Eric Nave

Who is Eric Nave?

Captain Eric Nave was a Navy Paymaster Commander and an Australian cryptographer, before and during World War II. He served in the Navy from 1917 to 1949. As a midshipman in the 1920s, he was required to learn a foreign language and chose Japanese: "with French and German you got sixpence a day extra, for Japanese you got five bob". He spent two years in Japan, and transferred to the Royal Navy Sigint section in 1925, then the Government Code and Cipher School in London in 1927. In 1930 he was sent to the Far East Combined Bureau, in Hong Kong and later in Singapore. He was invalided sick to Melbourne in 1940 where he set up a small RAN cryptographic unit in Victoria Barracks. The unit had a core of naval personnel, with an appreciable number of university academics and graduates specialising in classics, linguistics and mathematics, e.g. Athanasius Treweek and Arthur Dale Trendall.

The unit outgrew Victoria Barracks, and moved to the Monterey building in February 1942. But Monterey also housed FRUMEL, run by Lieut Rudi Fabian, ex-Station CAST in the Philippines. Nave was eventually forced out of Monterey by Fabian, who apparently regarded him as a "security risk" – because he wanted to cooperate with the Army's Central Bureau. According to his staff, Nave often kept keys to new codes passed on by the Americans and British to himself, which might have been acceptable as a training exercise in peacetime, but not in time of war. Treweek said: "We always looked forward to his day off. We’d get the keys to his safe and find all this material in there." Nave also had difficulties with his superior, Commander Long, the Director of Naval Intelligence, whom he considered a man of no great ability.