Gordon Cramer has just posted about Edward John Rice, a machinist at Australia’s Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, who the management there tried to dismiss in 1942 for allegedly being a Communist. They were also very annoyed about the way he tried to force Mrs Dawkins, the nice lady from the canteen, into telling him all the gossip to go into the staff magazine of which he was one of the four editors.

What inspired Gordon was what Rice apparently said to a man called Keane (a surname guaranteed to set many Somerton Man theorists aquiver with excitement):-

Mr. Ashburner (for the CAC): Do you remember when you were distributing literature in the factory telling a man named Keane that “My one wish above all is to lead a revolution in this country, and when the shooting starts you want to shoot fast”?

Rice: No. I never said anything like that. You produce this man.

Mr. Ashburner: Don’t worry, he will be produced.

Gordon Cramer then appended lots of pictures of aircraft factories and alleged microwriting to help make his case that all these pieces linked together. But why did he not look at the rest of the reports of the tribunal from that same week to see if he could find out “Keane”‘s first name?

The report Gordon cited was from the Monday 3rd August 1942 edition of the Adelaide News. But the Wednesday 5th August 1942 Daily Advertiser names the same witness as Charles Keenan:-

Mr. Charles Keenan, employee of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation. said that Rice had distributed pamphlets to some employees. Rice said that the Friends of the Soviet Union had issued them and admitted he was a Communist. He spoke of leading a revolution.

The Thursday 6th August edition of the Sydney Morning Herald voiced Rice’s denials of these lurid claims:

Rice, in evidence, denied that he had told an employee, Keenan, that he wanted to lead a revolution, that he would shoot or cut the throats of capitalists or that he was a Communist.

I’m not keen on this being the Somerton Man’s Keane: in fact, I’d go so far as to say this identification is 100% pants. 🙂

(I’m claiming neither plaudits nor brickbats for this suggestion, it’s Pete Bowes’ bonny baby: but funnily enough, I rather like it.)

Born in 1903 in Hungary, Czechoslavakia, Vienna or somewhere else completely (nobody knows), Arnold Deutsch was a brilliant young academic (with a PhD in chemistry at just 24) with an interest in Wilhelm Reich’s sex stuff who then moved to London to become, while a psychology graduate, a devastatingly well-connected Soviet spy. In fact, the Cambridge Five (including Lil’ Kim Philby) were his boys, and it was Deutsch who came up with the strategy of embedding them deep within the Establishment.

But then in 1937 Stalin got super-edgy and paranoid, and pulled all his wildcard agents back to Moscow, to be executed and replaced by a new cadre of even more hard-core home-bred Communist crazies. However, Deutsch managed to escape that fate: and was kept on “as an expert on forgery and handwriting”, says Wikipedia (with a straight face).

However, when he finally got abroad again in the 1940s, Deutsch is believed to have died, though – as you’d expect – nobody is sure quite how, where or even when.

Might he be the Somerton Man, found dead on an Australian beach in 1948?

Facially, the photos do look quite similar: they were of similar age, and they seem to share the same propensity for mystery. And dying so publicly and yet at the same time so privately has a curious rightness to it.

Up until now, I’ve hated every single speculative spy story floated to explain the Somerton Man that crossed my path: and yet I find myself smiling with delighted intrigue at this particular one. You know, “wouldn’t it be nice if…?”

And surely the best part of it all is that Arnold Deutsch’s fingerprints must surely be somewhere – Nigel West would know, wouldn’t he? Rupert, my man, have you still got a copy of Deutsch’s file upstairs? We have a nice set of fingerprints to compare it with… 🙂

Right now, I think there is a ~35% chance that the Somerton Man was a Russian merchant seaman who had worked on a WWII Lend-Lease ship bringing goods from America to Vladivostok on the Pacific Route. We know his physical appearance, height, fingerprints, and his rough date of birth: and that he was found dead on a South Australian beach on 1st December 1948.

What struck me last night was that this might well be all we need to work with.

So at long last, I’ve finally formed a Somerton Man plan. Here’s what I’ll do (though it won’t happen in a day or even a week):-

(1) Find the Soviet crew lists for Lend-Lease ships landing on the West Coast of America during 1941-1945 (e.g. via Ancestry.com or elsewhere), and merge them into a single list.

Once this is filtered for merchant seamen of the right age (and I’ll happily take your suggestions as to what age range to filter against), my estimate is that I should have ~250 names to work with.

(2) Find out if any of these were alive in 1949 and beyond.

As I recall, there is a Maritime Cemetery in Vladivostok. My guess is that a fair few of these merchant seamen will be buried there: hopefully I’ll be able to find a nice administrative list or database to work with.

I estimate that this should reduce the list to something closer to 100 names. If other usable secondary databases exist, they might help get the list down to ~50 names.

Once I get to this point, it seems that there are four parallel strategies to follow, each of which might independently work:-

(3a) Trace these 50 names further using other Soviet databases. (Though because this was the era of Stalin’s Russia, there might well be rather less to go on than one would normally hope for).

(3b) Find crew-lists of Soviet ships arriving in or leaving from Australian ports 1943-1948 (and/or Australian alien seamen registration forms), and cross-reference against these.

(3c) Network through to retired Russian merchant seamen who worked on Lend-Lease ships and see what / who they remember. (There are, as I also recall, Homes for Retired Seamen in Vladivostok, which would seem to be a good place to start).

(3d) See if I can get a Vladivostok journalist interested enough in the story to try to run it in a paper. Who knows what might come out of it.

Perhaps one of these will work, perhaps it won’t. But it certainly beats sitting around trying to guess what “MLIABO” might conceivably stand for (“Making Love Is A Bad Option”, etc). 😉

From almost the start of the 1948 investigation into the Somerton Man, South Australian police suspected that he (a) might have worked as a Third Officer on a merchant ship, and (b) might originally have come from Eastern Europe. Add to this his connection with a nurse living in Glenelg who later claimed to have spoken Russian when she was younger, and you get what I think is a reasonably meaty hypothesis to work with – that he was a Russian merchant seaman.

But because he had an American comb, some clothes with American stitching, and a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, it also seems that he had visited America (or perhaps have some long-standing fascination with it). So how might all these pieces link together?

One fascinating maritime connection between the USA and USSR from around this time is the Lend-Lease program, which was launched by the Lend-Lease Act of 11th March 1941: note that the USA was still (theoretically) neutral then, because it did not officially join the war until 8th December 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Though Lend-Lease started a lot slower than had been intended (and there are plenty of theories about why this should have been so), it lasted until 1945 and covered all manner of items… on a truly epic scale, as per the following alphabetic list (which I found here):-

• Airplanes 22,150 units; Anti-submarine ships 105 ships; Army shoes 15,417,000 pairs;
• Building equipment in total cost US Dollars 10,910,000; Blankets 1,541,590 pieces; Buttons 257,723,498 pieces;
• Cars 51,503 units; Chemicals 842,000 tons; Cotton 106,893,000 tons;
• Detonators 903,000 units;
• Explosives 295,600 tons;
• Foodstuffs 4,478,000 tons;
• Gasoil 2,670,000 tons;
• Locomotives 1,981 units; Leather 49,860 tons;
• Motorcycles 35,170 units; Machinery in total amount US Dollars 1,078,965,000;
• Non-ferrous metals total 802,000 tons;
• Pistols 12,997 pieces;
• Rifles 8,218 pieces; Railways cars 11,155 units; Radar 445 units;
• Sub-machine guns 131,633 pieces; Ship’s Engine 7,784 units; Spirits 331,066 liters; Cargo Ships – 123 units;
• Tanks 12,700 units; Trucks 375,883 units; Tractors 8,071 units; Torpedo 197 units; Tires 3,786,000 pieces;

(In fact, Russia finally settled its Lend-Lease debt only in August 2006, but that’s another story entirely.)

This vast array of items travelled on at least 123 Lend-Lease ships, and by a variety of sea routes:-

• Pacific 8,244,000 tons (47.1% of total volume);
• Caspian via Iran 4,160,000 tons (23.8%);
• Arctic 3,964,000 tons (22.6%);
• Black Sea 681 tons (3.9%);
• Soviet Arctic Route 452,000 tons (2.6%);
• Grand Total 17,501,000 tons (i.e. 100.0%).

For the Pacific Route (which I suspect is what we’re most interested in), ships departed ports on the USA’s west coast (“principally Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Columbia River ports”). The Japanese would often intercept and examine ships on this route, because as part of the USSR-Japan Neutrality Pact, it could not be used for military cargo. These ships usually docked in the heavily-congested port of Vladivostok, before having their cargo carried 5,000 miles West by the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Also as part of this agreement, Japan only allowed the USA-supplied ships used on the Pacific route to be crewed with Russians. Crew was typically a mix of USSR merchant seamen and poorly paid USSR Navy armed guards.

Unlike the Atlantic crossing, Pacific Lend-Lease ships usually sailed individually rather than in convoy: but they were in greatest danger from submarines – German, Japanese, and American submarines all sank some Russian ships (sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally).

Incidentally, one of the most famous Lend-Lease Pacific sea captains was Anna Shchetinina, who wrote a book about her experience called “On the Seas and Beyond the Seas” («На морях и за морями») (though after WW2 she worked in the Baltic).

Might the Somerton Man have been a Soviet seaman from a merchant ship that was lost in WW2? I found a list of Soviet ships that were lost in the Pacific: but the only one with unaccounted seamen seemed to be the Uzbekistan (though this ship is marked as “Redelivered” in a different list):-

01.04.1943 – Uzbekistan (Узбекистан – one of USSR republics); Cargo ship / Far East State Shipping Company / 3400 BRT / North Western Coast USA / Wrecked / No information about losses.

Or possibly the Ilich (which doesn’t appear on the list of Lend-Lease ships, so probably wasn’t one):-

4.06.1944 – Ilich (Ильич – Second name of Lenin); Cargo passenger ship / 4166 BRT / Far East State Shipping Company / Capt.I.S.Sergeev / Port of Portland, USA / She sank alongside of berth due to unknown reasons / 1 crew (A.Arekhpaeva) was lost and 66 crew were rescued.

Or perhaps even Soviet submarine L-16, which was torpedoed by Japanese submarine I-25 on October 11, 1942 “on the approach to San Francisco while sailing in surface position, and sank.” More detail on this very interesting (and well-illustrated) page.

I really don’t know: at this stage, I’m just starting to find my way around this little slice of 20th century history, so this is more of a research log than a cipher history post. But I thought you’d like to see what’s going on here. 🙂

* * * * *

Other links and books:-

State archive of Primorsky Territory

Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East – where it is, how to use it

Records of the United States Maritime Commission

Major Jordan’s Diaries (online)

“Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945”, Hubert P. van Tuyll: Greenwood. ISBN 0-313-26688-3.

Gordon Cramer was recently looking at Paul Lawson’s 8th June 1949 work diary entry relating to the plaster cast that he was making of the Somerton Man, and noted this interesting-looking page:

Police Job
Interview with Detectives (Brown + 1)
Ring from Constable Dinham re disposal of original body

Gordon quickly builds his own theories on top of why the word “disposal” was used, but it turns out that if we follow the timeline of what happened, it all makes sense.

According to a 30th May 1949 Adelaide News story, “The SA Grandstand Bookmakers’ Association secretary (Mr. Alan Saunders) said today his association would pay burial costs, to prevent the victim being buried as a pauper.“. This is the first mention I’ve found of an actual burial.

Then, according to the 14th June 1949 Adelaide News, the burial itself took place at 9.30am of that morning. The service was carried out by Captain E. J. Webb of the Salvation Army, who said at the end (according to Gerry Feltus’ book, p.85) “Yes, this man has someone to love him. He is known only to God.”

Originally, only a simple wooden stake saying “UNKNOWN SOMERTON BODY” was placed there, but the headstone we see today was added a few days after the funeral by Mr. A. Collins, a Keswick monumental mason.

So it all makes sense. As far as Paul Lawson knew on the 8th June 1949, the original body (i.e. not the plaster cast he was making!) was to have been disposed of in a pauper’s burial: but a last-minute donation by the SA Grandstand Bookmakers’ Association at around the same time secured a proper burial, while an after-the-event donation by a local monumental mason turned the grave into something that would last.

According to the (1978) “Somerton Beach Mystery” documentary by Stuart Littlemore, flowers were left on the grave in the spring (though not every year) by an unidentified person. So perhaps Captain Webb might just have been wrong.