Transcript
Colonel Scott was quite a different fellow. I was with him in the, I think it was, the first day of the Overlord operation which, I think, claimed the lives of 12 guys over the next few days and he had tanks, he had armoured personnel carriers, he had infantry. I think there was an American complement there too, I just can't quite recall now.
Anyhow, we were dependent on re-transmitters, which means you transmit out on a frequency, the re-transmitter, located on a hill or somewhere or other, swaps it over to another frequency and sends it on. But with that, there was a tiny delay and when you've got a lot of call signs who could potentially use the radio, when you're on radio, you wait till there's no noise, nobody's talking, then you speak. But with re-trans there was a short delay and people would wait, not realising, and they'd talk.
They were talking too early and it blocked the whole system. So there was chaos and the armoured personnel carriers went up the wrong road and all the rest of it. Poor old Colonel Scott was just about turning his hair out or tearing it out and anyhow, between him and myself, we had two different radios in the helicopter, he'd be using one, he'd be giving me information, I'd be writing it up with a wax pencil, chinagraph pencil, on the bubble, on the perspex so I wouldn't forget it and I'd relay the information out on the other radio.
It took us about an hour to unravel it but we did and, by the time I got home, I was mentally, totally, exhausted but between the two of us, we got everything back on the rails. So, that was another job that we did. He was a bit of a character.
