9

Stone frigates

Joan Duff was never quite sure how she came to work for Jack Newman at the Navy Office. In August 1941, aged 20, Joan heard that the armed forces were starting to enlist women. Since three of her four brothers were in the army and serving in combat areas, she decided to join up. Her mother was vehemently opposed, but she had made up her mind.

The Melbourne city recruitment station was a temporary shack next to the town hall. A recruiter inside the shack asked what service she wanted to join. She told him ‘army’, and provided him with her school reports. The recruiter read them slowly, then opened a notepad, wrote a brief letter, and placed the letter into an envelope, which he then sealed and addressed to ‘Commander J.B. Newman’ on the outside. ‘Take this to Victoria Barracks and deliver it to Commander Newman,’ he told her, handing her the envelope.

Joan did as he instructed. She caught a southbound tram to Victoria Barracks, where she showed the letter to the guards at the gate. The letter seemed to act as an automatic pass into the barracks. The guards directed her to go the third floor of a building called ‘Block E’. She spoke to nobody else until she was inside the old brick building, had gone up a flight of old wooden stairs, and found the office of Jack Newman.

Newman was middle-aged, stern-looking, and smoked a pipe. He didn’t wear glasses, but had a mannerism that gave the impression he did. He looked sternly at Joan with his chin pointed down and his eyes bulging up, as if staring over the top of invisible bifocals.

Newman opened the envelope, read the letter, then folded it, looked up at her, and said, ‘Any special qualifications?’

Joan said, ‘No, Sir.’ Many women her age who were entering the workforce could type, but she, as a trainee journalist, could only do two-finger typing.

Newman said, ‘Except intelligence.’ It was a statement, rather than a question.

Joan said, ‘Well, I hope so, Sir.’

Newman asked her, ‘When could you start?’

She said, ‘When would you want me to?’

Newman said, ‘Would you like to start now?’

And from that moment, Joan Duff joined Newman’s staff. He paid her in cash in an envelope at the end of the week. As Joan was not part of the swelling ranks of Morse telegraphists, and instead reported directly to Newman and worked with ‘the men’, she missed out on the bulk enlistment of women telegraphists into the WRANS, and remained a civilian employee of the navy, a ‘temporary clerk’, throughout the war. In that capacity, she worked for Jack Newman’s directorate, and in later years of the war for other Melbourne-based intelligence units.

On one occasion, Jack Newman told her, ‘Since you’re a civilian here, if the Japanese invade us, you’ll be shot.’

‘What, as a spy?’ Joan said, jokingly.

Newman gazed at her and replied, ‘We are engaged in espionage.’

The second batch of Mrs Mac’s female telegraphers left Melbourne at the end of July to begin work at Harman. Joan Cowie and Jo Miller remained in Melbourne, where Newman gave them additional training in methods related to signals intelligence, then brought them in to work at Block E in the same room that he and Joan Duff occupied. The three women — Joan Cowie, Jo Miller, and Joan Duff — studied the call signs of Japanese ships, sorting lists and looking through patterns of communication for particular ships.

As Joan Duff explained it in an interview:

If someone found a copy of my telephone bill, all the numbers are there that I have rung in the last six months. Now if, for some reason, they didn’t know whose bill it was, they could find out by looking at those numbers that I frequently call. If you know someone’s calling pattern, you can tell it’s them by who they call. If Frank calls Fred, Josie, and Eleanor all the time, if you find a phone bill belonging to someone who called Fred, Josie, and Eleanor, it’s not going to be someone else now who’s calling, it’s Frank. Now, it might not be Frank, but you can more or less presume it is until you find Frank in another signal. And that’s what we were doing. We were identifying ships by monitoring who they called and how often.

They located and tracked Japanese ships across the Pacific Ocean, and, as they did so, marked them with coloured pins on a map of the Pacific Ocean on the wall. The map itself had a metal blind that was rolled down and locked to conceal it at the end of each day. One evening, Joan Duff, who was working late, returned to the office to discover that they had forgotten to lock away the map. A cleaner was standing in front of it, leaning on her mop, studying the map.

‘Those little dots,’ the woman asked, pointing at the map. ‘Would they be ships?’

‘I really don’t think we should be discussing this,’ said Joan.

‘Oh, it’s all right, luvvy,’ the cleaner said. ‘I’m Mrs Gathercole, and I’m Navy Intelligence.’

Joan reported the incident to Jack Newman the next day. Mrs Gathercole was reassigned, and Block E got a new cleaner.1

Newman’s ‘office’ was just a desk in the far corner with a tall partition in front of it. A frequent visitor was Commander Rupert B. M. Long, known as ‘Cocky’ Long, who was Australia’s director of naval intelligence. Long, sometimes dressed in naval uniform and sometimes in expensive suits, would saunter wordlessly past Joan’s desk beside the door and disappear behind Newman’s partition, where the two men would have long conversations in low, murmuring voices. As they talked, smoke from their pipes would waft from behind the partition to the ceiling.

Jack Newman and Cocky Long had known each other since 1913, when they were both 13 years old. That was the year they joined the navy, as part of the Royal Australian Naval College’s first intake of cadets. Their parents signed them over to the navy for five years of schooling plus a guarantee of 12 years of service after graduation — effectively locking them into 17 years of service. The benefit was that the boys would be career officers, and would join the inner circles of naval command. They lived, studied, and trained together at Osborne House in Geelong until 1915, when they relocated to the newly constructed college facilities at Jarvis Bay.2

In 1917, with the First World War in full swing, the boys graduated and were posted to ships: Cocky Long and three other cadets were sent aboard HMAS Australia, while Jack Newman served with the British on HMS Canada and HMS Columbine.3

After the end of the First World War, Jack Newman, considered by his superiors to be intellectually gifted, was posted to London for several years to undertake a specialist course with the Royal Navy in signals and communication.4 There, he developed an interest in signals intelligence.

As the new director of naval communications in March 1939, Newman travelled to Singapore for a conference on ‘wireless intelligence’, and to inspect the direction-finding apparatus in use there.5 On his return, he planned the construction of three direction-finding stations in Australia: at Canberra (Harman), Perth (Jandakot), and Darwin (Coonawarra), to be linked with the British radio-intelligence operations based in Singapore and Hong Kong.6 In August of that year, the navy created a new position, director of naval intelligence, and appointed Cocky Long to it. Newman wasted no time in convincing him of the merits of signals intelligence.

Like Newman, Cocky Long had also studied in London after the First World War, but while Newman was learning science and cutting-edge technologies such as radio, radar, and codes, Long trained as an old-school spymaster. Since 1934 he had effectively been running naval intelligence in Australia, so his promotion was more a matter of formalising what he was already doing.

Cocky Long was a charming and popular socialite. Barbara Winter, in her biography of Long, described him as ‘an extraordinarily skilled manipulator of people’:

He was friendly, constantly and professionally cheerful, likeable, helpful, a sympathetic listener, generous with his praise, he made people want to do what he intended them to do. A pair of elderly ladies touring a restricted area of Japanese territory would never have thought of themselves as spies; they were just doing a favour for that nice young naval officer.7

Long’s wife was the daughter of a wealthy Sydney businessman. Through her, he had entered the upper echelons of Sydney high society, and was well known and well connected. His connections included Captain Francis Edward de Groot, the man who in 1932 charged the opening ceremony of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on a horse and slashed the ribbon with his sword before the premier, Jack Lang, could cut it.8 Through de Groot, he was introduced to The Association, a discreet and informal ultra-right-wing organisation. Long cultivated a large personal spy network across the south-west Pacific, in large part through his father-in-law’s shipping company. He personally ran over 150 agents, whose files he later burned at the end of the war.9

Long was also in charge of the Coastwatchers, a network of individuals across Australian coasts and the south-west Pacific who would monitor and report on shipping movements. Some were locals, and some were Australian agents placed in the field. In the coming years, their reports on Japanese warship movements would be invaluable.

Long understood the value of sigint, but Newman was the expert on signals, so Long was happy to support his colleague’s drive to get it going. They lobbied the Australian government, but the prime minister, Robert Menzies, knocked them back, telling them by letter that there was no point in having an Australian cryptanalysis capability, since the British were already taking care of that in Singapore.10

Eric Nave’s arrival in Melbourne in May 1940 was the turning point. Long summoned Nave to Victoria Barracks for a meeting with himself and Newman to talk about establishing a cryptographic organisation. Nave was interested. Still sick and with a heavily pregnant wife, he had no desire to return to Singapore. He was assigned to work for Newman.11

Later in 1940, Newman invited Nave’s old boss, Captain Wylie of the Far East Combined Bureau, to a secret conference in Melbourne, at which Newman and Nave outlined detailed plans for an Australian cryptanalysis organisation.

And in March 1941, just before relinquishing his command of Harman and moving to Melbourne, Newman flew to Singapore again to attend an intelligence conference between Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Holland, which had a signals-intelligence unit on Java called ‘Kamer 14’.

On his return, Newman prepared a secret report for the Australian government. He described how the Singapore operation had two sections, a ‘W’ and ‘Y’ section. The W section (which stood for ‘wireless intelligence’) was doing traffic analysis and direction-finding, while the Y section was doing cryptanalysis — actual code-breaking. He also reported that the other nations, including Britain, supported the proposal that Australia should have its own cryptographic organisation. Getting the British on side was the finishing touch in convincing Menzies, who finally relented.

The plan had come together by May. A new unit was formed, the Special Intelligence Bureau, with Nave in charge but reporting to Newman. The army offered the services of its intercept station at Park Orchards, and informed Newman about its secret little network of code-breaking professors in Sydney. The air force offered to contribute, too. It was willing to provide a signals team, so long as Jack Newman trained them. It also sent an officer, Henry Roy Booth, to Singapore for training and experience in sigint. And, of course, Newman had discovered an untapped well of signals talent and expertise through Mrs Mac’s Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps.

The air force kept their part of the bargain to establish a signals unit … barely. They sent a mere seven men to Jack Newman for training at Victoria Barracks. Their ranks were bolstered by two men sent from the army.12

Newman sent six of them to Darwin in September, where they began intercepting Japanese radio signals, sending the results back to Newman’s office in Melbourne. None were officers. When they got to Darwin, they reported to the local commanding officer, but operationally they reported directly to Newman in Melbourne.13 The Darwin RAAF command was told not to interfere or harass the small unit. They set up two Kingsley AR7 radio receivers on the top floor of the ‘Camera Obscura’ building at Darwin aerodrome, where they began monitoring Japanese naval radio signals across the western Pacific.14

The downside of Jack Newman’s stellar career was that the Naval Board would no longer let him serve at sea. He was stuck working on shore stations, known in the navy as ‘stone frigates’. Ship’s protocols applied on stone frigates, and they all had names as if they were ships; for example, the signals station he had established in Darwin was HMAS Coonawarra; the nearby Melbourne naval base was HMAS Lonsdale; and Harman, when the official designation came through, would be HMAS Harman. But these weren’t real ships. Calling them frigates didn’t change that.

Jo Miller said of Newman years later,

He took the trouble to visit our families in Sydney and assure them we were doing a good job. He met our Service friends, brothers and cousins who spent various periods in Melbourne training, in transit or on leave, and shared our concern when some were listed missing, wounded or killed. We knew his heartbreak at being rejected for sea-going duties time and time again. It was no consolation that he was found to be indispensable where he was. When my young brother was killed I remember him saying, ‘I feel so guilty, J.J., he was only a kid. I’ve spent my whole life being trained for war and have ended up with a safe shore job.’ No doubt this was why he worked so hard, at times working 19–20 hours a day.15

The mild and charming Newman differed markedly in personality from the introverted, anxious Nave, but the two men had several points in common: they were the two foremost experts in signals intelligence in Australia at the time, both were workaholics, and both were career naval officers stuck on land.