Differentiation of Signals (Part 2 of 2)
Heroes Remember
Differentiation of Signals (Part 2 of 2)
The Germans had a, an air base at a place called Bad Zwischenahn.
Very important to us. Bad Zwischenahn, which is just 10k outside
of Oldenburg in North West Germany, Emden, so forth. And they had
a flight of three or four what they called Condor air craft.
They were a four-engined modern air craft who could fly at,
which could fly, do not say who, which could fly, aren't you
impressed with my English? Interviewer: It's fabulous.
... which could fly 35-40,000 feet, which was quite an enormous
height, to a point where even if there was an early warning for
our fighters, they could never catch them. They could never get
up there in time, they were gone. They were there through
everyday, what they call, what they called a Zenith Flight.
Everyday, a Condor would take off from Bad Zwischenahn
and go along the east coast of Britain all the way up to Iceland,
then go back to Stavanger, and go back to Bad Zwischenahn.
And they, they had, had four engines on them, and they'd throttle
them out, at the end of the runway. They'd synchronize the
engines, warm them up before they took off, and we were talking
to the tower in the code and whenever we heard the Zenith,
looked at his call sign: NDF today. So you had a, a reverse list.
NDF is on page forty-two, we were using number seventeen today.
There we were. And every unit which we had identified before,
we could identify again. Wasn't that difficult. The Germans never
caught on that we had that, we had, we had penetrated their
system ‘til early in ‘45, they introduced a system which was
called Frei Valf: Free, Free Selection. You could, they allowed
people to, to, to change, to change frequency on the, on the
radio which caused us a little trouble. But, we had listened to
some of these units so long now that it was difficult for them to
conceal who they were. You could tell 12SS, 1SS, 8SS, 10SS,
17SS, 2SS, and then 115 Panzer, Panzer Lehr, and all those
infantry units. We could identify them easily enough.
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