Photo By Lori Stewart | In July 1942, Col. Abraham Sinkov arrived in Melbourne, Australia, to take command of...... read more read more
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by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
JULY 1942
In July 1942, Col. Abraham Sinkov arrived in Melbourne, Australia, to take command of the 837th Signal Service Detachment, the American contingent of the multi-national Central Bureau. In addition to being the senior U.S. Army officer in the signals intelligence (SIGINT) organization, he served as assistant director of the Central Bureau throughout the war.
Activated on 15 April 1942, the Central Bureau was the theater SIGINT organization for Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA). [See "This Week in MI History" #36 15 April 1942] The bureau was comprised of men and women from fourteen different military organizations of six nations, including the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. Under the overall direction of Col. Spencer B. Akin, SWPA’s chief signal officer, the Central Bureau provided valuable intelligence for MacArthur’s operations throughout the war. It intercepted and decrypted Japanese ground, air, and naval radio traffic and supplied adjacent theaters of operations with pertinent radio intelligence. Given its multi-national nature, the bureau had three assistant directors: Maj. Alastair W. Sandford of the Australian Army, Wing Cmdr. H. Roy Booth of the Royal Australian Air Force, and Colonel Abraham Sinkov of the U.S. Army.
Born in 1907 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Sinkov had earned his Bachelor’s, Master’s and Ph.D. in mathematics by the time he was twenty-six. In April 1930, William Friedman hired him as one of the first three cryptanalysts in the Army’s Signal Intelligence Service. [See "This Week in MI History" #34 1 April 1930] Sinkov worked for Friedman through June 1942, when he departed for Australia to lead the American personnel of the Central Bureau.
The original core of Americans in the Central Bureau were several soldiers of the 2d Signal Service Company who had fled the Japanese attack on the Philippines. Arriving in Australia in March 1942, General MacArthur radioed the War Department of his urgent need for more personnel to establish his own SIGINT organization for SWPA. In response, on 16 April 1942, six American officers and eight enlisted men arrived in Australia and, two months later, they were augmented with another three officers and twelve enlisted men. Sinkov arrived with the second group and assumed command of this contingent, designated the 837th Signal Service Detachment.
Initially, the detachment set up operations in a rented private home on Melbourne’s Main Street. In September, when MacArthur relocated his headquarters to Brisbane, the Central Bureau, including Sinkov and his detachment, followed. After tracking down the state-of-the-art IBM computers sent from the U.S.—they had sat on a pier in the Sydney harbor for several months—Sinkov had them overhauled and installed in a garage at 21 Henry Street, several blocks from MacArthur’s headquarters.
In May 1943, the 837th was inactivated and replaced by the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS), under the command of Col. Harold Doud. Later in the year, Colonel Sinkov took command of the SIS, dual-hatting him as one of the three assistant directors of the Central Bureau and the commander of the American contingent. He would retain these positions until the end of the war.
The SIS’s primary focus was on codebreaking, not intercept or analysis. One of the successes credited to Sinkov’s organization was the breaking of the Japanese Army’s Water Transportation Code used to coordinate and control unit movements by sea. [See "This Week in MI History" #35 6 April 1943] This cryptologic feat opened the way to break other high-level Japanese codes, giving a distinct advantage to the Allied forces in the Pacific.
The SIS was inactivated in November 1945, at which time Sinkov was tasked with establishing the Army Security Agency Pacific theater headquarters in Manila. [See "This Week in MI History" #162 25 November 1945] Later, as a civilian, he worked for the National Security Agency, from which he retired in 1962.
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| Date Taken: | 06.30.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 06.30.2023 17:02 |
| Story ID: | 448439 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 66 |
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