Tarlac

At Central Bureau Brisbane, preparations were made for the move to the Philippines. Everyone who could go was going, which meant most of the men but none of the women. Sections that were slated to move included the air-to-ground solution centre, still working on air-to-ground three-figure additive codes, and the wireless units that worked closely with them.1 A medical team arrived to dispense inoculation shots against the various tropical diseases they might be exposed to.

Wireless intercept units across the south-west Pacific that were now too far from the action were also given orders to relocate to Luzon.

The IBMs couldn’t move, though; assembling them once had caused enough headaches. They would continue to run at Ascot Fire Station.

Central Bureau’s new home, dubbed Forward Echelon, was established on the grounds of a golf course by a burned-out sugar refinery at Tarlac in the countryside near the city of San Miguel.

One Wireless Unit worked in the sugar refinery itself, a corrugated-iron factory that had been left with bullet holes in the walls after the recent fighting between the Japanese and MacArthur’s invasion force. Here in the refinery, an American intercept team joined the Australians, and set up their listening stations next to the unit.2

The Americans brought typewriters with them, and they arrived with extras — enough to supply the Australians. No longer would the interceptors have to write messages down in shorthand; they could type them straight onto a keyboard.3

The team from Central Bureau’s Forward Echelon lived in tents in a flat field on the grounds of the golf course. The course had been unused for some time, and was overgrown with weeds and long grass. It was the wet season, and so, to prevent flooding, the team dug trenches around the tents. This was not a sure-fire preventative measure, and sometimes the rain was so torrential that the tents would flood and their clothes would be saturated. But the wet season was also the hot season, and there would be periods of hot sunlight in which their clothes would quickly dry.

The living conditions were as squalid as those in the jungles of New Guinea. Disease was common. Many — perhaps most — of them spent time in the nearby army hospital at Tarlac.4

Near the tent city were five makeshift huts for the Forward Echelon: three to work in, a mess hall, and a cookhouse. The commanders — Mic Sandford, Abe Sinkov, Roy Booth, Pappy Clark, and a few others — did not live with the teeming masses of workers in the fields that flooded, but in rented houses in the nearby hills. They were removed from the waves of malaria and other tropical diseases that swept back and forth through the sodden campsite.

The wireless stations were nearby. 5 Wireless Unit was camped just across the creek, and a short way along a road from them was a brothel in a nearby house, which was frequented by Australian and American troops. The Philippines madame ran the brothel in a strict, business-like manner. Troops would line up outside, and she would step out of the door and announce in a loud, crisp voice, ‘Next!’5

The mess tent quickly attracted Filipino children, who would stand outside the tent with empty bowls and other containers, hoping for food. The soldiers would oblige by scraping their plates into the bowls rather than throwing the leftovers away.

This led to more children coming with more empty bowls, and soon there were crowds of children with bowls at every meal. The children would jostle for the best positions, and the jostling turned into fighting. The situation became increasingly unmanageable. The commanding officers issued an order that no food was to be given to children outside the tent: all food was to be scraped into rubbish containers. The children then took to going through the discarded containers of rubbish, but at least the problem had been moved away from the mess tents.6

The local children would also arrive, selling mangoes, avocados, star fruit, and bananas, in exchange for pesos or the cigarettes that were US regulation issue. They would then take the cigarettes to the local market and sell them.7

Some of the local boys would also wander about the camp offering to do jobs for money, such as cleaning and tidying tents. They would steal food from the camp and take it to the hungry Japanese soldiers hiding and living nearby. In exchange, the Japanese soldiers would give them military items such as army caps, which could then be sold to the Australians and Americans as souvenirs. Thus there was a thriving black market in food and Japanese items at the base.8

Doug Pyle, an enciphering-machine mechanic, travelled from San Miguel to Manila, and was shocked by the devastation:

In spite of what I had heard, I was not prepared for the almost-total devastation I saw … Many enemy soldiers remained buried in the rubble and the stench was appalling. Worse was to come as I made my way to Intramuros (Spanish for ‘within the walls’), a once-beautiful walled city built by the Spaniards in the 1570s. Part of Manila’s heritage, it had been destroyed by the American bombardment. When I was a couple of hundred yards from the walls I came to an old aquarium, where 115 Japanese had fought to the end and had all been killed. Great dugouts, which had been their last refuge, were now deep wells with their rotting bodies floating in the water…

There were no schools for children to attend; no police stations left standing; hospitals had been replaced with makeshift temporary huts; roads were impassable; bridges were in ruins and the harbor was full of sunken ships.9

Gordon Gibson, a Central Bureau veteran, observed that as the work expanded it became increasingly pointless: ‘It seemed like there were more and more people doing less and less.’10

They were reading army air-to-ground, naval air-to-ground, and Water Transport code messages, among others. But the high-level Mainline code was unreadable again. The Japanese army had switched to a new codebook, Rikugun Angosho 5 (Army Code 5) on 1 January. Central Bureau’s long-running streak, which had been kicked off by the Sio box discovery, had come to an end: the Sio codebook was out of date.11

But although it might have seemed that way, the code-breakers’ efforts were not pointless. In three years, Pappy Clark had built a sprawling, monstrous traffic-analysis empire. All the personnel, the piles of messages moving back and forth, the banks of antennas manned by rows and rows of Kana operators, were all components of a huge machine, watching and listening to the hum of activity to the north and west. They were close enough now to pick up messages from mainland Japan, and as the American bombers destroyed the mainland phone lines, the Japanese army was increasingly relying on radio to communicate, even on its home turf.

Pappy Clark was making every radio message count, and was feeding MacArthur and his generals large amounts of detailed, reliable intelligence every day. The generals were eating it up.