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Old 31st May 2017, 12:31 pm   #21
Herald1360
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

No, it's a Pretend Old Wireless.
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Old 31st May 2017, 3:50 pm   #22
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

The clue if there is one might be the make of razor blade.Though it certainly looks very clean,as made yesterday!
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Old 31st May 2017, 7:51 pm   #23
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Herald1360 View Post
No, it's a Pretend Old Wireless.
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Old 31st May 2017, 9:37 pm   #24
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

I suspect the few POW radios that were actually made were constructed by bored prisoners to give themselves something to do, rather than from a desperate need to hear news from home. Any radio that could have been built from smuggled or improvised parts wouldn't have been able to receive international transmissions anyway. I can't imagine that the British authorities would have been very concerned if German or Italian prisoners were spending lots of time trying to build radios rather than trying to escape, and the German camps were probably the same. British and Australian prisoners building the Burma Railway would have concentrated on staying alive rather than building crystal sets.

Lots of this legendary POW ingenuity probably falls into the 'keeping busy' category rather than constituting a serious attempt to escape or occupy their adversaries' time, but understandably propaganda during and immediately after the war chose not to portray it in that way.
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Old 1st Jun 2017, 10:26 am   #25
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

Here is a transcript from a recorded interview with a senior officer in WW2, recalling afterwards how he and others overcame the obstacles needed to build a POW radio. htthttp://www.zerobeat.net/qrp/powradio.htmlp://

The account seems entirely credible, and although we have no photo, what is assembled here in the photo in the OP clearly looks nothing like the ingeniously cobbled-together device described in this interview!
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Old 1st Jun 2017, 10:53 am   #26
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

Couldn't get the link to work Al. This should work:

http://www.zerobeat.net/qrp/powradio.html
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Old 1st Jun 2017, 11:18 am   #27
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

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Couldn't get the link to work Al. This should worK...
Thank you, David! What do you make of that account?
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Old 1st Jun 2017, 9:08 pm   #28
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

Interesting read. It strikes me that there are two aspects to that account:

Firstly, that this was a Japanese POW Camp - very different from a German one.

Secondly - of more direct relevance to this thread - the technical aspects.

Can't really deal with the technical aspects without first considering the circumstances of Japanese POW Camps. Forget the Geneva Convention, Red Cross parcels, medical facilities, or any semblance of civilised treatment. And bear in mind the conditions under which prisoners were kept. I don't want to cast aspersions on the character of the writer, but much of what he says, to my mind, stretches credulity.

He says: 'Escape parties were organised but none were very successful' which infers that some were successful. Escaping from a German POW Camp where you can blend in with the populous, have transport facilities and resistance movements to help get you back to the UK is one thing. Escaping barefoot into impenetrable jungle where your racial characteristics will mark you out as very different from the indigenous population is quite another.

Prisoners of the Japanese found themselves in camps in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and other Japanese-occupied countries. Those who did attempt to escape would be executed in front of other prisoners. In some camps the Japanese also executed ten other prisoners as well. Escape attempts from Japanese camps were rare. Escaping into the jungle is a different proposition from escaping from German POW camps.

There were more than 140,000 white prisoners in Japanese P.O.W camps. Of those, one in three died from starvation, punishments, executions, being worked to death, or from diseases for which there were no medicines to treat - cholera, dysentery, ulcers etc. Around 61,000 prisoners were put to work on the Burma railroad. Of those, 13,000 died – estimated at one per railways sleeper laid.

As to "the whole camp had a real craving to get news", from all the biographical accounts I've read, written by former Japanese POWs who - by some miracle managed to survive the war and live to tell the tale - they craved not for news from the outside world, but enough food and water to survive on, to recover from diseases which were rife, without medicines and few Medical Officers, and to stay well enough to see each day out without falling foul of their captors.

Only four things matter when every new day might be your last: Safety, food, water, shelter - not 'news of the outside world'.

500 - 600 calories a day and working like slaves from dawn to dusk and beyond doesn't strike me as conducive to building a radio, but setting all that aside, let's assume, as I guess we must, that every word is true, and consider the technical aspects. He was in Sandakan POW Camp. He states: "On the question of the headpiece an outside contact smuggled in one headphone, which was better than no headphone, and a valve - no valve holder but one can't have everything in this life".

Again, we can only take him at his word, but what 'outside contact' would smuggle a radio valve and headphone into the camp on pain of death? What's in it for them? Nothing that I can think of. (I've read accounts of POWs in Germany getting their hands on a pair of headphones and using the fine gauge enamelled wire from one of them to wind the coil).

If most of us had a radio valve a headphone and power source, it doesn't take a great deal of ingenuity to create the other items. Sandakan received about 1,500 Australians, most of whom had been captured from Singapore and brought to the Camp to build a military airfield for the Japanese. In 1943, another 500 Australian and 770 British soldiers were sent to the camp, and at its height later in 1943, about 2,500 POWs were located there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandakan_camp

Hence, it was a large camp, so items such as wire, tinplate, cardboard and all sorts of other materials would abound and the prisoners will have had a wide range of skills. He stated: "A variable capacitor was another component we had to bring in. We couldn't make a variable capacitor, it was impossible". I disagree - it would be perfectly possible to make a crude compression trimmer using tinplate, with card as the dielectric, or a slide type capacitor where the moving plates are pulled out or pushed in, between fixed plates.
He explained how they made resistors from string. You can also make them if you have a graphite pencil by drawing thick lines on paper or card. (Try it!).

As I say, I really must not cast aspersions on his character - all of what he says is perfectly feasible so I must take him at his word, but I've read quite a lot of biographies of former POWs, the most remarkable of whom in my view was Reg Twigg from Leicester, who lived until he was 99 and passed away just weeks before his book 'Survivor on the River Kwai' was published:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...y-forever.html

Not much scope for making radios during Reg's captivity at the hands of the Japanese.
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Old 1st Jun 2017, 9:39 pm   #29
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

I have very similar feelings about this story - not completely impossible, but perhaps a bit embellished. In the 40s and 50s there was a great appetite for stories about POWs being defiant, getting up to all sorts of tricks etc, and some veterans were happy to supply them. Just look at all the POW escape films made at that time, whereas in fact only a tiny number of people escaped and got home. My suspicion is that POWs in the good camps mostly kept their heads down and waited for the war to end one way or the other - that's what I would have done. In the bad camps they lived from day to day just trying to stay alive.
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Old 1st Jun 2017, 10:01 pm   #30
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

I used to work with some one who was captured by the Japanese though he never talked about those times.

Just as a long shot the name if anybody knew him was Fred Girt and lived in Wheatley ,Doncaster.

My D.E.R days in the 70,s.
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Old 1st Jun 2017, 11:55 pm   #31
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

I didn't know him but there's a bit of info here but it's difficult to read.
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Old 2nd Jun 2017, 3:43 pm   #32
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

The only mention of P.O.W. wirelesses in Pat Reid's 1952 book "The Colditz Story" is a sentence at the bottom of the last page of its epilogue, which simply states:

" Dick [Howe] also took over magnificently concealed wireless sets left behind by the French and gave the prisoners daily News Bulletins. "

The mains supply of Colditz was DC, which would have simplified the HT requirements: it is mentioned in the book that A Polish officer had made a solenoid and used this to make compasses for escapers. .

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Old 2nd Jun 2017, 3:51 pm   #33
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

I'm sure I read in one of the Colditz books that the parts for the radio were sent to POW's in parcels. Of course the Germans searched all parcels, but the POW's stole them from the parcels store before this happened.
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Old 2nd Jun 2017, 6:33 pm   #34
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

Well, in contrast to modern day scepticism there's actually quite a lot of contemporary evidence of the creation and use of radios in PW camps, both German and Japanese. For instance, Julie Summers' book on Colonel the Philip Toosey (the person so unjustly and inaccurately portrayed as "Colonel Nicholson" in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai) when quoting primary sources has this to say:

Quote:
"The news came principally from the camp radio that was operated in the hospital by two young officers of the Malay Regiment, brothers Max and Donald Webber. They had operated the radio in Chungkai for over two years without detection."
This radio was later moved successfully to another camp by concealing its parts within the bamboo tubes forming a stretcher and then again by hiding it amongst the personal luggage of a Japanese officer. This was possible because one of the British PW was acting as the officer's batman and was thus responsible for packing and unpacking his belongings at either end. It was on this radio that they heard news from All India Radio confirming that the Japanese had surrendered.

Russell Braddon, an Australian Gunner says in his book The Naked Island (his first hand account of being taken prisoner by the Japanese in Singapore):

Quote:
"The set was bundled into a rice bag and slung swiftly and unceremoniously from one man to another as we were searched. At the gaol we had another search and felt a certain apprehension. It is remarkable how prominent a field radio in a sack can seem on a search parade. In the midst of this search, however, the Almighty weighed in heavily on our side with a sudden violent tropical storm. Shouting, "This is no good to me too much rain" our searchers lost all interest in their quest for contraband and scuttled back to the guardroom. We strolled casually past them and down to our cells Robbie bearing a sackful of potential B.B.C. news bulletins slung negligently over his shoulder."
Later he says:

Quote:
"The Coral Sea Battle was won, the Japanese endeavouring to cover up their defeat by fantastic claims in the Syonan Shimbun, claims which involved the sinking of more Allied vessels of war in one clash than were ever listed in all the copies of Jane s Fighting Ships. Perhaps because of the open derision with which these propaganda efforts were greeted by us they staged a sudden search for secret radios. They found none although one lay in the rice store, one in an open dust box in a hut casually camouflaged with rubbish, and one in the bottom half of an Army-issue water bottle."
and there are then perhaps a dozen or more references to illicit radios, their hiding places and the Japanese guards' attempts to find them.

Finally a bit of searching with Google produced the attached photo, which apparently came from an American PW Recovery Team sent to Japan to assist with the repatriation of Allied prisoners and has this description
Quote:
"Lt. Paul Burrough of Oxford, England, of the Royal Signal Corps. Lt. Burrough was directly responsible for the safe keeping of the only radio in Prisoner of War Camp #13 [Omi]. Yokohama, Japan. September 1945."
Given that these camps were run by the Japanese and therefore amongst the harshest conditions that Allied PW had to endure it's probably understandable that modern readers doubt their accuracy. All I can say that there is plenty of evidence on the subject in published material and I'd add that, if 30 odd years in the Army taught me anything, it is first that anecdotes such as these are generally true (though often only for a very specific point in time and space) and second that people (particularly soldiers) will do the most unbelievable things. Sometimes they are unbelievably brave, sometimes they are unbelievably stupid and often it is difficult to tell the difference between the two.

So believe these accounts or disbelieve them as you wish, that's clearly your choice, but the evidence is there if you choose to look for it.

Oh and I entirely agree that the object at the start of this thread is definitely not a genuine "POW radio"!

Hugh
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Old 2nd Jun 2017, 8:04 pm   #35
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

Just to make it clear, neither I nor (I assume) anyone else who has expressed scepticism on this subject wishes to impugn the ingenuity or resourcefulness of the POWs who built things like radios, especially under very oppressive conditions. The prisoners in Japanese camps in particular were enduring hell on earth, and if constructing a radio helped them to stay sane through that then I'm not going to criticise. I do have doubts about how these things were interpreted postwar though, both by the general public and by the surviving prisoners themselves.
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Old 2nd Jun 2017, 8:29 pm   #36
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

POW's in Japanese camps were extremely resourceful, especially when it came to lack of medical facilities. Just one example was that they knew of course that blood could not be given to someone if neither their blood group nor the donor's was known. However, they knew that plasma could be given to anyone, but getting plasma from blood requires a centrifuge - hence, impossible in a POW camp. No, actually - they went ahead and built a centrifuge from a scrap bicycle using the wheel, chainwheel and chain. The attached small jars of blood to the rim, spun the wheel at high speed and separated the plasma. Used small bamboo shoots for needles.

Here's a clip from a diary relating to that:

"Bad bout of malaria and beri-beri. Sent down to hospital camp at Tamuan, 5,000 patients. Marvellous medics, innovations, surgical instruments, amputees limbs, cycle wheel centrifuge to separate blood, distillers for pure water, use of native remedies…"

As to radios, this is relevant:

"Barges pulled by pom poms brought supplies up river. Mainly rice or dried vegetables with canteen supplies for the Japs. 100kg rice sacks. The supplier Boon Pong was pro-British. He supplied batteries for illicit radios. He took post-dated IOUs for payment after the war".

But if they could smuggle in batteries, they could smuggle in small radios. The fact that the guy in question accepted IOUs would - in these days - be seen as wishful thinking, but back then, honour and 'my word is my bond' meant something.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peop...a7483359.shtml
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Old 2nd Jun 2017, 9:21 pm   #37
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

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JI do have doubts about how these things were interpreted postwar though, both by the general public and by the surviving prisoners themselves.
Me too, I remember walking around town with my dad when I was a nipper and often we bumped into someone who hadn't seen my dad since dad was called up for the war, "did you see any action George" was the question often put to my dad, as it happens he did but that question also seemed to imply that an awful lot of folks didn't see any action and it was some of those who were always coming out with some tall story or other.

I worked with an ex prisoner of war who was a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp, he was the tally man in a timber yard I worked at, top bloke at his job but you couldn't hold much of a conversation with him, he was basically more or less "gone" in that respect.

In many cases there was plenty of time during the war for troops etc to make radios etc, like the great war, it wasn't all battle time.

Never got much out of my dad about the war, it was only after he died that I took an interest in the family history and discovered his brother was killed in the battle for Florence, his half brother died in a Turkish POW camp during the great war, dads auntie's son and only child survived the great war in Europe only to be shipped up to Archangel after the armistice to fight the Blosheviks, he was transported down the Dvina river and ended up in the interior where he met his end when fighting in 1919, he was 19 years old, he's commemorated on the 1st stone of the Archangel Memorial. My step grandad on mothers side lost his only son during WW2, he was a radio operator/air gunner on a Lancaster bomber, 625 Sqdn, he managed to make it to 21years of age.

Sobering stuff.

Lawrence.
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Old 2nd Jun 2017, 9:42 pm   #38
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Just to make it clear, neither I nor (I assume) anyone else who has expressed scepticism on this subject wishes to impugn the ingenuity or resourcefulness of the POWs who built things like radios, especially under very oppressive conditions.
Yes, I'm sorry Paul I didn't mean to imply that and I only realised that it might perhaps be read that way after it was too late to edit it.

Hugh
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Old 3rd Jun 2017, 1:42 am   #39
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

From my recollection of mentions of wirelesses in books about WWII prison camps, they all referred to the use of a valve of some sort. The use of at least one valve was presumably essential to provide amplification of the relatively weak signals that would have been received from far distant BBC or VOA transmitters via less-than-ideal aerials. I have no personal experience of the type of simple wireless that prompted this thread, but on the face of it, it would need a fairly strong local signal to produce an audible output.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:39 pm   #40
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Default Re: P.O.W. Radio?

The piece of wood and razor blade, subject of this thread, sold today for £100 so someone thinks it's real.
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