Merchant Navy radio operator
My name is Phil Orchard and the service I was in was Merchant Navy and I was a radio officer.
A radio operator, now our job on the ship in convoy in the Atlantic was that we did not keep continuous watch at all, because the submarines could hear our receivers and therefore we kept a watch on the bridge with the captain and the mates on watch.
We also did the coding and decoding, so we knew everything that was going on and very close to those people at the whole time and so you may find even that we know a lot more about than some others. And quite as well, as the secret side of it and the mates and the masters were more or less just learning the Morse code in those days.
We were pretty good at it. So that will give you a bit of an idea and if an aircraft came, for instance, to call us, he'd say AAA, which means I want to talk to you. And we would say K, which means go ahead, and we'd go ahead. Not at a slow speed that the mates might try to do. We got fast as they did too. About 20 or more words a minute, just the same as you hear the Navy. So that's the way it is.
We knew the flags, we did the lot and all the more people on the bridge is handy too. More people to look out for something on the water we didn't want. And so that'll give you a bit of the idea and perhaps give you an idea of what we saw, and the rest of it. Sometimes I've seen ships have been torpedoed. One right next to us, had the same cargo as we had, everything that blew up, it did blow up. And I don't know how many lives would have been saved in that instance and at that particular tale.
Life in the Merchant Navy
My father was at sea all his life. He was a chief engineer and I suppose it had to follow sometime. I was always interested in radio, amateur radio and that sort thing and he paid up at one stage and so I did the course at the Marconi school of wireless for 12 months and that got me a ticket and very soon we were in demand. Very soon we were away on an overseas ship. And so that's the way it goes.
I was the only Australian on board and I gave it all back too, so that's a bit of it. There's always somebody either sneaking behind you talking or somebody else shouting down your neck. But the bloke was making most of the noise, it turned out he was a Scotsman and it turned out to be me best friend on the ship. While we were in Manchester, the two of us worked by the ship while others went and so we were very good friends.
He was a fellow had been down in a ship, he was on one of those tankers that got torpedoed and he had dived into the water, come up and found he was amongst flames and oil so he dived down again to get out of it, and he's still alive. And so he was second mate of that ship that I was on, and I suppose he would have become a master later on.
Dangers of a convoy
One next door to us was, carrying the same cargo as us, all the supplies and the rest of it. It completely exploded. I shifted in my chair, I was on watch at the time. Whether anybody lived from it, I doubt. That's the sort of stuff we're carrying. Bombs, heavy stuff. I've seen instances where one ship's swapped places in the night with another one, with the fog around, things like that.
No there's not many happened, because the ship has an engineer down below with his hand on the tiller, not the tiller, but on the controls, all the time. It's very hard on them, to keep continuous watch, all the time there, and the same way with a mate on watch. And the speed has to be watched as well.
All the lights are closed and the rest of it, and if the escort sees a light coming from your ship, he's likely to fire on it. I don't blame him. And some things you hear, you know. You hear a ship going down and their Morse starts to slow down. The water's coming in and the machinery stopped and it's an awful feeling. There were things like that you come across in the sea. So there we are.
The Enigma machine
And then of course there's the secret stuff we did. Can't tell you much about it, it's still secret, so that's the way that goes. And we know what the Germans were doing with the Enigma machine. It sent a very high Morse and it was received on the other end on a simple type of receiver. The Enigma machine, it's quite small, you may have seen one. The front of it was just like a typewriter. It's not heavy and usually in a wooden box and it runs off a nine volt battery and every station has one of these things and they have books and papers which are very regularly changed. Without those, you can't get the immediate result on your signals. That's it. I've seen one and seen it been demonstrated.
They were not a German invention, they were invented by the Poles, and just by sheer luck, the British had one during the war and it was highly secret.
There was a German U-boat called 510 [110], I think, and their skipper was Lemp, who was the skipper of the first ship that was sunk during the war. He had been depth charged and surfaced and nearby there were two of those American type naval ships nearby. One of them was about to ram but was told not to, so the German ship stayed there on the surface and the crew got off.
A naval boat came and took the crew, took them away, put them down deep in the ship and told them nothing. Then another crew went out and examined the submarine and the Enigma machine and all the papers were there, and went to Bletchley Park. And so from then on, we had the signals the whole time.
