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By Root 2813 0

that twenty-one reports on Japan’s ‘preparations for Southward Move’ had been issued to the War Office and the Far East Combined Bureau between 30 November and 7 December 1941. These described a steady build-up of Japanese army and air force units in Indo-China, and included a report in early November that Japanese reinforcements ‘for ultimate despatch to Indo-China’ were arriving at Hainan Island (south-west China), and another in mid-November that the ‘Japanese [were] preparing to attack both Thailand and Burma’. On 5 December a source had reported thirty transports at Camranh Bay in southern Vietnam (one of the Japanese assembly points). ‘Strength of troops ashore estimated 48,000,’ continued the report, ‘with 250 aircraft.’

In August 1943, reviewing his work at Singapore, J. H. Green maintained that his liaison efforts had been particularly successful. Emphasising the personal factor, he reported that his liaison with Dutch and French colonial intelligence organisations in the Netherlands East Indies and French Indo-China was ‘founded entirely upon friendship and mutual trust’. When he began in 1938, official contacts with the British services had been prohibited by the Dutch (in keeping with their policy of neutrality), but he ‘commenced liaison with my friend Lovink’ (the local Dutch intelligence chief), who organised a false passport for Green to visit Batavia (Jakarta). The Governor-General of the colony was in on the relationship and (rather like General van Oorschot in The Hague) turned a blind eye to the contacts ‘provided that neither the Dutch nor the British Service Chiefs should know of it’. But the connection produced useful material. Lovink’s signals intelligence branch provided analysis of Japanese broadcast weather forecasts ‘as to time and place of invasion’, as well as two captured German cyphers and ‘two Chinese ciphers required by our cryptologists’, which were handed over to the signals intelligence section in Singapore. Green claimed that in 1941 his French liaison in Indo-China, code-named ‘Sectude’, had kept in clandestine contact using an unauthorised radio. From him ‘we received ample warning of the attack upon Siam [Thailand] and Malaya. A two months’ notice, a one month’s notice, a week’s notice and two days’ notice. The last warning gave the correct date and the actual places selected for the landings and the strength and movement of the enemy invasion fleet.’ Following the declaration of war, we received ‘full and last minute details of their [Japanese] Air and Military reinforcements to Indo-China and Siam and the location and construction of operational bases’. Green was ‘extremely proud of these successes. The full warning of the invasion’, he claimed, ‘was possibly the S.I.S.’s most spectacular success in the Far East over a period of years.’ But, however good this intelligence may have been (and in the circumstances it was understandable if Green hyped it up a bit), it could not be of much use without sufficient military forces in the region and their appropriate deployment. ‘Had we been in a position to adequately oppose the Japs or to advance against them,’ he wrote, ‘our organisation and the information given would have been invaluable and perhaps adequately appreciated.’

There were, in any case, problems with processing the material. Although Green’s reporting was apparently very well received by the War Office in London during the days immediately after the Japanese invasion, it does not appear to have contributed much, if anything, to the actual defence of Malaya. In May 1942 he asserted that much of his intelligence had been disregarded. ‘Evidently’, he wrote, ‘the pile of information which conclusively proved that a Japanese attack upon Siam and Malaya was to occur in the first week of December 1941 was set aside as “I” staff were told by a visitor from Siam that owing to Monsoon any attack would be impossible before March.’ Another ‘important contributory factor’, he claimed, was the ‘lack of any scientific system of collation. Owing to frequent changes of officers information