A local woman and veteran of the Second World War will be given a special award for her efforts decoding the enemy’s communications in the Pacific Theatre.

Bea Corbett, 94, will receive the Bletchley Park Commemorative Badge. The badge, from the Government Communications Headquarters located in Cheltenham, England, will be officially presented to her at a ceremony at HMCS Cataraqui by their commanding officer Robert Brunner later this month.

Corbett, a member of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (WRCNS or Wrens), didn’t work at Bletchley Park in England, which was brought back to life in the 2014 movie The Imitation Game, about code-breakers during the Second World War and starring Benedict Cumberbatch, but she worked at one of Bletchley Park’s outstations at Gordon Head, now a seaside surburb of Victoria, B.C., making her eligible for the award.

At the outstation, Corbett worked officially as a wire telegraphist, trained in the Kana and Japanese code.

Corbett joined the WRCNS in 1944, a year after graduating from Queen’s University with an English degree.

In March 1944, she was sent to basic training in Galt, Ont., and then attended signal school from April to September 1944 in Quebec before being dispatched by train to Vancouver Island, where she worked for a year breaking the codes of the Japanese.

Corbett, whose maiden name is Beatrice Margaret Grant, was 22 years old when she started at Gordon Head.

Corbett’s group worked with the American, and any intelligence they gathered went to Bainbridge Island in Washington state and Bletchley Park, where the information was analyzed.

"We were really run by the Americans," said Corbett in a recent interview in her downtown Kingston apartment. "They said we were in the Pacific war, not the Atlantic."

Her responsibilities included breaking the Japanese equivalent of the Morse code.

"We were listening to the Japanese and it was all in code and I still know the code: it was called Kana."

She and her fellow code-breakers, the majority of them women, deciphered communications between Japanese warships.

The Wrens lived in barracks nearby and were transported by truck to their job. The code-breakers worked day and night shifts on a rotating basis.

Corbett spoke of a couple of occasions when she heard conversations between the enemy’s warships and passed the information on to the United States military.

"They took bearings from three different places and they got the position of the Japanese ship, then they could go and sink it."

The decoders, Corbett said, could also anticipate imminent attacks on allied ships.

"It was said the work we did shortened the Pacific war, the Japanese war, by two years."

Corbett only worked for a year at Gordon Head, but some of the other code-breakers were there during the entire conflict.

"Once you were in, you were there for as long as the war went on," she said.

When the war in the Pacific ended in August 1945 Corbett worked another month at Gordon Head before being sent back to civilian life.

But she couldn’t celebrate her contributions to the Allied victory or tell anyone about it for more than 35 years.

Corbett said they were "absolutely" sworn to secrecy.

"Strict orders were given that we were never to tell anyone, even family members, of the work we were doing," she wrote in the application for the badge.

"We were to take it to our graves.

"We were also told that we could never be fired, because we couldn’t be replaced."

But, in the late 1970s when books began surfacing about Bletchley Park and the code-breakers, she broke her silence.

"She never told us and we never knew," said her daughter, Cathi Corbett. "She didn’t start talking about it until she read A Man Called Intrepid, and she said ‘if it’s in here, I can talk about it.’"

After the war, she came back to Kingston and married Casey Corbett, who was a prisoner of war in Germany.

They moved to Toronto and started a family, having two boys and two girls.

For a time, Corbett worked in the publishing industry.

After divorcing her husband in the 1980s, Corbett returned to Kingston in 1989.

"It was difficult to believe we were involved in secret work in one of the greatest global conflicts in the history of mankind," she wrote. "For that reason, my memories are pleasant ones during a time of important service to one’s country and the Allied war effort.

"I have always considered my service in the WRCNS as one of the happiest and memorable times in my life when I accomplished a great deal."

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