Wireless Experimental Centre

Last updated

The Wireless Experimental Centre (WEC) was one of two overseas outposts of Station X, Bletchley Park, the British signals analysis centre during World War II. The other outpost was the Far East Combined Bureau. Codebreakers Wilfred Noyce and Maurice Allen broke the Japanese Army's Water Transport Code here in 1943, the first high-level Japanese Army code broken. John Tiltman broke prewar Russian and Japanese codes at Simla and Abbottabad. [1]

Contents

Location and function

The WEC was located in Ramjas College (formerly part of the Delhi University campus), atop a hill called Anand Parbat "the hill of happiness" and was several miles out of Delhi and hence secure. [2] [3] Staff were from the Intelligence Corps, the British and Indian armies and the Royal Air Force. Section C under Colonel Marr-Johnson was a radio (wireless) intercept station and decoding section for Japanese codes. There were three outstations: the Wireless Experimental Depot in Abbottabad (where Russian (Soviet) transmissions were monitored in the interwar period), the Western Wireless sub centre at Bangalore and the Eastern Wireless sub centre at Barrackpore. There were also about 88 listening wireless sets around India, and several mobile Y-stations. [4]

Work on BULBUL the IJA air-to-ground code which was first broken at Bletchley Park was transferred to the WEC as it provided valuable tactical information on Japanese air raids. [5] [6]

Sections

Apart from Section C, the other four sections carried out administration, collating and evaluating signals intelligence, traffic analysis and radio interception. Colonel Aldridge headed the signals section, and had under his command No. 5 Wireless Detachment, Royal Corps of Signals. [2]

Peter Marr-Johnson

Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Marr-Johnson was the head of Section C of the Wireless Experimental Centre from 1943. He ran a successful but "too rigid" operation, with staff finding him distant and snobbish. [7] He was a regular Army officer, having been commissioned in the Royal Artillery. He showed a talent in languages, and in 1932 with two other officers was sent to Japan as a language student. He received training in cryptography at GC&CS, and was in a BP SLU (Special Liaison Unit) in Singapore and possibly Java (for Wavell). He was sent to Hong Kong in early 1939, and in 1939-40 (as a captain, then Major) was attached to the FECB in Hong Kong, where he objected to being under Admiralty control. He had little time for war-commissioned officers, referring to one who had been in business before the war as a "Bombay carpet-bagger". [8]

Maurice Allen

Maurice Allen was an Oxford Don who with Wilfrid Noyce broke the Water Transport Code in spring 1943 at the WEC, the first high-level Japanese Army code broken (at the WEC and also at Central Bureau in Melbourne). [7]

Notes

  1. ↑ Smith 2000, pp. 54–55, 175–180.
  2. 1 2 Elphick 1998, p. 396.
  3. ↑ March 1944 : The Invasion Postponed, from Bletchley Park archives, accessed 15 February 2008
  4. ↑ Intelligence and the War Against Japan: Britain, America and the Politics of Secret Service, Richard James Aldrich, Cambridge University Press 2000
  5. ↑ Smith 2000, pp. 244–246.
  6. ↑ Smith & Erskine 2001, p. 150.
  7. 1 2 Elphick 1998, pp. 396, 397.
  8. ↑ Elphick 1998, pp. 75, 174, 175.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bletchley Park</span> WWII code-breaking site and British country house

Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Sir Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fish (cryptography)</span>

Fish was the UK's GC&CS Bletchley Park codename for any of several German teleprinter stream ciphers used during World War II. Enciphered teleprinter traffic was used between German High Command and Army Group commanders in the field, so its intelligence value (Ultra) was of the highest strategic value to the Allies. This traffic normally passed over landlines, but as German forces extended their geographic reach beyond western Europe, they had to resort to wireless transmission.

The vulnerability of Japanese naval codes and ciphers was crucial to the conduct of World War II, and had an important influence on foreign relations between Japan and the west in the years leading up to the war as well. Every Japanese code was eventually broken, and the intelligence gathered made possible such operations as the victorious American ambush of the Japanese Navy at Midway in 1942 and the shooting down of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto a year later in Operation Vengeance.

Cryptography was used extensively during World War II because of the importance of radio communication and the ease of radio interception. The nations involved fielded a plethora of code and cipher systems, many of the latter using rotor machines. As a result, the theoretical and practical aspects of cryptanalysis, or codebreaking, were much advanced.

Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, CMG was a British classics scholar and papyrologist at King's College, Cambridge and a codebreaker. As a member of the Room 40 codebreaking unit he helped decrypt the Zimmermann Telegram which brought the USA into the First World War. He then joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hut 8</span>

Hut 8 was a section in the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park tasked with solving German naval (Kriegsmarine) Enigma messages. The section was led initially by Alan Turing. He was succeeded in November 1942 by his deputy, Hugh Alexander. Patrick Mahon succeeded Alexander in September 1944.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry Hinsley</span> English cryptanalyst and historian (1918–1998

Sir Francis Harry Hinsley, was an English intelligence officer and historian. He worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and wrote widely on the history of international relations and British Intelligence during the Second World War. He was known as Harry Hinsley.

MI1 or British Military Intelligence, Section 1 was a department of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, part of the War Office. It was set up during World War I. It contained "C&C", which was responsible for code breaking.

Station CAST was the United States Navy signals monitoring and cryptographic intelligence fleet radio unit at Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines, until Cavite was captured by the Japanese forces in 1942, during World War II. It was an important part of the Allied intelligence effort, addressing Japanese communications as the War expanded from China into the rest of the Pacific theaters. As Japanese advances in the Philippines threatened CAST, its staff and services were progressively transferred to Corregidor in Manila Bay, and eventually to a newly formed US-Australian station, FRUMEL in Melbourne, Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Central Bureau</span> WW2 Allied military unit

The Central Bureau was one of two Allied signals intelligence (SIGINT) organisations in the South West Pacific area (SWPA) during World War II. Central Bureau was attached to the headquarters of the Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur. The role of the Bureau was to research and decrypt intercepted Imperial Japanese Army traffic and work in close co-operation with other SIGINT centers in the United States, United Kingdom and India. Air activities included both army and navy air forces, as there was no independent Japanese air force.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oliver Strachey</span> British cryptographer (1874–1960)

Oliver Strachey CBE, a British civil servant in the Foreign Office, was a cryptographer from World War I to World War II.

Hugh Rose Foss was a British cryptanalyst. At Bletchley Park during World War II he made significant contributions both to the breaking of the German Enigma code and headed the section tasked with breaking Japanese Naval codes.

The "Y" service was a network of British signals intelligence collection sites, the Y-stations. The service was established during the First World War and used again during the Second World War. The sites were operated by a range of agencies including the Army, Navy and RAF plus the Foreign Office, General Post Office and Marconi Company receiving stations ashore and afloat. There were more than 600 receiving sets in use at Y-stations during the Second World War.

Before the development of radar and other electronics techniques, signals intelligence (SIGINT) and communications intelligence (COMINT) were essentially synonymous. Sir Francis Walsingham ran a postal interception bureau with some cryptanalytic capability during the reign of Elizabeth I, but the technology was only slightly less advanced than men with shotguns, during World War I, who jammed pigeon post communications and intercepted the messages carried.

The 1943 BRUSA Agreement was an agreement between the British and US governments to facilitate co-operation between the US War Department and the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). It followed the 1942 Holden Agreement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilfrid Noyce</span> British mountain climber

Cuthbert Wilfrid Francis Noyce was an English mountaineer and author. He was a member of the 1953 British Expedition that made the first ascent of Mount Everest.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Far East Combined Bureau</span> UK intelligence outstation

The Far East Combined Bureau, an outstation of the British Government Code and Cypher School, was set up in Hong Kong in March 1935, to monitor Japanese, and also Chinese and Russian (Soviet) intelligence and radio traffic. Later it moved to Singapore, Colombo (Ceylon), Kilindini (Kenya), then returned to Colombo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hut 3</span> Part of Second World War UK government cypher school

Hut 3 was a section of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park during World War II. It retained the name for its functions when it moved into Block D. It produced military intelligence codenamed Ultra from the decrypts of Enigma, Tunny and multiple other sources. Hut 3 thus became an intelligence agency in its own right, providing information of great strategic value, but rarely of operational use. Group Captain Eric Malcolm Jones led this activity from 1943 and after the war became deputy director, and in 1952 director of GCHQ. In July 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower Supreme Commander of Allied forces wrote to Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) saying inter alia:

"The intelligence that has emanated from you before and during this campaign has been of priceless value to me. It has simplified my task as commander enormously. It has saved thousands of British and American lives and, in no small way, has contributed to the speed with which the enemy was routed and eventually forced to surrender."

Japanese army and diplomatic codes. This article is on Japanese army and diplomatic ciphers and codes used up to and during World War II, to supplement the article on Japanese naval codes. The diplomatic codes were significant militarily, particularly those from diplomats in Germany.

References

28°41′8.6640″N77°12′22.9788″E / 28.685740000°N 77.206383000°E / 28.685740000; 77.206383000

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.