1 Wireless Unit
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1 Wireless Unit, was established on 25 April 1942.
This name which was the formalised name given to the small RAAF Intercept Station operating in two back to back houses at 21 Sycamore Street and 24 French Street in the suburb of Pimlico in Townsville established by Wing Commander Booth in March 1942.
1 Wireless unit became part of the larger Central Bureau established under Macarthur and comprised 7 RAAF, 1 AMF and 4 United States Army personnel in No. 1 Wireless Unit at Townsville. Flight Lieutenant Blakely was the first Commanding Officer. He was assisted by Captain H. Brown, US Army, and four US Air Force sergeants who were experienced in Sigint and who had escaped to Australia from the Philippines.
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[edit] History
The first seven RAAF personnel to be trained as part of No. 1 Wireless Unit in a "special intelligence" course were trained at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne in July 1941. They were the first personnel in No. 1 Wireless Unit which was to be involved in the interception of Japanese Naval and military traffic. The members of the first group trained were:-
- Shirley "Snow" Bradshaw
- Edward "Ted" Cook
- B. Crosby
- G. "Taff" Davis
- Clarence "Clarrie" Hermes
- Alf Towers
- Jim Wilson
They were all qualified radio operators and extremely proficient in international Morse code. Crosby did not finish the course and the remaining 6 operators were sent to Darwin by 3 September 1941 where "Snow" Bradshaw, as senior NCO, headed the intercept group in Darwin.
They set up two intercept radios (Kingsley AR7's on the top floor of the "Camera Obscura" building at the RAAF Darwin airfield. They worked in continuous 4 hour shifts intercepting Japanese naval "point to point" and "aircraft to ground" traffic from Japanese at the following locations:-
Their intercepts were sent to the navy cryptology section in Melbourne via RAAF Signals Darwin. They enciphered their messages to Melbourne in a secret cipher before passing them over to the RAAF Signals personnel. This ensured that their intercepts of Japanese Kana code or encoded messages were not apparent to other military personnel to protect the secrecy of their intercept operation.
In the mean time the RAAF began to establish their own small administrative and intelligence group in Melbourne. H. Roy Booth was in charge of this new group. Their task was to start to learn how to process the intercept information sent from Darwin.
The RAAF Kana operators in Darwin intercepted many important transmissions leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Darwin intercept group was reduced to four due to illness.
[edit] Darwin bombing
The early morning shift detected abnormal traffic on the morning of 19 February 1942 from Kendari in the Southern Celebes and between aircraft and possible aircraft carriers. The abnormal traffic was passed on to Group Captain Scherger, the Commanding Officer of RAAF Darwin.
Unfortunately no precautions were taken at Darwin on that fateful day. 188 carrier-based aircraft attacked Darwin in the first raid followed by 54 land based bombers in the second raid. There were 243 killed and about 350 injured on this tragic day.
Orders were sent from Melbourne for the four healthy Kana operators in Darwin to disperse to civilian radio stations across the northern parts of Australia as follows:-.
- "Snow" Bradshaw - Wyndham, WA
- Alf Towers - Broome, WA
- G. "Taff" Davis - Groote Eyelandt, NT
- "Clarrie" Hermes - Groote Eyelandt, NT
Snow Bradshaw was evacuated to Wyndham in Western Australia onboard a De Havilland Rapide. The Rapide was attacked while landing at Wyndham airfield by a flight of Japanese Zeros during the first enemy air raid on the town on 3 March 1942.
The crew and passengers abandoned the Rapide, which trundled along the runway on fire. It stopped at the end of the runway where it burnt itself out. A group of nine "Betty" bombers then bombed the Wyndham airfield leaving a number of large mud holes in the runway.
Alf Towers was slightly luckier than Snow Bradshaw. He had departed Wyndham airfield just prior to the Japanese air raid in a Lockheed 10A piloted by Jimmy Wood. They landed at Broome in Western Australia about 30 minutes after a very large Japanese bombing raid on the town in which at least 70 people were killed.
The use of the civilian radios proved totally unsuccessful as the Kana operators could only use the radio receivers when not being used by the civil air radio service. This meant it was impossible to keep a constant watch on Japanese activities.
[edit] Pimlico Houses
Then on 7 March 1942, a top secret small RAAF Intercept Station was set up in 2 houses at Pimlico in Townsville under Wing Commander Booth. The two houses backed on to each other, one being at 21 Sycamore Street, Pimlico and the other being at 24 French Street, Pimlico. Operators based in these houses would intercept Japanese wireless signals and break the Japanese KANA code. Radio equipment was installed in No. 24 French Street.
On 25 April 1942 this small RAAF Unit was given its new name of No. 1 Wireless Unit and then became part of General Douglas MacArthur's new joint American-Australian Sigint organisation called Central Bureau in Ascot, Brisbane.
Early in 1943, a draft of WAAAF signallers was posted to 1 Wireless Unit at Townsville and report the following:[1]
We were barracked first at St. Anne's and then at the bush camp at Roseneath, living under primitive conditions.
The operations room was located in an isolated area near Stuart. This was a remarkable building, camouflaged as a farm-house, and inside furnished most impressively with all the sophisticated equipment necessary to a first class intelligence establishment. There were D/F and teleprinters, scrambler phones, plotting tables and dozens of radio sets. Here [at Stuart] we concentrated on air-ground activity. Each operator was given a frequency to monitor and as Jap planes took off from their bases in and around New Guinea and sent messages from the air back to them, we intercepted the messages, the D/F located their positions, the interpreters and code people extracted the information and in a matter of minutes, the nearest Squadrons were alerted and flew out to defend and attack. Quite often an operator could follow right through to the Kana "I am being attacked" signal and perhaps silence thereafter
Another email from Chris Young states: [2]
I have a friend here in Dubai whose father was with No 1 Wireless Unit, the RAAF radio intercept unit based first at French Street and later out at Stuart. It was this unit that intercepted the Japanese bombers' departure messages from Rabaul and allowed the P-39's to be airborne and at altitude in time to intercept the incoming Emilys. (The RAAF radio operators took down the Japanese Kana Morse messages verbatim and it was then decoded to straight Japanese and then to English.) The USAAF claimed that they had shot down the Emily they damaged on one such intercept. However, the RAAF unit intercepted its safe landing report at Rabaul the next morning. The American pilot was still credited with the 'kill', both for the propaganda/morale value and more importantly because the RAAF couldn't admit to the world that they were reading the Japanese forces' mail!
The book about the intercept unit gives an amusing account of the concrete block house built at Stuart to resemble a 'Queenslander' wooden house. Some clown mounting a mock attack on the building ran up the steps and nearly brained himself trying to open the 'door'. This block house was located on the site of the present day copper refinery and it was destroyed, (not without some difficulty), when the refinery was built. I understand that it took quite a quantity of explosives to remove it.
