大象传媒

BRIDLINGTON 1943

Special mission to Yugoslavia

Radio operators and officers, from both 23rd Hussars and 24th Lancers, were asked to volunteer for a special duty. I was among the four radio operators who volunteered from the Lancers.
Together with others from the Hussars we were taken to a parachute battalion barracks in Oxford. Here we were given full details of the operation to parachute into Yugoslavia to assist the resistance partisans - but then they realised they had forgotten to test us radio operators for our proficiency in morse!.
We were taken to a tent and seated at a long table with morse keys in front of each person. A sergeant then told us he would give us a 鈥榳arm up鈥� and sent a message at a reasonable speed which we all managed to get.
Then an officer came in and the sergeant saluted and said 鈥淚鈥檝e given them a warm-up and they were all OK鈥�.
The officer took his place at the morse key and sent a message at such a speed that I, for one, couldn't even get the first few letters, let alone any of the words. However, two of our Lancer friends did take the message perfectly correctly and one of them was such a 'natural' that he didn鈥檛 write each word as it came but waited and wrote a sentence at a time!.
Therefore out of our group of half a dozen or so there were only two who were capable of doing the job!. After saying our goodbyes and good luck to them they went off to join other men who had been accepted from other regiments.
It now dawned on the officers of the unit that here was a group of men who had all been completely briefed on the complete operation but were not now taking part. There was only one solution we would all have to sign the official secrets act and then be confined to the camp until the operation had been mounted. For some seven or eight days we hung around the camp enjoying the excellent food and reveling in the comfort of having bed sheets at night. During that time we heard that one of our friends had been killed doing a practice jump and an officer from the 23rd hussars (Captain Stephenson) was killed on the flight over. Then we were given a forty-eight hour leave pass, and travel warrants to re-join our units in Bridlington.
When we arrived back at our unit we rejoined our squadrons and settled down to normal work. Then, some three weeks later at breakfast our intelligence officer came over to my table and, after getting the friends I was sitting with to move to another table, he said "I've got some news for you about the Lancers who were accepted for that special job you went for in Oxford. A report has come through from a liason officer with the Yugoslav partisans that, as they landed, our men were shot by communist resistance fighters to get their equipment".
Standing up to go he added 鈥淒on't forget, there are still some of our people out there so don't let on what we've been talking about will you?".

Len Bolden

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