FRUMEL

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Fleet Radio Unit, Melbourne (FRUMEL) was a United States-Australian-British signals intelligence unit, based in Melbourne, Australia during World War II. It was one of two major Allied signals intelligence 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 was attached to the Allied South West Pacific Area command headquarters.

FRUMEL was established at the Montery Apartments in Queens Road, in early 1942, and was made up of three main groups. First was Lieutenant Rudolph J. 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 Montery 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. The third group was a trio of British Foreign Office linguists and Royal Navy support staff, evacuated from Singapore, particularly from the Far East Combined Bureau (FECB) there.

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