大象传媒

When war first broke out Chris Foulkes, then a young design engineer working on specialised valves for radar, was working with a group of other young engineers in Eltham. One colleague was a brilliant engineer from Austria.

One day they were outside on the lawn at lunch time when a group of German aircraft came overhead. As they looked at the aircraft, the brilliant engineer said, "Heil Hitler!"

Chris and the others thought it was a bit strange but it was in the "phoney war" stage and they thought he was a good bloke so they concluded it must have been a rather odd joke rather than a lapse.

A few weeks later the engineesrs were contacted by the man's landlady who wanted to find him because he had gone and not paid the rent. She said he had left some things in the flat and wondered if they would like to buy anything and offset her loss.

They went to the flat and Chris saw a very high-class radio for which he paid the landlady 10 shillings. It was the kind of radio that woould have been far too expensive for him to buy normally. A broadcast or domestic radio but with vaery wide coverage of wavebands and very sensitive. It could pick up transmissions form a long way away.

Some months later they had word that the engineer had been seen in Holland. How had he got there? Was he a spy? One of theirs? Or one of ours?

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.