[3] Thomas was also a long-standing member of the Adelaide Repertory Theatre, initially as an actor and producer,[4] then as business manager, acting secretary, and chairman.
[2] On 1 February 1917 Nave joined the Royal Australian Navy, and was posted to HMAS Cerberus[10] the RAN training establishment south of Melbourne, where on 1 March, he was appointed a paymasters' clerk on probation.
[14] He was based in Japan from February 1921 to April 1923, and was then examined by the officials of the British Embassy in Tokyo and awarded the highest pass mark (91%) ever recorded by them,[10][15] also receiving promotion to paymaster lieutenant on 1 September 1921.
[16] He returned to service at sea aboard HMAS Brisbane from April 1923 to January 1924,[10] and was then attached to the staff of the Rear Admiral Commanding HM Australian Fleet.
Nave expected to be employed as an interpreter, but instead was presented with intercepted coded Japanese naval signals and ordered by the Commander-in-Chief, China, to break them.
Within two months Nave had not only broken the code, but had also worked out the Imperial Japanese Navy's radio protocols and relay system, and the organisation of their various commands.
[15] Nave had been promoted to paymaster lieutenant-commander on 1 September 1929,[20] and on 29 August 1930 "in view of his exceptional qualifications and experience in certain specialist duties" he was transferred to the Royal Navy.
He was promoted to paymaster commander on 30 June 1937,[10] and assigned to the code-breaking unit of the Far East Combined Bureau (FECB), a tri-service intelligence organisation based in Hong Kong.
However, the pressure of work had begun to take its toll on Nave's health, and in early 1940 he was diagnosed as suffering from tropical sprue, and was sent back to Australia to recuperate.
The unit had a core of naval personnel, with a number of university academics and graduates specialising in classics, linguistics and mathematics, e.g. Athanasius Treweek and Arthur Dale Trendall.
[10] When Central Bureau moved forward to the Philippines in 1945, Nave was left behind to write the unit's official history and to close down the organisation in Brisbane.
[34][35] The book apparently reflects Rusbridger's views rather than those of Nave, particularly the claim that Winston Churchill deliberately did not pass on warnings about the attack on Pearl Harbor, in order to get the United States involved the war.
According to British historian Peter Elphick, in a 1991 interview on Japanese television, Nave "repudiated a large slice of what Rusbridger had written, calling it speculation".