Australia. Australian Army. Intelligence Corps - The secret code-breakers of Central Bureau: How Australias signals-intelligence network helped to win the Pacific War

THE SECRET CODE-BREAKERS OF CENTRAL BUREAU

David Dufty is a Canberra-based writer and researcher. He completed a psychology degree with honours at the University of Newcastle, has a PhD in psychology from Macquarie University, and has worked as a statistician and social researcher at the University of Memphis, Newspoll, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. His previous book, How to Build an Android , described modern developments in robotics and artificial intelligence.

Scribe Publications
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First published by Scribe 2017

Copyright David Dufty 2017

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

9781925322187 (Australian edition)
9781911344711 (UK edition)
9781925548198 (e-book)

CiP entries for this title are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk

To my parents, Don and Barb Dufty

Contents

Prologue:

1939

1940

1941

1942

1943

1944

1945

1946 and beyond

Abbreviations

ADVON Advanced Echelon. Central Bureau in Port Moresby and later Hollandia.

ANZAC Australian and New Zealand Army Corps

ASIP Australian Special Intelligence Personnel

ASWG Australian Special Wireless Group

AWAS Australian Womens Army Service

COIC Combined Operational Intelligence Centre

FECB Far East Combined Bureau

FRUMEL Fleet Radio Unit, Melbourne

FRUPAC Fleet Radio Unit, Pacific

GCCS Government Code and Cipher School

JN-25 The main Japanese naval code system

WAAAF Womens Auxiliary Australian Air Force

WRAN Womens Royal Australian Navy

PROLOGUE

Names in the dirt

About 10 years or so after the end of the Second World War, in the sleepy Brisbane suburb of Chermside, a boy named Peter Hill noticed the chooks in his familys back yard scratching at objects in the dirt. When he inspected what they were scratching at, he found several small, rusted metal disks. Some of the disks had names, as well as the ranks of military officers, on them. Others were corroded beyond recognition. He searched for more of the buried disks, found many that the chooks had not located, took them inside, cleaned them up, and arranged them in an album as a personal collection.

About 55 years later, Peter Hill donated them to the local historical society, which was baffled by the disks, what they meant, and why they had been buried at Chermside. The disks belonged to military personnel, but that was all they seemed to have in common. Some were from the army, some from the navy, and even those from the same service had different unit memberships. The ranks were all over the place, including privates, corporals, captains, and lieutenants. The highest-ranking disk was that of Lieutenant-Colonel Alistair Wallace Sandford. According to the identity disk, the colonel had two units, Central Bureau and a second unit that seemed to say ASIPS .

Some of the other names were Victor Lederer (Captain, Central Bureau, born 1914), Don Laidlaw (Captain, Central Bureau, born 1923), and John Lovell (private, Central Bureau, born 1923). Who were these people, and what was Central Bureau? Who buried all their identity tags, and why?

The answers are even more interesting than the questions. The people whose wartime identities were buried in the ground in Chermside had been involved in a large, secret intelligence operation against the Japanese army in the Second World War that the United States navy was later to declare had been of immeasurable importance in the successful prosecution of the war.

When the Second World War started in 1939, Australia had little expertise in signals intelligence, the field of espionage devoted to intercepting and making use of the enemys own communications systems to learn their plans and movements. There were no code-breakers, traffic analysts, or radio-security experts in Australia in part because Australia was a backwater in the international espionage game, and in part because Australia relied on Britain to do the dirty work of intelligence on its behalf.

By the end of the war, there were several signals-intelligence organisations based in Australia, all secret, and all working at full capacity against the Imperial Japanese forces. The largest and most active of these was Central Bureau, which was based in Brisbane but had tentacles across northern Australia, the Pacific Ocean, and South-East Asia, and as far as Luzon in the Philippines. Others were known as the Australian Special Wireless Group (ASWG), Fleet Radio Unit Melbourne ( FRUMEL ), Special D Section, and Section 22.

This book tells the story of the emergence of signals intelligence in Australia during the Second World War, and of the men and women who worked for Central Bureau and other signals organisations based in Australia. The activities of those people remained secret for decades, and were never recognised by the Australian government. During the post-war decades, they were all bound by the Official Secrets Act and forbidden from telling anyone what they had done during the war. They did not participate in annual ANZAC Day marches for 30 years. For decades, there was no official acknowledgement of their vital contribution to the war effort.

This intelligence network was made possible due to the help of the Allied powers, particularly the United States and Britain, who had both been developing their expertise in signals intelligence for decades. Until now, the Australians who contributed have been neglected and ignored, and their incredible stories and achievements have remained unknown.

1939

The fires of a distant war

The Second World War began far from Australia, on a moonlit autumn night in Poland. Before dawn on the morning of 1 September 1939, a bomb fell from the sky onto the Polish town of Wielu, exploding on the All Saints Hospital. More bombs followed, also hitting the hospital, killing 32 people. Air-raid sirens sounded as the bombs fell like rain, destroying almost all of the towns buildings and killing more than 1000 residents.

The bombs were being dropped by the Luftwaffe, the formidable German air force, under the command of Field Marshal Hermann Goering, as part of a coordinated series of attacks by Germany on Poland. The 32 patients and staff who died in the All Saints Hospital were the first people killed in the Second World War a war that would ultimately cause the deaths of more than 60 million people and wreak unprecedented devastation.

There were no Polish troops in Wielu, no heavy industries, no major transportation routes. There was nothing of military value there only the sleeping residents, woken by the sounds of explosions and air-raid sirens. The first deaths in the bloodiest war in history were utterly pointless, even from a military strategic perspective.

Within minutes of the air raid on Wielu, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein , anchored in the harbour near the Polish military garrison of Westerplatte on the Baltic Sea, started shelling the Polish outpost. German naval infantry troops landed and attempted to storm the garrison. The fighting at Westerplatte continued into the days ahead until the garrison was seized.