Captain Eric Nave (1899–1993) was a Navy Paymaster Commander and an Australian cryptographer, before and during World War II. He served in the Navy from 1917 to 1949. As a midshipman in the 1920s, he was required to learn a foreign language and chose Japanese: "with French and German you got sixpence a day extra, (but) for Japanese you got five bob" (ten times as much). He spent two years in Japan, and transferred to the Royal Navy Sigint section in 1925, then the Government Code and Cipher School in London in 1927. In 1930 he was sent to the Far East Combined Bureau, in Hong Kong and later in Singapore. He was invalided sick to Melbourne in 1940 where he set up a small RAN cryptographic unit in Victoria Barracks. The unit had a core of naval personnel, with an appreciable number of univer