大象传媒

This is a story told many times by my late father-in-law who was the telephone engineer for Swindon during WW2. He would never commit to paper his wartime stories as he held the fear of the authorities in regard to his signing of 鈥淭he Official Secrets Act鈥�. However he did tell this story with some pride.

As a telephone engineer one of his responsibilities was for the secret world of Highworth and Shrivenham (now the Royal Military College of Science and the Joint Services University). This story is of one day at the United States Army Command at Shrivenham.

He received a call requiring him to attend to the telex machine at base and affect a repair, as they were awaiting a very important signal relating to the last few days of the war.

He made his way to the base and started to work on the machine, which was spewing out gibberish in vast quantities. One must remember at this stage of the story that the telex machines were American and worked on the US standard 60 cycle AC electric system and been adapted to take the UK standard 50 cycle system, thus the tuning of the works was critical to obtain the fluent flow of legible English.

Under ever-increasing pressure from the General, he fine-tuned the machine until it started to produce English, before lapsing again and again into gibberish.

By now the General and several of his staff were going ballistic and my father-in-law was under massive pressure to fix that machine.

After some time, and many attempts at the fine-tuning the machine with a small screw in the middle of the valves wires and cogs, it started to produce English then more gibberish, a tweak of the screw and English started again.

The first legible script that emerged was something like:

URGENT 鈥� URGENT- URGENT.

TOP SECRET

The American Airforce has just detonated the nuclear device over the Japanese city of Hiroshima鈥︹�︹�︹�︹�︹�︹�︹�︹�︹�︹�︹��.

This message was taken from the machine before my father-in-law had time to finish reading it, and warned of its secrecy.

Hence my father-in-law he became the first civilian in the UK to know about the horrendous episode unfolding in Japan.

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