NEWSLETTER RSS AND ALL SCUs
February 2002
Greetings to all ex-SCU members and friends. I am pleased to say that our next reunion will by held, by courtesy of the Trust, at Bletchley Park as before (in room red 1 opposite the book shop) on Sunday 5th May, when I hope to meet as many of you as possible.
For those who cannot get there I hope this letter will help to keep you informed and be some compensation for missing the event. Sadly we have lost a few more members during the last year, including G3NL with whom I had maintained weekly radio contacts for 54 years after 4 years working together at Arkley. The number attending the reunions does not diminish for three reasons. One is that relatives, including offspring, of ex-SCUers come to my notice. Also, but unfortunately not often enough, someone, previously unaware of our reunions, comes to light. Lastly the other SCUs have come into our picture. In general we knew nothing of each other’s existence until long after the war.
The RSS and the "Y" service were on the input side, with SCUs and SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) etc on the output, with Bletchley Park in between. Without the Morse code operators Bletchley Park (BP) would have been a private house, or perhaps requisitioned for some other war work. All the material entering BP was in enciphered form, some by machine and some by hand cipher. Most of this material was received as Morse Code and the Enigma and Lorenz machine enciphered messages presented some problems for the cryptologists. The hand ciphers, used frequently by Abwehr agents outside the occupied zone, were easier to solve as no machine was involved. Oliver Strachey’s department at BP dealt with these and this non-military information coming out from BP was known as ISOS. The military intelligence coming from BP, largely Enigma and Colossus enciphered, was passed to SCU1+ at Whaddon for transmission to the Special Liaison Units (SLUs) from where it was conveyed to the commanders directing operations. Some of the output material from BP went direct to Winston Churchill and our own Secret Service departments. Later, in 1942, control of the more distant SLUs was taken over by the RAF.
As SCU members we all came under the same roof and it is now a great revelation to learn about each other. The backbone of the RSS, originally the GPO, was later the Radio Amateur movement and hence the location of war times colleagues was facilitated via the medium of the amateur radio organisation. However there are still many surviving ex-RSS members (or their families) who would certainly like to know of our activities but with all the secrecy that survived long after the conclusion of hostilities we have only limited means of locating them.
If you receive this Newsletter by post please consider contacting someone you know who can take e-mails for you. Let them know that the mails would be short and infrequent; it is much easier (and cheaper) for me to send information by this method. If of course you have succumbed to the addiction of these frustrating devices spawned by Alan Turin, let me know your address, or simply send me any message (e.g. Hallo) and I will then have your e-mail address automatically. Details are at the end of this letter. My mailing list of all the SCU contacts of ex-members and friends (which includes telephone and e-mail) is available (s.a.e. or e-mail). Geoffrey Pidgeon (on my list) has his own compilation, that includes some SCU1 etc, which are not on my list.
I am always conscious of the need to make the reunions what you want them to be and welcome your comments and/or suggestions. Some of you come a long way and it is important to make the journey worthwhile. You are of course free to spend your time with us or elsewhere on the campus. If you have anything you would care to contribute please let me know, now or later. The various short talks from individuals describing their experiences were very popular last year. How you came to be involved is of interest, especially as the reasons are quite varied. A short explanation of your wartime (or post-war) activities is a good way of getting to know each other. It is so gratifying also when a couple meet for the first time in 50 years. Looking through the records I see that 7 of us have attended every reunion since 1997. Please try to wear a prominent badge with name (unit and call sign if appropriate) in letters large enough to be readable in a photograph!
The suggested provisional programme for the 5th is:
Start as near 1100 as possible (the gates open by 1030 if not before). Unless you qualify for the Freedom of the Park, there is an entrance fee. Remember that most of the staff are volunteers and give up a lot of time in keeping the museum going. [Be nice to them].
Introduction, welcome and thanks to the staff.
The Museum Director (Christine Large) may be able to address us. (Subject to be announced; perhaps
The Abwehr Enigma. Note that the 5th May is a Bank Holiday weekend so the programme is subject to change).
Talk by Wilf Neal. (My times with SCUs and SLUs)
How I came to a V.I. (G3ASE)
Lunch break for chat.
Other contributions including David White on his work in Hut 1 (A working Museum).
After lunch break visit Hut 1 (David will show small groups round)
A visit to Hut 12 may be of interest; the story of the Abwehr Enigma machine.
A showing of the half-hour film about the agent Zigzag.
I shall remain in the room for the lunch break and most of the day (I would like to see Hut 1 and 12 if I can get there!). Perhaps you will allow me to make up my collection of "mug" shots for the records.
Last November, in an unusual departure from the normal trash on television, channel 5 gave a reasonably accurate account of how Eddie Chapman, an experienced criminal, became a double agent known to us as Zigzag. Discharged from the Coldstream guards in 1933 for desertion he became a professional master safe breaker and was serving two years hard labour in Jersey when the Germans occupied the Channel Islands. He saw a way to shorten his sentence by offering to work for the Germans as a spy against Britain and further as a means of getting revenge for his sentence, including being paid. This was his story, but in fact, in spite of everything, he was loyal to the Crown throughout. Incidentally Mark Seaman gave evidence in the film; I deposited some RSS papers with him at the Imperial War Museum before BP was fully established as a safe depository.
In Germany in January 1942 Chapman was recruited by the Abwehr to be trained as a spy, which included learning the Morse code and bomb making. He also picked up a working knowledge of the language and was provided with a Wehrmacht uniform. His German cover name was Fritzchen (Little Fritz). On 16th December 1942 he was parachuted into a field near Ely as we expected, due to the Abwehr messages intercepted by the RSS. We intercepted 160 messages concerning Fritzchen between 27th April and December. His training call sign was FFF and we knew him, in the RSS, as the 3 Fs man. He landed with radio gear, cameras, explosives, papers and £1,000 and called at a farmhouse to report to the police. His statement, made that same day, 16th December, to MI5 agreed completely with what we already knew so he was accepted as the double agent Zigzag. It should be noted that it can be proved that a person is a spy but not that he is not. However Zigzag operated under supervision, sending a message to his controllers four days after landing and the reply indicated that he was accepted by the Abwehr as the genuine Fritzchen.
One of his tasks was to attack the De Havilland factory in Hatfield, for which the Abwehr promised £15,000, and also to obtain information on US troops, shipbuilding and weather. He was to return within a few days either as a seaman or if this failed by submarine. The attack on a power station at De Havilland was faked and we provided evidence to satisfy aerial reconnaissance. At the end of January he got back to Germany by deserting as a seaman from a ship at Lisbon. He was the last wartime agent to reach England on 27/28 June 1944 and he again landed in Cambridgeshire with radio sets, cameras, a large sum of money and much useful information. Notice of his arrival was given in an RSS intercept of 10th June. He was to collect information on ASDIC, anti-aircraft radar, the US army airforce operational plans and the landing places of the V1 flying bombs. [One can understand the last task, but thinking back to those years I don’t know how I would set about delving into the other such secret matters. Perhaps that is why I was not recruited as an agent by SIS].
Zigzag was awarded the Iron Cross by a grateful Reich, but paid off by MI5 in October 1944 as he became indiscreet and a problem concerning the cover of another agent. After the war he resumed his life of crime abroad. [The Morse code in this film was supplied by David, G3ZPA]
Various other agents were "turned" and operated under the supervision of a radio amateur to check that no betrayal was taking place. This was extremely difficult because the agent may have been instructed to either include or omit a certain word or letter if he was operating under duress and we had to rely upon him to tell us the truth. It was, after a while, possible to get a good idea as to whether the Germans trusted the agent or not. The first spy to bring a radio transmitter here was Summer in 1940. He was quickly captured but could not make contact with Germany (under our control from a field in Buckinghamshire) because of low power and poor aerial. The supervising radio amateur suggested putting the aerial high up on the Aylesbury police station and this worked straight away. Zigzag, Mutt and Jeff also succeeded using low power (5 to 10 watts). Zigzag operated under amateur control near to Box 25 Arkley. [I remember questioning some signals logged by VIs and being told to ignore them and return them as "Not Wanted". They were, I later surmised, the turned agents which at Arkley, were known as "Iron and Steel".]
Garbo was probably the most valuable spy. His operator (believed to have been the radio amateur, Ronnie Reed G3RX) was "allowed to acquire" a 100 watt transmitter (actually the American BC610 capable of 600 watts) and a good aerial as it was essential that Germany should be given false information about the D-Day invasion preparations.. We had to take care not to use too powerful a transmitter or too good an aerial as the Germans would have been suspicious if the signal was out of proportion, bearing in mind that their agent was supposed to be operating in secret. In addition the location had to be roughly right because the transmitter could be found by direction finding. Eventually the transmitter was operated from the roof of MI5 in London: a convenient arrangement for us.
Geoff Jessup G3AMG on yet another mode of introduction to the RSS.
Geoff was a keen short wave listener prior to WW2 and got into correspondence with fellow enthusiasts all over the world. He used his Dad’s 10 valve GEC multiband wireless, using an 0-V-1 as a BFO. He had learned Morse code with the unstinting help of G2XB, the local optician/chemist. He doesn’t say, but perhaps G2XB also told him how to make and use the BFO. However in correspondence with a lad in Honduras, after the outbreak of hostilities, Geoff boasted that he could send and receive Morse at 20 wpm.
A few weeks later a couple of "heavies" paid a visit and demanded to search his parent’s house for radio transmitters. Anyway they found nothing, but he is sure that it resulted in a letter, from memory from Lord Sandhurst, setting up a meeting at his home. This was in fact an interview, which led to an invitation to become a VI. Being only 16 it was a little while before the inevitable invitation came to don the King’s uniform and spend the next 4½ years with a pair of S.G. Brown’s headphones clamped to his ears day and night.
We shall never know the connection between Honduras and the call to RSS. Perhaps it was G2XB rather than Honduras!
(Many of us will remember the S.G.Brown headphones, possibly tucked away or still in use).
It is amazing how things are still coming up from the past. David White is in an excellent position to receive information from visitors to the Park. He reports the existence of a hitherto not recorded out-station from BP in Drayton Parslow a village about 4 miles south of BP.
Herman Hollerith, an American who died in 1929, is credited with the invention of the punched card sorting device. Now of course for searching and sorting information we use computers and the youngsters probably cannot imagine how difficult this task was years ago. By putting information on cards and punching a pattern of holes it was possible to make a machine look for where holes coincided on different cards and thus extract the wanted information. This little known aspect of BP’s work was important in several ways and the timber Hut 7 was built in 1940 and allocated the work, using the Hollerith punched card machines. The record index grew until hut 7 was inadequate and C block was constructed in the eastern side of the Park in 1942. Yet again in 1943 further space was required and a site was chosen 500 yards to the west of Drayton Parslow. Like many other secret places there is now no trace of this unit, which had direct teleprinter lines to BP and several Hollerith machines.
The army controlled and guarded it and the Foreign Office recruited many civilian women to operate the machines and teleprinters. Mr F Freeborne was in charge here and of C block. Masses of 5 figure codes came from BP for sorting and processing before being sent on to Oxford. Many of the staff were recruited from Banks, due to their ready-made experience, and returned there in September 1945, a few days after the Japanese surrender. After the war the site was kept on a caretaker basis until 1948 when it was used by the GPO for technical training. It was closed in 1970 and is now a housing estate.
There is still a lot to be discovered about those war-time years especially in the detail.
I saw a note on a web site that, following Pearl Harbour, the National Company inc. was instructed to manufacture HROs until told to stop. Was any other communications receiver made in such numbers?
The part radio amateurs played in those days of technical conflict extends beyond the thousands in RSS, as I have been reading in the "Pioneers of Radar" by Colin Latham and Anne Stobbs. Similar to the "Code Breakers" edited by Hinsley and Stripp, it relates the experiences of those actually doing the work, 60 of them in this case. Fascinating reading it is as one can really appreciate the difficulties and problems, including those of a technical nature, to which amateurs contributed with their short wave transmitting experience. These pioneers went on to impressive careers post-war and it is remarkable that Latham and Stobbs were able to interview so many of them "in time".
Our chances of getting first hand accounts are diminishing all the time, so it is important to obtain every scrap of information while we can. More information is sought on the operation of the SYKO encipherment tool and the Hollerith punched card system.
Newsletter written by:
Bob (Noz) King g3ase@waitrose.com
Telephone: UK 01480 463129