The Emperor's Codes

by Michael Smith

  The record of the US Navy on cooperation, not just with the British but with their own Army, was not merely lamentable, it was shameful. But it was not the only problem faced by the codebreakers. The very nature of the Far East War, spread as it was over many thousands of miles, made communication between the main code-breaking centres extremely difficult. If Bletchley Park and its US counterparts had problems exchanging information with the various outstations that stretched from East Africa to the West Coast of America, the stations themselves found it almost impossible to coordinate their own operations during the early years of the war.

  Yet while the codebreakers were only rarely to enjoy the same influence they exerted on the war in Europe and North Africa, their achievements were many. The existing literature credits this almost entirely to the US codebreakers. In fact, with the exception of Purple, only one of the key codes was broken by an American alone and that in Australia. It was British and Australian codebreakers who led the way in breaking the majority of the Emperor's Codes. Here for the first time is their story.

  1

  SINGAPORE, DECEMBER 1941

  The old Cathay Cinema opposite Fort Canning military base in Singapore was packed for the matinée showing of the latest Rex Harrison film, a screen version of George Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara. For weeks the talk among the city's expatriate community had been of the threatened war with Japan. But any suggestion that the Japanese might manage to invade Malaya or, heaven forbid, even succeed in capturing the ‘impregnable fortress’ of Singapore was ridiculed by the authorities.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief Far East, had told a press conference only two days earlier that there was nothing to worry about. ‘There are clear signs that Japan does not know which way to turn,’ he said. ‘Tojo is scratching his head. There are no signs that Japan is going to attack anyone.’

  There had in fact been some very clear signs, all of them pointing to a conclusion directly opposite to that expressed by Brooke-Popham. For the past month, a wireless intercept station at Kranji on the north of Singapore island, an offshoot of the British codebreaking organization based at Bletchley Park, had been picking up radio signals indicating the movement south of a large Japanese armada which was now crossing the Gulf of Siam towards the north-east coast of Malaya.

  The intercept operators at the Kranji listening post included a batch of Wrens, four of whom had ‘gone ashore’ – naval parlance for leaving the base – to see Major Barbara. ‘In the middle of the showing, the film suddenly stopped running and a big sign came up on the screen in two-foot-high letters,’ one of the Wrens recalled. ‘It read: “All British service personnel to report back to barracks immediately”.’ The cinema emptied quickly. But few of those leaving were particularly worried. It was just another security scare. Brooke-Popham had set the popular mood. The Japs were hopeless. There was no chance of them winning anything.

  John Burrows, an Intelligence Corps sergeant on Brooke-Popham's staff, had just arrived in the colony and found the complacency impossible to believe.

  It was Cloud Cuckoo Land and to someone like myself who had come from Britain it was unbelievable. There were some who had their doubts, but the planter society as a whole was very comfortable. They had always been able to depend on the British to defend them and they totally underestimated the Japanese military threat. All the able generals were collected in the Middle East at this time and it was the duds who were shipped out to the Far East, some of them with no understanding of reality at all. There were one or two staff officers who were the exception but they hadn't any power to do anything about it.

  The Wrens’ bosses at the Far East Combined Bureau, the British joint service codebreaking and intelligence centre, were among those who were not underestimating the Japs. For the past two months, the airwaves had been full of Japanese radio transmissions and the code-breakers had identified every ship in the Japanese armada. They had also deciphered a message from the Japanese Ambassador in Bangkok to Tokyo revealing that the ships were to land an invasion force at Kota Bharu in north-eastern Malaya. But the British commanders were dismissive of their ‘defeatist’ warnings. The British officer class was reluctant to believe that the good life was about to come to an end.

  Until now life in Singapore had been very relaxed, even for the ordinary servicemen and women. The Wrens were in specially built wooden quarters, two sharing a ‘cabin’, each with the luxury of an ensuite bathroom; some even had a cabin to themselves. All the British service personnel had locally employed servants, recalled Lance-Corporal Geoff Day, one of a number of British Army intercept operators working alongside the Royal Navy, WRNS and RAF personnel at Kranji:

  *

  Our life was one of relative luxury. We had native Malay boys to wait on us hand and foot, make our beds, do our washing and serve us excellent meals. We slept in dormitories built on stilts because of the heavy seasonal rains, and our beds were provided with mosquito nets which were attached to copper wires stretching from one end of the building to the other. During electrical storms lightning would run along the wires, frightening but harmless.

  The work could be tiring, often requiring long periods of intense concentration, said Day.

  During our evenings off we played contract bridge or we would go into Singapore City to see the movies, to service clubs, of which there were many, or to the three amusement parks: New World, Great World and Happy World. Some of us attended recitals at the Gramophone and Music Society. The city was a very smelly place, particularly near the water. The street stalls selling all kinds of Chinese and Malay food added to the aroma – or should I say stench. Washing was hung on the lines between buildings, across streets. But the young Eurasian girls were truly beautiful. On one occasion some friends and I ventured across the causeway to the north to Johore Bharu to visit a brothel, but drank too much and left without sampling the goods.

  Single British women were at a premium in Singapore and some of the Wrens soon found boyfriends. Lillie Gadd fell in love with her instructor at Kranji. ‘Archie was in the Navy,’ she said. ‘We were learning the job alongside the naval operators who had been there for a while. We had to double bank, sit by the side of the operator who was training us, and Archie was watching over me to make sure I did the job right. So we saw each other day and night. We used to go “ashore” together to the pictures or to do a bit of shopping. Archie and I did all our courting in Singapore. We had quite a good time. We always say it was the best time of our lives.’

  But things were about to change. The day after the servicemen and women were called out of the Cathay Cinema, Geoff Day went on the ‘middle watch’ at the Kranji intercept site. ‘Since we were on a naval wireless station, we observed navy watches and middle watch meant you were on duty from midnight until a minute past four, when you were relieved.’

  John Burrows had already begun the night shift as Duty Intelligence Reporter at GHQ Far East in the Selatar naval base, seven miles east of Kranji. ‘I was working in what was more or less a Nissen hut collating intelligence from all sources, heading up the intelligence support for the Commander-in-Chief.’ Shortly after one o'clock in the morning, Japanese troops began landing at Kota Bharu. It was some time before the first report came in by telephone, Burrows said. ‘I remember one of my superior officers telling me at the time that there was only one telephone line from Kota Bharu to Singapore. That may not actually be true but as an indication of the unpreparedness it is quite vivid.’

  At twenty-five minutes past three, the wireless operators at the intercept site were ordered to black out their windows in preparation for a raid by bombers flying in from Saigon. ‘At three forty-one, the sirens went off,’ Geoff Day noted in his diary. ‘At ten past four we were sent “on post” which was considered safer than the accommodation and setroom buildings. At four forty-five, the all-clear sounded. Then, two minutes later, there was another warning siren and the final all-clear went at five fifteen.’

>   The military bases had been alerted by Fighter Control Operations Room. But the civil Air Raid Precautions Unit was unmanned and no-one could be contacted to sound the sirens. As a result the lights stayed on in Singapore, guiding the Japanese bombers into the skies above the city. ‘I remember sitting there and seeing Japanese aircraft flying overhead and dropping bombs on parts of Singapore which was still brilliantly lit up,’ John Burrows said. ‘You would not believe it but that was how unprepared Singapore was.’

  As the Japanese pushed rapidly down the Malay Peninsula, meeting little opposition from the retreating Allied troops, the intercept operators were warned that they were to be evacuated to Colombo with the Far East Combined Bureau's codebreaking section. Realizing they might never see their boyfriends again, three of the Wrens decided to get married.

  Hettie Marshall and her fiancé John Cox, a major in the Indian Army, were married in St Andrew's Cathedral on 30 December 1941. ‘We were engaged when the Japanese attacked,’ Hettie recalled. ‘At the time, everyone was escaping. The Indians were dashing back off to India. So we just decided to hasten it on. John's colonel threw a party for him and we had it with a marquee in the gardens of the brigadier's house.’

  A day later, Lillie Gadd married Archie Feeney, also in St Andrew's Cathedral.

  The fighting was coming, we might get separated, anything might happen, so make the best of it while you can, we thought. I had to keep my wedding a secret because in the Navy if a Wren married a sailor they split you up straight away. Archie and I went ashore on the same coach. There was one of the male operators to give me away, the best man and a few of the girls from my watch. I'd had a blue chiffon dress made up in Singapore for my wedding but because the war had begun I had to wear uniform.

  We came out to bells but you weren't allowed to take photographs. Then we just went across the road into the café. We had a bit of a celebration back at the camp with some of the girls but it had to be kept secret. The men slept in a different part of the camp, of course, so we would have to spend our nights apart. But we didn't that night. We spent our wedding night in my cabin.

  On New Year's Day Rene Skipp married her fiancé, John Watson, a Royal Navy chief petty officer from another unit. ‘It was very much a last-minute affair,’ she recalled. ‘There was no wedding as such. We were married in the registry office and the only other people there were the witnesses.’

  Four days later, Lillie and Archie Feeney were evacuated to Colombo with the bulk of the codebreakers and intercept operators. Hettie Cox and Rene Watson were forced to leave their husbands behind. Geoff Day was one of a small party of intercept operators who stayed in Singapore to continue monitoring the Japanese radio messages.

  When Singapore finally fell on 15 February 1942, many thousands of Allied servicemen would be captured, spending the rest of the war amid the horrors of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. But by then John Cox had already been safely evacuated to Java, as had Geoff Day, while John Watson had sailed for Colombo. John Burrows had also escaped, having been recalled to England to work at Bletchley Park. But not before being asked to brief the generals on the complacency that led to the fall of Singapore and on how the code-breakers’ warnings had been ignored.

  2

  BORROWING THE CABLES

  The British had been busy intercepting the diplomatic communications of their enemies, and on occasion their friends, since 1324 when King Edward II ordered that ‘all letters coming from or going to parts beyond the seas be seized’. After a brief period, during the second half of the nineteenth century, when Victorian morality and Foreign Office penny-pinching led to Britain's codebreakers being declared redundant, the onset of the First World War brought them more work than they might previously have imagined possible.

  The British Army was the first organization to realize the potential intelligence to be garnered from ‘censoring’ the German diplomatic communications sent on the cables of the international telegraph companies. The War Office set up a special section, MI1b, inside military intelligence, recruiting a number of eminent academics, a mixture of classicists and Egyptologists, to break the German codes. Shortly afterwards, the Royal Navy followed suit on the orders of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty.

  The army and navy codebreakers had little time for each other during the war, competing rather than co-operating in their own petty turf war. Following the Armistice, the moral imperative for ‘censoring’ the private communications of other countries’ ambassadors and the strong desire within the Treasury for a ‘peace dividend’ put their role under renewed threat. But so successful had they been that every other government department was clamouring for more.

  The army and navy codebreaking organizations were combined into a single civilian operation of just twenty-five people based in London's Berkeley Square and known as the Government Code and Cipher School. ‘It was a very small organization for the Treasury had, throughout the negotiations, been insistent on cutting down the expense,’ recalled William ‘Nobby’ Clarke, one of the old Room 40 codebreakers.

  With the Foreign Office reluctant to fund its operations, GC&CS was placed under the control of Admiral Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair, Director of Naval Intelligence, who moved its offices to Watergate House on the Strand.

  But when the lease on Watergate House ran out, it was transferred to a new headquarters at Queen's Gate in London's fashionable Kensington district where day-to-day operations were run by Alistair Denniston, a former Royal Navy education officer who had been in charge of codebreaking in Room 40. ‘The public function was “to advise as to the security of codes and ciphers used by all government departments and to assist in their provision”,’ he recalled. ‘The secret directive was “to study the methods of cipher communications used by foreign powers”.’

  The War Office's decision to close its censorship department caused major problems for Denniston and his codebreakers. Britain was a central point on the international cable network and messages from all over the world passed through London on their way to their ultimate destinations, so the censorship system had produced large amounts of intelligence on the activities of a wide variety of foreign governments.

  ‘Temporary unofficial arrangements were made with the moribund censors which provided the cable traffic for some further months,’ Denniston recalled. However, this was not enough to keep the supply of cables going indefinitely. Tapping the cables themselves was deemed to be too expensive. But although unwilling to fund the operations, the Foreign Office insisted that there was no question of not obtaining the information they carried.

  ‘The deciphered telegrams of foreign governments are without doubt the most valuable source of our secret information respecting their policy and actions,’ said Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary. ‘They have proved the most accurate and, withal, intrinsically the cheapest means of obtaining secret information that exist.’

  The easiest solution was for the codebreakers to take over the role of ‘censorship’. So the cable companies were approached to hand over all their traffic to GC&CS, which would copy it before returning it to them. This presented no problem with one of the companies, Cable and Wireless, which was British-owned. But the other two, the Commercial Cable Postal Telegraph Company and Western Union, were American. They would need some persuasion before they handed any cables over to the British.

  The Official Secrets Act already gave the Government the right to scrutinize cable traffic for purposes other than censorship, Denniston recalled. ‘A clause was inserted authorizing a secretary of state to issue a warrant to cable companies operating in the UK requiring these companies to hand over all traffic passing over their systems in the UK within ten days of receipt.’ The maximum punishment for refusing to hand over the cables was only a £100 fine or a three-month prison sentence so the Government still depended heavily on the goodwill of the cable companies. The last thing it wanted was for the procedure to become public knowledge. ‘Secrecy is essential,’ Lord Cur
zon told his cabinet colleagues. ‘It must be remembered that the companies who still supply the original messages to us regard the intervention of the Government with much suspicion and some ill-will. It is important to leave this part of our activity to the deepest possible obscurity.’

  It was not to be. The British practice of ‘borrowing’ the cables became the focus of an investigation by the US Senate. Western Union's president, Newcomb Carlton, was forced to describe how his company connived with the intelligence service of a foreign power, but defended himself by pointing out that most of the telegrams were encoded. ‘Messages in their original form – ninety per cent of them are in code – are taken to, I think, the British Naval Intelligence Bureau,’ he said. ‘They hold them not more than a few hours and then return them. They do not hold them long enough for anything like deciphering.’

  This somewhat weak defence was ridiculed by the chairman of the investigation, who pointed out that it only took a few seconds to make a copy which could then be decoded at leisure. Nevertheless, the cables continued to flow into the Government Code and Cipher School where they were sorted in a department run by Henry Maine, one of the First World War codebreakers. Despite the implicit coercion, the relationship with the cable companies was handled in a thoroughly gentlemanly, and typically English, fashion. ‘It was our aim to make this procedure work smoothly with the companies,’ Denniston said. ‘It was undoubtedly a nuisance for them to have to send all their traffic in sacks to an outside department and I have always considered that the credit for smooth working and no questioning should go to Maine.’ The cablegrams were sorted and copied by a small group of workers borrowed from the Post Office, he added. ‘Our aim was to inconvenience the companies as little as possible and throughout we tried to let them have their traffic back within twenty-four hours, though many million telegrams must have passed through their hands.’