Obtaining Parts for a Radio Receiver
Heroes Remember
Obtaining Parts for a Radio Receiver
To have a clandestine radio was a death sentence
and in this camp 3 years earlier
on the american warship the Houston,
the Houston encountered a major Japanese fleet
in the Sunda Strait off the coast of Java,
and in a naval battle was sunk.
When she went in to the water,
her radio crew took little critical components of their powerful
receiver on the battleship into the water with them.
Now some of these men were in the water for ten
hours before they got ashore in Java and managed to conceal
these critical little elements of this ship's radio receiver.
This wasn't a transmitter, it was a receiver.
Now these radio men are highly trained electronic technicians.
They were all professional sailors and so when they got ashore,
they hid them in false heels and in false water bottles
and all sorts of places while they were prisoners of war in Java.
And when they finally wound up in northern Japan in this camp,
one of them named Ralph Bunch, a very highly skilled electronics
warrant officer in the american navy was placed by the Japanese in their
electronics repair section to repair Japanese electronics in the mine.
Well, that was like putting the fox in with the hens.
He began to steal the additional components needed
and to avoid detection,
he had a hat which he built a secret compartment in
where he could put things like transistors into his hat.
When he was searched, he managed to escape detection.
When he thought that a Japanese product needed only four transistors
but it had five, he would simply extract a transistor.
If it worked, he would keep it.
And being the skilled man he was, he built a receiver,
and he concealed it in the barracks.
And so two or three of us
were given the news every day from the receiver.
The senior american officer and myself received the news
but it was a very dangerous undertaking.
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