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This story was submitted to the People War’s site by Jane Van de Ban of CSV Media on behalf of Margaret Diplock and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Margaret Diplock nee McCarthy (RAF
Service number: 892863)

Confidential duties
I initially volunteered for the RAF in 1939. Then they called me up in November, but my father had a terminal illness and I wrote to ask them to delay.

I eventually went in on 10 June 1940. I was interviewed at Roose Airport, and they decided I would become Clerk, Special Duties (SD), for Fighter Command. This meant that everything I did was confidential.

I was trained in West Drayton; then I went to Leighton Buzzard to train as a plotter. I made a short visit to Filton, to see an operating table. Then I was sent into Cornwall, in St Eval. At the time, the table wasn’t operating, so we volunteered for other duties. I volunteered for phone duties, and I ended up in Special Operations, where I was an assistant to the Ops B officer. We operated two fighter squadrons, 1-234 Squadron, day fighters, and 247 Squadron, the night fighters.

Air Defence
We were ADGB (Air Defence of Great Britain). I worked with one gentleman, who was regular Air Force. The story was that he never worked with a woman before, but we became great friends.

St Eval was very badly bombed in 1940, and the operations room was bombed. Two of us volunteered to go down to the table to keep it going. But then we moved into a barn, because the OR wasn’t working, with a pigsty for our restroom. Coming out one evening, I mentioned to a friend, ‘The moon is very bright.’ And she said, ‘That’s no moon, that’s a landmine.’ It was a landmine coming down.

At that time, they strafed the NAAFI. A number of people were injured, some killed. I had a telephone box in front of me, and when the controller gave the warning to take shelter, normally the first number that came up on my board was Extension 17 - Flare Path duty. This one time, the extension didn’t come up. We later found that a landmine had rolled down the steps, and 21 people were killed.

Using radar
After that, we went on to our own aerodrome at Portreath. I was only there for a short while, when I was asked to go to a new system: GCI (Ground Control Inception) in 1941. Our responsibility was to use radar to track planes from the ground up to a certain height. For this, we had two radar tubes, one height finder, one with blips. It was up to us to sketch the inception.

I was in charge of the crew that shot down the first JU88 west of the Scillies. And to prepare, what we did was ask the pilots to fly any plane up from the ground, in any direction. And within a short time, I was able to give them all the details on the plane, the direction it was going, the height, etc.

All of this is out in the open now, but then it was all strictly confidential.

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