The Wireless Experimental Centre (WEC) was one of two overseas outposts of Station X,

Bletchley Park 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 ...

, the

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 analysis centre during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

. The other outpost was 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 ...

. 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 Brigadier John Hessell Tiltman, (25 May 1894 – 10 August 1982) was a British Army officer who worked in intelligence, often at or with the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) starting in the 1920s. His intelligence work was largely conn ...

broke prewar Russian and Japanese codes at Simla and Abbottabad.

Location and function

The WEC was located in

Ramjas College Ramjas College is a college of the University of Delhi located in North Campus of the university in New Delhi, India.The college admits both undergraduates and post-graduates, and awards degrees under the purview of the University of Delhi. ...

(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. 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 Abbottabad (; Urdu, Punjabi language(HINDKO dialect) آباد, translit=aibṭabād, ) is the capital city of Abbottabad District in the Hazara region of eastern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. It is the 40th largest city in Pakistan and fourt ...

(where Russian (Soviet) transmissions were monitored in the interwar period), the Western Wireless sub centre at

Bangalore Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...

and the Eastern Wireless sub centre at

Barrackpore Barrackpore (also known as Barrackpur) is a city and a municipality of urban Kolkata of North 24 Parganas district in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is also a part of the area covered by Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (K ...

. There were also about 88 listening wireless sets around India, and several mobile

Y-stations 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 inc ...

.Intelligence and the War Against Japan: Britain, America and the Politics of Secret Service, Richard James Aldrich, Cambridge University Press 2000 Work on

BULBUL The bulbuls are members of a family, Pycnonotidae, of medium-sized passerine songbirds, which also includes greenbuls, brownbuls, leafloves, and bristlebills. The family is distributed across most of Africa and into the Middle East, tropical A ...

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.

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.

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. 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 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 ...

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".

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).

Notes

References

* * * {{coord, 28, 41, 8.6640, N, 77, 12, 22.9788, E, display=title Cryptography organizations Locations in the history of espionage Bletchley Park Signals intelligence of World War II Intelligence Corps (United Kingdom)