|  | History - 2 Canadian Special Wireless Section Type "B"History
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| Introduction
I think it's best I start with my own introduction to the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals (RC Sigs/Signals).
I started with Signals in 1936 in Calgary when I was sixteen years old. I joined the 13th District Non-Permanent Active Militia (NPAM) and took various wireless and line courses in the evenings at the Mewata Army Barracks whilst still in high school. During the summer I attended summer training camps. I was also a radio amateur operating my own station (VE4GS) and became proficient in the morse code to a level of thirty to thirty-five words per minute copied on a typewriter. This proficiency was arrived at because my father was part owner of broadcasting station CFCN; he was a customer of the Press Wireless News Service which sent the latest news from New York City by high speed morse on the High Frequency (HF) radio band throughout the day. Ted Heavens was the primary operator, and I was learning to be the part-time assistant.
I would like to describe a bit of Signals training in my early days, from 1936 through to about 1938, when I was in the 13th District Signals. I mention it as a warning to those who think you can declare war, then raise an army, and go off and fight.
Some of our training consisted of getting out Aldis lamps and going out to the Sarcee Hills. There we would flash morse code messages from one hill to the other. We also used heliographs which required orientation with the sun as well as your receiving station. I felt I was in the Khyber Pass of India fighting tribesmen.
Another activity was operating our elaborate horse-drawn cable layers which required great skill and team-work. Or, in the case of wireless using the old army C set. I am not sure when the C set came into being, whether in World War I or shortly after. I am sure it was the only set used by any army which was still using long wave radio transmissions for field work with correspondingly big and awkward components and aerial systems. Someone told me it was intended to be carried by two men and a mule.
It came with large trunk size panniers to hold the parts. The transmitter and receiver were in individual wooden linen- covered boxes. The receiver used a loop aerial on a tripod while the transmitter used a wire aerial needing two masts and a large ground mat. When you got it working a distance of ten miles the signals received sounded as if they were coming from the moon.
To give you an idea of operational usage I will describe an exercise I took part in. I was a boy corporal and was told to support the Cavalry - and I do mean Cavalry. This was the South Alberta Horse Regiment with farm boys and their horses. The men got paid twice because they brought their own horses. They also had their sabres and Lee Enfield rifles.
I was to provide wireless communications with a C set back to brigade. We were using an "impressed" vehicle which was an old civilian truck hired out to the army on a daily basis. We would be travelling along with these horsemen when the officers would say they wanted communications with brigade. At that point, with the help of two or three other signalmen, I would unload the panniers and get the masts out with the guys, erect the 2 thirty-foot masts with the aerial, unroll the large three-by-thirty foot bronze screen ground mat under the aerial, and connect the transmitter. Next, set up the receiver and its loop aerial system. Finally, get the Stewart-Turner gasoline generator going and the final tube in the transmitter glowing and tuned; then, try and contact brigade down the road. Working as fast as we could, it would take between a half and a full hour just to set up our equipment. By that time the officers were ready to move and everything had to go back into the truck.
I recall the first night. We billeted down along the banks of Pincher Creek so the horses could be fed and tethered. I had not eaten that day and eventually someone said: "Here is your meal" as he handed me half a loaf of bread and half a tin of bully beef. Back I went, pounding away on the morse key under the prairie sky and stars. The battle conceived was that the Permanent Force unit, the Lord Strathcona Horse with their horses, was to attack us from the direction of Banff. We were defending Calgary, and our defence units included the Calgary Infantry Battalion.
I can remember the battle in its final stages when we were having a final shoot-out on a plateau. By this time we Signallers were no longer needed and could watch the goings on. The infantry was forming in a long line across the plateau and walking forward. After about one hundred yards another line was formed. and then another advancing towards the bluff. The South Alberta Horse was advancing in front of them. Suddenly, with a surge, a whole line of Lord Strathcona Horse appeared over the edge of the bluff, and a lot of shooting with blanks took place. About this time Frank Ho Lem, a local Chinese restaurateur and a sergeant in the Calgary Regiment, and also, by the way, a Bisley shot, didn't want to miss a bet; he quickly got ice cream trucks out to sell ice cream along the lines of infantrymen. The battle sort of ended there as did our summer training camp. I compare this with the goings-on in Germany, the modern aircraft, the tanks, and the radio equipment. I don't think we would have stood a chance without at least three or four years to allow for a catch-up.
With my interest in Signals, coupled with the desire to build a bank account to attend university, I joined the Permanent Force Signals with the intent of serving a tour in the Northwest Territories and Yukon Radio System operated by them. At that time I had about three years of service and was a sergeant in the NPAM, but received an immediate demotion to signalman upon joining the Permanent Force. So in November of 1938, I arrived at the Royal Canadian School of Signals in Kingston as a new recruit. I spent eight months under training on Signals regimental and technical courses before World War II became imminent in August, 1939. Just a few days before the war started there developed an immediate need to relieve the shortage of operators at the Army Signals Station VER in Ottawa; eight of us were selected and sent on our way within a couple of hours of being told. My brother Bill, Ray Fleury, and I were three of the eight. The letters "VER" were the international radio call-sign assigned to the Army Headquarters radio station.
Upon arrival we were quickly informed that we would start immediately on twelve-hour shifts - twelve hours on, twelve hours off, seven days a week - i.e., eighty-four hours per week. We had to find our own accommodation and food, and after adding in an allowance we were to receive a rate of pay of four dollars per day. The station was located at Rockcliffe Airport and had three operations rooms, one each for the Navy, Army, and Air Force. We were under very heavy pressure with high traffic loads and hardly had time to find out that the war had started. We had been there for about two months, September and October, when one day the three of us - Bill, Ray, and I - were told to report to Major W.J. Megill at the Directorate of Signals offices in the Elgin Building. He informed us that Army Signals were going to start a new business known as "Y". He said: "at the moment we know nothing about it, but we'll give you a room, some radio equipment, and set you up in the basement of VER with RESTRICTED ENTRY. So go down there and start".
That's the way I got involved in Special Wireless or Y work. So as you can appreciate I was in the Canadian Army Y work on Day One. We were given operator numbers to identify our intercepted material; Ray was number one, Bill was number two, and I was number three; these numbers rose into the hundreds as the organization grew. We set up the intercept equipment and, with some operational direction which started to filter in, became familiar with the activity in the HF band. We then started to look for subversive and other unusual activities slowly expanding into military targets. Once we were asked by the FBI to monitor a certain frequency and listen for the call-sign AOR; apparently it had to do with a German submarine and secret agents along the eastern seaboard of the United States. We picked up this weak agent transmission and it became an intercept assignment for several weeks. After a couple of months another building across the road from VER, a test site used by the Signals Inspection and Test Department, became available and this became the first Army Y station.
Operators started to show up in increasing numbers, including my lifetime friend, Ted Heavens, as they were selected and posted in. Shortly after, Captain H.D.W. Wethey, the designated Officer Commanding, arrived back from England where he had been on a familiarization course. His arrival was followed by Lieutenant E.M. Drake as his assistant. Captain Harry Wethey went back into the main army stream in a few months upon being promoted to major. Ed Drake took over and became the Senior Signal Intelligence Officer in Canada throughout the war. By the end of the war he was a lieutenant-colonel. I continued to work in operations at this station till December, 1940.
At that time a notice was posted on the station notice board asking for volunteers to join a field Y unit about to be formed. My brother Bill and I put our names up and were accepted. We then left fixed station Y work, and started in with Captain J. W. Anderson to help him organize and train the first field unit known as No.1 Canadian Special Wireless Section Type B. This was a corps-level unit formed to support 1st Canadian Corps Headquarters. We moved into the "Cow Palace", complete with straw, at Lansdowne Park, Ottawa and trained the unit in most aspects of technical and general soldiering necessary to a field Y unit. I was a lance sergeant, my brother a sergeant, and Harold Whincup was the other sergeant. We worked day and night for six months till about June, 1941.
About halfway through this six-month period, Bill and I were told to report to Major Fairfax Webber in the Directorate of Signals. He informed us that we had been selected to be members of the first class for officers to be commissioned from the ranks. Major Webber, however, said that we were desperately needed in No.1 Canadian Special Wireless to help get them ready for overseas. He inquired as to whether we would object to being delayed until the unit was ready; we agreed. Just as the unit was leaving for overseas, Bill and I were pulled out and sent to the common-to-all-arms Officer Training School at Brockville for general officer training. By the time we had finished our Signals officer training at Kingston in the spring of 1942, the army was forming the 2nd Canadian Corps, and another Type B unit was needed. My brother was appointed Officer Commanding and I was made second-in-command. We started all over again to form and train another Y unit, No. 2 Canadian Special Wireless Section Type B, which we took overseas in August, 1942. I took command from my brother in England in the spring of 1943 when he was sent to North Africa on attachment to the 1st British Army to do Y work. I spent the rest of the war with No.2 Special Wireless Section Type B. Our activities included; operations in England, the landing in Normandy, the advance through France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany; finally, with our Corps taking the surrender of the German forces in front of us near Oldenburg in Northwest Germany in May, 1945.
After that I came back from overseas, went to Queen's University for four years, completed my engineering degree and went back into Signals. I graduated in 1949, and on promotion to major I assumed command of Ottawa Wireless Station which was a major post-war communications station. After about three years I was assigned to the Directorate of Signals at Army Headquarters as a staff officer where I had tri-service committee responsibilities in Electronic Warfare, Technical Equipment, and Planning.
By 1957, the army was thinking of promoting me to Lieutenant-Colonel and putting me back into the general Signals stream of command. I did not relish this so I resigned my commission. I then joined the National Research Council holding several different positions of increasing responsibility until retiring in 1975.
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