Oral History of Defence Electronics

R G Wells: The need for a radio. It was about the beginning of 1942 when I was a prisoner of war of the Japanese, when I was ordered to go on a working party which eventually finished up in Sandakan in British North Borneo. 2,000 odd of us were on this work party and it wasn't long before we noticed the absence of information as to the international situation, what was happening in the outside world, and the whole camp had a real craving to get news by whatever means. Escape parties were being organised, but none of these was very successful. The next thing people turned to was a means of getting some radio news, and this is where the building of a radio set became an urgent requirement. The main thing, of course, was that we didn't have any components and although we had some contacts outside which later on were helpful in the building of this receiver, it limited our requirement to a regenerative receiver as distinct from a superheterodyne receiver and the decision to do that was borne out by the results. The high frequency spectrum during that time of the war was fairly quiet in that part of the world and the BBC, we hoped, would be able to be received. This was aided by the fact that the Japanese in their wisdom called a friend of mine out one evening to repair their radio set and he took the opportunity, of course, to switch over to the short wave bands, with headphones while doing that, and picked up the BBC successfully. That day was memorable because it was the day that the BBC broadcast the death of the Duke of Kent in an aircraft crash. That was the only news we had of the outside world for something like six months.

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