Gwenda’s war: how I listened to the Japanese from a secret hut in Canberra

The young woman who helped sink Japanese submarines. 

Gwenda Moulton served in the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service during the Second World War as WR/36 Petty Officer Wran Telegraphist. So why was she listening out for .-. ... -. ---

By Tim Barlass and Roland Leikauf

Gwenda Moulton aged just 19-years-old sat along with some six other girls in their green uniforms in the small room located at HMAS Harman outside Canberra she knew only as ‘Y hut’.

It was 1942 and as a newly qualified telegraphist, she had been listening in to Japanese morse code messages over her headphones well into her evening shift when, without warning, came the most important signal she recognised.

It was ‘RS NO’ (the girls knew it as RS negative) .-. ... -. --- the Japanese codeword for submarine.

“As soon as you heard that you called out to your leading hand,” Gwenda, now Gwenda Garde, 102, explained at her home in Orange in the NSW Central Tablelands. “She would then dial the direction finder operator who was way out up on a hill in the country.”

“He would contact other direction finders and they would cross reference their bearings to get a fix on where the Japanese submarine was. We never found out if they sank the submarine.”

Other morse messages she received were sent by teleprinter to Melbourne where they were decoded.

It was a time of change for the forces in Australia. 

Even before declaration of the Second World War on September 3, 1939, several women’s voluntary organisations had sprung up, despite the derision heaped upon them. One was the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps started in Sydney by Florence McKenzie (affectionately known as ‘Mrs Mac’) who trained girls who at the time were barred from joining any of the Services in Australia, but were willing to learn wireless telegraphy.

Such was the bureaucracy that it wasn’t until April 18,1941 that the Minister for Navy reluctantly approved the employment of telegraphists for HMAS Harman, the navy’s communications base just outside Canberra – with the proviso that no publicity be given to the break in gender tradition.

Gwenda was among those first 48 recruits.

“I heard about Mrs McKenzie and went to her classes in Clarence Street,” she said. “She was the first female electrical engineer, founder of the Women's Emergency Signalling Corps and a lifelong promoter for technical education for women.

“She was a little woman, not much bigger than me at five foot, but about 20 years older,” said Gwenda. She was quite stern with you; you had to do what she said.

“Mrs Mac got the navy, with great difficulty, to take girls – I was WRANS number 36. When we got to our accommodation, they wanted us to paint the place, to camouflage it. The male telegraphists went off to sea and we moved into their cottages. We ate in the mess; the girls ate on one side and the remaining men on the other.

“There was a dance every Saturday night in Canberra. I would dance with boys from the army and air force but we weren’t allowed to date naval officers, they were way above us.

“The girls were divided into two lots of 12. One lot went to the ordinary station and did ordinary communications and the group I was in went to a very secret location called the Y Hut, it was a separate little building. It was important work but it was so secret we didn’t know what the other people on the base were doing. We weren’t allowed to talk about it and we had to learn the Japanese morse, which was a bit different to ours.

“The Japanese didn’t know but we had their code books and we knew, for instance, what their signal was for ‘submarine’. It was dit dah dit dit dit dit dah dit dah dah dah.

"You would listen in to different frequencies until you heard something that you knew was Japanese. We knew quite a lot of the frequencies that they used. We would write it down in morse code and then we had to change it into letters (Kana) so it could be sent on the teleprinter to Melbourne. [Kana was a system of syllabic writing used for Japanese.]

“When you heard ‘submarine’ there was great excitement! You’d call to the leading hand, tell her the frequency you were on, the DF [Direction Finding] station got in touch with others and they took a bearing. There were a lot of submarines down our coast but you never knew if that submarine was sunk.

"It’s a funny thing but you got to know the Japanese a bit, they could be very cross with each other, you could hear the tension in their sending.

“I was made a leading hand and then a petty officer which meant I didn’t have to sit there listening, I just had to be in charge.

“In 1944 I was based in Townsville, then a petty officer in charge of 32 girls. Dengue fever was rife and everyone seemed to get it at one time or another. As soon as the war ended they took me off listening to the Japanese and we had to listen to the Russians. I thought that was terrible because the Russians were our Allies. When the Australian prisoners of war we released they came through Townsville. They were so emaciated; it was so sad to see them.

Gwenda didn’t speak about her wartime role to anyone until Covid when she sat down with her daughter Robin and told her the complete story.

Mrs Mac was appointed OBE in 1950. She died in 1982.

Gwenda had a steady boyfriend, Robert, a Spitfire pilot who was killed when he was shot down over the North Atlantic. After the war she married his best friend, John, who had flown Kittyhawks in New Guinea. They had three children and their eldest daughter, Robin, said: “Mum may be 102, but she’s as bright as ever and playing bridge four times a week - and still winning!”

Australian National Maritime Museum historian and curator Dr Roland Leikauf, who interviewed Gwenda, sees the morse code WRANS as another case where war-time shortage helped women break gender barriers in a reluctant, male-dominated world.