Intelligence
In April 1942, Brigadier General Spencer Akin and his Australian counterpart at LHQ, Major General Colin Simpson, agreed to pool their resources and establish a combined intelligence organisation, known as the Central Bureau. The Australian, British, and US Armies, as well as the RAAF and the RAN all supplied personnel for this formation, which worked on codebreaking and decrypting Japanese message traffic. This Magic and Ultra intelligence was vitally important to operations in SWPA.
To handle other forms of intelligence, Blamey and MacArthur created the Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB). This included the Services Reconnaissance Department with its Z Special Unit that carried out special operations like Operation Jaywick; Secret Intelligence Australia; the Coastwatchers, who watched for Japanese aircraft and ships from observation posts behind Japanese lines; and the propaganda specialists of the Far Eastern Liaison Office (FELO). Two other important combined organisations, not part of AIB, were the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS), which translated Japanese documents, and the Allied Geographical Section, which prepared maps and charts, and drafted appreciations of the terrain.
Since quality tended to be more important than quantity in intelligence, this proved to be a fruitful field in which the minor Allies, Australia and the Netherlands, could play an important part. Good intelligence enabled the Allied forces to minimise the risk of failures and maximise the chances of success. Moreover, the organisation built up in Australia proved to be useful after the war as well. David Horner later wrote that "it may prove that present day intelligence cooperation has proved to be the most lasting and important legacy of Australia's experience of coalition warfare in the Second World War."
Read more about this topic: South West Pacific Area (command)
Famous quotes containing the word intelligence:
“... perhaps there exists only one intelligence from which the world sublets, one intelligence toward which each person, from the depths of his individual body, directs his gaze, as in the theater where, though each has a seat, however, there is only one stage.... But if it we all shared the same intelligence, [Bergotte] would, upon hearing me express [my ideas], remember them, love them, smile at them....”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“Most women’s intelligence tends more to the improving of their folly than their reason.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)