Part 3
From Ground Level to Subterranean

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Prologue to Part 3.

Now, as a grounded pilot, I was about to begin my new RAF career. In some respects a breath of fresh air started to blow through my life. Back at home, my father was still nagging at me to leave and could not accept that it was impossible. As a businessman running his own Company he was not used to being defied (as he saw it). Our relationship became rather thin at times, yet I had to try to put this behind me and face the new challenges which lay ahead.
In describing this section of my RAF career I have had to rely almost entirely on my crumbling memory. I have no prompts, save for my Fighter Controllers Log Book and a few unlabelled photographs, nor do I have access to any diaries, official or otherwise. Yet, in many respects, this was a more important part of my RAF career than any other. I became involved with aspects of the Cold War which, according to my advisers, have probably never been recorded from a personal or, indeed, official standpoint. Plenty has been written about the Cold War from the United Kingdom point of view, but none of these writings mention anything about the RAF involvement as part of the 2nd Allied Tactical Air Force in Germany which, without doubt, was a significant part of the defensive front line of our homeland.
I have taken time to describe something of the local German inhabitants and their activities. Whilst, at first sight, this may seem irrelevant, it sets the scene in that part of Germany and is something I would never have been able to record had I not been in the Royal Air Force.
My memories are all the more important, even at this late stage, because much of my work was unrecorded at the time, and had to remain so for very good reasons. My Log Book says really very little because Fighter Control, per se, was to be only a part of my responsibilities, much of the rest of my operational work was, at the time, regarded as being 'under wraps'. Please take account of the fact that I have only written of my own experiences. If some of them seem as though they could have been the start of World War III, there were others of like importance witnessed by my brother Officers who were doing the same work as me during this period. It was a time of very strained international relations.
Without access to any official chronological order of events with which to sequence my memories, I have to point out that some of the instances I relate may appear in the wrong order. In these circumstances I can offer no excuses. It is better that they are recorded in the wrong sequence than not at all. I challenge anyone who did similar work to write up and circulate their memories, so that a fuller record of the 1950s, from an operational Signals Unit point of view, may also be placed on record for posterity before it is too late.
I must point out that, during the events to be described, the designation of my Signals Unit changed from 537 SU to 210 SU at the end of 1956. Some of the following chapters, being of a general descriptive nature, cover both Units, and necessarily cover the same period, but from different aspects.
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