William "Bill" Hardcastle was trained during the Second World War at Camp X, an excellent location for transferring code. With a shortage of expert radio operators, Bill realized that any hope of being posted as a secret agent overseas was dwindling. There was a much greater need for trained personnel to build and operate Camp X.
The building that would house Hydra was the most mysterious looking building at the Camp. It was a four-sided structure, completely open on the inside, with windows all around but placed seven feet above the ground for obvious reasons of secrecy. The building had only one entrance and that was at the front; two large doors making it easy to bring in large equipment. One day, not long after Bill arrived, a large van drove into the Camp and delivered crates of communications components. When it all was unloaded, someone yelled, “Go to it, fellows!” Bill and his mates proceeded to build a complete, working communications installation from a photograph. They hooked it up, and Hydra was born.
Bill completed his course at Camp X and was trained to intercept, decode, re-code and then transmit messages back to North America. Bill and his partner Jack, from Toronto, were to cover South America as far south as Lima, Peru. They were advised that the plan had been aborted and they would not be needed.
Bill went off and joined the Air Force which he had tried to do earlier, but was not called up because of his colour blindness. It was now wartime and the Air Force overlooked the colour blindness because they were short of wireless operators. The exact day Bill joined the Air Force, he was told that he was needed right away for coding. He attended one course at the Air Force training centre before he was assigned to Montreal, Quebec, as an instructor-in-training. He was informed that he was to be an instructor and the very next day he was back at Camp X wearing a Royal Canadian Air Force uniform. He was given permission to keep the uniform as he was entitled to wear it, which he did proudly.
Once the equipment was operational, Bill Hardcastle and Bernie Sandbrook personally sent the very first messages to England. Bill and his colleagues received German messages which had been intercepted by agents in South America, re-coded, and then sent along to Camp X.
Anticipating a particularly busy day, Bill Hardcastle, Hughey Durant and Bernie Sandbrook were asked to work in the Communications Building on the Morse machines. Bill recalled that he was working the teletype machines. The raw data would come in through Hydra and flow through to the Communications Building where it would be printed out in five-letter code. Bill and the others were receiving coded messages from England that particular day, turning them around and Morse Coding them to British Security Coordination in New York. Suddenly, a flurry of the highest level of priority messages starting flying out onto the printer, one after the other.
Bill was so alarmed by this seemingly endless stream of about fourteen messages that he did exactly what he was trained to do; he dropped everything else and started pounding out the keys to New York as quickly as he could. At the same time he turned to his fellow mates and said, “Hey boys, I think this is it! I think the invasion has started!” An excellent guess; it was June 6, 1944, D-Day.
