Medic’s secret pinhole code informed wife
A soldier who served in the medical corps used an ‘‘ingenious’’ covert system to tell his family where he was stationed during World War II.
Private Kenneth Herbert Leak used a secret code – involving a pin, a map and specially folded letters – to communicate his location to his wife back at home on Auckland’s North Shore.
It was an act of disobedience that would have seen him severely disciplined, but Leak didn’t support the war and only participated ‘‘to do his bit’’, according to his son Norm Murray.
During the war, censors would intercept soldiers’ mail and black out or cut with a razor any detail that might convey a location.
In Leak’s soldier’s handbook it said: ‘‘The enemy wants information, so keep them in the dark. Gossip is dangerous and secrecy is key to success.’’
Private Leak bought two copies of an atlas from Whitcombe and Tomb, and gave a specially folded copy to his wife.
When Coralie Leak received a letter from her husband, she would place the letter’s folds over her map and hold it up to the light to reveal a pin prick in the paper.
Placing a drawing pin in the hole would reveal on the map where in the world he had been stationed. ‘‘It was ingenious,’’ said Murray. Leak was a bank clerk and had a mind for security and information, said his son, which in this case he used to thwart army censors.
‘‘When I was a kid it was part of the family folklore, although it could have been that half the blokes in the unit did it,’’ Murray said.
The holes in Leak’s map shows he visited New Caledonia and Guadalcanal island in the Solomon Islands, among other places.
In Guadalcanal, Leak wrote in his diary how New Zealand and Australian soldiers laboured with picks and shovels for two weeks in an attempt to build an airfield.
‘‘Then, the Americans showed up with bulldozers and laid down metal and had planes landing on it within half-an-hour.’’
Leak filled his war diary with illustrations of the places he visited and painted watercolours which he sent to his wife. One of them depicts the sinking of the American ship SS President Coolidge, which hit a minefield and blew its stern. The captain raced for shore and managed to run aground on the beach at Vanuatu.
However, Murray said the family never attended an Anzac Day service and war was not glorified in their household.
When Leak died in 1978, representatives of the RSA attended the funeral with the intention of laying a flag on his coffin and performing The Last Post, but the minister restrained the bugler, saying: ‘‘It wasn’t Leak’s way’’.
‘‘Dad wouldn’t often talk about the war, but I think he was a bit of a pacifist at heart. He wanted to ease the suffering of humanity in some way,’’ Murray said.
Murray said he believed that Leak avoided being a conscientious objector due to a ‘‘sense of duty’’ and compromised by joining the medical corps.
‘‘Back then people did their bit even though it was a colossal upheaval and sometimes the odds were against them.’’