大象传媒

The death of an elderly local lady has reminded me, a former wireless operator in an Eighth Army armoured division, of the part that she, and many others like her, played in promoting final victory in North Africa.
She was trained to listen in and record wireless traffic between the Afrika Korps and their German HQ. Just as we did, the German operators changed frequencies and call signs at irregular intervals, so that they would seem simply to disappear from the air. But this bright girl had studied and memorised the sending techniques - the fingerprints, as it were - of individual operators, and, by searching through the band of frequencies, could penetrate their new disguise, and continue to follow their traffic.
She and I worked out, to our satisfaction if to no one else's, that she had worked on the exchanges in March 1943 which resulted in our having a line of camouflaged antitank guns waiting for the panzers which Rommel sent out from the Mareth Line to delay our advance. Such was the havoc they inflicted that Monty announced that Rommel had "made a balls of it", and the Desert Fox returned to Germany, a sick man, and never returned.

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