大象传媒

Admiralty Civilian Shore Wireless Service.

During World War 11 I was a civilian radio operator employed by the Admiralty, and the service of which I was a member was known as the Civilian Shore Wireless Service, sometimes referred to facetiously as the Co-operative Wholesale Society because of the similarity of the initials. The work was interception of enemy naval signals and taking direction finding bearings on enemy ships which were mostly submarines.

In 1940 I was working as a radio operator in an aviation radio station in Ireland. One day a friend of mine showed me an application form for the Admiralty Civilian Shore Wireless Service and some information which came with it. Entrants were required to be able to receive morse at 20 words per minute. My friend changed his mind but I filled out the application form. Three weeks passed, during which they may have been 鈥渧etting 鈥� me in case I would turn out to be a spy, and then I got an invitation to attend for interview at the signal school of the Royal Navy barracks in Portsmouth on Monday 27th May 1940 at 9a.m. The first question I was asked was 鈥淎ssuming that you pass this interview, would you be able to start with us today?
I joined a class of about twenty men. During a course at Portsmouth R.N. Signal School we were told that submarines could only transmit when they were on the surface, and when they were submerged they could receive, but only on low frequencies. When on the surface they could of course receive on all frequencies. When they surfaced they had to dry out their antennas. They did this by pressing their key which made a particular sound which we had been trained to recognise. The moment we heard this we had to call out the frequency to the controller who was permanently connected to several DF stations and they would hopefully be able to locate the U boat position very precisely.

At Portsmouth we also learned and practiced the morse symbols for accented vowels, which are extra to the ordinary letters, figures, and punctuation marks which every radio operator must learn for his certificate. Other skills learned on the course included target practice with the .45 revolver, known officially as a pistol, never a 鈥渉and gun鈥� in those days. We also had rifle practice but ammunition for this was limited to only five rounds each.

After three weeks in Portsmouth I was transferred to Flowerdown R.N. W/T station near Winchester. In the main building there were perhaps forty operators on duly, some of them civilians and some were girls in the uniform of the W.R.N.S., all copying traffic from German or Italian stations.
The German radio stations controlling the Battle of the Atlantic were Lorient, R X 脷, and Berlin 脕 D A. Four letter code was used, and naval ships used no call signs, transmitting their messages on the same frequency as the shore stations and using a prefix which distinguished between a weather report W W, and an enemy sighting report 脡 脡, which we called an E bar, (morse symbol ..-..).
e.g. 脡 脡 ZMPQ CLRB FXDS JTLM RNOX.
There were also prefixes for other categories of messages.

The German broadcasts would come up on known frequencies, at the same time, ten minutes past the hour, long messages of four letter groups The message would then be repeated from another base in the area so that should any of their intended recipients miss a group or letter for any reason there was a second chance for their operators (as us as well) to check the message and insert any missing letters or groups. By using another station to repeat the message there was the chance that the second station might not have the same atmospheric disturbances as the originator. Ships were not supposed to ask for groups to be repeated for fear of being D/F ed but occasionally they did. If so the operator shouted the frequency and the control person would direct, via his land lines, his choice of D/F stations to that frequency.

I had been there a couple of weeks in Flowerdown when one morning a supervisor came round and said 鈥淗as anyone had experience of short wave direction finding?鈥� I was the only one who answered and I stood up and told him of my experiences at an aviation radio station in Ballygirreen.

From then on, until May 1945, I was continuously employed on taking bearings on enemy ships, mostly submarines, when they transmitted with their radio, and after Flowerdown I served at Cooling Marshes, on the Thames Estuary, Lydd on the Southeast coast of England, Kingston (Jamaica) and Wick in the north of Scotland.
We had Direction Finding stations at strategic points around the U.K. so that when an enemy submarine transmitted with his radio, provide that at least two of our stations got bearings his position could be determined and so a convoy might be diverted out of danger or its escort reinforced.

At Cooling Marshes we were having air raids every night, so I had some anxious times with enemy bombs exploding nearby and our anti-aircraft shells exploding overhead and showering their fragments all around. In the end of April 1941 we got instructions to close up the radio station at Cooling Marshes and transfer to Lydd, near Dungeness, where a better site for a D/F station had been found.

This really sounds like ancient history, but it was decided that when the time came to warn the people of England that Hitler鈥檚 invasion had started the church bells were to be rung all over the land, and the signal for this to be done was to be the code word 鈥淐romwell鈥�. Therefore there was no bell for Mass, or Church of England, or other religious service.
On Sunday, September the 8th I went on duty at 8 a.m. from my lodgings in the nearby village of Littleton and in those days my instructions were to collect a rifle and ammunition at the main receiving station and to take them with me to the building known as D/F one. On arrival at my place of duty I was surprised to see two armed soldiers at the door, and I was even more surprised on going inside to see that Mr. Kenward, whom I was relieving had two revolvers on the table beside the receiver.
His reply to my question 鈥淲hat is it all about?鈥� was 鈥淥h haven鈥檛 you heard? The church bells have been rung, and the Germans have landed. Hardly had he said this when we heard the sound of a large formation of aircraft approaching. It was a day of low grey clouds, just below which and partly shrouded in mist we saw the twin engined planes, several abreast and more behind them.
I don鈥檛 know if the others with me expected a low level bombing or machine gun attack, but my own expectation was that we were going to be in action against paratroopers within minutes and that we might shoot some of them on their way down. Of course, we were all looking anxiously towards the oncoming aircraft, when one of the soldiers was the first to see the markings and called out 鈥淚ts all right, they are ours鈥�. I can truly say I was never more relieved in my life. The explanation of the mistaken ringing of the church bells came to me long after the war in a book called 鈥淚nvasion 1940鈥� by Peter Fleming. It seems that there was doubt or confusion in London among highly placed persons as to whether 鈥淐romwell鈥� meant that an invasion was imminent, or that the Germans had actually landed. The night of 7th/8th September was that of the first heavy air attack on London. At the same time there was a concentration of enemy ships sighted off Calais, and so in the belief that the invasion of England was on the way, the dread code word was sent out .

In the summer of 1942 I accepted a transfer abroad where there was a good overseas allowance. In July I crossed the Atlantic from the Clyde to New York. The crossing took 14 days and on several occasions the escort dropped depth charges, I suppose when the presence of submarines was suspected. I was instructed to take the train to Miami and Pan American airways to Kingston, Jamaica.
I spent two and a half years in Jamaica, and might have been longer had I not got a succession of very severe attacks of asthma, with which I was laid up on three or four occasions in the British Military Hospital in the kind and gentle care of Queen Alexandra鈥檚 Nursing Service. Finally it was found that I was allergic to the tropical vegetation so I was sent back to the UK via Miami and the 鈥淨ueen Elizabeth鈥� ship from New York to the Clyde. I left pier 90 North River in New York during the night of February 28th/ March 1st crowded with fifteen thousand American soldiers. My passport bears the stamp of the Immigration Officer, Clyde Ports dated 6th March, 1945, and with that my travels to distant lands were over.

My next posting was to Wick in the north of Scotland, which was a very severe change of climate, but by then the war was nearly over and eventually I was transferred to Winchester where I retired from the CSWS on 25th March, 1947. I could have stayed on to retiring age because the interception service was necessary to try and find out what potential enemies were plotting but I decided to apply again for the job I had in Ballygirren prior to the war. Therefore I continued at Ballygirreen for 31 years from 1947 to 1978 when I retired at the age of 69.

HF D/F was a war winner. D/F bearings reached the Admiralty Submarine Tracking Room before the decrypted translated texts and often enabled control to warn convoy escorts that they had been sighted within a few minutes of the event. The Bismarck would not have been sunk but for HF D/F and many, many convoys were kept clear of U boats or at least given an advance warning of an impending attack.

Dermod J. Kirwan.

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