Scavenging German Electronics

My job was really to, as I say to help out with the technical efficiency, well all of the radar units but particularly these mobile GCI type of things, Type 8's, and so we followed pretty well on the heels of the 8th Army and the Desert Air Force keeping these, you know, helping them, solving problems I suppose, technical problems and also it was a great boon to us, the Germans left an awful lot of their signals equipment behind and we were very short of spare parts for maintaining a lot of our gear, resistors and condensers and things like that. So we picked up any old bits of stuff and we had a depot at Alexandria set up to strip all these parts, we found the color code on all of their resistors to know what they meant and we were able to use these as substitutes for our own spare parts which we still weren't able to get through the Mediterranean, you see, and we were able to solve some of our problems that way.

Mr. Beall describes spare part shortages and using scavenged parts from abandoned German electronic equipment to help maintain his equipment.

Herbert Beall

Herbert Beall was born in 1908 in Ottawa, Ontario. He attended Lisgard Collegiate, where he commanded the 94th Cadet Battalion, and also joined the Governor-General's Footguards. He entered the Canadian Officer Training Corps at university, and received his commission in 1931. In 1932, Mr. Beall joined the Royal Canadian Signal Corps. In February, 1941 he transferred to the RCAF as a Flying Officer with the rank of Lieutenant. His service in England saw him at radar stations in the Orkney Islands and the Isle of Wight. He later went to the Middle East, where he set up and maintained portable radar systems in Egypt, and to a lesser extent Kuwait and Jordan.