大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Christine McDerment at Camberley Library and has been added to the website on behalf of Margaret (she prefers ot withold her surname) with her permission and she fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
"I was living in London when the war broke out and I joined the Wrens in 1943. I was about 20 then. I have lots of memories, but the most important one is about D Day.
I knew it was D Day because of the smokescreen.
I was working as a teleprinter operator in Portsmouth, taking down the coded messages and passing them on. I had been there for about two years and lived in Catsfield while I worked at Southwick Fort on Portsdown Hill above Portsmouth. We worked underground there for the Commander in Chief, Portsmouth, HMS Victory. We worked in three shifts, but there must have been about two or three hundred of us working there on combined ops at any one time.
I remember I was just coming on for nightshift when I saw the smokescreen all over the town, so I knew it was 鈥渙n鈥�, because of course it had been postponed a couple of times. We鈥檇 had hundreds of troops gathering there for months and all leave had been cancelled for weeks too.
We鈥檇 been training for it and we were waiting for it, so we were all prepared. I suppose we all felt relief really, that it was finally happening, that it had actually come. It didn鈥檛 change anything about what we were doing: we were always busy anyway and didn鈥檛 know what the messages were that we dealt with, as they were all in five letter codes.
Funny, I never thought how important that smokescreen was, but it would have acted like a fog so that any aircraft couldn鈥檛 see what was happening. But that鈥檚 the first thing I think about when I think about D Day, that smoke."

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