Decoding German signals

Heroes Remember

Decoding German signals

We, we had, for quite a while, an attached British Warrant Officer and, and a Captain came down every so often and spent a month or two months with us. And by this time, you had already B-type, in other words mobile signals intercept units waiting for to go war in Sicily or in the West Indies or in, in Europe who knew what they were up against and they helped us in getting started, but nobody had any idea. It was just amazing, but just to reflect we had almost three years to learn our job. So by the, in three years, we did nothing but intercept German traffic. So by the time we landed in Normandy in June 1944, we knew half the units which were opposing us. We did. We had and okay, we are now in a signal unit. Do you want me to describe roughly the unit? Okay it, it was a composite unit. The major part, about ninety-eight people were signallers and about eighteen people were, was a signal unit and then the intelligence part of it. The signal unit was the housekeeping unit and their job was technically to pick up the signals and record them, write them down. They, and they had two sources of signals intelligence. One is traffic coming over the air from a transmitter on the other side and direction finding. Very elementary by today's standards. Today you know, you can hop into a tank and you switch on and it tells you where you are. You know, it tells you bloody well where...

Mr. Pollak recounts how he went directly into service after landing in England and how his unit had three years experience intercepting and decoding German signals before they went over to Normandy in June 1944. He then describes the makeup of the unit and the duties they had.

Fred Pollak

Mr. Pollak was born May 20, 1919, in Vrezno, Czechoslovakia, a small town in the German part of Bohemia. In September of 1938, his family was expelled from Vrezno and had to go inland to Prague. They arrived in Canada as refugees in August of 1939 and lived in Prescott, Ontario. Mr. Pollak eventually joined the Canadian Army, enlisting as a typist. At the end of the war, Mr. Pollak monitored radio transmissions for German traffic and was also employed as an interrogator of war criminals in Belsen.

Medium:: Video
Owner:: Veterans Affairs Canada
Duration:: 02:01
Person Interviewed:: Fred Pollak
War, Conflict or Mission:: Second World War
Location/Theatre:: Europe
Battle/Campaign:: Northwest Europe
Branch:: Army
Occupation:: Signals Intelligence

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Date modified:: 2024-12-30