40

The expanding web

As MacArthur had moved, Central Bureau had followed him — first from Melbourne to Brisbane, then to Port Moresby, then to Hollandia, then Leyte, and now Luzon. The result was a strung-out network of headquarters and units across thousands of miles of ocean. Communication lines had become stretched between Brisbane, Hollandia, Leyte, and Luzon, complicating the transmission of intercepted material and the coordination of work.

The wireless units were also scattered across the south-west Pacific area, with units in Perth, Darwin, Townsville, Port Moresby, Hollandia, Biak, Morotai, Leyte, and elsewhere. As wireless units multiplied, so did the daily flow of intercepts arriving for the Central Bureau code-breakers; and as more messages came in, more personnel were needed to sort them, file them, copy them, decrypt them, feed them into IBMs, strip routing codes, and generally suck as much information out of them as possible.

Morotai, being the staging point between the south-west Pacific area and the Philippines, had quickly become a major Allied base. Several personnel with 4 Wireless Unit on Morotai learned that in June they would form part of an intercept unit on the island of Labuan, to the west.

Australian artist Donald Friend was appointed to the role of ‘War Artist’, and was deployed to Morotai immediately before the unit left for Labuan. Friend arrived on the island of Morotai on 27 May, and, being a compulsive diarist, recorded his impressions of the island:

It’s just what you’d expect. All tropical islands are alike; the jungle is international. In this place, our forces squat on one end of it, and the Japs on the other.

All is mad excitement. Jeeps and trucks and aeroplanes tear about like mad. Busy little ants running everywhere. And mad muddle …

Because any day now, perhaps tomorrow, the AIF will invade the island of Tarakan. A very important attack. It’s all rather alarming, this nearness to the battle. All the time overhead the coming and going of flocks of planes never ceases. Everyone seems to be a bit tense — excited and expectant.1

Friend’s plane had touched down only hours earlier, so his confusion about the battle preparations was understandable, but he had it slightly wrong: the Australian 26th Brigade had captured the island of Tarakan three weeks earlier, in a prelude to taking the large island of Borneo. A week later, 16,000 grim-faced Australian soldiers stationed on Morotai boarded transport ships, bound for Labuan, on the far side of Borneo. They were the soldiers of the 9th Australian Infantry Division. At Labuan, they went ashore without meeting any opposition, but when they moved to secure the airfields, the Japanese put up some resistance before retreating.

Sailing to Labuan with the 9th Australian division was a detachment of 4 Wireless Unit. Among others, they included Hugh Melinksy, a British translator who was sent to Central Bureau from Bletchley Park in 1944; Ron Warlow; and Keith Carolan, who was a child welfare officer before the war.2

The Australians landed and established a base there, and the wireless unit set up direction-finding equipment in communication with the main contingent on Morotai.3 The Japanese army retreated inland, their snipers making occasional forays to take shots at the Australian infantrymen. One wireless operator was injured by sniper fire; Keith Carolan was standing in line for dinner when the digger two places in front of him was shot dead. On another occasion, a Kana operator was hit in the arm by a bullet.4

The unit operated at a building near the airstrip, and had been there for some time when a local man of Chinese descent appeared on the runway, asking for help, as his wife was very ill. After introducing himself as Cheng Lee, he took them to his family, who lived in a clearing in the jungle a few hundred yards away, where the unit discovered that his wife had malaria.5 The wireless operators organised for her to get some Atebrin tablets, which were in plentiful supply at the Australian base.

The curious thing was that the family lived so close to the base, but the Australian wireless unit had no idea of their presence until the man made his presence known. Two of the Australian operators, Keith Carolan and Ron Warlow, stayed in contact with Cheng Lee and his family long after the war.

The Australian army’s 53 Wireless Section also began operations on Morotai. They had been in eastern New Guinea at Finschhafen since mid-1943, but now, with Allied forces on Morotai, Borneo, and the Philippines, tracking enemy circuits around eastern New Guinea was no longer of strategic interest. The commander of the section was Captain William Hill, a veteran of the 1941 Crete campaign, where, as a lieutenant, he had shared his water bottle with a thirsty Mic Sandford as they escaped the German advance.

Vic Lederer — the British-born German speaker who had fled Germany due to his Jewish heritage — was attached to one of the American Radio Squadrons Mobile on the island before joining 53 Wireless Section as the intelligence officer in charge. An incident on Morotai became burned into Vic’s memory.

One night, Japanese soldiers threw a grenade into their campsite before running away. The unit hastily grabbed their weapons and pursued the grenade lobbers, tracking them down to a thicket. They opened fire on the thicket, and were about to depart when Lederer insisted that they search for the bodies — if there were any. As it turned out, they came across the bodies of two Japanese soldiers in the nearby jungle. Searching their belongings, Lederer and his companions found a letter that one of the soldiers had written to send home, which they collected and delivered to an American intelligence unit stationed on Morotai. 6

In June, around the time of the Labuan invasion, movement orders for the direction-finding team of 4 Wireless Unit came through. They had to relocate yet again, this time to the Philippines, to join Central Bureau’s Forward Echelon at Tarlac. The Labuan detachment continued to operate at the Labuan airstrip, and another small detachment was formed to stay on Morotai itself.

While Australian and American wireless units moved in hops and jumps northwards up the Pacific islands, chasing the advance of MacArthur’s forces, one intercept unit moved south … from Canada to Australia.

On his visit to North America in 1944, Pappy Clark had arranged for a Canadian intercept unit, ‘Number 1 Canadian Special Wireless Unit’ (or ‘1CSWG’) to be deployed in Australia.

By the time the Canadian intercept unit arrived in Brisbane in 1945, the city presented a stark contrast to the frenetic bustle there three years earlier, when it had been a garrison town close to the war. Since then, the war had moved far north. Troop ships were no longer unloading thousands of freshly recruited young American soldiers before their deployment to the battlefields of the south-west Pacific. Those soldiers were taken directly to the Philippines, or to Guam, or other territories recently wrested from the Japanese forces.

Gil Murray, one of the Canadian intercept operators, described what it was like:

The Brisbane docks were devoid of life. We hadn’t expected crowds of well-wishers to greet us, but we did at least expect to see a busy waterfront, teeming with wartime dockyard activity, as we’d witnessed in the war zone at Hollandia. There we had seen huge cargo cranes swinging ominous loads of war materiel onto ships, stevedores sweating, swearing, and heaving boxes off trucks; bosses shouting and cursing their charges; quiet men in shirts and ties carrying clipboards and carefully checking off war goods as they moved hither and yon. Here, apart from the tramp-tramp of Canadian parade drill boots and the snarl of the sergeant-major, there was peace and tranquillity.7

The Canadians soon discovered that a large part of the reason for the ‘peace and tranquillity’ was that the Brisbane dockworkers were on strike. That being the case, the Canadians unloaded their equipment themselves from their frigate at the deserted docks. The unit camped at Chermside barracks for several weeks while they undertook training at the Central Bureau ‘I School’ before being moved out to the Northern Territory in mid-April.

When they arrived at their site at MacMillan’s Road outside Darwin, a local brass band, the Australian Northern Territory Band, was there to greet them. As the Canadian wireless operators jumped down from the trucks, the band burst into a rendition of ‘O Canada.’8

The Canadians erected antennas and radio receivers, and began monitoring the seas to the north. Gil Murry described the operation:

Almost from the moment of our arrival, the Number One Section operators, their skin turned deep brown from the sun, sat in khaki shorts, sneakers, and headphones in a big, steamy, tin-roofed hut, their fingers jabbing at typewriter keys. They got down on paper a typed record of the frenetic beeps picked out of the air by short-wave radio sets piled on a long bench … Each monitored two radio sets, one tuned to a Japanese sender, the other to a receiver.9

An hour’s drive south, the 51 Wireless Section was stationed at Coomalie Creek, where it had been since September 1942. The section was now ordered to wind up its operation and return to Brisbane, but it could not leave until the Canadians were up and running, and covering their circuits. The unit continued until Central Bureau was satisfied with the Canadians’ performance, and then packed up and relocated to Brisbane.

The gaze of the Allied commanders had shifted north, but intercept units were still needed on the Australian mainland. The Canadians monitored traffic from Singapore and parts of Indonesia and Irian Jaya that were still under Japanese occupation.