Early Days and Orders from London

"War Office: Main Building," n.d. Image: IWM (H 42536). Imperial War Museum Collections, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/
item/object/205513833.

In September 1939, the Dominion of Canada went to war with Germany in support of Britain. Canada was the first North American country to enter the conflict we now call the Second World War, and its southern neighbour would not join the fight until the end of 1941.

During the early stages of the war, London closely coordinated the contributions of its dominions and empire more broadly to aid in the Allied war effort. It was in December 1939 that Canada came to be assigned special intelligence duties by the British War Office.

On December 15th, 1939, after some informal conversations between Canadian and British military intelligence officers, Major H.E. Taber of the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals received an official request from M.I.8 in London. As preparations for war with Germany were well underway in Britain and France, Canada—an ocean away from where the fighting would take place in Europe—could contribute meaningfully to Allied intelligence due to its geographic advantage: Canadians could reliably pick up wireless signals coming to and from the Americas. The War Office requested that the Canadians monitor all traffic that seemed strange (traffic that was not “recognized work”) and in particular that Canadian signallers try to listen in on a few “U.S.A. amateur [radio] stations” which could not be reliably heard in Britain, but which may be transmitting to Britain’s enemies (CDWI00033). On December 19th, M.I.8 clarified the initial request by stating that Canadian interception efforts should focus on “illegal and amateur” radio traffic (CDWI00035). By this time, Canada had already been sending transcriptions of intercepted radio transmissions to London, and it would continue to do so throughout the war.

Thus began Canada’s primary signals intelligence mission in the early Second World War: keeping an eye on the Americas on behalf of the Allies.

How did Canadian military intelligence begin to comply with this broad mission from London? One of the practical considerations that came with the territory of radio interception was the need for Canadian personnel who knew how to operate radio technology. It was not a universal skill.

Declassified documents from January 1941 show the Canadian military’s continuous efforts to recruit Canadian amateur radio operators to help shoulder the burden of wireless interception across Canada. On January 7th, 1941, the Controller of Radio, Walter Rush, wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel W.W. Murray of Military Intelligence to provide him with a list of Canadian radio amateurs who were prepared to carry out duties on behalf of the Department of National Defence (CDWI00058). Because the military and R.C.M.P. closely controlled all radios operating in Canada during the war, these amateurs needed special authorization to even begin operating their equipment on behalf of the Canadian military (CDWI00059). We will see more of the initial implementation of communication controls in Canada in early 1940 on the next page of this briefing book.

Cooperation between military intelligence and the R.C.M.P. was very important in the early stages of the war, before the military had fully adjusted to the previously-inconceivable scope of its new interception operations. In January 1941, after Captain E.M. Drake made a visit to R.C.M.P. headquarters, the R.C.M.P.’s Assistant Commissioner and Director of Criminal Investigation, R.R. Tait, wrote to Colonel P. Earnshaw, Director of Signals at the Department of National Defence (D.N.D). In the letter, Tait informed the military of several radio stations and frequencies which the R.C.M.P. knew to be used by Germany or Japan to communicate with people in the Americas, and in one case, a frequency used for direct contact between Germany and Japan whose signals crossed North America (CDWI00063). The D.N.D.’s grateful reply came from Lieutenant-Colonel W.W. Murray, G.S.O. 1 Intelligence, who had forwarded the information to the Officer Commanding the Experimental Wireless Station at Rockcliffe, Captain E.M. Drake (CDWI00064). Part of setting up for wartime signals intelligence meant working with the R.C.M.P., who had been monitoring illegal radio traffic in peacetime and already had some knowledge and expertise that could prove useful to military signals intelligence.

In early 1941, the Canadians were still fine-tuning their interception operations in Military District No. 7 (in Saint John, New Brunswick). Brigadier G.G. Anglin, in charge of radio interception in M.D. 7, wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Murray in Ottawa to let him know that although the inaccuracy of transcriptions recorded by Anglin’s men still left some messages entirely indecipherable, they were committed to improvement. Problems encountered by the monitoring station at M.D. 7 included inadequate interception technology (messages sounded fuzzy in bad weather), and that the men were having trouble keeping up with the speed of messages and getting them all written down accurately. Brigadier Anglin wrote that “the men have been encouraged to proceed with their duty of monitoring, in which they display considerable interest, and have been urged to improve their accuracy and speed” (CDWI00046).

Also by January 1941, the Canadians were intercepting radio transmissions from Mexico and South America (CDWI00036, CDWI00037), and strange cipher traffic in the United States (CDWI00039), forwarding it all on to London. It is clear that by this time, the Canadians had their eyes (and ears!) trained on the Americas and any potential threats or subversion that might impact the Allied war effort. The following two pages of this briefing book deal with Canada’s early efforts in the realm of signals intelligence and counter-intelligence in the Second World War throughout 1940 and the first few months of 1941.

In the early stages of the Second World War, there were technological, skill-based, and organizational challenges to setting up Canadian wartime signals intelligence. The process of creating a massive, nation-wide wireless interception program would be a continuous process of learning, expansion, and adaptation as the war went on. Fairly quickly, instead of just forwarding raw intercepts to London, Ottawa would develop its own expertise in deciphering and translating intercepted messages. Soon the Canadian Department of External Affairs would be regularly receiving intelligence collected by Canadian radio interception stations, allowing the Canadian government to get a more accurate picture of the war-torn world.