WATERLOO — A Waterloo woman who was in a top-secret codebreaking unit during World War II has died 11 days shy of her 101st birthday.
Delores Schaack Burdett, 100, died Friday in hospice care at Edgewater/New Smyrna Beach, Florida, according to an obituary published in the Daytona Beach, Florida, News-Journal and family members. She had tested positive for COVID-19 despite having been vaccinated. She would have turned 101 on Jan. 18.
A 1938 graduate of Waterloo East High School who grew up on High Street near the school, she had worked in the offices at The Rath Packing Co. She joined the U.S. Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) following the death of a Rath colleague, Bob Manske, on the USS Arizona in the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged the U.S. into World War II.
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She was a member of the United States Naval Communication Intelligence Organization, based in Washington, D.C. She was a Navy intelligence communications specialist.
“We decoded the Japanese messages. It was really quite an experience,” Burdett said in a January 2021 Courier interview before her 100th birthday.
“Our fleet intercepted the messages, and when they came to us, we decoded them,” Burdett said. On one occasion, she said, “I had gotten a message and it was telling about how the Japanese were planning to attack one of the islands. We got the message transcribed and out to our fleet and they destroyed that (Japanese) fleet.
“But we couldn’t discuss anything about our work — only within the walls of that room,” she said. “It was that secret.”
It was so secret, Burdett said, she couldn’t even discuss an award she received for her work after the war.
The Navy awarded the Naval Communication Intelligence Organization, including Burdett, a unit commendation for their work. But the notification letter she received about the award said, “It is directed that, because of the nature of the services performed by this unit, no publicity be given to your receipt of this award.”
“I couldn’t tell my husband, nobody,” she said “I packed it away in the bank. It was there for 50 years, and after 50 years they said we could talk about it.”
And her husband Glenn, originally from Tennessee, was a career Navy man. “All he knew was I was in communications. I couldn’t tell him any more.”
They married during the war, having been introduced through a mutual acquaintance in Washington.
Glenn subsequently served in the Philippines during the war. The couple lived in Waterloo for a time after the war. Glenn returned to the Navy and served 26 years, through Korea and Vietnam, and 25 years with the U.S. General Services Administration in Washington, before he retired and they moved to Florida. They were married 70 years, with two children and three grandchildren, and he died in 2014 at age 92.
In 2017, her unit received some long-overdue recognition with the publication of a New York Times best-selling book, “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II,” by Liza Mundy.
In November 1945, after she’d left the Navy, she received a letter of commendation from U.S. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal.
Services with military honors for Burdett will be Wednesday in Florida. She told The Courier she’d requested her Navy unit commendation award — a secret for 50 years — be pinned on her and laid to rest with her upon her passing.
“I’ve had quite a life, and that was an experience not many people had,” she told the Courier last year.