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From the Home Guard to the Royal Signals.

When I was in Dad’s Army — you know, the Home Guard - they gave me a Browning automatic. It was slightly larger than other rifles. You had to hold it like that … it was gas operated: a gas cylinder would propel the bullet then return and move the next one into position … the empty cases were sent up and over your head … hell of a thing it was … I fired Springfields, Winchesters, Gud knows what else.

Eventually they asked me what unit I’d like to be in. I told them that I had a brother in the artillery — you could do that, follow a relative … then the next week I got my papers for the Royal Signals. I was sent to 5 ATB — STALAG 5, we called it, in Durham — Brancepeth.

When we got there we had to listen in to the headphones and this chap explained that we would hear some Morse at 3 words a minute. He said that we would be able to deal with three words a minute by the end of the week.

We were in a disused cotton mill. We all slept in a huge room — four hundred of us, with bunks all along the wall. One night we they got a new detachment through and some of us had to move. I was one of them. We had to sleep on the other side of the room, by the windows. The windows were open, and it was snowing. One of the chaps actually died later. They took him to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary. I was one of the coffin bearers: right arm out like this, on the next bloke’s shoulder, carrying the coffin, down to the station, so that he could be taken home.

They announced that there was an opening to train for Special Operations. I was sent to Special Operations on the Isle of Man.

When we got there we had to write our life story, with details. A couple of pages of foolscap .. you always had to do that at every new place you were posted, for security.

We did the training. We had to learn German, Italian and Japanese Morse procedures. We had to go up to 22 words a minute, transmitting newspapers … we could stop every half hour. You had a pencil which was sharpened at both ends, so you could carry on if one end was blunt.

Japanese Morse is called Kana. You just had to learn the codes. There were extra letters, which had to be added, so you had to be able to distinguish between the extra Japanese letters and the ordinary ones, as they came.

Each message had a Q code. .. say, three letters starting with a Q, showing special proceedings. QSV, QTA, QRM. . they would show that they were telling you the time of something, or that there was interference on the line. I’ve got the whole list upstairs.

Japanese nearly floored me. You had to pass. If you were trained in Special Operations you either passed or were sent to the cookhouse. I took the exam seven times before I passed it. We worked from 9am to 5pm. I had to go back for 7 o’clock until 9 to get me through it. I just scraped through. It was in Douglas, in a hotel on the front.

When we moved to Harpenden we had to listen to lots of German stuff, all in code. It was a wonderful set-up. they had international co-operation and they had learnt how to predict the call-signs. Each radio station ha its own call-sign of three letters and he’d send his — say FJG, DE and so on. But then, at 23.59 each day they changed the call-signs. But IC could work out what the next call-signs would be. I’ve no idea how. they were absolutely dead on: marvellous, it was. But you had to learn all that … The start of the message — the date, the time, the group, then a block of letters — about seven — then the message, in groups of five letters., in blocks of forty — so our message pads were laid out like that, with carbon copies.

There was a log sheet of messages you had to keep. Sometimes there was no message for hours, sometimes all night. It was diabolical: they’d watch you in case you dozed, and if you did you were in dead trouble.

You had a sandwich — cheese or jam — and your own mug. They’d come round and ask: which do you want? ‘One of each’, you’d say — and fill up your mug.

The messages were often from fighting units - Panzer divisions quite a lot.

That was special operations training. We went out on field operations, in France. I was in … I forget … just before Arnhem. We’d been taking messages from a Panzer group and sent a message to London — but the reply came back ‘insufficient information’. That’s something that could have been stopped.

Our team was in a 15cwt truck. We used the three points for location finding. It was so daft, a lot of it. We were in the American zone following … Bradley? Each day we had to ‘mark up the map’ — name the villages that had been taken. We used to send someone to look. One bloke rode forward to the next village on a motor bike. He saw some German uniforms, turned round and rode back at 90mph. They would have shot him.

How many were there in a unit? . mm … there were three watches, with 20 in a watch, plus drivers, electricians and mechanics.. probably about 100.

For supplies, every day they’d send a lorry down to a reference point, about 10 in the morning, to get the stuff. We were following the Americans, so we had a right to the American supplies and the British rations as well. We used to get PX rations — little extras. They were nearly always laid out on tables in a barn. They used to put wads of tobacco, chocolate, Hershey Bars on the trestle tables … they used to drop them in your hat as you went by. Palmolive Soap … tins of nuts … fruit … pipe tobacco — I used to smoke a pipe then — the soap was a luxury. The US had Palmolive, all done up in dainty wrappings.

The French were still there in some places. Right up to Verdun, we slept in tents. At Chateaucourt near Verdun the weather turned nasty. One day the sergeants came round and said ‘You’ve all got to move into the village.’ The Mayor had said that we MUST do so: it was too cold. If we didn’t they would shoot him. Four of us were moved to a house in the village — two were in a feather bed. I slept on the floor. It was really cold — way below zero. We walked through the snow: our feet got covered with snow, then it thawed, but it didn’t dry … so you froze … I dropped a rifle butt on my foot once … never felt it, it was that cold.

We used to go to Verdun once a week to have a bath. They’d take you up to a marquee. There were great coke fires. You’d strip off, then walk through great U-shaped troughs. When you came out they gave you fresh underwear.

There are so many memories … how can I pick something out that might be interesting … there were so many incidents …
14343289 Jones F.G.

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Notes taken verbatim by FGJ's daughter and son-in-las.

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