The Backroom Boys—and Girls

Abstract

After finishing their course at the Bedford Japanese School in 1942, some people were sent out to the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi, which was the equivalent to Bletchley Park in India and which also absorbed cryptographers from the Far East Combined Bureau after the fall of Singapore. The Wireless Experimental Centre was primarily concerned with monitoring communications connected with the Burma Campaign and the Japanese attempted invasion of India. Meanwhile, the members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service who had been working at the Far East Combined Bureau in Singapore, and who had been the first British servicewomen to be posted overseas, were transferred to Kilindini Naval Base near Mombasa, where the British Eastern Fleet was based after having been forced to leave its base on Ceylon (Sri Lanka). In 1944, as the tide of the war was turning, the Eastern Fleet returned to Ceylon: one of the troopships, SS Khedive Ismail, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and this led to the largest single loss of Allied servicewomen and of African troops in the war, including some of the Wrens.