A German prisoner of war camp is something you never forget, and Oflag 64 was a very special one. Here is a look at those grim, and not-so-grim, days a half century ago.

News from the BBC came every night via a secret
radio in the White House. This is the story of how it happened,
told by the genius who built the "Bird".

BY JIM SHOAF

I had learned all about building radios literally at my father's knee, in 1928. It was then that I assembled a crystal (Galena) set in Dad's radio shop in Smithfield, and received Station KDKA in Pittsburgh very clearly. I was nine years old.

When everything hit the fan and I was taken prisoner in Tunisia, we spent several months at a British Officers' camp, IX A/Z, and we learned much from the British, some of whom were taken at Dieppe months before. They had built a workable secret radio and showed me how it was done, using only materials available in a prison camp, plus a vacuum tube.

That camp had AC current, 50-cycle power, so they could use a vacuum tube as a detector-amplifier, but needed a tube or "rectifier" to change AC to DC, necessary to power the radio circuit. An 0.1 to 0.5 mfd capacitor (or condenser) was used to "block" the power from the radio-frequency circuit.

Now that you understand all of this, you know that a foil electrode (made from cigarette packs) and a thin homogenous insulator (made from wax-type paper found in British Red Cross food parcels), alternately wound around and around, made an adequate condenser. So at Oflag 64, we immediately started collecting old cigarette packs and wax paper from everybody each time Red Cross parcels appeared. The necessary "resonant-coil" wire was obtained from an abandoned camp P.A. speaker, with a field-coil type magnet, in the building.

When we left the British camp at Rothenberg, the Limeys gave us a Pentode (5-element) tube sealed in a biscuit tin.

The first radio receiver at Oflag 64 built with these elements was my crystal set. It worked quite well, while we collected additional parts for our "one-tube" set. In fact, it worked on the first trial. Even Edison was not that lucky!

The "Bird" was installed in the attic of the White House and worked well every day until the camp was disbanded. The Germans never found it, due partly to the system of stationing "anti-goon" guards to warn of any Germans in the area while the set was in operation.

Encoded letter information from the States was very valuable in setting the frequency and broadcast times from BBC, which was approximately 2:00 a.m. every day.

On the long march from Schubin back into Germany, we got out the old crystal set and worked it every night. The story of Col. Goode carrying the "Bird" is only marginally correct. His bagpipes actually concealed spare parts. These were to be used to assemble another radio in case the working one was lost or seized by the Germans. We worked the radio in haylofts, manure piles, pigpens and cellars all during the January-February march to Luckenwalde.

Some other camps were able to build radios of a sort, too, but the Stalags' radio operations did not have as much G-2 type training as we were given beforehand in Tunisia. Stalag 17, and later Hogan's Heroes, showed a lack of proper information from SHAEF, such as we obtained earlier.

Two months before I was captured, 10 of us were taken to a rear area and given training in "communicating" in the remote chance that we might be taken prisoner later on. We learned letter codes, the BBC 24-hour radio frequency routine, and some instruction on how to assemble a workable simple radio. It all came in handy at Oflag 64.

Author: Becky Driscoll
E-Mail: bdriscoll@dcccd.edu