Rear-Admiral Johannes Frans Willem Nuboer

J.F.W. Nuboer is best-known for his pre-war rather than his wartime exploits. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1921, and during the following years, specialized in communications. In 1930, he attended a course in cryptology given by Major H. Koot of the Dutch army. Following fleet exercises in the Netherlands in 1931, he concluded that the contemporary system for coding and decoding was too vulnerable; he advocated the introduction of the socalled "Enigma"-machines of German origin, which would gain world fame after World War II. After he graduated from the High Naval Academy in 1934, he wrote a particularly critical report about the combat readiness of the fleet.

That same year, Nuboer was appointed as head of the new Intelligence Bureau of the Naval Staff in the NEI. During the following four years, Nuboer would work closely with the famous "Kamer 14", the intelligence bureau of the colonial army. His activities were restricted to passive intelligence gathering: cracking codes and analyzing communication traffic. Nuboer ofcourse concentrated on the coded radio messages of the Japanese navy, while Kamer 14 concentrated on the code of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Nuboer worked full-time on the Japanese codes, and his successes were in keeping with his efforts. During the 1930s, the results of the codebreaking efforts gave the Dutch advance warning of events to come, and allowed the Naval Staff to keep track of Japanese squadrons at sea. This is even more surprising when one realizes that there were only two officers available to work on the codes at any given time, and that none of these men were familiar with the Japanese language. Unfortunately, the Japanese changed their coding system shortly thereafter, thus rendering Nuboer's efforts useless for the future.

Nuboer was stationed in Holland at the outbreak of war as teacher and acting director of the Dutch naval academy, a post he held only in name. He was in fact attached to the naval staff as staff officer, and escaped with most of the naval staff on board a Dutch fishing boat to Dunkirk, from where he made the crossing to Britain. After his arrival, Nuboer played an inconspicuous but important role in London, as advisor to Admiral Furstner and later Prime Minister Gerbrandy. After his discharge from the Navy in 1953, Nuboer wrote a number of articles about his activities before the war.