I went in for signals because two of my mates went in as well. We did a little training in England, I think about three months with signals, picking up the Morse Code, of course, which was around then. And then we were shipped abroad and we went to South Africa, Cape Town. From South Africa, we went to North Africa. Now, we found after that they kept us down there for the three months because the push was on El Alamein, to push the Germans out and we didn’t want to get involved in that too much. So we waited until they’d started and were pushing them to Tunis [Tunisia], the Jerries [nickname for the Germans].
And so we went up there, we went to Derna [Libya], they were nearly deserted towns then, Bizerta [Tunisia], and we ended up in Tunis, just as the Germans were being pushed out. We just saw the end of it. So from there, we went across to Sicily. I was there for, how long, we were pushing the Germans out and I was there for about four months. And then they pushed them out and a bit later on, I can’t specifically say dates because everything was so rushed at that time, but from there, we went across to Italy, Anzio. So we landed in [HMS] Azalea at Anzio and we joined up.
The thing was, our unit, we were a special wireless unit. We’d had two vans with aerials and we used to follow a German division across the front and take down all what they were talking about to one another. We joined up, we were with the Americans, we were with the Canadians. We were with the Polish Division, you know, wherever this German division was, we’d move across with it. And if they moved in front of another division, like Canadian, Polish, whatever, we’d join that division. The [Fallschirm-Panzer] Göring Division, that was one of them, we were chasing them for quite a while, Hermann Göring Division.
We had the special boys in with us, the intelligence. There were three of them in the van and when we took something down, we’d just wave it to them, they’d come over and they’d look at it to see if it’s worth sending through to headquarters. Many times it was because they were on the move, this Hermann Göring, so they had to keep up with them. One minute they were there and the next minute, they weren’t. So they wanted to know where each division was, you see.
I was an operator. I sat in front of a wireless set, wireless, and you just turned the dial. You see a big dial in the front, you’d turn that until you heard German and then you, and we’re off. On duty, there were about four of us, each time, there were about three shifts, you see, about 12 operators altogether. The only scary time was when we were going down a pass or we were just about to go down the pass, around this mountain, you see. And suddenly, we saw another heavily armoured group approaching the pass from the other end. So we thought, well, that’s funny because we were usually told if there’s our troops around. So we thought, well, we’ll wait a minute and hang on there, until somebody screamed, “They’re Jerries!” It was a German division coming up the other end and we were … That was very fast. We just turned around and bolted, I don’t know where we went.
And also we were at Cassino [Italy]. We were just above Cassino, so we had a good view of the battle down below because we had to get up high for our aerials, you see. And the division, Herman Göring I think, they were in, oh no, they were paratroopers. We had the Hermann Göring Division next door to Cassino. And we were keeping our eye on them, at the same time we could see the battle going on down below, which was a nasty one.
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Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Sandford Tuey
I'm Sandford Tuey. I was with Communication Research 291 in the Canadian Armed Forces.
I volunteered to serve in the Canadian Armed Forces from 1976 to 1979. I was straight out of high school, age seventeen, too young to join myself so I convinced my mother to sign me up, which she did.
I flew in a jet for the first time from Vancouver, BC to Canadian Forces base Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, where I went through very rigorous basic military training, harder than what was portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's movie Full Metal Jacket. My favourite course was 'Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Warfare' – an eye-opening subject for a teenager. To this day, it was one of the most stressful and physically demanding times of my life, but well worth the experience.
After graduating from basic training, I worked at Canadian Forces base Kingston to begin my trade – communications research. I learned general communications and how to operate many kinds of transmitters/receivers, typing, cryptography, to being able to copy Morse code to how to receive signals from telex and satellite. There were also courses like 'riot squad' and 'base defence', where dealing with anti-terrorism techniques and controlling rioting crowds was mandatory education. I was proud to graduate with a top-secret clearance level.
I was then stationed at Masset, Queen Charlotte Islands, in the British Columbia wonderful and beautiful group of the Haida Gwai'i Islands. Due to the top-secret nature of the work I did there, I am not liberty to discuss this other than to say that I continued to research communications for the benefit of Canada and NATO. If you visit the area today, you will still see the tall listening poles in a circle around the main building where I worked.
I then served six months – one hundred and eighty-three days and a wakie – at Canadian Forces station Alert, Northwest Territories, now Nunavut, at the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, four hundred miles south of the North Pole. So far north of the Arctic Circle that when you looked at a compass, magnetic north read southwest. When I arrived there it was pitch black twenty-four hours a day and deadly cold. In between whiteout blizzards, we would go outside to watch the aurora borealis swirling overhead, with its greenish blue and red ion trails. It was so quiet up there sometimes; you could even hear the northern lights crackle.
Researching communications from other countries during the Cold War was a dangerous time, and the servicemen like myself paid their dues during isolation duty received Special Forces medals. This is due to the fact that if the Cold War ever went hot, we could be one of the first bases to be attacked. Back in the '50s, '60s and '70s, there was always the chance that the Americans and the Russians would start World War III. I, however, always believed that the Cold War was World War III, based on the fact that hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, if not millions, in conflicts that took place all over the world since the end of World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Link
I volunteered to serve in the Canadian Armed Forces from 1976 to 1979. I was straight out of high school, age seventeen, too young to join myself so I convinced my mother to sign me up, which she did.
I flew in a jet for the first time from Vancouver, BC to Canadian Forces base Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, where I went through very rigorous basic military training, harder than what was portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's movie Full Metal Jacket. My favourite course was 'Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Warfare' – an eye-opening subject for a teenager. To this day, it was one of the most stressful and physically demanding times of my life, but well worth the experience.
After graduating from basic training, I worked at Canadian Forces base Kingston to begin my trade – communications research. I learned general communications and how to operate many kinds of transmitters/receivers, typing, cryptography, to being able to copy Morse code to how to receive signals from telex and satellite. There were also courses like 'riot squad' and 'base defence', where dealing with anti-terrorism techniques and controlling rioting crowds was mandatory education. I was proud to graduate with a top-secret clearance level.
I was then stationed at Masset, Queen Charlotte Islands, in the British Columbia wonderful and beautiful group of the Haida Gwai'i Islands. Due to the top-secret nature of the work I did there, I am not liberty to discuss this other than to say that I continued to research communications for the benefit of Canada and NATO. If you visit the area today, you will still see the tall listening poles in a circle around the main building where I worked.
I then served six months – one hundred and eighty-three days and a wakie – at Canadian Forces station Alert, Northwest Territories, now Nunavut, at the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, four hundred miles south of the North Pole. So far north of the Arctic Circle that when you looked at a compass, magnetic north read southwest. When I arrived there it was pitch black twenty-four hours a day and deadly cold. In between whiteout blizzards, we would go outside to watch the aurora borealis swirling overhead, with its greenish blue and red ion trails. It was so quiet up there sometimes; you could even hear the northern lights crackle.
Researching communications from other countries during the Cold War was a dangerous time, and the servicemen like myself paid their dues during isolation duty received Special Forces medals. This is due to the fact that if the Cold War ever went hot, we could be one of the first bases to be attacked. Back in the '50s, '60s and '70s, there was always the chance that the Americans and the Russians would start World War III. I, however, always believed that the Cold War was World War III, based on the fact that hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, if not millions, in conflicts that took place all over the world since the end of World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Link
Monday, May 7, 2018
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