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On watch with 537 SU.

Now that I was properly qualified in my new occupation I had to take my turn on night watches. On these I was the only Officer on the tech site and had no more
than 15 or, at the very most, 20 men on watch with me. There were a group of
technicians keeping an eye on the equipment and the generators, and a couple of
lads on guard duty with the anti-intruder dog patrols, but the rest were radar
operators, fighter plotters, plotters and tellers. It was not expected that a night watch
would ever have to carry out fighter control duties; RAF night flying was in the
evenings and was usually over by 23.00 hours. Weekends were similarly devoid of
RAF flying activity unless there was a scheduled exercise in progress.

Our job was the surveillance and plotting of all aircraft movements within our area of responsibility. This area was the very south-east corner of the British Zone,
and over the East-West frontier as far as we could see into Eastern Bloc airspace.
Usually everything was quiet, very quiet.

My position was in the Chief Controller's cabin in the Leyland Hippo Ops
vehicle. I must have spent something like 6 weeks of night watches in its plywood
and perspex two-person box, sweating alone in shirt sleeve order and cursing the
white-arsed flies in the summer then, later in the year in the cold weather, wrapped
up warmly in the under-heated and stuffy atmosphere.
1 I had a corded switchboard
with telephone lines to Group and to the control vehicles from which plots were
'told' on our own tech site. Lines also linked us to the USAF base at Rothwesten, and
to our domestic site. There were also two outstations, one of which was at Waggum,
near Braunschweig (Brunswick). The other was further north. Both were very small
units and had their own radar. Their specific task was to monitor aircraft movements
on the Berlin air corridors (and anything else they could pick up), and tell the plots to
Borgentreich. Waggum, though, told its plots over a beamed radio link to a receiver
located near our tech site, and thence by land-line. The Waggum end of this link was
far from secure because the back-beam (which was found to be almost as powerful
as the main beam) transmitted the data straight over the border into East Germany
and was doubtless constantly monitored by the Russians.

I did not have a radar screen in front of me when on nights. All plots, from both our own radar and the outstations, were told down land-lines to the plotters
sitting round the
GSM in the Hippo.
2 A teller, also sitting at the
GSM, then told the plots to Group. The Group Ops Room also received plots from other radar
stations. Thus, Group had an overall radar picture albeit a few minutes late because
of the delays of telling and plotting.
3 I was able to witness this when I was attached
for a short while to 83 Ops Room at RAF Wahn for continuation training just before
I became fully qualified.

Usual night time activity consisted of plotting slow transport aircraft, flogging their noisy way along the Berlin air corridors, until they faded from view below our
radar cover. Occasionally we had a glimpse of activity in the Russian Zone, but these
could only be high flying aircraft because other activity, if there was any, was out of
sight below our radar horizon. The usual highlight of the watch was the 02.00 hours
Met balloon which, although it wasn't our job, we plotted just for something to do.
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1 During day watches the second seat was occupied by the
Ops 'B' who had charge of the switchboard.
2
GSM = General Situations Map. Effectively a plotting table with a map of the relevant area with a
GEOREF
grid and major features (e.g. the East-West frontier) also painted on its surface.
3 This delay was acceptable in the days of slow, piston-engined aircraft. In the present jet age, as was evident
during exercises, this delay could mean that fighters were scrambled too late to intercept incoming raiders.
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