Missing Pieces: - Royal Australian Navy

24 Missing Pieces
RAN task, as neither of the other Services had much to offer in the way of relevant
intelligence, and it was not until 18 December 1940 that COIC went on continuous watch
in response to the activities of the German raider Pinguin in Australian waters. 57
The war caused some significant developments in RAN Sigint as well. In April 1938
the decision was taken to post the few special wireless operators from ships to shore
wireless stations, and these formed the nucleus of the RAN’s Sigint contributions
throughout the coming war. By April 1940 the Naval Staff was ready to offer the
Admiralty more than a dozen operators, with more in the training pipeline. A significant
step was the establishment of the RAN Special Intelligence Bureau, collocated with NID
in Melbourne in September 1940. 58 The Bureau was led by an Australian, Commander
Eric Nave, who had transferred to the RN in 1930, and who had been sent to Australia
to convalesce from an illness caused by his service in the Far East. He was now
on secondment to the RAN. The Bureau was tasked with the intercept of Japanese
communications through the services of the three intercept and direction-finding
(DF) stations in Australia at the time, Darwin (HMAS Coonawarra), Canberra (HMAS
Harman) and an Army station at Park Orchards in Melbourne. In May 1941, the Special
Intelligence Bureau absorbed Army personnel and academics who had independently
been investigating Japanese codes to form Australia’s first joint signals intelligence
organisation. By July1941 Sigint product had become available to COIC from Bureau
and British sources. 59
DNI Long continued to strengthen Australia’s links with other intelligence and
cryptanalytic agencies. The FECB connection was already working well, and after April
1941 a naval liaison officer in Batavia was cultivating links with the Dutch. By that
time the British had made inroads into the new IJN operational code, Code D, and the
Dutch as well were thought to be making progress in solving it. Direct liaison between
FECB and the USN codebreakers at Station CAST in the Philippines had first occurred
in March 1941, and decodes from the Code D/JN-25 system were being exchanged,
their security protected by the new security warning ‘ULTRA’.
These Australian command and control arrangements, and their intelligence
support, were tested by a series of operations undertaken on and proximate to the
Australia Station between April 1940 and December 1941. From these I have chosen a
representative selection of incidents to examine the relationship between intelligence
and operations, and to decide how well both the Naval Staff and the NID played
their supporting roles. The sinking of the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni in the
Mediterranean by Sydney has been included as a yardstick to assess whether Australian
Squadron units were more or less confident and effective within the more advanced
and experienced Admiralty system of operational and intelligence support.
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