WRAFs were given supplies of these to administer to us and took a great delight in going round all the Officers, one at a time, to give us our medicine. Whether they were placebos or not is of no consequence, for none of us caught the 'flu.
At Üdem I met a Belgian Fighter Controller who spoke perfect English. Chatting, as all service personnel do, I quickly discovered that he had had a reputation as a saboteur with the Belgian resistance during the last war. Some of the tales he told about derailing ammunition trains during the Allied advance through France were almost unbelievable. Another Belgian verified his stories. He was a brave man who, because of his clandestine anti-German activities, always kept one bullet in whatever weapon he was carrying - just for himself if capture appeared inevitable.
For part of the exercise I was involved with surveillance and plot reporting and analysis. This was an interesting facet of air defence and, apart from during training at Middle Wallop, I had never done it before.
My over-riding impression of my work at Üdem is that I did nothing, yet I was occupied working at something or other the whole time. There did seem to be too many bodies in the bunker and I wondered whether we were all needed, and whether the Unit would have run more efficiently with less of us. Maybe this was one of the lessons learned from the exercise.
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