Earlier this month I became the custodian of last resort of a small collection of Japanese dictionaries that once belonged to one of Canada’s earliest codebreakers, Earl R. Hope. Most of the dictionaries date from the 1950s and 1960s, when Hope was working as a translator for the Defence Research Board (DRB), but four of them date from the Second World War or earlier, and at least one of those was actually used in the Examination Unit, Canada’s first cryptanalytic organization, as evidenced by the stamp on its title page.

Hope was a linguistic prodigy. Born in 1906 in Brandon, Manitoba, he grew up in the Vancouver area, where as a child he learned Cantonese during regular visits to a Chinese grocery store and laundry. During his time at the Examination Unit he “could boast of a good knowledge of thirteen languages,” including Japanese, German, and Italian, and when interviewed in 1970 shortly before his retirement from the DRB he was reportedly “able to translate about 20 languages fluently.”

Hope joined the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR) as an intercept operator early in the war, well before hostilities with Japan began. But Canada was already participating in the broader British Empire signals intelligence effort to monitor Japan’s radio communications and had in fact been doing so since 1925. Very few Canadians other than those of Japanese heritage* had any knowledge of Japanese, which made Hope’s fluency in the language highly valuable.

(* There were more than 20,000 Japanese Canadians, mostly living in British Columbia, at the beginning of the war, but Canadian authorities accepted only a tiny number for military service, and none were assigned to intelligence-related duties before 1945; beginning in early 1942, the great majority of Japanese Canadians were expelled from their homes and interned until after the end of the war. A formal apology and nominal compensation for this deeply shameful policy were finally offered only in 1988.)

At some point, certainly no later than early 1941, Hope was promoted to naval lieutenant and transferred to translation and analysis duties for the RCN’s Operational Intelligence Centre in Ottawa. In early 1942, shortly after Japan entered the war, he was appointed briefly as the Canadian liaison officer at the U.S. Navy intercept station at Bainbridge, Washington, which had just been given direction-finding assignment control over the entire West Coast direction-finding network, including the Canadian station at Gordon Head, B.C. Not long afterwards, however, he was assigned to the Examination Unit (XU) and returned to Ottawa, beginning work on 10 June 1942.

 

Japanese Diplomatic Section 

When Hope arrived at the XU, he was put in charge of the section working on Japanese diplomatic communications. At that point, the XU was almost exactly one year old. Its founding director, the notorious Herbert Yardley, had come and then been disposed of, and it was now under the direction of Oliver Strachey, a veteran cryptanalyst on loan from Britain’s Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), who was himself soon to be succeeded by the “younger and more energetic” Tony Kendrick, also from GC&CS.

The most important Japanese diplomatic communications were secured by a machine system known to the U.S. codebreakers who cracked it as PURPLE. Canada was never involved in the attack on PURPLE. But not all of Japan’s embassies had the PURPLE machine, and not all traffic, no matter where it originated, was transmitted via these machines. Codebook-based systems carried a lot of Japan’s diplomatic traffic, with higher-category systems being augmented by various procedures, such as the use of additives or transposition processes, to provide greater security.

The XU began translating material from some of the simpler book-based systems as early as August 1941. When Oliver Strachey arrived in January 1942, he brought among other treasures a partially reconstructed codebook and partial list of keys for a high-category transposition system called JAE that was sometimes used for some of Japan’s most sensitive communications.

The diplomatic section found itself unable to read JAE traffic, however, because the codebook was too incomplete, no one in the section had any experience in Japanese book-breaking (the process of recovering the unknown values in a codebook), and the cryptanalyst assigned to assist the translators, although capable, had insufficient knowledge of Japanese to be of much help.

Only with Hope’s arrival did things begin to change. “On his first day in the Unit, Lt. Hope was able to produce the first translations of JAE traffic, but no consistent results could be expected until an organized attack on the above problems was made.”

When Tony Kendrick took charge of the XU in August 1942, he “took great interest in the Japanese section and was responsible for an immediate and far-reaching change in the scope of its work.” In the wake of Hope’s arrival, “quite a large number of additions to the JAE code book had been discovered, but this... was incidental; it was not considered that the section was in any way taking part in the cryptographic work in progress at other centers, and none of these recovered code values had been cabled to other authorities. Mr. Kendrick now suggested that it was time for the section to undertake some share of the cryptographic work, such as the solution of JAE transposition keys.”

This decision marked the beginning of the section’s active participation in the British and American effort against Japanese diplomatic communications, and its work against the system was ramped up significantly over the next several months.

“The first JAE transposition key solved by the Unit was cabled to England in January 1943. From this time until the cancellation of JAE cypher [on 1 July 1943], the Examination Unit was able to make a steady contribution to this work. Mr. Kendrick was much interested in it, he and Lt. Hope solving about equal numbers of those sent out.”

(The quotations above are taken from the chapter on the Japanese Diplomatic Section that Hope wrote for the History of the Examination Unit, which was compiled at the end of the war. The chapter – see pages 145 to 182 – contains detailed descriptions of the JAE system and the later ciphers worked on by the section.)

In addition to its contribution to Allied intelligence, the XU's successes against Japanese diplomatic communications and its parallel successes against Vichy French communications led the Department of External Affairs to set up a Special Intelligence Section (SIS) under Dr. Herbert Norman to exploit the decrypts for Canadian government use. Even after the SIS was shut down in early 1945, Norman continued to read and summarize Japanese intercepts on behalf of the department, while another officer did the same for French traffic.  

 

Post-war activities 

At the beginning of August 1945, with the war in Europe over, the XU itself was shut down. But the sections working on Japanese diplomatic and military communications continued to operate and were transferred to the military-run Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU), which remained in operation after the war and ultimately evolved into the civilian Communications Branch of the National Research Council (CBNRC), now known as CSE.

Among the XU employees who stayed on were both Hope and his wife, Myra. Myra had joined the Japanese Diplomatic Section as a volunteer in January 1943 and was taken on as a full-time employee six weeks later.

In the immediate post-war period, the JDU continued working on Japanese communications, but by early 1946 the unit had obtained a set of new, post-war targets in Europe, South America, and the Far East. These targets, which were agreed in consultation with the SIGINT authorities in London and Washington, helped to fill gaps in allied SIGINT coverage, but they were intended mainly as training opportunities for the Canadian unit and did not represent particular Canadian government priorities.

Hope was put in charge of the Far East section, which focused initially on internal civil communications of the Chinese nationalist government. The History of CBNRC reports, somewhat unhelpfully, that “The [redacted] traffic, which was based on [redacted] was decoded and issued with the aid of a converted [redacted; probably "Japanese"] typewriter, developed by the fertile brain of LCdr. Earl Hope, the Head of the [redacted] Section, and an expert in nine or ten languages.” (Volume I, chap 4, para 4.4)

CBNRC’s Chinese tasks were switched to the Communist government following the creation of the People’s Republic, but then dropped in 1957 when CBNRC shifted to an almost exclusive focus on the northern Soviet Union and the Arctic. Today, however, China is once again on the list of CSE’s primary targets, as this recruitment notice for Foreign Language Intelligence Analysts (Chinese) shows.

For reasons that are not fully explained in the available records, CBNRC’s overseers did not want to keep Myra Hope on the staff of the permanent post-war organization. When the subject was discussed in June 1946, the committee controlling Canadian SIGINT policy recommended that CBNRC “follow the policy of the Civil Service Commission of not employing a husband and wife within the Unit. However it was agreed that in the case of Mrs. Hope she should be appointed on a casual basis for a period of two months to enable a replacement to be trained to take over her duties.” The period in question would have begun in September 1946, when CBNRC formally began operations. 

A staff list from 1 October 1946 shows that she was still working for CBNRC at that time, but there is no public information that shows how long she may have remained after that date.

What we do know is that Earl Hope stayed with CBNRC only a little over two years longer than that, leaving the organization to take up a position as a translator at the Defence Research Board in December 1948. He remained at the DRB until his retirement in 1971, mostly producing unclassified translations of scientific papers that had originally been published in Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and other languages. Most of the dictionaries in the collection date from his time with the DRB. (This photo shows Hope in 1970.)

The dictionaries

So how did I end up with the collection?

Myra Hope died in 1978, and in 1979 Earl married Betty Burton, who had worked in the French section of the Examination Unit and went on to a long post-war career at CBNRC. Following Betty’s death in 2006, a family member donated 34 boxes of their books – mostly dictionaries and phrasebooks in a wide variety of languages – to CSE. The agency called this trove the Burton–Hope Collection.

At some point in the years that followed CSE decided it didn’t have room for all the books in the collection, and the ten dictionaries now sitting on my shelves were among those that didn’t make the cut.

I’m a little surprised that a book with such a clear connection to Canada’s first cryptanalytic organization was among the discards, but I don’t know what books CSE retained. It may be that they had plenty from the XU – perhaps even another copy of the same dictionary.

In any case, some unidentified soul salvaged them and took them home, and that’s how they came, either directly or indirectly, into the possession of the person who ultimately gave them to me. That person, who prefers to remain anonymous, made an extended effort to find a more appropriate home for them, contacting Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian War Museum, and a number of other institutions. But none were interested.

I don’t share that lack of interest, of course, but I don’t find it entirely incomprehensible. The books are standard dictionaries that were widely available. A few have minor notations, but there’s nothing in them that provides insight into how they were used within the XU or elsewhere or that tells us much about their owner. There’s really not a lot that historians could learn from examining them.

I can imagine the dictionary with the XU stamp being used as part of a really fascinating exhibit at the Canadian War Museum on the origins of Canada’s codebreaking capability – how about it, folks? – but, honestly, I trust the staff at the museum to make their own decisions on questions like that.

For me, what makes these books special is that they offer a tangible, physical connection to the founding years of the Canadian cryptologic program: at least one of them was actually there in the building, in use during the dawn of Canadian cryptanalysis. The subject of the books, Japanese, was one of the main targets of that program. And the collection as a whole was assembled by a singular figure in that history, not by any means the only brilliant mind who worked at “Canada’s Bletchley Park,” but one who possessed a perhaps unique linguistic genius, and who was an important participant in the wartime development of Canadian signals intelligence and the early days of its transition to the post-war world. 

To me, that’s more than enough reason to preserve them.


Here’s the full list of the books in the collection:

- Koop, Albert J. and Inada Hogitaro, Japanese Names and How to Read Them (London: Eastern Press, 1923).
- Ueda's Daijiten, A Japanese Dictionary of Chinese Characters and Compounds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942). This huge dictionary is the one with the XU stamp.
- Fuzambo's Comprehensive English-Japanese Dictionary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942).
- Yamagiwa, Joseph, Modern Conversational Japanese (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1942).
- Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1954).
- Japanese Scientific Terms, Chemistry (Tokyo: Nankodo, 1955).
- Japanese Scientific Terms, Mechanical Engineering (Tokyo: Nankodo, 1955).
- Japanese-Chinese dictionary of foreign words (Beijing, 1960)
- Sansom, George, An Historical Grammar of Japanese (Oxford University Press, 1968)
- Vaccari, Oreste & Enko Elisa Vaccari, Brush Up Your Japanese (Tokyo, 1969).