Canadians in Radar
A Collaborative Oral History of World War II Veterans
proudly presented by
The Secrets of Radar Museum
Day and Night: Working in Radar
Radar personnel served in a number of important positions throughout the war, such as radar operator, mechanic, technician, officer, or teacher. These jobs were varied and widely dispersed, with radar personnel serving all over the world. Their work training personnel, building and maintaining equipment, developing new technologies, and using radar to detect approaching enemies or guiade allied planes through enemy airspace was crucial to the war effort.
Art Bamford
Art Bamford: They had an idea, and you got some of it, identification friend or foe. And I guess you know what that is, eh? They send the signals out and they pick them up and respond so they know if they should shoot them down or not. I was supposed to put IFF prototype works, so they could figure out how to put the thing in there, in all the RCAF airplanes in Canada. So that was a big job. So they had everything on the list. They even had … The first thing we scratched off was the Mosquito Moth, and IFF weighs about, around seventy pounds, somewhere around there, and sthey decided the damn plane couldn’t handle an extra seventy pounds so that was scratched out. And one of the other funny things I remember was I had to go to B.C. to the aircraft, air force place in B.C. and they had Stranraers and that was a real old biplane, and they only had about three or four of them, and I always remember these huge wings and this big spread, and the engines, two engines, were up at the top, but the way you get them going was there was a chain and a crank that came down to the bottom wing so to start the engine was to crank around the bottom wing. So anyway I get out there and I report in at the place and the fellow there says “Wow, jeez, no sense putting them in these things, they’re going out of service!”
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Art Bamford: So one day they got ahold of me and said “Well, we want you to go to Montreal. One of Churchill’s aircraft is there and we want to put LORAN in." Have you ever heard of LORAN? Long Range Navigational… something or another. And anyway it worked by virtue of a signal that went out and there was a master station and a slave station and you could get your position by getting these signals back from the signal you sent out.
Interviewer: While you were flying?
AB: Yeah.
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Janet Bates
Janet Bates: I got posted to Hawkshill 6 and having got my corporal stripes I was put in charge of a watch, as we called it. Girls, never had a man operator, it was all girls. And that’s where I started on, you know, running … how to run the sets on Oboe for the offensive radar. Now, I was there a while when the next thing came up. They wanted me to go back to Swanage and take a further course on it, which I did, and for some reason or other they decided they would keep me on as an instructress. Which I really didn’t enjoy because to me it was rather boring after having been on an operational station because you just had a new batch of kids, then a new batch of kids. I think that course was only about three weeks.
Interviewer: Was it only girls that you taught?
JB: Yes. There were very few men operators.
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Joseph Lesley Brown
Joseph Lesley Brown: Well, I was in Northern Ireland that winter, the following spring I was posted to RC… not RC, RAF Greyfriars, which is near a little place called Dunwich, which is on the coast of Suffolk. There was brand new, never-tried-out Type 16 equipment. It had a parabolic antenna, which is about thirty feet in diameter, huge thing. Previously, I didn’t mention, in Ireland I was on CHL equipment; Chain Home Low. This was Type 16. It was meant for guiding daylight bombers over the Low Countries. These were mostly Americans, flying forts and the like, that did that. So I was there for quite some considerable time, and there I met my wife! She was a radar operator. She comes from Cheshire.
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Donald Harrett
Donald Harrett: So I still didn’t do anything until we got on the squatter and then I got servicing the radar on our aircraft. We had the job of searching the Mediterranean Sea for submarines and enemy ships. We … and they worried about all those submarines there. The year before Britain had attempted to send a convoy of fifteen ships from Gibraltar to Malta. Only three of them got through. The submarines had sunk the other twelve. So we realized we had a big job to do. So we had to work out our aircraft with the radar, searching out the submarines.
Charlie Jackson
Charlie Jackson: I was, myself and another chap, were sent off as instructors to another radar school and to teach the Canadians as they came across what we had been taught at this first training school. I didn’t mention this first training school was at Cranwell. We had been sent from London up to Cranwell, at twenty years old, together and … I enjoyed the teaching very much. It was … we didn’t call them kids then, at nineteen, we called them young people. Of course we were one of them.
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Charlie Jackson: We had the choice to go where we wanted to go in Canada. So since Clinton was a teaching area and also it was the closest station to home, I chose that one. So for the next two years I was at ... in Clinton.
Interviewer: So that was 1943?
CJ: That would be 1943 to 1945 roughly. And there was a fair amount of action going on there. We had a number of American people coming up and taking training. And some of our WEM(R)s - wireless electrical mechanic (radio) - who are electronic people in the Canadian Air force and had remained in Canada. They took some of the radar program. And I was … of course the war was over in late 1945.
I: So you were teaching at Clinton when you found out the war was over?
CJ: Yes, yep. Well, teaching most of the time, I was learning about the other pieces of equipment too.​
Edna Simpson
Edna Simpson: It’s a bit like a TV tube and there’s a center point, and from that point a beam of light travelled continuously around that tube. And on that tube was etched in black the outline of the area you were in and when this beam of light hit an object, such as a plane, or the laser I was trained on, looking for E-boats and U-boats. But when it hit an object, a bright blip would appear there. And on this tube was a … it was kind of graphed out in to squares which had numbers one way, letters the other and we had to sort of mentally divide that square where that blip was into fifths one way and fifths the other way.
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Edna Simpson: The people who knew where the aircraft were, were all around the outside, as you remember, and so we passed our plot, we passed it on to the operator there and they plotted it on the map and the people above would say, “Oh, that’s a hostile,” or “That’s a friendly.” And if it was a friendly aircraft you only passed about three plots on it to see if it was okay. But if it was a hostile aircraft you had to pass a plot every time until they shot it down or they knew what had happened to it.
Interviewer: So you weren’t able to tell, just by looking at your screen whether it was hostile?
ES: No, not until we got an identification from the plotting room.
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Edna Simpson: So, it was a continuous thing, it was a twenty-four-hour day, and we worked either on a three shift or four shift system, which depending on how many girls we had on the station at that time, or how many were on leave, we’d either be on a straight eight hours or a straight six hours. And then we’d have some time off, and our shift was continually changing. We’d be 7:00 to 3:00, or 3:00 to 11:00, 11:00 to 7:00.
Interviewer: So you would rotate shifts?
ES: Yes, and so if it was a three shift system and every third day you’d have some time off. If it was four you’d have more time off.
I: So how much time would you have off? You’d work, was it three days on, three days off?
ES: No, you’d only have about, maybe twelve hours off. Well, if you were on a night duty then you’d have to sleep the next day then maybe you’d go on change shift in the middle of the day and you’d maybe come off at 7:00 and go on at 3:00 if you’re on the 3:00 shift.
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Edna Simpson: And we changed our jobs around all the time because watching a cathode ray tube was very hard on the eyes and we were not supposed to do it for too long at time. And then we’d change over and we’d be taking the plots and putting them on the board and passing them to the plotting room.
Interviewer: So how long would you stay on each job, maybe an hour?
ES: An hour, you were supposed to but very often we found at nighttime, if there were any men on duty, they usually ended up in the pub so they got rather tired so they fell asleep.
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Kenneth Wells
Kenneth Wells: Now during that time I was sent away late in 1943 after I’d had a leave to a special course, south in London, for some equipment that was being prepared to update. I came back … we were on a three-watch system, twenty-four hours of machinery. See, our jobs as technicians were to make sure that the equipment never broke down or was off the air for any length of time. When I was at Clinton, when we had finished the course, the RAF people, instructors, would deliberately create a fault in one of the model machines that we were going to service and say, “Okay, point to trouble.” That was a test to see whether we knew what we were doing up here. So that was our job then. At night, there was two of us who were technicians on at each watch, a group of girls in uniform interpreting the information, an officer on the other tube, he was directing night fighters at night, that kind of thing.