2 Mar 2005 14:02
OBITUARY - Brian Townend
THE TIMES March 02, 2005 OBITUARY - Brian Townend ------------------------ Cryptanalyst who learnt Japanese from a destroyer's logbook and broke the enemy's naval codes AFTER reading Greats at Oxford, Brian Townend was recruited by the Foreign Office at the outset of the Second World War and was sent to the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park to train as a cryptanalyst. As such he was to make a contribution to the prosecution of the war in the Far East through the reading of Japanese encrypted signal traffic. For this purpose he learnt Russian and Japanese, both with a very specialised vocabulary. Indeed his Japanese was learnt from the logbook of a captured destroyer of the Imperial Navy. In 1942 he was posted as a civilian attached to the Royal Navy intelligence staff at Kilindini in Kenya, where one of the preoccupations was breaking the ciphers with which the Japanese Merchant Navy communicated with the Imperial Navy and protected its shipping routes. Allied codebreakers had already, in May 1940, broken one code, dubbed JN39, causing the Japanese to change it. Then early in 1941, before America had been drawn into the war, the FBI had stolen a copy of the changed codebook from a Japanese freighter in San Francisco harbour. When they found out, the Japanese promptly changed the code again. The new code, named JN40 by the Allies, was worked on at Kilindini by John McInnes and Townend, who in September 1942 had a lucky break when a(Continue reading)
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