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Tropical sickness

Four days before the invasion of Poland, a British cruiser, the HMS Birmingham, sailed into the Seletar naval base in Singapore. The Birmingham had come from Hong Kong, Britain’s other major military and trading hub in East Asia, bringing with it almost the entire workforce of a secret British intelligence unit, the Far East Combined Bureau. The unit had evacuated from Hong Kong because the nearby war between China and Japan was too close for comfort and had become too much of a threat.

Japan was not at war with Britain — not yet — but was engaged in a protracted war with China, and was winning. The Japanese army had recently invaded Canton, the Chinese province next to Hong Kong, the Spratly Islands just to the south, and Hainan to the west, so that Hong Kong itself was now an isolated island surrounded by Japanese-occupied territory.

The Far East Combined Bureau had for some time been monitoring Japanese radio and diplomatic messages.1 Like Singapore, Hong Kong was British territory and was unlikely to be attacked by Japan, but even a small risk of the bureau being captured had been too much for the authorities to accept. Such a capture would enable the Japanese to learn exactly how much progress the British had made in signals intelligence and in breaking Japanese codes. It would send the British code-breakers back to square one.

One of the passengers who disembarked from the Birmingham was the Australian Eric Nave, now an officer in the British Royal Navy. Fifteen years earlier, Nave had established Britain’s first radio-interception and code-breaking operation in Asia, working from a cabin on a naval ship in Shanghai. He was the first person to break an Imperial Japanese military code in 1927, and had since broken numerous low-level and medium-level codes. In Hong Kong, aside from radio intelligence, he had become involved in more traditional spycraft activities, and became friends with a British intelligence agent named Ian Fleming — the man who later created the fictionalised spy James Bond.2

Nave, aged forty, was thin, quiet, and neatly dressed. He had been in the navy all his adult life; at first in the Royal Australian Navy, and subsequently the British Royal Navy. In the final year of the First World War he enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy, but was initially rejected (for reasons unknown), and was eventually accepted only on the condition that he sign up for permanent service. This meant that, unlike most young men who enlisted during the war, he wouldn’t be demobilised when it finished. Later, stuck in the navy during peacetime, he studied Japanese, spent two years in Japan attached to the British embassy studying the Japanese language, and returned as the Royal Australian Navy’s leading expert on Japan and its language. He was transferred to the British navy in 1923, and joined the GCCS. Although he was employed by the British, he was the first Australian code-breaker.

When he arrived in Singapore on the Birmingham, Nave was sick, and had been for some time. Earlier in the year in Hong Kong, he had started having bouts of nausea, diarrhoea, cramps, and vomiting. The illness recurred, each time with increasing severity, and he spent several long stints in hospital. As a result, Nave looked far older than his years. The doctors did not know what was wrong with him, and they could not cure him. In the absence of a diagnosis or a cure, and with Japanese naval activity at an all-time high, Nave went back to work.

He still did not have a diagnosis, but the hospital trips had yielded one benefit: he had fallen in love with a nurse, Helena Gray. She was not allowed to travel on the Birmingham, since she was a civilian, but she made her own way to Singapore. Nave married her within a week of his arrival.

Four days later, on the other side of the world, on the first day of September, the Second World War began. Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, invaded Poland with one-and-a-half million troops. German planes bombed Polish towns while 60 German army divisions moved eastward, no match for the relatively small and poorly armed Polish forces. Within days of the occupation, France, Britain, and nations of the British Commonwealth such as Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand declared war on Germany, and the second Great War had commenced.

As a part of the British Empire, Hong Kong and Singapore were now officially at war — but with Germany, not Japan. A war was on, but it was in Europe, on the other side of the globe. Nave and the other code-breakers and traffic analysts at the Far East Combined Bureau — or FECB, as they called themselves — focussed on Japanese naval movements.

The Japanese consulate encrypted its messages in a code known to the FECB as the ‘LA’ code, because every encrypted message began with the Japanese syllable ‘LA’. The FECB had long ago figured out how the LA code worked, and had developed techniques for breaking new versions. Nave spent most of his time decrypting consular messages in the LA code until a replacement arrived.

A British officer, Hugh Foss, Nave’s mentor and trainer from the GCCS in England, took over the work on consular messages. Like Nave, Foss was fluent in Japanese and was a highly skilled cryptanalyst. With Foss taking care of the LA code, Nave returned to what he knew best: Japanese naval radio messages.

Work on such messages was about to ramp up significantly. In early September, another British agent from the GCCS, Malcolm Burnett, arrived in Singapore. He brought with him important information about the Japanese navy’s new code. The Americans called it JN-25 (short for ‘Japanese Naval Code 25’), but apparently had not managed to break it. Back in England, at Bletchley Park, a team of analysts, including Burnett and led by John Tiltman, had not only figured out how JN-25 worked, but had devised a method for breaking it. The method was neither easy nor quick, but it meant they could chip away at the code, message by message and piece by piece.

Nave and his colleagues could not decrypt JN-25 messages. Not yet. But they understood several other Japanese naval codes, and provided the Singapore commanders with continuing, detailed briefings of Japanese navy activity.

The Far East Combined Bureau was, in theory, just one of many sources of information available to the commanders regarding foreign powers such as Japan. But British intelligence was so meagre and poorly run in East Asia that it was almost worthless. As a result, the code-breakers were in reality the main source of reliable information for the British. Unfortunately, most British military commanders in Asia did not understand how good the signals-intelligence analysts like Nave were. They did not fully appreciate the value of the intelligence they got, and did not pay sufficient heed to their warnings.

It was clear to everyone at the bureau monitoring the daily radio traffic, and as a result completely immersed in the day-to-day activities of the Imperial Japanese Navy, that the threat of Japan was real and growing. Japan’s military dominance of East Asia was almost total and was expanding southwards, ever closer to Singapore.

The bureau picked up information about a landing of Japanese troops on the coast of Cambodia that had just taken place, but were not sure of the exact location. Nave and the commanding officer of the FECB, Captain Wylie, decided that, at a minimum, this warranted reconnaissance flights around the area, to try to find out more about what the Japanese army was up to. Where exactly had the army landed? It would be good to know.

Nave and Wylie visited the air marshal. They explained what they had discovered, and suggested he send a reconnaissance plane over to Cambodia. The air marshal replied that he would like to do so, but alas, there were no planes available. He then added that, yes, there was one plane available, but unfortunately it was far too slow and ‘would probably be shot down’.

No planes were sent.

The military establishment recognised that Japan was a threat, but in an abstract, ‘we’ve seen all this before’ kind of way. The British Empire was at the height of its extent and powers. After four centuries of colonisation, expansion, and conquest, it was the most extensive empire that the world had ever seen. It was a supremely prosperous military superpower with interests across the world, including the wealthy trading ports of Singapore and Hong Kong, which it had transformed over the decades from small, undeveloped harbours to trading powerhouses. It had seen rivals come and go.

In short, the British military establishment was complacent. They knew that Japan was conquering China and nearby territories, but China’s army in 1939 was small, and poorly trained and armed. They felt that Japan would not dare take on the British Empire, and if it did, it would lose.

One officer in Malaya, the British territory to the north of Singapore, was preparing his troops for the possibility of a future war with Japan. He said to Air Chief Marshal Sir Henry Brooke-Popham, the head of British military in Singapore, ‘I do hope, Sir, we are not getting too strong in Malaya, because, if so, the Japanese may never attempt a landing.’ Heaven forbid that his soldiers not have an opportunity to face those upstarts from the north. Another regimental commander was famously heard to say of his troops, ‘Don’t you think they are worthy of some better enemy than the Japanese?’3

Singapore was multicultural, but it had a stratified caste society, with Europeans, and particularly the British, at the top. All British residents had servants, regardless of their class background back home. The British spent their days working in downtown offices, and their evenings attending the cinema, going for night-time strolls along the harbour, and socialising at exclusive venues such as the legendary Raffles nightclub. Singapore’s Chinatown, by contrast, was a slum teeming with the activity of markets, rickshaws, and alleyways.4

For Nave and his colleagues at the FECB, the mood around them jarred with the shifting geopolitical landscape to the north. These changes were barely noticed by the local population, with their light-hearted optimism about the empire that protected them. At the FECB, poring over the constant stream of radio transmissions, team members were immersed in their study of the rise of a new and very different empire. They spent their days tracking army and navy units around Asia and the Pacific Ocean. It was not any single radio signal, or the contents of any specific message, that caused them alarm, so much as the overwhelming weight of the patterns of movement, the tone of the correspondence, the arrival of new ships and new army units, and the sheer amount of activity that seemed to increase with every passing week. The conclusion was inescapable.

Nave kept working, but his illness was wrecking his body. He was thin and weak, and in pain. He was admitted to Johore Hospital, where he was subjected to a litany of tests. After questioning Nave at length, the hospital’s senior surgeon made a diagnosis: ‘No doubt about it. Sprue.’5 There was no cure for sprue, and his condition was chronic and deteriorating. Normally, someone as sick as this would be ‘invalided’ and sent home, but Nave couldn’t be replaced, so he had to stay.

The head of the bureau, Captain F. J. Wylie, compromised and gave him permission to take three months’ leave in Australia. 6 Helen and Eric Nave boarded a ship bound for Australia in January 1940, hoping that Nave’s holiday might be more permanent than Captain Wylie intended.