大象传媒

John Tucker (1918-2000) was born in Solihull, near Birmingham, into an electrical-manufacturing family. His father was a pioneer of amateur (鈥渉am鈥�) radio in the Midlands, and John caught the virus early. As a schoolboy at Charterhouse, he ran an amateur radio station; through all his adult life, from his call-sign G5TU, he continued to communicate regularly with fellow 鈥渉ams鈥� 鈥� including a conversation with Helen Sharman as she orbited the Earth in the Russian space station MIR in 1992). At the outbreak of WW2 (during which he acquired the nickname of 鈥淭ommy鈥� Tucker) his communications expertise took him into the Royal Corps of Signals. He organised discreet and efficient radio setups on board former French fishing-boats running agents from Cornwall to and from occupied France; later he did the same for boats running from Shetland to occupied Norway, and for boats running along the coast of Burma in the Far East.
Following some most enjoyable reunions in the mid-1990s with many of those whom he had known on the Helford River, 鈥淭ommy鈥� wrote down his war experiences for his family.
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PART TWO

[In late December 1943, after two years visiting the Helford River, in Cornwall, and north-east Scotland to do radio installations in vessels used for transporting secret agents to and from occupied France and Norway, I was sent to India to work on similar operations against the Japanese. See A4211731 for this story]

We were booked on an RAF DC3, which departed Swindon in the afternoon of 31 December 1943 and landed for a few hours in Cornwall (St Eval). We took off again at about 2200 hours, bound for Gibraltar, keeping to the west of Spain and Portugal. We arrived Gibraltar at about 0730 and went ashore for breakfast, which was very good after the breakfasts in England during the wartime food-rationing. After breakfast, it was back to the DC3 for the next part of our flight to Tripoli, Libya, where we spent the night. The final part of our flight was the next morning bound for Cairo, where we were to wait for our boss to arrive from London. We stayed in a hotel that was run by a man who was to have been our agent if the Germans had succeeded in capturing Cairo earlier 鈥� which they did not, thanks to General Montgomery. We waited here for two weeks before the boss arrived, and then we were able to continue to India.
This part of the journey was very interesting, as it was by Imperial Airways flying-boat. We took off from the River Nile and, after stopping on the way at the Dead Sea and Baghdad, landed on the River Tigris, near Basra, for a night in a hotel. The next day we flew from Basra to Karachi, with a few stops on the way. After another night in a hotel we took off again from Karachi harbour bound for somewhere in central India. The flying-boat landed on a large lake, where we were collected by two army vehicles and driven overland for about 50 miles, with dust flying in all directions. We were glad to be dropped at a small airfield, where we climbed into yet another DC3 that took us on to New Delhi.
Our main radio station in the East was in the military area near New Delhi. This worked not only to London but also to various parts of the Far East, such as Ceylon, Calcutta, Kunming, Kweilin and Brisbane.
This was early in 1945 and the war in Europe was expected to finish fairly soon, after which all efforts would be devoted to finishing the war against Japan. This involved us in building a new main radio station in or near Calcutta that would be very much bigger than the New Delhi one. We designed it to have a capacity of 24 circuits, though with only 12 circuits at the first stage.
It was a tremendous amount of work. First, it was necessary to have completely separate receiver and transmitter stations because, once more than about two circuits were operating in the same room, the transmitters would 鈥渂lock鈥� the other receivers, or even put them out of action. So an additional site was found about 10 miles away, on the north side of Calcutta. We could only be allotted six pairs of telephone lines between the two stations. This was a bit of a problem for us, as we had to remotely control up to 12 transmitters, and we needed one telephone line for speech, and we wished to keep one line spare in case of breakdowns. Eventually we were able to borrow some VF (voice frequency) equipment from the Americans in New Delhi. This could use four lines and give us eight circuits on each line! The other important thing was to have a mains electric supply for the transmitter station. This was organised with great help from the Calcutta Electric Supply. Finally, we needed 20-24 masts, 100 feet high, to carry all the different aerials that we would need. We managed to get these from the Indian P&T Dept. By this time a very good old friend of mine 鈥� Robin Addie - had arrived from Bletchley, and he and I spent most of out time on this new station.
The SIS office in India was known as ISLD (Inter-Services Liaison Department), and did the same kind of work. One day when I was in the ISLD office in South Calcutta, imagine my surprise when I saw 鈥淛J鈥� [see Helford River story] walk in. I had no idea he was coming to Calcutta. So we saw quite a lot of each other for a while. 鈥淛J鈥� was anxious to do Helford-River-type operations along the coast of Burma. He was given what was called a 鈥渃ountry craft鈥�, which turned out to be a sampan, and a crew consisting of a Chinese No 1 named Chang, plus a number of Indian sailors.
The sampan had to be fitted out with an engine, as it was designed for sail only 鈥� and very slow sailing, at that. I installed radio in exactly the same way as I had done on the Helford River boats. Once the engine was fitted, it was time for tests. This proved to be a waste of time, because it was impossible to steer. The hull shape of a sampan was fine for slow sailing, controlled by a very large rudder. However, when it came to trying to move under power from the engine, it had to be seen to be believed. The smallest movement of the rudder would make the ship shear off at right-angles from her course and head for the bank on the other side of the River Hooghli, quite out of control. I know there was a lot of discussion between 鈥淛J鈥� and the 鈥減owers-that-be鈥�, but nothing seemed to come out of it. In the end, he told me that he had to take the vessel 鈥渂y fair means or foul鈥� to the port of Akyab, on the coast of Burma, where it could be used to supply the base ship named Blinjoe with stores and coal! He didn鈥檛 like the idea of going out to sea in the Bay of Bengal with a ship that had such bad habits, so he decided to take a local pilot and to go through the area of the Ganges delta, which is about 230 miles wide and full of little rivers and interconnecting streams, and wildlife. I saw him again after he had done this, and as usual he had some very amusing stories to tell.
In May 1945 I was sent to install radio equipment in an ML of the Bengal Auxiliary Flotilla, at Akyab. The Senior Officer (Commander Norman, ex-Shanghai Customs), known as SOBAF, told me that radio communications with ships of his flotilla appeared to have a range of only 4 or 5 miles, and asked if I could do anything about it. I found that there were six 110-foot MLs in the flotilla, all of which had had their original, quite tall masts removed and replaced by short bamboo masts about 10 or 12 feet long so that they could lie up when necessary under overhanging branches, close to the banks of rivers. The result of shortening the mast meant that the radio aerial was very short indeed, and very inefficient as it was impossible to install one that would run from the top of the main mast right down to a short mast aft. The frequencies allotted to these MLs needed an aerial 130 feet long. SOBAF gave me the go-ahead to install, on one ML only, a new aerial of about 130 feet in length between the small cross-tree on the bamboo mast and the forward gun safety hoop, by taking the aerial up and down many times until the required length fitted in. When completed, the whole thing looked rather like a flying bedstead, but it loaded the transmitter correctly and seemed as if it would work.
The whole thing was given a live test a few days later, when the ML was despatched on an operation to take place about 300 miles south down the coast of Burma. SOBAF himself went on that mission and, after completing it and being still about 300 miles south, insisted that they break radio silence and send a quick message back to us in Akyab to see if all worked.
At about 2 o鈥檆lock in the morning I was on watch with another radio operator on the base ship, and we were both amazed to hear how strong the signals were 鈥� in fact they nearly blew the earphones off our heads while I was taking down the message. (We were later told that it was exactly the same in the ML.) SOBAF was delighted when he returned, and asked me to install the same aerials on each of the other five MLs. This I did, and there were no more radio problems after that.
Somehow a report of that episode seemed to reach the ears of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia (SACSEA), because I received a special card in May 1946 from him, thanking me for solving the problem. I always suspected that SOBAF had arranged this.
After that, I returned to Calcutta to find that the new main radio station was already working well. Not long afterwards, in May 1945,the Japanese pulled out of Burma and I remember seeing a picture in the paper of a prison building near Rangoon, taken by the RAF the previous day, showing how some British POWs had painted on the roof in large letters 鈥淛APS GONE: EXTRACT DIGIT鈥�.
The Calcutta radio station carried a lot of traffic in those days, but we never extended the number of circuits to 24. Perhaps that was just as well, because some months later the Japanese surrendered. In the meantime, I was sent out to Rangoon with a radio mechanic and some radio equipment which we installed in a house that ISLD had taken over in rather a nice area north of the city, an attractive spot where there were several lakes. We then returned to Calcutta.

I finally got back to England in March 1946, and was demobbed in London.

[END OF PART TWO]

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