OTTAWA’S ENIGMA CONNECTION
Team intercepted coded messages
The story of Alan Turing’s efforts to crack the Nazis’ Enigma code — made famous yet again by the Oscar-nominated film The Imitation Game — has a seldom-told Ottawa connection. Just ask Ernie Brown. Brown is one of the last surviving members of a crack team of radio interceptors who were stationed in a secret building in the nation’s capital during the Second World War under a classified program code-named Ultra.
There, they intercepted coded enemy messages and relayed them back to Britain.
Brown began his involvement as an Ottawa radio operator in 1942.
“I listened in on coded signals from any German vessels. Anything over 100 watts was heard across North America,” recalls Brown, who is now 95 and lives in Stouffville, Ont.
Copying down the Morse code signal intercepted on Hallicrafters receivers, Brown would listen for a different tone to the signals, which indicated it was hand-keyed rather than a machinegenerated signal.
“The hand-keyed signals meant it was from a U-boat that had surfaced,” he said.
The radio frequencies used would often alternate, so operators would have to listen in on multiple frequencies as part of their round-the-clock job. Twenty-four hours a day on eight-hour shifts, Brown joined more than 20 operators in a small, remote building as an employee of the “Department of Transport — Radio Division, Ottawa HQ.”
Once the coded messages were intercepted, they — along with similar messages picked up from other overseas stations — were transferred to a place known only as “Admiralty” to be deciphered and analyzed at Bletchley Park in London by Turing’s team.
First located in rooms on Wellington Street, the radio receiver operations were hampered by unwanted interference from the electric streetcars and power wires. The operation moved to empty greenhouses at the Experimental Farm, but high humidity in the greenhouse affected the sensitive radio equipment and the operation was moved again, this time to a farmhouse at the corner of McCooey and Ash lanes. All that remains there today is a treelined empty lot.
As international tensions mounted, the farmhouse was soon overflowing with radio-receiving equipment meant to intercept German communications. Permission was quickly granted to build a new building to accommodate this then full-time war operation in 1941. A new Art Deco structure was built on the west side of the Experimental Farm, near what is now Merivale Road.
Initially with a staff of 20 radio operators and other personnel, Ottawa’s intercept station grew to include a staff of 125 men and women who worked there in the final years of Second World War.
Brown was ordered to keep his “lips sealed” about his job at the farm, but since retiring in 1972, he has created a website dedicated to honouring his fellow code interceptors. Brown says that, of his Ottawa co-workers, “I think I’m the last one still around.”
Brown’s code-breaking efforts under project Ultra were recognized in 2010, when he received a certificate from Bletchley Park that hangs on his wall: “In Recognition of Your Service at An Outstation.”
Referring to a map drawn by Brown and historical aerial images of the farm area, it seems this once-vital interception station building stood until the early 2000s, when it was unceremoniously bulldozed to the ground.
Intercepted German communications from Ottawa’s Experimental Farm and those from No. 1 Canadian Special Wireless Group at Leitrim (Canada’s first signals intelligence intercept site, built in 1939), unfortunately, are not mentioned in most books or The Imitation Game, despite the role played by hundreds of people in Ottawa and across the country in other receiving stations (such as Father Point on the East Coast; at Strathburn in southwestern Ontario; at Forest, near Rivers, Man.; and at Point Grey in Vancouver).
It was their work that eventually helped break the Enigma code and turn the tide against the Germans.
Perhaps Brown could unveil a commemorative plaque at the unmarked site and receive the recognition that he, and so many others, deserve for helping to bring the Allies victory.