, swearing to secrecy anything she had done during the war.  Thus, until 1968 when the Government disclosed the existence of the Navajo Code, Breegle remained silent concerning her World War II experiences and even her husband and son knew nothing of her cryptographer role until the government released information about the Navajo Code Talkers.  Breegle served on active duty until 1946 but upon release following the end of World War II, she was retained in an inactive Naval Reserve status for an additional three more years until 1949 when she was finally discharged.

Following World War II, Breegle returned to Ohio and taught in high schools until 1977 when she retired and with her husband they moved to Panama City, Florida.  Shortly after the transition she began to teach at Gulf Coast Community College where she taught for another 20 years until she retired for a second time in 2008.

Submitted by CDR Roy A. Mosteller, USNR (Ret)