FRUMEL
Fleet Radio Unit, Melbourne (FRUMEL) was a United States-Australian-British signals intelligence unit, founded in Melbourne, Australia during World War II. It was one of two major Allied signals intelligence units, called Fleet Radio Units, in the Pacific theatres, the other being FRUPAC (also known as Station HYPO), in Hawaii. FRUMEL was an inter-navy organisation, subordinate to the Commander of the United States Seventh Fleet, while the separate Central Bureau in Melbourne (later Brisbane) was attached to the Allied South West Pacific Area command headquarters.
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's Station CAST in the Philippines before being evacuated by submarine on 8 April 1942. The second was Commander Eric Nave's small Royal Australian Navy-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. These included Arthur Dale Trendall, Athanasius Treweek, Eric Barnes, Jack Davies and Ronald Bond.[1] The third group was a trio of British Foreign Office linguists (Henry Archer, Arthur Cooper and Hubert Graves), and Royal Navy support staff, evacuated from Singapore, particularly from the Far East Combined Bureau (FECB) there. IBM (punched-card) equipment was obtained in 1942 to replace that left behind in Manila Bay on leaving Corregidor.
Nave and Fabian had a difficult relationship, and Nave eventually joined the Army’s Central Bureau at Brisbane. According to Jenkins:[2] 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. Eventually he seems to have succeeded in ousting Nave, who went to Central Bureau, the joint Australian-US Army codebreaking unit in Brisbane. Men like Jamieson (A.B. Jamieson, Nave’s second recruit) and (Athanasius) Treweek, who had cordial relations with the Americans, remained with 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”[3] although he was born in Butte, Montana in 1908.[4] 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) was not interested in any exchange of material with the Army’s Central Bureau.[5]
Intercept Stations
The major (naval) Intercept Stations which carried out intercept and D/F (direction finding) but not cryptographic work were:[6]
- Park Orchards in Melbourne
- HMAS Harman near Canberra
- HMAS Coonawarra near Darwin
Notes
References
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- Smith, Michael: The Emperor’s Codes: Bletchley Park and the breaking of Japan’s secret ciphers (2000, Bantam London) ISBN 0-593-04642-0.
- Smith, Michael and Erskine, Ralph (editors): Action this Day (2001, Bantam London; pages 127–151) ISBN 0-593-04910-1 (Chapter 8: An Undervalued Effort: how the British broke Japan’s Codes by Michael Smith).
