Charlotte 'Betty' Webb MBE, Legion d'Honneur

"A Bletchley Park codebreaker who “inspired women in the Army for decades” has died at the age of 101.
Charlotte “Betty” Webb MBE, who was one of the last surviving codebreakers from Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, died on Monday, the Women’s Royal Army Corps Association said.
She worked at Bletchley Park as a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), from 1941 to 1945, indexing German messages and paraphrasing Japanese signals, Bletchley Park said.
She later paraphrased Japanese messages at The Pentagon in the US, during the Pacific War, and was also awarded France’s highest distinction, the Legion d’Honneur, in 2021, for her work in the ATS.
Mrs Webb was 18 and studying at domestic science college near Shrewsbury in Shropshire when she and several others on her course decided “we ought to be serving our country rather than just making sausage rolls”.
She started volunteering for the ATS in 1941, according to an interview she gave as part of the Bletchley Park oral history project in February 2012.
She completed her basic training in Wrexham at the Royal Welch Fusiliers’ barracks before being taken to London for an interview and then immediately to Bletchley Park.
Mrs Webb remembered registering messages immediately without any training, and said they were told to just “get on with it”, before being taken into a separate room occupied by a “rather severe” Army captain and given the Official Secrets Act to read.
She said every message that came in had to be registered. About 10,000 messages came into Bletchley Park each day, all requiring sorting and storing correctly.
Mrs Webb was then moved into the Japanese section, paraphrasing the translated Japanese messages, and was sent to Washington in May 1945 to assist with the Pacific War effort.
Mrs Webb never told anyone about her work and it remained a secret until 1975. She was never able to tell her parents as they had already died."
Bletchley Park codebreaker who ‘inspired women in the Army’ dies aged 101