´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Roland Gardner from Sidley On Line Centre, and has been added to the website on behalf of Elise Broadbent nee Herivel with her permission, and she fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

SAVING OUR SHIPS

At the outbreak of WW2, I was 23 years old, and had just graduated with an Honours Degree in History from Queens University, Belfast. I trained as a teacher, but because of the wartime travel restrictions, I was unable to pursue my teaching career. In 1940 I joined the WRNS, and as a university graduate, I was specially trained in top-secret specialities. After a year, I was detailed to join the ‘degaussing’ unit in Belfast. I should explain that in the earlier years of the war, our Merchant and Royal Navy fleets suffered tremendous losses from the German magnetic mines. The degaussing process was carried out in a highly restricted deepwater channel. Across the channel floor was situated a specially formulated cable, which as the subject ship passed above it, photographed and assessed the magnetic field given out by the ship. I was in charge of taking the photographs and developing them. Once the magnetic field had been assessed, the results were sent to the master of the ship by Aldis Lamp. He would then proceed to the shipyard in Belfast, where an electrically charged cable would be passed around and attached to the ship. This would neutralise the ship’s magnetic field, thus ensuring it gave a negative attraction to magnetic mines. There is no doubt that this process saved many thousands of lives.

As part of the ‘family war effort’, my brother, John Herival, who was a top-flight mathematician at Cambridge University, was recruited by Military Intelligence to work in the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. In May 1940, he was directly responsible for breaking the Luftwaffe Operational Code.

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