大象传媒

Part 6

Uncle Percy was my father鈥檚 eldest brother. While in north Wales recovering from wounds received in France during World War One, he married my aunt Vi who had been a volunteer nurse鈥檚 aid. They had no children. Perce (as he was known) came away from the army with 鈥漵hell shock鈥� which in his case left him with a distaste for noise. Perce worked as a watchmaker in the family shop in Thame. His life was very routine. Each evening he would spend an hour in the pub then go home for a cup of cocoa, bread and cheese with a sample of the onions he had grown and Vi had pickled for his enjoyment. He never complained of indigestion or sleeplessness.
Perce was deeply involved with the Freemason movement. His other consuming pursuit was amateur radio. At one time he combined both endeavours by joining a Masonic lodge given over entirely to amateur radio enthusiasts.
Perce built his own short wave transmitter that he operated from the spare bedroom of his home. He concentrated exclusively on Morse code key and would not even consider a microphone. His Morse speeds were at the high end of human ability, somewhere in the forty letters per minute range. Early in the war he had joined the Observer Corps for which he spent regular shifts at 鈥渢he post鈥� recording the movements of aircraft. His ability with Morse code led to his recruitment by what must have been a branch of the secret service to make use of his radio expertise to read code on assigned frequencies at specified times. He did this for several years during the war but never knew who the sender was, or what the messages were about, everything was in code. His sessions were in the middle of the night.
The following morning he would use the envelopes provided to post by registered mail the texts he had recorded.
At the end of the war he received a certificate of thanks for his contribution to the war effort, but he never did find out exactly what he had done.

Shortly after the US entered the war in 1942 we were inundated with bad news from the Far East where Americans, French and British were singularly unprepared for the attack by Japan. Not long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought America into the war, the British navy had used torpedo carrying-aircraft based on aircraft carriers to launch a surprise attack that just about annihilated the Italian fleet as it lay in Taranto harbour. A Japanese military team went to inspect the site. Nobody realized how they would use the information they gathered to plan their attack on Pearl Harbour in November 1942.

While idly turning the short wave radio dial for something more cheery than the usual fare, I once picked up a fluke propaganda transmission on short wave from a Japanese station in what is now Indonesia in which British prisoners of war were broadcasting home. After the war I read a magazine article about these transmissions. A photograph illustrating the article showed soldiers supposedly making a broadcast of the kind I had heard but the text read that no such broadcast was ever picked up. I should have been writing down the names of the soldiers but of course never did and have often wondered whom the men were that made the broadcast I heard.

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