To balance these stressful and repetitive duties was a prospect that Mr Budd and his comrades were daily dazzled by; their leisure hours were spent relaxing on beaches the like of which, nowadays, only the very rich can afford. ‘The beautiful lagoon in my day was a marine paradise. The atoll made the water a few degrees warmer – you had to push sharks aside to get in to have a swim. Well, I am exaggerating a little. But there were sharks by the thousand in the area. There were manta rays too. We didn’t know they were peaceful. We were terrified of them. And barracudas. If you went out fishing in a little boat, you were told you must bring your fishing line in within a hundred yards of the shore, in case a barracuda was following. One man didn’t do it. And someone swimming had half his bottom eaten off.’
Such hazards were not off-putting (even though, in the above instance, a seaplane had to be sent from Colombo in order to pick up the unfortunate man in question). ‘It was out of this world,’ says Mr Budd. ‘The water was much saltier being in a lagoon. And if you weren’t careful, you’d get salt forming on your eardrums, which would drive you mad.’ The answer? ‘You had to put cotton wool in your ear after swimming.’ There was also a limited amount of musical entertainment. ‘We had a wind-up gramophone with about six records. You had needles in those days, one for every record, and instead of putting a new needle in, we’d sharpen the old one on a stone. And you’d hear Bing Crosby singing on that beach.’
Even the close shaves are recalled fondly. ‘We were having a game of football and I was goalkeeping.’ There was even a proper football pitch laid out on the island for the wireless operators. ‘When we finished, it was just too hot, we all ran down the jetty to go for a swim. Someone had fixed a plank at the end, and those who were good, dived. Those who weren’t, like me, jumped. I ran along, jumped, and as I was going up into the air, I looked down at the water, and there was a shark, twenty feet long, absolutely motionless in the water beneath me.’
Obviously, in mid-air, in the manner of Wile E. Coyote, there was little that Peter Budd could do about it except pray. ‘I can’t remember now whether I landed on its back or in the sea. All I know is that I came up from the water like a Polaris missile and grabbed the plank and was shouting “Shark! Shark!” The experience terrified me at the time – but looking back, the poor shark had been out swimming or went into the warm water to have a little doze and then something comes out of the sky and lands on his back!’
Budd’s comrades were assiduous at exploiting the memory for pranks. ‘Another day, I was coming in one side of the jetty, and my mate was behind me. He dived under and through my legs. I felt this smooth body – and I jumped in the air again.’
For reasons of secrecy and security, Budd’s adventure was one of which his parents, loved ones and friends back home were allowed to know nothing, save that he was abroad. Letters were very strictly censored so as to prevent Mr Budd and his comrades inadvertently giving anything away. This was particularly pertinent after the fall of Singapore in 1942; following this catastrophe, the decision was taken to erase the Cocos Islands from the maps and the maritime charts, to simply pretend that they were not there at all. They were never referred to openly in communications. To all intents and purposes, Mr Budd was in a paradise that – for the purposes of the enemy – no longer existed. Even the RAF simply referred to it as ‘Island Brown’.
What must his parents – who had no idea where exactly he had been posted – have been imagining at the time? ‘They knew I’d gone abroad. They had no idea where I was. All they got was an occasional letter from me. You were allowed to give an address, which was HMS so-and-so, care of South East Asia command. So you could get letters. But they didn’t know whether I was on a ship, on shore, or wherever. Our letters were all censored. There would be blue pencil.’
Touchingly, Mr Budd’s parents attempted to send him parcels of food from home. These dispatches were rarely successful. On one occasion, he says, they ‘sent some apples out to me. They were pulp when they got there.’
Happily, the system was a little more rewarding the other way around. ‘I was allowed to send home tea – you could send boxes of tea from Ceylon. And I think I managed to convey that I was on an island. I used to say that I’d been out swimming.’
There are some who might have found the extreme isolation – and unvarying company – rather claustrophobic. But actually, says Peter Budd now, it fostered genuine closeness and friendship; so much so that the otherwise exhaustingly laborious work of homing in on Japanese signals seemed barely to impinge upon their lives at all. ‘Every three months a destroyer would come down and offload us some supplies. So when we went down on HMS Rocket, we helped carry stuff along the little jetty and they said, “We’ll come back in three months, we’ll bring you supplies – if you’re still here.” You see, the Japanese were on the next island.
‘We lived on fish and dehydrated potato. And whatever tinned stuff there was available.’ Again, this dependence on outside supplies might have been thought to heighten the sense of threat from the enemy: that the Japanese could close in at any moment. But no: ‘You would look out on the beach when you woke up to see if there was a Japanese landing craft there. Because you knew the Japanese were on Christmas Island which wasn’t all that far away. Before I arrived, they had been sending aircraft over every month to see what was happening. Finally, the American submarines from Perth sank all the Japanese supply ships coming to Christmas Island, so they only had enough fuel presumably for one flight. A Japanese plane came over at 100 feet, dropped a bomb on Home Island and killed four or six of the Malays. Then it came to Direction Island. All our lads scattered into the undergrowth. The pilot dropped a bomb. And one of our lads – Challoner – was in the undergrowth and the bomb blew him out into the open and the rear gunner cut him in half. But this was before I arrived.’
The unique geographical position of the islands meant that they could offer not merely a target, but also sanctuary. ‘One night we were there, we heard an aircraft circling round. Pitch dark. We went out and a Catalina was circling around. It was a Qantas mail plane. It flew regularly from Colombo to Perth. And it had engine problems.
‘Now it’s nearly 2000 miles from Cocos to Colombo. The pilot found this dot of an island at night. He started signalling. We signalled back to him with the wind direction, and he came in and made a perfect landing. He stayed with us for a week until they came up with some spares.’ There was a tragic postscript, though, pointing to the hazards that lay unseen in these beautiful islands. ‘Just before I left, a Catalina flying boat came down with RAF technicians. It was flat calm. The pilot touched down – but somehow he got his horizon wrong. He pitched over and over. The plane caught fire. We went out into the water and brought back the survivors. Seven died. They had gone under and two died when we brought them ashore, they were so badly injured.’
Other than this, though, the days, weeks and months went by for Budd in a kaleidoscopic daze of colour. Unusually for wartime, he was able to take quite a few photographs – if he hadn’t, he would scarcely have been able to believe it years later. Obviously, with supplies only coming in once every three months, one had to be careful – but Mr Budd’s girlfriend back in England was the daughter of the owner of a chemist’s shop. And this man had access to more camera film than most.
For various reasons, the idyll could not last. ‘Our paradise was ruined when one day – it seemed – the waters around the island were suddenly full of ships. It was the RAF come down to build an airstrip on the longest of the islands. They were going to bomb the oil installations on Java. The arrival of all those thousands of troops ended the little unspoilt atoll that I knew.’
By that stage, nearer the end of the war, the islands had outlived their original strategic purpose and were instead to become a sort of forward base. Meanwhile, Peter Budd’s expertise – for he had acquired a great deal of experience in those intense months – was needed elsewhere. He was later to find himself posted to Karachi, this tim
e with a measure of authority. Like so many of his young colleagues, being flung to all corners of the earth had made him, quite without realising it, grow up very quickly.
16 Foreboding and Frustration
There were moments when all the airwaves in the world seemed alive with noise. Such a point came in the Mediterranean conflict with the fall of Mussolini on 26 July 1943. Although this appeared to indicate unstoppable Allied progress, however, the German divisions in Italy under General Kesselring were digging in. Meanwhile, on Sicily, where the Allies had landed, the Special Liaison Units were conveying Y intelligence directly to Generals Montgomery and Patton, while Enigma decrypts flashed across from Bletchley Park.
By August, the Germans had begun evacuating Sicily – and indications for the build-up of the operation were relayed, step by step, through the Bletchley codebreakers. In fact, by 11 August, both Bletchley and the Y section attached to the Eighth Army were able to confirm that the German withdrawal across the Straits of Messina was fully under way. The Bletchley official history raises the question of why – in a curious mirror image of the Dunkirk evacuation – the Allied air forces did not do more to try and halt this massive flow of enemy troops. The intelligence had been there for up to a fortnight beforehand: so why had the Allies not acted effectively upon it? Some suggest it was, in part, to do with unsuccessful Allied amphibious assaults; and partly to do with a huge amount of German firepower, concentrated in the area of the Straits of Messina, which was simply too intense for Allied pilots to get through.
Afterwards, on Sicily, there was then a lull, for which Y Service operative Harold Everett was particularly grateful:
After the Sicilian campaign had ended, our little unit spent three idyllic weeks at Milazzo on the north coast of the island. Our leaguer was in a vineyard about twenty yards from the sea and I could reach out from my ‘bivvy’ and pick the abundant luscious black grapes. The weather was hot, with almost unbroken sunshine . . . we swam or lazed on the sandy beaches, ‘the world forgetting, by the world forgot.’
But war could take the most surprising and unexpected tolls. In the case of Everett, it was an ulcer on his leg, which became troublesome – ‘my more imaginative comrades . . . told the locals that I had been wounded fighting the Germans and that I had killed dozens of them with my tommy gun.’ Soon becoming feverish and in great pain, Everett was hospitalised, and transferred from one Red Cross facility to another until a medic could finally pinpoint the exact nature of his malady: the sister ‘explained . . . that I was suffering from cutaneous diphtheria, a form of the disease that had died out in the Middle Ages but which had been re-activated by the dust and the dirt of the Afro-Sicilian campaign’.1 It is telling to imagine that a twentieth-century conflict could resurrect a medieval disease.
The Italians were surrendering; but any idea that this might hasten the downfall of the Nazis was misplaced. The determination of Kesselring’s forces seemed only to be reinforced. Furthermore, certain improvements had been made to German security. ‘With the development of the fighting in Italy,’ wrote Hugh Skillen, ‘Army Y redressed the disappointments in its [recent] performance . . . and again provided a picture of enemy activity as comprehensive as that which it had given in the Western desert and during the later stages of the Tunisian campaign.’ However, ‘German field security was steadily improving so that the amount of intelligence derived from (traffic) . . . greatly declined. Fortunately . . . the rediscovery in October of the enemy’s VHF networks proved a turning point and restored the declining prestige of Army Y.’2
In other territories, the resolve of the Germans to hold on in the face of Italian capitulation was equally remarkable. For instance, Italians who had been guarding the docks and the railways in Athens were swiftly replaced by German troops. And back at home, despite a token measure of resistance from Italian troops, the German army took hold of Rome. Elsewhere, Major Phillip Worrall was parachuted into the Pindus mountain region of Greece intending to make contact with Greek partisans but instead suddenly found himself having to defend a party of Italian soldiers both from the Germans, who wanted to capture and deport them, and from the enraged locals, who wanted to exact grisly revenge for all the wrongs that had been visited upon them. Worrall’s ruse was to pretend that all ninety soldiers were injured; he had them installed in a makeshift Red Cross hospital. When the German soldiers arrived, this is where they found them. Unfortunately for the Italians, the Red Cross provided no kind of protection; they were all taken out of the hospital and shot.
Despite the brutalising nature of the conflict, the Y Service operators continued to find that by listening in on enemy conversations, they could sometimes eavesdrop on unintentionally comic moments. Harold Everett wrote:
For some reason, Italian traffic tended to produce more amusing incidents than the German. When the Italian armies were crumbling away, we listened to a long conversation . . . between two signals operators in which they spoke in gloomy terms of the Allied advance, the collapse of Italian resistance and above all of the widespread desertions. At last one of them, after enumerating all those in his unit who had gone, said: ‘Siamo . . . why don’t we clear off?’ His opposite number replied: ‘Why not?’
As the conflict in Italy and the western Mediterranean continued to rage in the autumn of 1943, both sides almost paralysed into their positions by such factors as terrible weather, life in former war hotspots such as Cairo was, for certain social classes, regaining some of its old splendour. Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, wrote:
Last night we went to a charity ball at the Auberge des Pyramides. The courtyard was roofed over with rugs and in the immense space below were dining tables, bars, two band-stands and dance floors . . . The scene was like a Metro Goldwyn Mayer banquet: overdressed and overfed people seething against a background of oriental carpets with great jewels and blancmanges gleaming in every direction. It seemed as if all the harems in Egypt had come – ladies of every shape and size in fabulous frocks and furs.
Yet this is not to say that those high up on the social scale were insensitive to the battles being fought, the deaths and the injuries. Back in Britain, there were those – like Bletchley Park operative the Hon. Sarah Baring – who would race off on leave to see their smart chums in Claridges; but all these women were well aware of the horrors that were taking place. Indeed, the Countess of Ranfurly, with her new grandstand view from within the office of GHQ in Cairo, was especially sensitive, not least because her husband Dan was a prisoner of war in Italy. In one entry in her diaries, she recalled watching the troop and hospital ships embarking from Alexandria and making for Sicily: ‘In the lazy sunshine on this lovely day, it seemed fantastic that I was watching the launching of the invasion of Europe. “Will you come with us?” shouted the soldiers hanging over the sides. “Good luck”, we shouted back. Out on the horizon in single file they went. It was thrilling, but desperately sad.’
Meanwhile, in order to bring some relief to exhausted wireless personnel, fresh blood was being drafted in. At Kafr-El-Farouk in late 1943, ‘the station was asked to estimate the degree to which it could absorb British women civilians called up under the proposed extension of the “Employment of British Women – National Service Egypt Order”’, according to one official memo now in the archives. And after the outbreaks of throat infections and, occasionally, typhoid, conditions were looking rather more congenial. Even the entertainments had perked up. ‘The new YMCA which has been officially opened at the beginning of this month has proved a great success,’ wrote the base’s squadron leader. ‘Several concerts have already been staged in the main hall of which undoubtedly the most outstanding and unique event was the pianoforte recital . . .’ Added to this were the ‘amenities’ of a long-delayed swimming pool, an equally yearned-for cinema, and freshly built tennis courts at which racquets and balls would be ‘lent free’ to players but for which they would be ‘asked to make a very small payment to ball-boys’.3
Morale obviously plays a cru
cial part in any war effort; for the listeners, such perks had the effect of making them feel human again.
Just weeks later, in January 1944, General Clark’s Fifth Army landed at Anzio, on Italy’s west coast some forty miles from Rome. Some within the intelligence community had an inkling that the operation was coming and were filled with a sense of foreboding, chiefly for the wellbeing of the individual soldiers who were leaving to take part in the enterprise. For Y Service operative Aileen Clayton, in Algiers with Eisenhower and Thornton Wilder, there was more than a touch of chilly premonition about the whole thing:
It was forcibly brought home to me that I, as with so many others, had mislaid my youth. One morning at a planning meeting I had seen a list of the units which were to take part in the Anzio landings. In the evening I attended a party given by one of the Army Messes, and while I was dancing quite happily with a young British officer, I casually asked him to which unit he belonged. When he told me, I recognised it as one that had been on the list I had seen that morning, and I thought: ‘Oh God, you’re destined for Anzio. In a fortnight you may be dead. I know this, but I cannot tell you. There is nothing I can do to warn you, to suggest, perhaps, you might write a letter to your parents which they could treasure if you should die.’ I suddenly felt cold and very alone, and almost old. It was an intolerable responsibility for a young woman of 25 . . . I was to learn later that he had been killed a few days after landing.4
The Secret Listeners Page 28