How One Small Cog Entered World War 2

Quote in the New Jersey Star Ledger:-
“Who else is going to hold still and listen to us talk? We're as obsolete as dinosaurs. We're the old fools who saved the world.”

By the end of August, 1939 war appeared to be inevitable. I talked twice to the operators at the amateur station SP1ZK, operating at the Warsaw Radio Exhibition in that final week and they were in no doubt. At 11 pm on the 31st August I listened to the BBC News and heard that all British radio amateurs were to close their stations forthwith. Unable to resist temptation, I went back to the radio room and had two final contacts with the. USA and then pulled the plug for over six years.

Next morning we awakened to the news that Germany had invaded Poland and a few hours later mobilisation was declared. I went to work as usual but, when I returned from lunch there was a phone message from my mother. A telegram had arrived, telling me I had to report to London. This was completely different from what I was supposed to do. In 1938 the Air Ministry, with the help of RSGB, had set up the Civilian Wireless Reserve which I joined. In about June of that year we were asked to transfer to the RAF Volunteer Reserve and most of us did. At the time of the “Munich Crisis” in September, I was issued with a railway warrant and instructions to report to RAF Sealand, Cheshire in the event of mobilisation. The telegram obviously overrode those orders, so I hiked myself off to. London by train and eventually arrived at the Air Ministry at about 10 pm, almost the last of our group to get there. I was partly kitted up and then taken to the Endsleigh Hotel in. Endsleigh Square, where I spent my first night in the Air Force in a private room. Next morning a three-course breakfast and a choice of newspaper but, green as I was, I knew this sort of caper wouldn't last long. How right I was! We were collected and taken to draw steel helmets, gas masks and identity discs. We were assured that the latter were fireproof, so that even if we were burned to crisps, we could be identified for our grieving relatives. This was an early introduction to the gallows humour which is such a feature of the Services.

We were marched through the streets to the nearest tube station and thence to Liverpool Street LNER Station, where we entrained for Saffron Walden in Essex. This was the nearest the railway came to our destination, RAF Debden, one of the Fighter Command sector stations which was responsible for defending London against attacks coming from north of the Thames or along the estuary.

The rest of Saturday was spent in queues, collecting various things. The worst queue was for injections - three of them; Paratyphoid, Anti-tetanus, the third I forget. We took off tunics, rolled up shirtsleeves and ran the gauntlet. It was two injections in the left arm and one in the right. In these days of AIDS and Hepatitis-B, it seems incredible that the orderlies used the same syringes and needles throughout, pausing only to put in a new ampoule at intervals! And were those needles blunt by the time the last victims were done. I was staggered to see some of those ahead of me fainting, odd ones even before they reached the needles. Perhaps fortunately, I had had two or three courses of flu injections in the years before the war, so I was not adversely affected. However, worse was to come. Debden was not equipped to handle more than its normal complement of personnel so there was no accommodation for us, not even mattresses. We slept Saturday and Sunday nights on the concrete floor of an empty hangar, with just two blankets and a ground sheet. Like everyone else, my arms were swollen and painful, so sleep was fitful and disturbed. Then at 4.30 am we were blasted awake when a flight of Spitfires took off on the first patrol of the day. The British Government had given Hitler until 11 am on Sunday the 3rd September to withdraw from. Poland but of course no reply was received. Promptly at eleven the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, broadcast the declaration of war and we sat and listened to it on the PĀ system.

It is said that in America everyone remembers what he or she was doing when President Kennedy was assassinated. Presumably, everyone of my generation remembers what he was doing when the Second World War was declared. I was sitting on the grass outside our hangar and enjoying the warm sunshine, aware that this was a defining moment in my life but I had no concept of just how much of an upheaval was in store for the world. The rest of that day was spent packing kit and getting ready to move, though nobody said where.

On Monday, 4th September the 4.30 am Spitfires did not bother us because we were up already. After an early breakfast we were taken by truck to Saffron Walden station to await our special train. This was another learning experience - how the military mind works. We were delivered to the station at 6 am but the train did not arrive until nearly mid-day. When we finally got away, the sun indicated that we were travelling north and this caused a flutter. If we were heading for Grims by or Hull, then we must be bound for Poland, a prospect that thrilled none of us! Eventually our route turned west and tension eased. At this remove my memory is uncertain of the exact route but most of it was undoubtedly on lines which no longer exist (part of the thousands of miles of railways which were closed in the 1950's). With this caveat, I will say that I think the route was Saffron Walden -Cambridge-Bedford-Oxford-Reading-Southampton.

Eventually at about 9 pm, we detrained on the quay at Southampton. No doubt about our destination now! We boarded one of the cross-channel ferries in company with a large number of troops and sailed at about 11 pm. Since breakfast at Debden, all we had had to eat was bully beef and “hard-tack” biscuits washed down by water. However, when we were bedded down, an angel appeared in the shape of our senior NCO, Flight Sergeant Ballingall, and the only “regular” in our outfit. He had bullied the ferry cooks into making a dixie of tea for us and he brought it round to us in our bunks. That was one of the best cups of tea I ever had. I often thought of this episode when, later in the war there was a comic song :-

“Kiss me goodnight, Sergeant Major.
Tuck me in my little wooden bed.

Before I dropped off to sleep, I peered through the porthole and could just see the shape of a destroyer escorting us. I think this finally brought it home to me that we were at war and perhaps not everyone out there was disposed to be friendly. However, I had no trouble in falling into a deep sleep, having been on the go for about twenty hours.

Tuesday, 5th September was another eventful day. We berthed at Le Havre before daylight. The two destroyers which had escorted us, turned back just short of the port, no doubt to go and pick up another ferryload. We were one of the first units of any of the services to set foot on the Continent in WW2 and were later nicknamed “The Early Birds” by the Radio Society of Great Britain. Once off the ferry we were placed aboard a train which was standing at the quayside and there we sat and we sat and we sat. It was now more than twenty-four hours since breakfast at Debden and apart from that mug of tea on the ferry, all we had had was that damned bully-beef in those trapezoidal tins, those tooth-breaking biscuits, and water. (No food was provided on the ferry). Now sitting on the platform was a pile of wooden boxes and according to the stencil, these contained tins of crab. One of our unit was not a radio amateur but an ex-Royal Navy telegraphist (God knows why he had joined the RAFVR). Unlike us innocent ex-civilians from sheltered homes, he was skilled in the art of converting things for his own use. Making sure he was unobserved, he nipped out, grabbed a case and was back on the train in a flash. The army guys, further up the train, saw this and repeated the operation but with much less skill and were spotted. All hell broke loose among the French railway officials; the train was shunted out of the station; we were marched back and made to wait while the carriages and our kit were searched. The soldiers were caught red-handed but we were as blameless as choirboys. While the train was being shunted out of the station, our naval friend smashed up the wooden case and threw it out of the window (As the train was moving, no way of knowing which window the wood had come from). Then he proceeded to hide the tins of crab. The coaches had “concertinas” for access between adjacent ones and each concertina had two steel plates which folded down to form a floor. The crab nestled cosily under these plates and the railway staff did not have the gumption to look underneath. Once we started our journey, out came the crab and instead of bully-beef and biscuits, we had crab and biscuits. Our RAF issue knives, equipped with a tin-opener, did a sterling job of opening those tins. As you can see, I was rapidly developing a part of my education which had been neglected in my previous life.

Eventually the train deposited us at Amiens which was to be our base for a couple of weeks. We were accommodated in an unoccupied convent which was completely devoid of furniture. We slept in the refectory on a parquet floor with no mattress - just two blankets. The only good thing was that the blankets were new French Army issue and were magnificent - roughly twice the size and thickness of the RAF ones we had used at Debden. (The only other French issue we got was tinned meat for emergency rations and we were grateful we never had to make use of it because it was past its use-by date by fifteen years!)

That evening we were let loose in the city but it was a case of, “Look but don't touch,” because we had no French money. Of course, I had damned little English money either. But give the RAF credit; the next day we were paid and could change our own money into francs (about 240 to the pound). So that evening it was out on the town in a big way. Food, glorious French food! With our rates of pay we in were in much the same position as the Yanks in Britain later on. From now on we went out for dinner each evening to a good hotel. The late Bert Allen, G2UJ, and I discovered that we could buy a five-course meal, including wine, at a good hotel for the equivalent of one shilling and sixpence, which was about the cost of a seat in a London suburban cinema in those days. It was here that I first encountered the heavenly “escargots en aspic” served as hors d'oeuvres.

As soon as we had settled into the convent, we were informed in strict secrecy that we were now part of No.1 Wireless Intelligence Screen and that we should soon be going out on location. Our days were spent in driving around the countryside in the vicinity of the Belgian and Luxembourg borders. I found myself co-opted as a driver of one of the new Renault vans which had been delivered to us direct from the factory in Paris. It was an interesting experience! Not only was it the first time I had driven on the “wrong” side of the road and used my right hand to operate the gear lever, but the said gear lever went through a hole in the dash board. The whole area was very interesting, because it had been fought over with great ferocity during the First World War and British troops had been heavily involved. We took time out to visit places like Arras, Cambrai, Vimy Ridge, etc. It was eerie to see the old trenches winding across the countryside and often still quite distinct, even though the outlines had been blurred by weather and cultivation.

At the end of two weeks we were split up into individual stations and spread out along the Belgian border. This was obviously a dry run because after a fortnight, we were recalled to base and the whole unit was moved to a new HQ at Metz. This was the centre of another very historic area which had been the scene of bloody battles and sieges involving French troops; places like Verdun and Douaimont. Our HQ was in the “caserne” at Metzbut we were rapidly deployed to our posts and I finished up at Station N, which was at the south end of our screen. I was senior wireless operator, with an “artificial aerial” licence holder as my second op, plus four Royal Artillery spotters to feed the plots to us. We established our station in an empty cottage in the village of Bellange. Unless you have a large scale map, you will not find it but you should be able to locate Morhange, just eight kilometres down the road. This was in the Maginot Line defence area so, apart from us, all the troops were French. We were just dumped down with our equipment, a two-burner cooker and some ration money and told to get on with it. We were given what the RAF called “Higher Rate Ration Allowance”, with which to buy food locally.This was quite generous and each of us was receiving more money for food than we were getting in pay. We made little use ofthe cooker as the cottage had a wood-burning stove which did double duty for heating and cooking. As there were six of us, we did duty in pairs on a three-day roster. It was a most interesting experience! One day I made a jam tart for dessert - a real work of art, with twisted strips of pastry across the top. Sadly, after cooking, it was impossible to cut it and, when banged against the corner of the stove in frustration, it shattered like glass. I was not aware that fat had to be rubbed into the flour and water mixture! One of the others made a milk pudding - he took a large bowl, poured in rice up to the rim and filled in the spaces with milk. After a while a smell of burning came from the oven and when the door was opened, the pudding billowed out. Strangely enough, our salvation was cigarettes. The British ones were as superior to the French variety as home-made bread is to fast-food buns, so our Players, Capstan, Gold Flake and Senior Service were extremely popular with the French troops. We were each issued with a tin of fifty free every week and could buy extra at duty free prices from our support van which called several times a week. As bribes went, fags were cheap. Across the road from our cottage was the officers' mess cookhouse of the French battalion occupying the village and the senior NCO was formerly the chef at a large hotel in Anger. We put him on the payroll - a tin of fifty twice a week and in return he acted as adviser and supplier. Most evenings he sent over a large dish of whatever the officers were having for dinner but if we were having something special, goose, sucking pig, etc., he would come over and supervise its cooking. He kept us supplied with fresh vegetables and gave us a crash course in cooking. One of the exotic dishes he showed us was a rum omelette for dessert. (The last one I made used twenty-three eggs.) The total cost of the two tins of cigarettes was three shillings, less than one day's ration allowance for one man.

If we went as far as Morhange we could buy liquor and, at that stage of the war, there was a wonderful range available. I did very little drinking, because I did not feel I needed to prove anything. I was and am very grateful to my paternal grandparents, who taught me that alcohol is something to be enjoyed in a civilised manner. However, as the winter advanced, our cottage gave a fair imitation of an icebox at night and I took to having a rum toddy on retiring - three fingers of Jamaican rum in a large tumbler, a dessert spoon of sugar, the juice of a lemon and topped up with boiling water. I used to get into bed before drinking this and then slept like the proverbial top all night. It's laughable to think that the lemon was more expensive than the three fingers of rum.

My second operator obviously did not have grandparents like mine. He had had a strict religious upbringing, with the result that he went completely over the top when he was free of adult control. He decided to start smoking. (Nearly all young men did in those days. The lung cancer link wasn't even thought of). Instead of starting on cigarettes, he bought himself a pipe and tobacco. He proceeded to become violently and disgustingly sick, of course. Worse was to come! He got drunk two nights running on spirits and after the second do, he was so ill that he scared hell out of the rest of us. He and I alternated the radio watches and it was always a problem getting him up at dawn. Even after the blankets had been stripped off him, he would still lie there. So, one morning four of us took a corner each of his bottom blanket and with a bit of manoeuvring carried him outside and deposited him on the frosty ground, much to the amusement of the poilus. It was real brass monkeyweather but we didn't know anything about hypothermia in those days. Fully five minutes later, he appeared looking somewhat shaken. His first impression on wakening was that the cottage had been bombed around his ears. Up to the time he left us, he got up when called after that. Perhaps fortunately, his morse was inadequate, so he was recalled to Metz for further training and was replaced by Doug Hammond, G4NL, who slotted into our little group very well.

The local inhabitants were bi-lingual in French and German because the province (Lorraine) had been fought over and changed hands many times through the years , the most recent being 1870 and 1914 - 18. (1940 - 45 was still to come). When I went shopping in Morhange, (Morchingen in German), I spoke French. I discovered that the local shoppers, when they wanted to gossip about us, switched into German but it was a long time before I let on that I could understand what they were saying. One day I broke into German to contradict something that was said. Talk about jaws dropping - pity I wasn't able to record it for posterity.

In spite of my pre-war travels in Germany, France was in many ways a culture shock to me. Possibly my most traumatic experience was when Humphrey, the RA lance-corporal and I walked to Morhange one afternoon for our first French hair-cuts. We had about two months growth and were feeling grotty. We asked for and were directed to the barber's, where we were taken together as there were no other customers. The first shock was that the hairdressers were girls but this was understandable because practically all French men were army reservists and were called up as soon as war broke out. The girls asked if we would like “the works” and on behalf of both of us, I gave the go-ahead. The cutting was normal but when that was finished, the chairs were turned round, tipped over and we were shampooed. Worse was to follow! Our hair was combed and primped, hair-nets put on and the drierswheeled over. At the end we were sprayed with pomade and came out of there smelling like the proverbial prostitute's boudoir. The embarrassment was so acute that neither of us said anything until we were well clear of the place, when we firmly agreed that nothing must be said to the others about our ordeal. Our reaction must seem stupid in these days of unisex salons but in England then nobody but a raving pouffe would have had such a haircut. Even the barber's I went to in the centre of Manchesterwas regarded as slightly effeminate because each customer had a sterilised comb and scissors for his haircut.

This was the period known as the “phoney war” because nothing very much was happening. We were located in the Maginot Line defence zone, so we were checked out regularly by German reconnaissance aircraft with the occasional one shot down. For many years I kept a piece of the Heinkel He111 which came down close by. I did not know then that, a few months later, when I was in Kent, downed German aircraft would barely raise a flicker of interest. Leaflets were dropped on us by these same planes and I donated them some years ago to the archives section of the local library.