SOE's Secret Weapons Centre: Station 12 by Des Turner

Author:Des Turner [Turner, Des]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Espionage & Intelligence, World War 2
ISBN: 9780752459448
Amazon: 0752459449
Goodreads: 10509985
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

18.40 hrs Party will embus and return to library.42

Colonel Wood described ‘nearly overdoing it’ during the VIP visit:

I said, ‘Now this is our method of dealing with cars that we wish to abolish, with people in them for that matter, for the resistance.’ I used to buy up cars that were quite useless from the local garages, and use them for our trials. I was wearing a steel helmet, of course and I said, ‘I’ll now toss one of these into this car.’ Well, I did it too accurately; it went in through the window and the car dismembered itself. I was trying to wriggle my way into the ground, steel helmet well down and my arms over the back of my neck, wishing that I was a blade of grass and could get further down than that. Things were raining down all round me, but I was very lucky and nothing touched me. They were laughing themselves sick.

Anyway, to finish up I said, ‘Well, gentlemen, just to show you the accuracy of a time fuse, I’ve got some old explosive to dispose of and it will be really rather a lovely sight. We’ll put it at the bottom of the pond and mark the time and the fuse, and you’ll see how accurate it is. We’ll lift the pond up into the air and it’ll go back again.’ Well, I positioned the viewers where I thought they were absolutely safe, lit the fuse and the pond went up in the air and the wind changed and the whole bloody lot shifted across and fell on top of them! All this ruddy water. Luckily it was a summer’s day but they were not prepared for it. I will never forget Donovan, with a straight face, saying out of the corner of his mouth as he passed me, ‘Wood, you know, old boy, I personally wouldn’t treat senior officers like that.’ They took it awfully well and just laughed it off, but I did feel such a fool. I didn’t anticipate a terrific gust of wind that came from nowhere. Blew the whole mass of water about 150 cubic yards. Sock! It fell down en masse, it didn’t just spray them. Oh dear, dear, dear.

They wanted me to have Mr Churchill down to Aston House. They said, ‘Oh, if you do, you will get a gong and all manner of things; he will just love this place.’ I said, ‘I know he will, but I want to get on with the war, I don’t want a bloody gong, what is the good of a gong to me, I want to get the war over and then get back to my family. If Mr Churchill comes here it will mess things up.’ I loved the man, he was marvellous. I met him after the war, personally, and talked to him a lot. But he did like magic, we would have intrigued him and he would have given us comic tasks to do – his own staff knew this.

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