The Dawn of Amateur Radio in the U.K. and Greece Part 8

1944: The friction between the various groups of the Resistance movement erupted into full-scale war, described as the 'civil war' or the 'guerrilla war' depending on whose side you were on. ELAS were determined that they alone would be in control when the Allies arrived. As a result of intense negotiations on the part of the British officers, all the Andarte leaders signed an Armistice doc.u.ment on the 29th February 1944 agreeing to stop fighting each other and to concentrate all their efforts against the common enemy--the Germans.

Unfortunately, barely a month later ELAS attacked and completely annihilated the smallest andarte group E.K.K.A. Now only EDES and the 200-strong S.O.E. force stood between the 40,000 ELAS Communists and total control of the Greek countryside.

In the Middle East, the Lebanon Conference, attended by delegates from all parties, including representatives of the Andartes, elected George Papandreou (father of Andreas Papandreou, recently Prime Minister of Greece), to act as Prime Minister of the Government of National Unity in exile. In September the government moved temporarily to Italy. In October, following the withdrawal of the Germans from Athens, British troops began landing in Greece from Greek and British warships. By far the largest contingent landed near the port of Piraeus and tens of thousands of Greeks turned out to cheer and welcome the British forces as they marched through the streets.

On October 18 the members of the Greek government returned to Athens under the leadership of the Premier George Papandreou, who was accompanied by Lt. General Ronald Scobie, the Allied military commander.

Sadly though, in December ELAS marched on Athens. The British troops, so recently feted and garlanded now found themselves fighting on the same streets of their earlier welcome. S.O.E. had been warning Cairo for two years that this might happen. After three or four weeks of intense fighting in the streets of Athens and in the suburbs, ELAS withdrew.

Winston Churchill came to Athens on Christmas Day to mediate. A couple of ELAS snipers hiding in a school a few hundred yards away from the British Emba.s.sy took a few pot shots at him as he got out of an armoured vehicle which had brought him from the airport. Next day, when he attended a meeting of all parties, the ELAS representative walked in wearing a military-style uniform with crossed bandoleers across his chest, and carrying two pistols. Churchill turned to his interpreter and said quietly: "Tell him to leave his toys outside, or I fly back to London immediately, to spend Christmas properly with my family."

1945: On the 1st of January Archbishop Damaskinos was appointed Regent. (It had been agreed that the King should not return to Greece until his position had been clarified by a plebiscite). Plastiras replaced Papandreou as Prime Minister. After the Varkiza agreement the guerrilla war (or civil war) was officially brought to an end.

Years later in a broadcast, Chris Woodhouse summarised what the S.O.E. mission to Greece had achieved.

1. It had provided the technical expertise, such as the handling of explosives, without which the major sabotage successes would have been impossible.

2. It had provided the tactical planning and supplied the communications which successfully harnessed the courage of the Greeks to the strategic requirements of the Allied commanders.

3. Most important of all, in the long run, it a.s.sured that no armed force in occupied Greece would gain a monopoly of power on the day of liberation. The final aim of the mission was to leave the Greeks with a free choice at the end of the war--a choice between a Monarchy, a Republic or even a Communist regime if they wanted it.

But the recent dramatic events in the closing months of 1989 in Poland, the U.S.S.R., Hungary, the East German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and finally Romania have proved that the last choice would have been an unwise one if the Greeks had also opted for Communism.

1946: Following a plebiscite King George II returned to Greece at the end of September and appointed Panayis Tsaldaris as his Prime Minister.

When I returned to Athens in October 1944 on H.H.M.S. AVEROF I had been appointed Radio Monitoring Officer of the Anglo-Greek Information Service (A.G.I.S.) with a staff of about 25 W/T operators and typists to a.s.sist me. My unit was a section of the Press Department of the British Emba.s.sy. I think the choice of t.i.tle was a rather unfortunate mistake. The English words 'information' and 'intelligence' have only one equivalent word in Greek pliroforiesq.

And most Greeks hold peculiar views about the C.I.A. and the British Intelligence Service. So here I was strutting about in the uniform of a war correspondent bearing the flashes 'I.S.', the b.u.t.t of many a joke from my friends who accused me of being a master spy. My boss, Colonel Johnson, who had been the British Council representative in Greece prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, came to my office one morning and told me that he had heard a rumour that King George of the h.e.l.lenes, who was then in London, was going to broadcast in the Greek service of the B.B.C. I replied I had heard nothing, but would try and find out if the rumour was true. As he left my office I glanced at my watch; it was 11 o'clock in the morning, 9 o'clock in London. I telephoned the General Manager of Cable & Wireless, Mr Briggs, who was a personal friend. I told him I wanted to make use of his facilities to ask an urgent question of the B.B.C. in London. He replied, "Tell McTaggert" (the engineer in charge of the Central Telegraph Office) "that I said he should help you in any way possible."

"Mac," I said over the telephone, "would you get one of your operators to ring the B.B.C. in Bush House (from where the World Service originates) and ask them if they have any plans for a broadcast by King George of the h.e.l.lenes." I immediately tuned one of my receivers to the frequency of the London telegraph link, which was carrying high speed morse traffic. In a short while the tape was stopped and an operator, using a hand key, asked my question slowly in plain language, and then the tape was put on again. I waited anxiously for about five minutes. Again the tape was stopped, a single letter 'R' (for received) was sent by hand, and traffic returned to normal. My telephone rang; it was McTaggert. "Nothing doing, old boy. The B.B.C. have no plans for such a broadcast." I thanked him and looked at my watch. It was 11.25, just 25 minutes had elapsed. I called my boss and told him the answer to his question. "How do you know?" he asked. "I asked the B.B.C., sir." "You what?" he shouted at me. "Don't you know there's a war on? I'm coming to see you." He stormed into my office and demanded an explanation, so I told him what I had done. "Good G.o.d, what is this going to cost us?". "Nothing at all, sir. There is no provision for anything like that in the operating procedure". "Then I must write a letter to Cable & Wireless to thank them." I thought to myself, why don't you write a letter to Norman and thank him for having friends in the right places. But I kept my mouth shut.

My equipment and my staff of 20 men and 5 girls were housed on the 6th floor of the Metohikon Tamion building. When ELAS marched on Athens, there was constant firing, sh.e.l.ling and bombing throughout the 24 hours of the day and night for three or four weeks. The bombing was by light aircraft of the R.A.F. on the ELAS positions in the suburbs and Beaufighter aircraft straffing them with 20 mm cannon. Then ELAS set up a 75 mm gun in the northern suburb of Aharnon, and started hitting us back. When we had received several hits on and around our H.Q. building, I was ordered to move down to the second floor, to safer accommodation. I extended some of my antenna down-leads, and resumed normal service. One of our a.s.signments was to transcribe, every day, what was said in the Greek transmissions of nineteen different countries about the situation in Greece, and to produce a daily summary in English, for the benefit of the Press Department.

In the summer of 1945 we began having interference on GIN, a station of the British Post Office which operated around 10MHz, transmitting a REUTER news service for Europe on the German h.e.l.lschreiber (h.e.l.l printer) system. This was a sort of very course TV picture of 49 dots, seven by seven. The letter 'I' for instance came out as seven dots vertically, and the letter 'T' just had another six dots across the top. The letters were very crude but readable, provided there was no interference, or crashes of static. The interference, which made our tape quite unreadable, used to start around 3 in the afternoon and fade slowly away about three hours later, when the tape became readable again. I decided I would try and identify the source. All I had in the way of recorders were office-type Dictaphones using wax cylinders. I removed the three weights from the speed governor, and the cylinder spun round like mad.

I managed to record for about three minutes and when I played the recording on another machine at normal speed the cylinder yielded up its secret--it was high speed morse traffic in 5-figure cypher. I typed it all out and noticed that some of the paragraphs began with the letter 'B'. I subsequently found out it was a characteristic of stations carrying Royal Air Force traffic. I sent my text to London, and three weeks later the interference stopped. It was more than a month later that I was told what had happened. The transmitter causing the problem was located in Kandy, Ceylon. It operated with a rhombic antenna beamed to R.A.F. Calcutta. Its frequency was only 500 Hz away from GIN. The department which had allocated the frequency never imagined that it could possibly cause interference in Europe to the REUTER news service. But sunspot cycle 20, which was a good one, had decided otherwise.

In 1947 I was transferred to the British Police Mission to Greece, which was headed by Sir Charles Wickham. My princ.i.p.al duty was to interpret for Sir Charles, and for his second in command Colonel Prosser. My friend Mr Eleftheriou at the Ministry issued me with a special licence and I came on the air again using my pre-war callsign SV1RX. When the Police Mission closed down in 1948 I came to England and got the callsign G3FNJ which I have now held for over 41 years.

8. Wartime Broadcasts from Cairo.

Elias Eliascos, a former teacher of English at Athens College (a joint U.S./Greek inst.i.tution) described to me how he came to be a news-reader at Radio Cairo in 1941 together with his brother Patroclos.

"When Hitler declared war on Greece and after the collapse of the front in northern Greece and in Albania, my brother Patroclos and I were summoned to the British Emba.s.sy in Athens and told that owing to our close ties with the British Council (of Cultural Relations), it would not be prudent for us to remain in Athens or even Greece after the German army had occupied the capital. We were told that we would be helped to leave Greece together with the British Emba.s.sy staff, the staff of the British Council and all the British nationals in Greece.

"The British Consul-General provided us with the necessary doc.u.ments for my brother and me to board the last evacuation vessel sailing from the port of Piraeus. It was the s/s 'Corinthia' which left Piraeus on the 18th of April 1941. It happened to be Good Friday according to the Greek-Orthodox calendar. About five days later Hitler's army marched into Athens.

"The ship was packed and the British Emba.s.sy staff carried most of the Emba.s.sy files with them. One of the pa.s.sengers was David Balfour who was the vicar of the little chapel attached to the Evangelismos Hospital, an impressive tall figure of a man sporting a large black beard. Although he had been ordained as a priest of the Greek-Orthodox Church he was a British national and it was widely rumoured that he was an agent of British Intelligence. His official t.i.tle was 'Father Dimitrios'. He was also the spiritual father of the Greek Royal family. I refer to David Balfour because recently the 'ATHENIAN' which is the only English language magazine in Athens, in its issue dated January 1988, published a feature article about him, saying that even before the Germans had entered Athens he had shaved off his beard and divested himself of his clerical robes.

"I can say quite categorically that this was not true. When the 'Corinthia' sailed he was still 'Father Dimitrios' and in fact he officiated at a Resurrection service while we were still at sea. On the voyage we carried out lifeboat drill on two occasions, once when it was thought that there was a U-boat in the vicinity, and another time when an aircraft flew overhead which turned out to be friendly.

I shall never forget how I was moved with emotion when I saw the women getting into the boats, most of them carrying babies or children in their arms, calmly singing hymns in low voices.

"Some time later I met David Balfour again in Cairo, and this time he HAD shaved off his beard, and he was wearing the uniform of a Major in the Intelligence Corps which is a regular unit of the British army."

Eliascos said he would like to quote a little more from the sensational article written by J.M. Thursby in the 'ATHENIAN'.

"Several years before war was even declared, the Abwehr (German military intelligence), along with the n.a.z.i civilian secret service, had highly trained undercover agents operating in Greece. With consummate skill they had catalogued all military and civil information that could be useful to the Third Reich, and organised spy rings throughout the country. As war became more and more inevitable, it also became increasingly imperative that Britain and other anti-fascist countries should gain specific and accurate knowledge of these operations.

"During this period a monk, who had embraced the Orthodox faith in Warsaw, arrived from Poland via Mount Athos, to join the monastery of Pendeli, just outside Athens. According to his biographer John Freeman, his registration at Pendeli reads,

Cell 102 Serial number 75 Secular name David Balfour Ecclesiastic name Dimitri Place of birth England Age 35 Inscribed order of His Holiness the Archbishop of Athens.

Coming from the Russian Church.

Archbishopric ordinance number 3197 of 9 May 1936."

"Father Dimitri was obviously a well-educated and very courteous person. He had studied in various parts of Europe and spoke several languages fluently. These included ancient, Byzantine and modern Greek, not to mention colloquial 'mangika' (slang). When a vacancy arose for a priest to serve the chapel at Evangelismos Hospital in central Athens, who should be more suitable for this post in the heart of the select neighbourhood of Kolonaki than the well-educated, well-bred, charming and conscientious Father Dimitri."

(David Balfour died aged 86 on the 11th of October 1989.)

"Anyway, let me continue my story of the 'Corinthia trip", Eliascos went on. "We celebrated Easter on board and when we arrived at Alexandria some of us were sent on to Cairo and others went to India. My brother and I presented ourselves at the offices of the Press Department of the British Emba.s.sy in the Garden City. We were received by the well-known Byzantine scholar Stephen Runciman who was in charge of all foreign language broadcasts directed to Europe, that is, the Balkans, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Poland and several others. One of our colleagues was Lawrence Durrell who later became the famous author of many successful books like the banned 'Black Book', 'Bitter Lemons', 'The Alexandria Quartet', 'Prospero's Cell' and others. But at that time, he used to entertain us daily with a fresh episode about his Aunt Agatha with the wooden leg."

Eliascos continued: "My brother Patroclos and I were told that we would be attached to the section producing the broadcasts in Greek directed towards occupied Greece, acting as translators, editors and newsreaders. The Head of this section was George Haniotis the sports editor of the Athens newspaper 'Elefthero Vima' who used to sign his sporting articles 'GEO'. Under him was the well-known literary figure of Dimitri Fotiadis, who died in October 1988.

"When the broadcasts began early in May 1941 I was the princ.i.p.al newsreader. Later when Haniotis was posted to the Greek Emba.s.sy in Washington D.C. as Press Attache, my brother was appointed Section Head. At that time the Prime Minister of the Greek government in exile was Emmanouil Tsouderos, a former Director of the Bank of Greece. The foreign language broadcasts from Radio Cairo were under the over-all control of the Political Warfare Executive (P.W.E.) of the British Ministry of Information. Later, in conjunction with the Americans, the t.i.tle of the unit was changed to Psychological Warfare Branch (P.W.B.)

"Every evening we had two broadcasts, at 7.30 and 10.30 pm, which went out on the medium wave transmitter of Radio Cairo at Abu Zabal, run by the E.S.B. (Egyptian State Broadcasting). The transmissions in eleven foreign languages were also relayed by three short wave transmitters, two belonging to the telegraph company Cable & Wireless (callsigns SUV & SUW), and an experimental transmitter of 7.5 kilowatts belonging to a British army signals unit, with the odd callsign JCJC, operated by young corporal Rowley Shears G8KW, a radio amateur friend of Norman Joly.

"The Greek broadcasts began in May 1941 and went on to the end of January 1945.

"During this period many important personalities broadcast from Studio 3, which was also used by well-known war correspondents of the B.B.C., the N.B.C. and many other news organisations. The people of occupied Greece were addressed by Mr Tsouderos, Crown Prince Paul of Greece, Sofoclis Venizelos, son of the famous Cretan politician Eleftherios Venizelos who had played a leading role in the political fortunes of modern Greece, and Panayiotis Kanellopoulos Minister for War. After the naval mutiny in the port of Alexandria Admiral Voulgaris spoke to the officers and naval ratings of the Greek Royal Navy."

Eliascos described in detail the negotiations of the Lebanon Conference which resulted in the appointment of George Papandreou (father of Andreas Papandreou who was recently Prime Minister), as the new Prime Minister of the Coalition government in exile. He can be seen at the famous R.C.A velocity microphone type 44BX which was used throughout World War II and many years after. This ribbon type microphone had a very large and heavy permanent magnet embodied in the design and must have weighed about 1,000 times more than a modern electret lapel microphone.

"I must explain that these war-time broadcasts were carried out in the presence of a Switch Censor who sat on the other side of the news reader's desk and was able to turn off the microphone in a split second if it ever became necessary. During the three and a half years of the broadcasts this was done only on one special occasion and certainly not because the newsreader had gone berserk or something like that. The Chief Censor was Professor Eric Sloman who had been the first Director of the Police Academy in Kerkyra (Corfu). Then there were censors for the eleven languages used in these broadcasts. The censor for the Polish broadcasts was the Countess Walevska, grand-daughter of Napoleon's lady friend. The Countess was a rather large lumbering woman who always came into the studio carrying lots of parcels. One evening she came in and sat in an armchair on the other side of the studio to wait her turn for the Polish broadcast which followed the Greek. As I was reading the news bulletin I suddenly became conscious of a regular ticking noise in the headphones I was wearing. I made a sign to Mr Joly who was acting as switch censor at the time, and he got up and walked over to the Countess. He whispered in her ear and asked her what was in her hand bag. The Countess blushed and replied that she had just collected her alarm clock from the watchmaker. I don't know if any sharp-eared listener had heard the ticking and thought that we had a time bomb in the studio.

"Having mentioned my good friend Mr Norman Joly I must record that he was the technical supervisor for the foreign language broadcasts, handling such things as wavelengths for the short wave relays, training the newsreaders (of whom there must have been over 30) and acting as studio manager and switch censor for some of the languages which he knew.

"A regular broadcaster in our studio was Francis Noel-Baker who later became a Labour member of Parliament in the British House of Commons, like his father. The Noel-Baker family are well-known in Greece because for several generations they have owned a large property on the island of Euboea (Evia in Greek). Francis speaks fluent Greek, and his mother was related to Lord Byron. In recent years he has switched his allegiance to the Conservative Party led by his personal friend Margaret Thatcher.

"Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor the writer who had kidnapped Major-General Heinrich Kreipe in Crete and spirited him away to Allied headquarters in Cairo, came to our studio and described how this audacious operation had been carried out by him and Captain William Stanley Moss, ex-Coldstream Guards, with the considerable a.s.sistance of the Cretan resistance movement partisans.

"Purely by coincidence, it was the Greek news bulletin from Cairo which first announced to the world General Montgomery's victory over General Rommel at Alamein. I must explain that during a broadcast the two doors leading into the studio were kept closed and an armed officer of the Military Police sat outside (in civilian clothes) to prevent anyone from entering for any reason whatsoever. I was in the middle of reading the news when suddenly, without warning, the inner door opened and a young despatch-rider, still wearing his crash helmet, walked in waving a piece of paper. Mr Joly immediately switched off the microphone and asked the young man what he thought he was doing. 'Most Immediate sir', he said. (This is the army's highest priority cla.s.sification.) 'To be broadcast at once.'

"Mr Joly handed the doc.u.ment to me and I saw it was written in English. Taking a deep breath I began translating the text into Greek, with some excitement and trepidation owing to the difference in syntax between the two languages. Forty-six years later Mr Joly gave me the identical sheet of paper, which he had kept as a souvenir. It is printed here in full. At the Editorial offices, where they were monitoring the newscast, they thought I had gone out of my mind, because the communique had not reached them yet. When they tuned in to the short wave service of the B.B.C. they heard the communique read out more than an hour after our Greek broadcast. A world scoop, if ever there was one. Years later when I returned to Athens, many of my friends told me they had heard the first broadcast of the thrilling bulletin and they could still remember the excitement in my voice.

"The Greek section was the first to inaugurate the transmission of personal messages. Many people were escaping from occupied Greece in sailing boats across to the sh.o.r.es of Asia Minor, ending up in the Middle East, mostly in Cairo. They had no means of advising their relatives and friends in Greece that they had survived the perilous journey. We used to broadcast pre-arranged messages like 'John informs Mary that he has arrived at the village'.

"As I mentioned above, George Papandreou came to our studio and spoke to the people in Greece about the formation of the government of National Unity, which had been agreed by all parties meeting in the Lebanon, including the representatives of the Partisans operating in the mountains of Greece. Papandreou and the government in exile moved to Naples in Italy for a short period and then returned to Athens on October 12th 1944 for the Liberation.

"Finally, I would like to say that in the dark days before Montgomery's breakthrough at Alamein, when it was quite on the cards that General Rommel might take Cairo, Mr Joly and I were sent to Jerusalem to make arrangements for the foreign language broadcasts to be continued from there. Fortunately the situation changed and we were recalled to Cairo, where we arrived just in time for me to broadcast the historic communique announcing the victory at Alamein, which marked the turning point of the war in the Middle East.

CHAPTER NINE