For years, Wauneta Seibert’s family had no idea what she did during World War II.
There was a reason for that.
Steeped in secrecy, Seibert was with the Naval intelligence effort during the height of the war, from 1942 to 1945, working as a codebreaker in an underground bunker in Washington, D.C.
It was her charge to decipher countless spools of 36-millimeter film filled with coded messages from a number of countries, primarily Japan.
She was good at it, too.
She helped break one code that identified where a pair of Japanese battleships were preparing to ambush an Allied fleet in the Pacific Ocean.
The Americans were ready. The Japanese craft were sunk in the battle.
“We tried to break any code they sent us,” Seibert recalled. “We did break a lot of other codes. The ones we could never break were our own.”
After the war ended, Seibert was sent back to the States, where courtesy of the GI Bill she attended college. It was there that she met an Army veteran who would later become her husband.
John W. and Wauneta Seibert eventually settled in southeast Kansas. They had two children, Kathy and Chuck.
On Wednesday, Seibert, 97, earned a special recognition from the LaHarpe Veterans of Foreign Wars Post and other groups for her military service.
She was presented with a cap and coin holder, courtesy of the folks from Fort Leavenworth, and a special pin from the Women’s Museum at Fort Lee. The presentation came during a VFW program commemorating the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.
The program was held at Iola’s Greystone Residential Care Center, where Seibert lives.
Terese Yetzbacher, a VFW member, spoke about Seibert’s contributions to the war effort, and for helping lead the way for women in the military for generations to follow.
“Going back to the Civil War, women helped do a lot of things, but a lot of people don’t know about it, and they haven’t gotten the recognition they deserve,” Yetzbacher said. “If it hadn’t been for the ladies in front of us like Wauneta, I wouldn’t have had the job I had.”
Seibert enlisted in the Navy in 1942, not long after her 20th birthday, the minimum age for women to serve back in those days.
As boot camp was ending, she was given a list of potential positions she could try, from nurse to receptionist.
One option stood out above all others: Naval intelligence.
