Fleet Radio Unit, Melbourne (FRUMEL) was a

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–

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

n–

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

signals intelligence Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is intelligence-gathering by interception of ''signals'', whether communications between people (communications intelligence—abbreviated to COMINT) or from electronic signals not directly used in communication ( ...

unit, founded in

Melbourne Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a met ...

, Australia, during

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. It was one of two major

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signals intelligence units called

Fleet Radio Unit Fleet Radio Units (FRU) were the major centers for Allied cryptological and signals intelligence during the Pacific Campaign of World War II. Initially two FRUs were established in the Pacific, one at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, called Station HYPO or F ...

s in the

Pacific theatres Pacific Theatres was an American chain of movie theaters in the Los Angeles metropolitan area of California. Pacific Theatres was owned by The Decurion Corporation which also owned and operated ArcLight Cinemas. In 2008, it sold its store loca ...

, the other being FRUPAC (also known as Station HYPO), in

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. FRUMEL was a US Navy organisation, reporting directly to CiCPAC (Admiral Nimitz) in Hawaii and the Chief of Naval Operations (Admiral

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) in Washington, and hence to the central

cryptographic Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adve ...

organization. The separate

Central Bureau 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 Allied Commander of the South West Pacific area ...

in Melbourne (later

Brisbane Brisbane ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the states and territories of Australia, Australian state of Queensland, and the list of cities in Australia by population, third-most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a populati ...

) was attached to (and reported to) MacArthur's Allied

South West Pacific Area South West Pacific Area (SWPA) was the name given to the Allied supreme military command in the South West Pacific Theatre of World War II. It was one of four major Allied commands in the Pacific War. SWPA included the Philippines, Borneo, the ...

command headquarters.

History

FRUMEL was established at the Monterey Apartments in Queens Road in early 1942, and was made up of three main groups. First was Lieutenant Rudolph J. (Rudi) Fabian's 75-man codebreaker unit, previously based at the

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...

Station CAST 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 p ...

in the

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before being evacuated by submarine on 8 April 1942. The second was Commander

Eric Nave Captain Eric Nave (18 March 1899 – 23 June 1993) was an Australian cryptographer and intelligence officer in the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) and Royal Navy, noted for his work with joint Allied intelligence units during World War II. He serv ...

's small

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-supported cryptography unit, which had moved to the Monterey Apartments from Victoria Barracks in February 1942. Nave's unit was made up of a core of naval personnel, heavily assisted by university academics and graduates specialising in linguistics and mathematics (including from June 1941 a "cipher group" of four from Sydney University). These included

Thomas Room Thomas Gerald Room FRS FAA (10 November 1902 – 2 April 1986) was an Australian mathematician who is best known for Room squares. He was a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. . Also published in ''Historical Records of A ...

Dale Trendall Arthur Dale Trendall, (28 March 1909 – 13 November 1995) was a New Zealand art historian and classical archaeologist whose work on identifying the work of individual artists on Greek ceramic vessels at Apulia and other sites earned him in ...

Athanasius Treweek Lieutenant Colonel Athanasius Pryor "Ath" Treweek (1911–1995) was an Australian academic, linguist, mathematician and code-breaker. He was the son of Walter Henry Treweek (a teacher who came from Cornwall to Australia in the 1880s) and Mary Mati ...

, Eric Barnes, Jack Davies and Ronald Bond. The third group was a trio of

British Foreign Office The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) is a department of the Government of the United Kingdom. Equivalent to other countries' ministries of foreign affairs, it was created on 2 September 2020 through the merger of the Foreign ...

linguists (Henry Archer, Arthur Cooper and Hubert Graves), and

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support staff, evacuated from

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, particularly from the

Far East Combined Bureau 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 Sing ...

(FECB) there. IBM (punched-card)

tabulating machine The tabulating machine was an electromechanical machine designed to assist in summarizing information stored on punched cards. Invented by Herman Hollerith, the machine was developed to help process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. Later models w ...

s were obtained in 1942 to replace that left behind in

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on leaving Corregidor. Nave and Fabian had a difficult relationship, and Nave was forced out of FRUMEL, going to

the joint Australian-US Army codebreaking unit in Brisbane where he was welcomed. The 1942 Holden Agreement specifically stated that Nave was not to work at FRUMEL. According to Jenkins, Fabian wasted no time in getting rid of the civilian supernumaries at Monterey, many of them British service wives who had been evacuated from Singapore. He also squeezed out the British diplomatic corps types like Cooper and Archer. But Jamieson (A. B. Jamieson, Nave's second recruit) and Ath Treweek had cordial relations with the Americans and stayed at FRUMEL throughout the war. Fabian or his deputy John Lietweller were always in the office, 24 hours a day. Fabian was "a highly professional officer with an air of authority and a hint of Central European sophistication", although he was born in Butte, Montana, in 1908. But he "regarded co-operation with anyone who was not in the US Navy or under its command as poor security". One senior British officer said the atmosphere at FRUMEL was "What is yours is mine, and what is mine is my own", and Fabian (backed by Redman and Herbert Leary) was not interested in any exchange of material with the Army's Central Bureau. Once Fabian burnt a document in front of MacArthur's Intelligence Officer (G-2), Major General Charles A. Willoughby, to demonstrate that only MacArthur himself and Sutherland could be present at FRUMEL briefings and that Willoughby was not allowed to see it (see

Intercept stations

The major (naval) Intercept Stations which carried out intercept and D/F (

direction finding Direction finding (DF), or radio direction finding (RDF), isin accordance with International Telecommunication Union (ITU)defined as radio location that uses the reception of radio waves to determine the direction in which a radio station ...

) but not cryptographic work were: * Park Orchards in Melbourne * near

Canberra Canberra ( ) is the capital city of Australia. Founded following the federation of the colonies of Australia as the seat of government for the new nation, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The ci ...

* near Darwin

Notes

References

* * * * *

History

Intercept stations

See Also

Notes

References

Further reading