21 Panzer Division
Heroes Remember
21 Panzer Division
Well, it was exciting. It was exciting, you know.
Well, for example, when we invaded we were still in, in Europe,
in England and Rommel was the Commander-in-Chief of the forces
there, or the mobile force, I don't know. They had, their high
command was so screwed up it was unbelievable on D-Day,
but I'll come to that in a minute. His favourite division in that
part of the world was 21 Panzer because he was with them
in Egypt. So he used the reconnaissance unit of the 21st Panzer
as a phantom unit. A phantom unit, we used the same thing,
you had a, you had a, a eight-wheel scout car with a huge antenna
on it and their job was, they're responsible for five kilometres
or ten kilometres in front and they would just incinerate
themselves and they report directly back to Rommel what's
going on. It's a phantom unit. And we could read those fellows.
Now listen to this. They, they, they used a three letter code.
We couldn't always read three letter codes, but there was always
one or two words in there which was enemy, Panzer, casualties,
attack, defence, so forth. The German codes, I don't know why,
but they obviously could, did not a ready made code for place
names because they didn't know where they're gonna be fighting.
You know, you see these codes are printed out in books and books
and books and books. They didn't know where they gonna fight.
So in the theatre of Normandy, there are at least half a dozen
place names called Bretteville. Now, if you look at Bretteville:
B-r-e-t-t-e-v-i-l-l-e. It's got a pattern. There was
Bretteville-sur-Laize, Bretteville this and Bretteville that.
And most, many place names ended up v-i-l-l-e, right? So they
used a simple substitution code. You know what a simple
substitution is? And it shows up a pattern. The double t and the
double l tells you this is Bretteville, you know. So you already
had six or seven letters. It didn't take, you, you be, you could
always do Trun. No problem with Trun. There was another place
name we could do easily enough because it was so short,
Rotz, R-o-t-z. I like that because it means snugs, snot in
German. So we could read quite a few of their messages. But when
things got really tough and things got really tough every so
often, they just had to break out in plain language. And I have
this, the papers I have here, I have a bunch of copies
of some of our reports and you can have those.
They're printouts of what used to be top secret reports,
but they tell you the sort of terminology we used and the
procedures we used and what we did.
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