I was parcelled off to a Commander Thatcher, a fierce naval man who put the fear of God into me. He informed me that I was in the Japanese naval section, which confused me even further, that from then on I would not be allowed to leave the Park other than through death or disablement, that if I said one word of what I or anyone else was doing, even to my nearest and dearest, I would get thirty years without the option. He stood over me while I digested the Official Secrets Act and dutifully signed it.
My billet was in Bedford – the lady of the house was not a willing billeter, and for the few months I was there she made my life miserable. I was turned out in the evenings as I was in the way, and so roamed round Bedford, which was manned by the American Army Air Force. I was petrified. Later I made a friend in another part of my section and we joined forces and went to another billet, again in Bedford, to a Mr and Mrs Buick, who had two children. They were completely and absolutely magnificent, never probed, always there for us.
So many of the people working at Bletchley Park were now women that Edward Travis had set up a ‘Women's Committee’ to advise him on ‘all questions affecting women at the War Station’ and to ensure ‘the promotion of the well-being of all the women working at the War Station’. The committee included representatives of all three women's services plus Foreign Office civil servants, and its chairman, a Miss J. V. Wickham, was available at all times to offer advice and help to ‘any civilian woman who is in difficulty of any kind’.
Olive was put to work on the JN40 merchant-shipping code broken in Kilindini.
One half was manned by a host of civilian women, who seemed to be dealing with coloured flimsy sheets of paper. I never did know what they did. The other half of the room was manned by the navy, and there we went. I was put on to three shifts immediately, the civvies were always on days, and I found myself sitting at a table with six to eight Wrens. In the centre of the room was the boss, Major W. E. Martin. He was older than us, of course, and looked after his youngsters like a benevolent father. At the other end were three or four navy boys. All were young and bright, and I was quite happy, as I had really wanted to join the Wrens.
We put the five-figure blocks, typed on flimsy paper, into clear English letters from pads, and constructed clear messages, such as, ‘Otaru maru leaving Manila at 0200 hrs for Singapore arrives such and such.’ These messages were then passed to Major Martin, who I suppose with hindsight passed them on. We didn't know what was happening in any other part of the section: the need-to-know syndrome was very much to the fore. One thing I regret deeply. I was an only child, and on my first day home my father at dinner said, ‘What do you do at the Foreign Office?’ I replied, ‘I cannot tell you. Sorry. Please don't ask me again.’ And he didn't; nor did my mother at any time. She died in the early 1960s and he in 1976, before I realized the silence had been lifted.
One of the young civilian women working in the other part of Major Martin's section was Elizabeth Ross.
I was conscripted after one year at Oxford University reading Medicine, along with a friend, Felicity Berryman. We were both sent to Hut 7 to work on the JN40 merchant-shipping code. It changed every month and once you had broken it you could set up the grids for the next month. A lot of the messages were positions, endless positions in latitude and longitude, sightings of ships. When there was a ‘rush’ on we were occasionally sent to work on JN25, which was a nice change and was presided over by the Cambridge mathematician ‘Septimus’ Wall. There was always great competition with the Americans on JN25. If we got some way in there was always a feeling that we shouldn't tell them this time: ‘We can get there first. Don't let them know about this one.’ That was always the joke, of course. We always did tell them but we always felt that we did terribly well without the machinery and vast amounts of manpower they had.
Like other Bletchley Park employees, we never spoke to anyone, even people in the neighbouring offices, about what we did. It was extraordinary. You might have friends in the next office, but you would meet them outside or in the canteen. You would never visit them in the office. We were billeted first in London Road, Bedford, and travelled in to BP in the army transport – very basic buses with wooden seats. After a few months we managed to move to a self-catering billet at Stony Stratford in an old coaching inn with wobbly floors. This was a wonderful improvement.
We were on twenty-four-hour shifts throughout our time at BP. There was no weekly day off as far as I remember but we were entitled to a long weekend every month and there was sometimes a bit of free time when the shifts changed over, especially if you didn't bother going to bed after the night shift. Days off we spent in one of two ways. We either hitched along Watling Street to London – the marvellous lorry drivers always picked us up and the roads were empty of all other traffic, except military vehicles, because of petrol rationing – or we bicycled to meet friends in Oxford – sometimes spending a night. But we seem to have been valiant bikers because sometimes we'd return the same day. We went via Buckingham but never learned the names of the villages because no notices or signposts were allowed to be displayed for fear of helping the enemy in case of an invasion or spy drop.
Olive Humble also remembered cycling to various places on her days off.
The social life at BP was for me rather mixed, as being on shift work did curtail it to a certain extent. When I did get enough time off, between shifts, I would remain in Bedford, sometimes with a Wren, whose name I have forgotten but who introduced me to Mozart. She would drag me into her favourite music shop, and we would land in the booths and listen to records. My recollection of hearing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for the first time is still very vivid.
I met some odd characters there. One was a very brainy lad, who could only work well while under the influence of whisky, so the caring FO provided him with a bottle a day or equivalent, until he broke and was taken away. I remember passing him in the corridors, always dressed in a pin-stripe suit, papers under his arm, muttering to himself, and a strong smell of malt wafting by with him. Another bright specimen divested himself of all his clothing and galloped round the lake with the army in hot pursuit, cheered on by us spectators on the banks, and the Wrens rowing lustily on the lake.
17
RETURN TO COLOMBO
The move from Kilindini to Colombo began in August 1943, the advance party arriving in Ceylon on 1 September 1943. Keith had wanted a site up-country away from the city, where reception was expected to be better. But he was overruled by the Chief of Intelligence Staff for HQ Eastern Fleet, who insisted the codebreakers should be within easy reach of headquarters. The intercept station and code-breaking operation had to be set up on the only available site at the Anderson Golf Course, just six miles from the Colombo HQ.
This was hardly the ideal site for intercepting radio traffic, stuck between a railway line and a main road, directly under the flightpath of aircraft flying into the Racecourse Aerodrome and far too close to a 33,000-volt high-tension electricity supply. As a result, radio reception was nowhere near as good as it could have been. Nevertheless, it was far better than at Kilindini and the codebreakers were soon swamped with JN25, JN11 and JN40 intercepts to work on.
The intercept operators at Anderson were kept extremely busy, not only noting down the messages passing between the Japanese naval stations but controlling an extensive Allied DF system which ranged from South Africa to India and on to Australia, recalled Paul Longrigg, one of the operators.
The main receiving room at Anderson consisted of about a hundred receiver bays. Radio communications between all the main Japanese bases in South-east Asia were covered continuously at Anderson. Each operator was assigned an enemy radio channel to monitor and took down all the traffic it passed.
Occasionally, a Jap mobile unit would come up on one of these channels, to indicate very briefly and quickly to the shore station that it wanted to pass traffic on another previously assigned channel. The mobile would then immediately switch to this new frequency and send its tr
affic as rapidly as possible. When this occurred the control room at Anderson became a pandemonium of activity. When it happened on more than one channel simultaneously (as it often did) everything turned into a veritable ‘madhouse’.
The enemy frequency on which the main traffic was to be passed had to be monitored. Sometimes these channels were known, and sometimes they were not, in which case a frantic search of the most likely part of the spectrum had to be made.
Once the signal was intercepted it was fed over a ‘guard channel’ to all the DF outstations in the network, Longrigg said.
The operator at each of the DF stations had one earphone tuned to Anderson's guard channel, while the other earphone was tuned to the enemy signals picked up on a local receiver at the outstation. When the two signals matched the operator immediately took a bearing on the enemy unit with a radio goniometer, a device that electronically moves a search antenna through 360 degrees. The skill of the DF operator lay mainly in his ability to tune his receiver quickly to match the signals on Anderson's guard channel, and also in his ability to take accurate bearings with the goniometer.
The various bearings allowed the position of the Japanese ship or submarine to be plotted on the map, but the DF operators had only a very brief period of time in which to get their bearing. ‘All of this activity had to be done extremely rapidly,’ explained Longrigg, ‘for the enemy did not linger around when transmitting traffic, knowing that he was being listened to and, in all probability, his position being determined. Some transmissions would last for only a matter of seconds, but such was the efficiency of Anderson's organization that enemy locations were very often determined from such short periods of traffic.’
Anderson was centred on a long, narrow, single-storey building built in a rectangle with wings coming off the centre. ‘It was specially built for the purpose,’ said Jon Cohen. ‘You came in at one end and then at right angles there was one very large unit going off and then another one.’
Each section was located next to the section handling the next stage in the production process. Intercepted messages were recorded in the central wireless telegraphy watchroom on standard white message forms specially designed to fit the needs of every section in the production process. These then passed from one room to the next.
‘The whole process was absolutely continuous,’ said Cohen.
It got better because as the Japanese got weaker and their positions were overrun by Americans, Australians or whatever it became more and more easy to get cribs, breaking into the cipher without having to work away at it. In Mombasa there were only about four or five people working on book-building. When we got to Colombo they came out in wodges of about three at a time. We had an enormous mechanical computer or tabulating machine which we used for storing our information. There was a firm called Hollerith, which had some kind of contract with the navy, and they had a very large office with an enormous mechanical computer, rods going through. A lot of the work was filed away, what data you had about a certain code group. We would collect a depth of messages with that particular group in it so that when you felt you might have a conjecture to test you hoicked it out and saw what context it had come in.
There were huts on the camp itself for the junior ranks but initially officers and civilians were based elsewhere.
I lived in a junior officers’ mess on the sea front. Then more and more people came out and a mess was set up for junior officers. But I wasn't keen to move out of this lovely place on the sea. The people out there were very hospitable, the planters or whatever, so we were invited to join the tennis club and the yacht club. There were parties, what you would expect with a lot of Wrens. It was difficult to get any transport so we did a lot of cycling, including one or two leaves spent cycling in the bush visiting ancient ruins that had been built by Sinhalese kings. Sri Lanka is a very beautiful island and we did quite a lot of sightseeing.
Large numbers of Wrens were sent out to assist the codebreakers, not just on the Hollerith machinery, which was housed in a separate long hut running parallel to the main building, but as intercept operators, traffic analysts, cipher strippers and in identifying types of traffic from call signs and preambles. They were sent first to Bletchley Park to be trained, recalled Dorothy Robertson, who lived in the ‘Wrennery’ at Woburn Abbey while being taught traffic analysis.
After breakfast every morning, several coaches awaited us Wrens at the front door of the mansion and we were driven to Bletchley Park. There were many huts in the grounds, each one dealing with top-secret work, about which none of us knew anything. We simply knew that our own hut was used for instruction on analysis of Japanese naval messages so that in Ceylon we could gain ‘inference’ from them. We had two instructors: one, a brilliant young homosexual called Angus Wilson. He used to mince into the room wearing, in those days, outrageous clothes in all colours; he chain-smoked; his nails were bitten down to the quick and he had a rather hysterical laugh.
The Wrens were then sent out in batches on convoys to Colombo, travelling out into the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean and then into the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal, Robertson said.
The other ships in our convoy always seemed far away and I know that we must have had several submarine scares, as we often zigzagged en route, but life was so exciting with only some sixty Wrens and forty female army nurses on board and five to six thousand servicemen. We really had a marvellous time. The OC troops had to ration the men daily to meet us, so we had different batches up on B Deck every day, with dancing on deck at night.
One of my clearest recollections is that of waiting in our convoy to enter the Suez Canal. It was gloriously hot and sunny and the sea had that smooth greenish tinge all round. We were up on B Deck with lots of the lads, looking over the side watching ship movements and generally wondering what was going to happen next, when we began to notice that a lot of landing craft seemed to be moving towards us filled with men in white helmets. I shall never forget, as they came alongside, far below, one helmet looked upwards at us on deck and emitted a loud cry: ‘Gee! Dames!’ Whereupon the whole flotilla of landing craft looked up and bawled: ‘Gee! Dames!’ We girls simply fled down to our cabins and locked ourselves in. Over the following days, the Yanks were also rationed to meet us, but somehow or other they seemed to appear here and there on our deck in spite of this, and, I must say, they were often very amusing, and, of course, terrible flirts. Our British lads were absolutely furious and used to surround us, four or five to one Wren, as an anti-Yank bodyguard.
In Colombo we were stationed at Kent House in Flower Road, a large house once privately owned, now a Wrennery for several hundred. The compound was filled with lots of whitewashed huts with thatched palm-leaf, or cadjan, roofs, providing sleeping quarters for up to 500 Wrens. The big house was the mess. Concrete paths led from it to all the huts, so that one had dry feet in the heavy rains. Alongside the paths were planted lines of brilliant zinnias and I remember how beautiful they looked at night under the lights.
Our work was done some miles away in the jungle at Anderson Wireless Telegraphy Station and, as ever, we worked in naval watches, or shifts, all round the clock. To go on duty, we had to congregate under a huge banyan tree in the compound where two or three naval buses or trucks waited to take us out to Anderson. Our drivers were locals and pretty rum characters, too. One, a skinny, scruffy, devilish chap, used to take a swig at his arak bottle before revving up and driving us, one toe on the gas, hurtling through the jungle.
On watch, we petty officers shared a room with several others: a Royal Navy commander; two sub-lieutenants, three Admiralty civilians; and two Malay seamen who had escaped from Singapore on a raft with the naval commander. We received our ‘traffic’, or Japanese messages, by messenger from the big wireless watchroom near by, but we never saw the inside of it and they never saw our watchroom either. We had all signed the Official Secrets Act and noone ever discussed his or her work with anyone else.
There were always plent
y of invitations to dances at service messes, so we went out most evenings, when not on duty that is, until we realized that we just could not keep it up any longer and became more selective. Romances blossomed, too, of course. The favourite evening spot was the little nightclub, the Silver Fawn, where we'd be taken for a really glamorous evening's dinner-dancing, the live band playing favourite dance tunes, the lights low, flowers for one's dress, gorgeous food. It was incredibly heady stuff for girls of our age. We were only in our early twenties, and there was usually the knowledge that the boyfriend would be leaving for India or Burma soon, perhaps never to return. There were literally about 1,000 men in Ceylon to a girl, and many of the men had not seen a white girl for months or years. You can imagine how spoilt we were, and we loved it! How different and how naïve we were in those days; one never heard of any misbehaviour and we knew that if any occurred, we'd be sent straight back to Britain. I only ever heard of one Wren who was. We had all been brought up so much more strictly then.
The Japanese belief that to surrender, even in the face of overwhelming odds, was shameful brought a happy welcome bonus for Anderson in the form of a number of Royal Navy sub-lieutenants who had been trained in Japanese in preparation for interrogator duties and had found themselves virtually redundant. Despite the improvement in reception and resources at Colombo, it had become clear by the late summer of 1943 that the end to the problems over co-operation which Bletchley Park believed it had negotiated was in fact little more than a brief respite. By the time the naval code-breakers moved to Anderson, the JN25 codebooks had changed a number of times and the plentiful supplies of easily broken coded messages unavailable elsewhere were no more than a distant memory. The relationship with Melbourne, on which so much hope had been placed, seemed as bad as ever.
The Emperor's Codes Page 25