The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  Chocolate was not the only item to disappear. There was also an interval when knickers went missing from the washing lines. Another case involving The Prowler? On this occasion, no – it was another Wren. But, as Mrs Sinclair points out, HMS Flowerdown accommodated a wide and interesting range of people. ‘We had these two girls – I didn’t even know what the word “lesbian” was,’ says Mrs Sinclair, laughing. ‘There was just this one couple where the girl was – well, one was all fluffy, and one was a bit butch . . . And now I realise they must have been a very close couple. But we didn’t know any of that. We were just young innocent friendly girls with each other . . . What a mixed crowd!’

  15 By the Sleepy Lagoon

  No one could ever really be counted as fortunate in war; as we have seen, however, the conflict offered some the chance to experience the world in ways they would never have found in civilian life. Among these individuals was teenager Peter Budd. Trained in wireless telegraphy, Budd had barely before left his native Bristol; holidays had been to Weston-super-Mare and, as he says, the very idea of somewhere like Calais was as ‘exotic as Timbuctoo’. Nevertheless, as the tide of the war was decisively turning, he was called upon to embark on a voyage that would offer him one of the most formative and indelible experiences imaginable; an adventure that introduced him to a world – a paradise even – that he had not seen depicted even in books. And he was to share this adventure with remarkably few others.

  After months of training, he recalls, ‘I went to Plymouth to wait for a ship.’ Plymouth had been bombed so badly that a signals section had been set up at a holiday camp on the road to Tavistock. ‘And I was there for about three weeks before we were summoned to barracks.’ There was an electric thrill of anticipation in the air. ‘The transport was ready for a very big convoy ready to go out to Bombay. In Plymouth, all you heard was loudspeakers all day. Ratings on draft to Sri Lanka. Muster so and so. Ratings on draft to wherever, muster . . . The barracks were so crowded you were sleeping on the floor, there was nowhere even to sling a hammock.

  ‘The River Tamar – you could have walked over it on the ships. There were thousands of American landing craft there, thousands of naval ships. There must have been 10,000 naval ratings in barracks waiting to be posted.’

  Even before his extraordinary adventure began, Mr Budd was finding his own status within it a little anomalous. ‘Those of us in the wireless group were civilians – we’d had six or seven months’ training in civilian billets. But we arrived in Plymouth barracks in the late afternoon and we had to do the official “Joining Barracks” routine – we had to find our way round the barracks to know where we were going to sleep, where we were to get food. We were very much civilians rather than sailors . . . and of course we were there with matelots.’

  This minor outbreak of disorientation was as nothing compared with what was to follow. ‘Then on to Glasgow – and then aboard a troopship,’ says Mr Budd. ‘We knew we were going to the Far East. I had never been on a ship before. While we were at anchor, I was behaving like Jack the lad around a few Wrens on board who were going to Colombo and the big naval intelligence base there.

  ‘This great fleet in the Clyde, I’ve never seen anything like it – aircraft carriers, battleships, great liners . . . Out we steamed off to north Africa.’ Budd’s ultimate destination was a great deal further than that, but before he arrived, he would have to endure a nightmare journey. ‘As soon as we got out into the Atlantic, I realised that the sea which I’d loved since I was eight, didn’t love me. I was so sick I wanted to die. It was terrible. I slept on deck all night, then eventually went down below – down to the bilges. Eight decks down. In the morning, everyone had to line up on the deck. We had Navy, Army, Air Force and they inspected the ship. I was sitting right down there and this admiral came in and said “What the hell are you doing down here?”

  ‘ “I’m sick,” I said.

  ‘ “Sick?” he said. “The bloody ship isn’t moving.”

  ‘ “It is for me,” I said.

  ‘Once we were in the Med, I was fine. We stopped at Port Said, where we dropped off a lot of army and picked up a lot of American troops. Going down through the Suez Canal, it was unbelievable. We had these few Wrens . . . all the Arabs were standing along the bank, in their long white robes – and they lifted them when they saw the Wrens.’

  This outbreak of coarse ungallantry aside, the voyage was mercifully calm – which was more than could be said for the weeks that followed. ‘The voyage took about a month or more to get to Bombay, then there wasn’t a ship available to take us to Ceylon, so we got on a train, and went for hours and hours, up into the northern desert, to an army camp named Doolallee. Heard of the phrase?’ The slang term, Mr Budd says with a laugh, apparently derives from this very place. ‘This area was so isolated, you’d go mad if you were stationed there for long. We had to wait there until there was a ship to take us down to Colombo.’

  There was also, for an eighteen-year-old, a glimpse into deprivation which, even in the 1940s, seemed simply beyond imagination.

  ‘We arrived in Bombay and you have never seen poverty like it. Bombay now is poor – seventy years ago, it was unbelievable. Most of the streets had a sheet of corrugated iron leaning against the wall and down over the pavement. And a family would live under there. All along the pavements would be heaps of corrugated iron – and families living there just to try and work in Bombay. Imagine the impact on a young person brought up in reasonable conditions . . . But that was nothing compared with what we saw when we came back from Doolallee to pick up a ship.’

  Mr Budd may have been slowly making his way towards a sort of heaven on earth – but his journey there through a horror-film hell was not yet over. The next scene came in the form of an old ship that Joseph Conrad would have had difficulty doing justice to in his most harrowing tales.

  ‘The SS City of London,’ says Budd. ‘She was built in 1903. And ready for scrapping in 1936. The Indian government bought her and used her for transporting Indians – very desperate prisoners – to the Adamon Islands. The Adamon Islands pre-war were like Devil’s Island.

  ‘So when we got on this ship – and there were about three hundred of us – we went below deck, turned the bulkhead lights on – and it was black. But the blackness was moving. It was a million cockroaches. The whole interior.

  ‘There were six squat toilets and six wash basins for three hundred men. All night you’d hear the cockroaches dropping in your hammock. So the next night we all slept on deck, but we made a big mistake – we didn’t keep our shoes on. Because we hadn’t realised that there were also a million rats swarming – and they were nibbling our toes.

  ‘We kept ourselves amused – we each had a piece of wood, and you’d stand by the ship’s rail and see who could knock the most rats off in five minutes. Whoever did was the winner. And the food: there was a hut on deck with a big cauldron. That was curry. And that was what you ate. We had a mutiny. We all assembled on deck and asked for the senior naval officer. When he came we told him the food was unbearable. He said he’d get it improved as best he could. But of course, we were at sea. He couldn’t take anything on.

  ‘The engine broke down for three days and we drifted in the Indian Ocean,’ continues Mr Budd. If the rats and the cockroaches were not sufficient sources of discomfort, there was now also the thought of what was patrolling the waters beneath them. ‘Now the Germans had just sent two flotillas of U-boats into the Indian Ocean. But we eventually got to Colombo. We kissed the ground. That trip must have been ten or twelve days. But then of course you were eighteen and you didn’t worry. You didn’t have any work to do.’

  Mr Budd’s first professional task in the East was to engage with the complex Japanese encryption systems. ‘We were straight into HMS Anderson. Intelligence, intercept and decoding. A brilliant Australian had broken the Japanese code J-25. So obviously they did some decoding there and the codes that they couldn’t manage went to Bletchley Park.

>   ‘But can you imagine intercepting Japanese code? There were three codes, and all three were different. You were writing up and down the page three different codes.’

  While he became more fluent in this skill, however, Mr Budd – even among the colour and tropical lushness of Colombo – soon found himself a little frustrated by his working conditions. And he had heard tell of a more remote base that appealed enormously to his youthful sense of adventure. He describes his new role as ‘a story of men out on desert islands’.

  ‘I got fed up with just being in a big control room. I’d joined up to go to sea. So I wanted to go either on a ship or somewhere else.’ Somewhere else it was – somewhere excitingly far away. After Budd’s application was approved, he was flown some 2000 miles out into the Indian Ocean, down to the Cocos Islands. It was to be ‘the most incredible experience anyone could imagine in a life’.

  On this minuscule cluster of islands in the middle of a hypnotically jade sea was an intercept station of surprising strategic importance; a relay point between the Antipodes, India and Malaysia. Mr Budd was flown in by seaplane and sailed by dukon – a sort of local raft – to the jetty. ‘Really, it was just coral sand with some overgrown parts. Only a few thistleweeds and palm trees.’ But instantly he saw the romantic aspect. ‘You only really read about people shipwrecked on desert islands in books. But to have been part of a little naval group there . . . And no one knew, they were very secretive about the Cocos Islands.’

  Eighteen Special Wireless Operators were based on the islands; and these men were in turn looked after by the neighbouring island’s native population of a couple of hundred Malays. The operators were not merely tracking and intercepting Japanese coded signals. They were also engaged in direction finding; keeping close and accurate tabs on the positions of the Japanese submarines that ploughed through the Indian Ocean, threatening Allied shipping.

  One might imagine that life on this tiny cluster of islands was dazzling but basic; in fact, it was not basic at all. The men had accommodation and facilities far superior to those of their colleagues in Colombo. He and his colleagues lived very comfortably, three to a room, in specially built shacks. And thanks to the numbers – this was not like three men trapped in a lighthouse for the winter – the atmosphere was almost embarrassingly congenial.

  ‘Imagine living there on a little island not much more than two hundred yards wide and about half a mile long,’ says Mr Budd, gazing over some hauntingly evocative black and white pictures of himself and his comrades on the beach. ‘It was part of an atoll. A circle of islands. The volcano died 100,000 years ago and coral started growing round the rim of the [submerged] volcano. And when the coral got within a foot of the sea, the sunlight killed it. But the coral underneath pushed it up so coral rock formed into a circle. And over the years, the waves and the wind broke it up into beautiful white coral sand – and then from the Dutch East Indies came coconuts, driftwood, palm trees. All over thousands of years. Those palm trees started to grow, birds started to land, so you had this absolutely unbelievable, natural, unspoilt group of desert islands. Sheer paradise.’

  That paradise is now, some fear, at risk from the effects of climate change and rising sea levels. Nevertheless, it has become a luxury destination; the kind of place that makes travel writers salivate. On top of this, the microscopic islands and their tiny populations always seemed tougher than their intensely vulnerable appearance and geographical position would suggest. Situated midway between Ceylon and Australia, to the south of Christmas Island and west of Singapore, the Cocos (or Keeling) Islands have had a disproportionate number of visitors over the last three centuries, for as soon as the western colonising race began, the place was reckoned to have scientific, trading and – latterly – military uses.

  ‘The Scottish East India shipmen had gone there in 1820 and cultivated palm trees for copra because that was the only oil they had – whale oil and copra,’ says Peter Budd. ‘And John Clunies-Ross then lived there.’ In the nineteenth century, the Beagle, with Charles Darwin on board, swung by. ‘Clunies-Ross sent to Batavia and brought back a hundred Malays and their families. And he built a little village for them on the home island and it became a British protectorate. He was the King of the Cocos and he ruled.’

  By the time young Peter Budd arrived over 100 years later, hierarchies were less sharply delineated. ‘There were two petty officers – and one sub-lieutenant – in charge of us.’ In such a small group, discipline was scarcely an issue – each man knew exactly what work he must do, and the levels of concentration he had to maintain. In other areas, though, given the remoteness and the climate, there was a certain laxity. ‘We’d gone native,’ says Mr Budd. ‘The lieutenant just wore his cap. He was in shorts, same as the rest of us.

  ‘When we went over to Home Island – where the natives were – you wore a uniform then.’ Otherwise, there was strategic value in keeping it casual, or so it was thought; any Japanese surveillance planes passing overhead would apparently see civilians rather than naval operatives. Furthermore, Mr Budd was still in that uneasy twilight world between civilian and military.

  Amid the minute population of the island were the Malay folk, descendants of those who had come over with Clunies-Ross, and who continued to act as staff (though rather better paid and treated than in the Victorian era). ‘Cable and Wireless had come here in 1903, and they built the corrugated iron huts,’ says Mr Budd. ‘That was when it became a relay station. The cable came from Singapore to Australia and this was exactly in the middle.’ Despite being little more than a speck in a vast turquoise ocean, the islands saw a little involvement in the First World War, with a German cruiser seeking to wreck the relay station. As the Germans prepared to destroy the transmitters, however, an SOS had been sent out and some Australian troops, on their way to Egypt, were redirected to Direction Island. The enemy was thwarted.

  By the time war with Japan had been declared, Direction Island was once more fulfilling that strategic signals role, alongside the other invaluable work of Direction Finding. ‘Cocos was vital – if you imagine the Indian Ocean, they had nowhere on the east,’ says Mr Budd. In other words, this negligible speck in the middle of a vast ocean was of vital intelligence value – closer than most other stations for the purposes of monitoring Japanese movements and submarine positions. ‘The Japanese were all down Malaya, Sumatra, all the islands,’ says Mr Budd. ‘So Cocos direction finding was very important.’

  Even day-to-day operational movements yielded information, specifically to do with supply lines of particular importance to the Japanese forces – chiefly because they became stretched so thinly. But the Japanese were also supplying the Germans with other commodities. ‘I remember the time I heard a German submarine, which at the time I heard it would have undoubtedly been a cargo one. They ran cargo submarines from Yokohama round to Brest, with rubber.’

  One might imagine that the work, in such an isolated location, would lead to a sort of tropical cabin fever, where perspective would be lost and real life would seem distant. You might imagine also that given the remoteness, the intensity of the job might increase. But somehow, according to Peter Budd, it seemed that the reverse was true.

  This was no place for short-sightedness, or indeed for daydreaming. One of the main concerns was to keep a sharp eye out not just for hostile craft but hostile local wildlife. ‘You did twelve hours on, twelve hours off, then twenty-four hours off,’ says Mr Budd. ‘The usual watch system – one on, two off. It wasn’t too bad in that respect. Twelve hours duty. When you’re young, you’re able to cope with that sort of thing. But when you were sat in the intercept room you might, for instance, feel something crawling up your shorts. And it would be a centipede. This happened to one naval officer and he made a mistake – he knocked the centipede backwards instead of upwards and the centipede put its tail in him. The officer was paralysed from the waist down. That’s how dangerous centipedes can be.’ At the start of the night watches, ‘you would walk out t
hrough the jungle’; in the shimmering tropical darkness, the greatest care had to be taken to avoid other poisonous fauna and flora.

  ‘Any advice on these kinds of things, we picked up from the locals,’ adds Mr Budd. Which was handy, because they had certainly received no advice before going. ‘No one in Colombo knew what it was like there.

  ‘And then you could catch dengue fever, which I did. That was mosquito-borne. It’s not as bad as malaria. You’re knocked out for about a week or two, and then you recover and you don’t get outbreaks of it again. We had someone there with a first aid box and if you were ill, you were allowed one aspirin. If you were quite ill, two. And if you had appendicitis, you had three.’

  After this came the work itself. Mr Budd recalls how, almost without thinking about it, he developed the knack for listening to two sets of signals at once, different headphones held to each ear. ‘You had split headphones. So you were listening out on the U-boat frequency for the Indian Ocean, for instance, and also you were listening out to your own command, the dummy message that was being sent out from Colombo to all the DF stations in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. There were forty operators all over the area, listening to the various frequencies, and if a ship came up on one of them with a message, [the Colombo controller] gave a call, a special sign. You immediately started to find the frequency that he was telling you a ship was transmitting on. In your other ear, you were listening to a frequency in Japanese and writing that down.

  ‘You’d develop the knack,’ says Mr Budd. But in this, he is being rather modest, for he and his team were also wrestling with the intricacies of Japanese codes. It wasn’t merely a matter of transcribing Morse – it was a case of transcribing it into Japanese. ‘You wrote the symbols up and down the page,’ says Mr Budd. ‘You’d finish one lot of headed paper, someone would take it away, you’d finish another one, someone took that away.’ So when the transmissions came, the work was frantic. But the transmissions were not constant. ‘When you were listening to something like the big Japanese naval station at Saigon, they didn’t transmit all the time so often you were just listening. And when it was quiet, you put American Forces Network on – you’d have that in one ear, and transmissions from Saigon in the other ear.’