FRUMEL

Fleet Radio Unit, Melbourne (FRUMEL) was a United States-Australian-British signals intelligence unit, founded in Melbourne, Australia during World War II. It was one of two major Allied signals intelligence units, called Fleet Radio Units, in the Pacific theatres, the other being FRUPAC (also known as Station HYPO), in Hawaii. FRUMEL was an inter-navy organisation, subordinate to the Commander of the United States Seventh Fleet, while the separate Central Bureau in Melbourne (later Brisbane) was attached to the Allied South West Pacific Area command headquarters.

FRUMEL was established at the Monterey Apartments in Queens Road, in early 1942, and was made up of three main groups. First was Lieutenant Rudolph J. (Rudi) Fabian's 75-man codebreaker unit, previously based at the United States Navy's Station CAST in the Philippines before being evacuated by submarine on 8 April 1942. The second was Commander Eric Nave's small Royal Australian Navy-supported cryptography unit, which had moved to the Monterey Apartments from Victoria Barracks in February 1942. Nave's unit was made up of a core of naval personnel, heavily assisted by university academics and graduates specialising in linguistics and mathematics. These included Arthur Dale Trendall, Athanasius Treweek, Eric Barnes, Jack Davies and Ronald Bond. The third group was a trio of British Foreign Office linguists (Henry Archer, Arthur Cooper and Hubert Graves), and Royal Navy support staff, evacuated from Singapore, particularly from the Far East Combined Bureau (FECB) there. IBM (punched-card) tabulating machines were obtained in 1942 to replace that left behind in Manila Bay on leaving Corregidor.

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