I was born in Izmir (then known as Smyrna), on the west coast of
Turkey in Asia Minor, in 1911, of British parents. My British
nationality was established through the Treaty of Capitulation which
was then in force between Turkey and the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland. I remember there was a British Post
Office in Smyrna and we posted our letters with British postage stamps
(of King Edward VII) overprinted with the word LEVANT.
My grandmother on my father's side had come from Russia. It is a
strange coincidence that Takis Coumbias (ex SV1AAA), Bill Tavaniotis
(ex SV1KE) and I all had roots in southern Russia. My grandmother on
my mother's side was the daughter of the Dutch consul in Smyrna. Quite
a mixed bag.
In 1922, at the end of the war between Turkey and Greece, the town
of Smyrna was destroyed by fire when the Greek army was routed. My
widowed mother with four young children, was advised to take us on
board a British merchant vessel while the town changed hands. We were
told to take a little food with us just for a day or two. We carried
a large string bag with some bread, cheese and fruit, and one knife,
one fork and one spoon between the five of us. I remember it was night
and my mother put all her jewelry in a small leather bag. As I
pulled the cord to close it the pin of a large broach stuck out
through the top. My mother grabbed it and said I would hurt myself--I
was only 11 years old at the time. She looked around the bedroom,
lifted up a corner of the mattress of her bed and hid the pouch
'safely' underneath it. We hurried out of the house--and never went
back.
We and many other families spent one night on the merchant vessel
where there was no sleeping accommodation. Next morning we were
transferred to a large hospital ship called MAINE. All day we watched
small groups of the Turkish and Greek armies skirmishing on the
sea-front and in the evening many fires broke out in the town. In the
middle of the night while we were sleeping the hospital ship sailed
away to an unknown destination. After two or three days we arrived in
Malta, where most of us stayed for the next four years.
It was in Malta that my interest in wireless telegraphy was first
aroused. We were housed in some military 'married quarters'. Close
by there was a wireless station which produced bright greenish-blue
sparks and crackling noises. Its antennas were supported on three
very tall wooden masts painted bright yellow. I soon discovered that
it was GYZ belonging to the Admiralty. Malta was then (1922) a very
big base of the British Navy, in the good old days when England had an
Empire.
I bought a kit of parts and assembled a small receiver and being
so close to the powerful spark transmitter that was all I ever heard.
In 1926 when I left school my family moved to Greece and my
brother who was 7 years older than me, opened up a shipping office on
the island of Mitylene, in the Aegean sea. My father and grandfather
had been in this business in Turkey.
It was in Mitylene in 1927 that I constructed my first short wave
receiver. It had 3 valves with 4 volt filaments, heated by an
accumulator (storage battery). H.T of 130 volts was obtained from a
bank of small accumulators in series. As I had not learned how to make
a charger I had to carry these two units to a local garage regularly
for re-charging.
Apart from commercial telegraph stations there was little else to
hear. I had still not heard about 'amateur' radio. The B.B.C. was
carrying out test transmissions from Chelmsford for what became the
Empire Service (now the World Service) using the callsign G5SW. There
was also G6RX which stood for Rugby Experimental, operated by the
British Post Office. They were experimenting with ship-to-shore
telephony, and after setting up a circuit the operator used to say
"over to condition A" (and sometimes B) which was very frustrating for
me because the voices then became scrambled and quite unintelligible.
When I first began transmitting six years later, having 'discovered'
the amateurs, I chose the callsign RX as I had been a listener so
long, and also remembering the excitement of listening to G6RX.
In 1930 I moved to Athens and became a salesman for RCA radios. It
was there that I met Bill Tavaniotis, SV1KE, and his mechanic Pol
SV1AZ (now N2DOE). None of us had official licences because the Greek
State did not recognise the existence of amateur radio, and in fact
Athens did not even have a broadcasting station until 1938, although a
station had been operating since 1928 in Salonica (Thessaloniki) the
second largest city of Greece. But the Head of the W/T section at the
Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs (Greek initials T.T.T) Mr Stefanos
Eleftheriou knew all about us and gave us his unofficial blessing.
My first transmitter was just an electron coupled oscillator using
a type 59 output pentode from a radio. With an input of around 5
watts I was able to achieve W.A.C. on 14 MHz in 25 minutes one very
exciting afternoon. There were very few stations around and single
frequency working had not been heard of yet. It was the middle of the
sunspot cycle (which I knew nothing of) and propagation must have been
exceptionally good.
Another thing we had never heard of in those innocent days was
SWR. I had a Hot Wire ammeter and always tuned for maximum
deflection, completely oblivious of the fact that a large proportion
of the indicated value was 'reflected power'. I moved to 'high power'
when I added a 210 P.A. to my rig.
Obviously the prefix SV was quite a rare one and SV stations were
much sought after, particularly the handful who used CW. But as I
described in a short article in the October 1948 issue of the SHORT
WAVE MAGAZINE published in London, it was not all fun being a rare DX
station. A photo copy appears below:
To return to pre-World War II operating: Most operators used
crystal oscillators in order to have a clean '9x' note. It was quite
normal procedure to call CQ on one's crystal frequency, say 14,076 KHz
and then go over and start combing the band from 14,000 for replies.
At that time 20 metres covered 14,000 to 14,400 KHz., and the 15 metre
band had not been allocated to the amateur service.
In September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and all of us hastily and
voluntarily dismantled our transmitters and scattered the components,
as there was nobody to order us to close down.
In the latter part of April 1941 the German army marched into the
northern suburbs of Athens at 11 o'clock in the morning. At 3 o'clock
in the afternoon of the same day, a strong unit of the Gestapo arrived
in the southern suburb of Kallithea and surrounded the block in which
my house was situated and broke into it, looking for me and my
transmitter. Of course I had dismantled everything 19 months
previously and even taken down the antenna. So after this long period
of QRT how did they know where to find me? Well, FOUR YEARS EARLIER I
had won the first prize for Greece in the D.A.S.D. DX Contest for
1937 and the German society had sent me a nice certificate. You can
draw your own conclusions. I heard later (because I had left a few
days earlier for Egypt with the staff of the British Embassy) that the
Gestapo had visited all the active amateurs and had managed to arrest
only one of them, Nasos Coucoulis SV1SM (later SV1AC) and put him in a
concentration camp in Italy for nearly a year.
I would like to sketch briefly the turbulent events of the
following three years with some extracts from my diaries.
One year earlier, in 1940, following the invasion of Greece by the
Italian army operating from Albania, the broadcasting authority in
Athens (ETHNIKON IDRIMA RADIOFONIAS) began a news service in English
which was beamed to England and the U.S.A. on the short waves. In my
capacity as a member of the Press Department staff of the British
Embassy I took part in the first programme, and in fact read the first
news bulletin, which went out at 3 a.m. Athens time. As I said
above, early in April I was transferred to the British Embassy in
Cairo, Egypt.
1941: Very small contingents of the British army landed in Greece
to help the Greek army. But they proved totally incapable of standing
up to the onslaught of the German army which followed soon after. The
Greek army laid down its arms in Epirus (north-western Greece).
General Tsolakoglou became the first 'Quisling' Prime Minister of
Greece. King George and his government, under Premier Emmanouil
Tsouderos had left for Cairo.
1942: In North Africa General Rommel had advanced to within 100
miles of Cairo, but his supply lines had become very long. One of the
most important was the railway link through Greece, so the British
strategists decided that attempts must be made to disrupt it. The
Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) in London, despatched two small
groups of saboteurs (about a dozen men altogether) under the command
of Brigadier Eddie Myers and Major Chris Woodhouse who had the task of
linking up with the various bands of 'Andartes' (Resistance movement
fighters) which had started forming in the mountains.
Unfortunately, the British officers were told nothing at all about
the bitter rivalries between the various groups, most probably because
H.Q. in Cairo were themselves ignorant about the real situation. It
didn't take Meyers and Woodhouse long to discover that by far the
largest group was E.L.A.S. (the Popular Liberation Army) under Aris
Velouhiotis, about 120 ill-equipped men operating in the Pindus
mountains. Another smaller group of about 60 men had rallied round a
regular officer of the Greek army, Colonel Napoleon Zervas. They
called themselves the National Republican Greek League (Greek initials
E.D.E.S.)
I met Zervas personally years later when he was Minister of the
Interior (and therefore responsible for the Police). I was then
acting as interpreter for the Assistant-Head of the British Police
Mission to Greece. I remember vividly with what relish he described
to Colonel Prosser his method of torturing E.L.A.S. prisoners, which
left no physical marks on any part of the body.
It was in the course of a secret visit to Athens that young Chris
Woodhouse found out the real chain of command, when he was introduced
to George Siantos, the Secretary of the Greek Communist Party (Greek
initials K.K.E.). The K.K.E. controlled E.A.M., the National
Liberation Front which, in turn, ran E.L.A.S. But with a title like
that (National Liberation Front) it was easy to see why E.A.M.
enjoyed such widespread support, not only in the countryside, but also
among the intelligentsia in Athens.
But the task of the S.O.E. officers was made very difficult for
various reasons: Winston Churchill had given orders that they were to
support, as far as possible, only those guerrilla leaders who favoured
the King--but there were none, or very few. The S.O.E. units had
orders to cause the maximum disruption to the German occupation of the
country. And that was impossible without the support of E.L.A.S.,
which was controlled by the Communists. At the outset, it became
obvious to the S.O.E. officers that military and political priorities
were already in conflict.
E.L.A.S. forces were getting stronger every day and very soon they
began attacking fellow Greeks in non-communist Andarte units. The
successful attack on the railway bridge over the Gorgopotamos river on
the 26th of November was the first and last time that ELAS and EDES
co-operated against the common enemy under the coercion and technical
guidance of the British.
1943: Friction between EDES and ELAS continued to increase. When
Eddie Myers told them that he had been instructed to destroy the
bridge over the Asopos river, ELAS said it was too dangerous a target
and refused to help, so this became an all-British operation. A
24-year-old demolition expert of the Royal Engineers Captain Ken
Scott, was sent from Cairo. He was dropped by parachute, and planned
the successful attack on the bridge. It took the Germans four months
to rebuild it.
On the 11th of September 14,000 Italian troops in the north-west
surrendered to the Andartes with all their arms. A month later ELAS
seized the weapons and attacked EDES. The civil war had begun.
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 document
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 Embassy 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 assured 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 assist me. My unit was a section of the Press
Department of the British Embassy. I think the choice of title 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 butt 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
Hellenes, 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 Hellenes." 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 God, 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, shelling 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 assignments 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
Hellschreiber (Hell 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 principal 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.