POSTAL & COURIER SERVICES BRANCH OF THE ROYAL ENGINEERS ASSOCIATION THE POSTHORN

Addition 30 November 2015

Contents Operation Sea Lion/ Seelowe Operation Sea lion/ Seelowe Page 1- 11 Allied-Occupied Germany Page 11- 16 Germany BFPOs then & Now. Page 16 - 18 Cold War Remembered Page 18 - 23 Medal Update Page 23 - 24

Post Notes Annual General Meeting Page 24 - 26 Membership & Committee Page 26 Lost & Found Members Page 26 -27 Subscriptions Page 27 - 29 Booking Form Page 30 Forthcoming Events

Annual Dinner & Dance Operation Sea Lion (German: Unternehmen Seelöwe) was Nazi Germany's plan PCS REA Reunion to invade the United Kingdom during the Second World War, following the Fall of 8th – 10th April 2016 France. For any likelihood of success the operation required both air and naval superiority over the English Channel, neither of which the Germans ever achieved during or after the Battle of Britain. Sea Lion was postponed indefinitely on 17 REA Events 2016 September 1940 and never carried out. 28 May Trooping the Colour - Major General’s Review 09 June Royal Hospital Chelsea Background Founder’s Day Parade Adolf Hitler had decided by early November 1939 on forcing an end to the war by 4 June Trooping the Colour – invading France. In order to avoid the heavily-defended Maginot Line the Germans Colonel’s Review 8 - 9 June Beating Retreat, had to invade Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in order to invade London France. With the prospect of the Channel ports falling under Kriegsmarine (the 10 – 12 June Chilwell Weekend* German navy) control, and attempting to anticipate the obvious next step that might 11 June Queen’s Birthday entail, Grand Admiral (Großadmiral) Erich Raeder (head of the Kriegsmarine) Parade instructed his operations officer, Kapitän Hans Jürgen Reinicke, to draw up a 29 – 31 July Minley Weekend* document examining "the possibility of troop landings in England should the future 16 - 18 September Corps progress of the war make the problem arise." Reinicke spent five days on this study Memorial Weekend* and set forth the following prerequisites: Elimination or sealing off of Royal 08 October REA AGM and Navy forces from the landing and approach areas. Annual Dinner * 09 October Sapper Sunday at

Royal Hospital Chelsea  Elimination of the Royal Air Force (RAF). 10 November Field of  Destruction of all Royal Navy units in the coastal zone. Remembrance, Westminster  Prevention of British submarine action against the landing fleet. Abbey 13 November Remembrance In December 1939, the German Army issued its own study paper Sunday (designated Nordwest) and solicited opinions and input from both *National Events the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe(the German Air Force). The paper outlined an assault on England's eastern coast between The Wash and the River Thames by troops crossing the North Sea from the Low

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 1 Country ports. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, responded with a single-page letter in which he stated: "...a combined operation having the objective of landing in England must be rejected. It could only be the final act of an already victorious war against Britain as otherwise the preconditions for success of a combined operation would not be met." The Kriegsmarine response was rather more restrained but equally focused on pointing out the many difficulties to be surmounted if invading England was to be a viable option. Later in the spring of 1940 the Kriegsmarine became even more opposed to invading Britain after its Pyrrhic victory in Norway. After Operation Weserübung, as the invasion of Norway had been code-named, the Kriegsmarine had only one heavy cruiser, two light cruisers, and four destroyers available for operations. Admiral Raeder was strongly opposed to Sea Lion since almost the entire Kriegsmarine surface fleet had been either sunk or badly damaged in Weserübung, and his service was hopelessly outnumbered by the ships of the Royal Navy. On 16 July 1940, following Germany's swift and successful occupation of France and the Low Countries and growing impatient with Britain's outright rejection of his recent peace overtures, Hitler issued Führer Directive No. 16, setting in motion preparations for a landing in Britain. He prefaced the order by stating: "As England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, still shows no signs of willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her. The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English Motherland as a base from which the war against Germany can be continued, and, if necessary, to occupy the country completely." Hitler's directive set four conditions for the invasion to occur:  The RAF was to be "beaten down in its morale and in fact, that it can no longer display any appreciable aggressive force in opposition to the German crossing".  The English Channel was to be swept of British mines at the crossing points, and the Strait of Dover must be blocked at both ends by German mines.  The coastal zone between occupied France and England must be dominated by heavy artillery.  The Royal Navy must be sufficiently engaged in the North Sea and the Mediterranean so that it could not intervene in the crossing. British home squadrons must be damaged or destroyed by air and torpedo attacks. This ultimately placed responsibility for Sea Lion 's success squarely on the shoulders of Raeder and Göring, neither of whom had the slightest enthusiasm for the venture and, in fact, did little to hide their opposition to it. Nor did Directive 16 provide for a combined operational headquarters under which all three service branches (Army, Navy, Air Force) could work together under a single umbrella organisation to plan, coordinate and execute such a complex undertaking (similar to the Allies' creation of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) for the later Normandy landings). Upon hearing of Hitler's intentions, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, through his Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, quickly offered up to ten divisions and thirty squadrons of Italian aircraft for the proposed invasion. Hitler initially declined any such aid but eventually allowed a small contingent of Italian fighters and bombers, the Italian Air Corps (Corpo Aereo Italiano or CAI), to assist in the Luftwaffe's aerial campaign over Britain in October/November 1940.]

German land forces In the plan finalised in August 1940, the invasion force was organised into two army groups drawn from the 6th Army, the 9th Army and the 16th Army. The first wave of the landing would have consisted of eleven infantry and mountain divisions, the second wave of eight panzer and motorised infantry divisions and finally, the third wave was formed of six further infantry divisions. The initial assault would have also included two airborne divisions and the special forces of the Brandenburg Regiment.[13]

Air power Battle of Britain Beginning in August 1940, the German Luftwaffe began a series of concentrated aerial attacks (designated Unternehmen Adlerangriff or Operation Eagle Attack) on targets throughout the United Kingdom in an attempt to destroy the RAF and establish air superiority over Great Britain. The campaign later became known as the Battle of Britain. The change in emphasis of the bombing from RAF bases to bombing London, however, turned Adlerangriff into a strategic bombing operation. The effect of the switch in strategy is disputed. Some historians argue that the change in strategy lost the Luftwaffe the opportunity of winning the air battle, or air superiority. Others argue the Luftwaffe achieved little in the air battle and the RAF was not on the verge of collapse, as often claimed. Another perspective has also been put forward, which suggests the Germans could not have gained air superiority before the weather window closed. Others have pointed out that it was unlikely the Luftwaffe would ever be able to destroy RAF Fighter Command. If British losses became severe, the RAF could simply have withdrawn northward and regrouped. It could then deploy when, or if, the Germans launched an invasion. Most historians argue Sea Lion would have failed regardless, because of the weaknesses of German sea power compared to the Royal Navy. The view of those who believed, regardless of a potential German victory in the air battle, that Sea Lion was still not going to succeed included a number of German General Staff members. Admiral Karl Dönitz believed air superiority was "not enough". Dönitz stated, "we possessed neither control of the air or the sea; nor were we in any position to gain it". Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine in 1940 argued:

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 2 .....the emphatic reminder that up until now the British had never thrown the full power of their fleet into action. However, a German invasion of England would be a matter of life and death for the British, and they would unhesitatingly commit their naval forces, to the last ship and the last man, into an all-out fight for survival. Our Air Force could not be counted on to guard our transports from the British Fleets, because their operations would depend on the weather, if for no other reason. It could not be expected that even for a brief period our Air Force could make up for our lack of naval supremacy. When Franz Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff, heard of the state of the Kriegsmarine, and its plan for the invasion, he noted in his diary, on 28 July 1940, "If that [the plan] is true, all previous statements by the navy were so much rubbish and we can throw away the whole plan of invasion". Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations in the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), remarked, after Raeder said the Kriegsmarine could not meet the operational requirements of the Army, "then a landing in England must be regarded as a sheer act of desperation". Limitations of the Luftwaffe The track record of the Luftwaffe against naval combat vessels up to that point in the war was poor. In the Norwegian Campaign, despite eight weeks of continuous air supremacy, the Luftwaffe sank only two British warships. The German aircrews were not trained or equipped to attack fast-moving naval targets, particularly agile naval destroyers or Motor Torpedo Boats (MTB). The Luftwaffe also lacked armour-piercing bombs and had almost no aerial torpedo capability, essential for defeating larger warships. The Luftwaffe made 21 deliberate attacks on small torpedo boats during the Battle of Britain, sinking none. The British had between 700 and 800 small coastal craft (MTBs, MGBs (Motor Gun Boats) and smaller vessels), making them a critical threat if the Luftwaffe could not deal with the force. Only nine MTBs were lost to air attack out of 115 sunk by various means throughout the Second World War. Only nine destroyers were sunk by air attack in 1940, out of a force of over 100 operating in British waters at the time. Only five were sunk while evacuating Dunkirk, despite large periods of German air superiority, thousands of sorties flown, and hundreds of tons of bombs dropped. The Luftwaffe's record against merchant shipping was also not impressive: It sank only one in every 100 British vessels passing through British waters in 1940, and most of this total was achieved using mines. Luftwaffe Special Equipment Had an invasion taken place, the Bf 110 equipped Erprobungsgruppe 210 would have dropped Seilbomben just prior to the landings. This was a secret weapon which would have been used to blackout the electricity network in south-east England. The equipment for dropping the wires was fitted to the Bf 110 aeroplanes and tested. It involved dropping wires across high voltage wires, and was probably as dangerous to the aircraft crews as to the British. Navy The most daunting problem for Germany in protecting an invasion fleet was the small size of its navy. The Kriegsmarine, already numerically far inferior to Britain's Royal Navy, had lost a sizeable portion of its large modern surface units in April 1940 during the Norwegian Campaign, either as complete losses or due to battle damage. In particular, the loss of two light cruisers and ten destroyers was crippling, as these were the very warships most suited to operating in the Channel narrows where the invasion would likely take place. Most U-boats, the most powerful arm of the Kriegsmarine, were meant for destroying ships, not supporting an invasion. Although the Royal Navy could not bring the whole of its naval superiority to bear—as most of the fleet was engaged in the Atlantic and Mediterranean—the British Home Fleet still had a very large advantage in numbers. It was debatable whether British ships were as vulnerable to enemy air attack as the Germans hoped. During the Dunkirk evacuation, few warships were actually sunk, despite being stationary targets. The overall disparity between the opposing naval forces made the amphibious invasion plan risky, regardless of the outcome in the air. In addition, the Kriegsmarine had allocated its few remaining larger and more modern ships to diversionary operations in the North Sea. The fleet of defeated France, one of the most powerful and modern in the world, might have tipped the balance against Britain if it had been captured by the Germans. However, the pre-emptive destruction of the French fleet by the British at Mers-el-Kébir, and the scuttling of the French fleet in Toulon two years later, ensured that this could not happen. Even if the Royal Navy had been neutralised, the chances of a successful amphibious invasion across the Channel were remote. The Germans had no specialised landing craft, and had to rely primarily on river barges to lift troops and supplies for the landing. This would have limited the quantity of artillery and tanks that could be transported and restricted operations to times of good weather. The barges were not designed for use in open sea and, even in almost perfect conditions, they would have been slow and vulnerable to attack. There were also not enough barges to transport the first invasion wave nor the following waves with their equipment. The Germans would have needed to immediately capture a port in full working order, a highly unlikely circumstance considering the strength of the British coastal defences around the south eastern harbours at that time and the likelihood the British would have demolished the docks in any port from which they had to withdraw. The British also had several contingency plans, including the use of poison gas. Landing craft

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Invasion barges assembled at the German port of Wilhelmshaven. In 1940 the German Navy was ill-prepared for mounting an amphibious assault the size of Operation Sea Lion. Lacking purpose-built landing craft and both doctrinal and practical experience with amphibious warfare, the Kriegsmarine was largely starting from scratch. Some efforts had been made during the inter-war years to investigate landing military forces by sea, but inadequate funding severely limited any useful progress.

A Pionierlandungsboot (de). The Kriegsmarine had taken some small steps in remedying the landing craft situation with construction of the Pionierlandungsboot 39 (Engineer Landing Boat 39), a self-propelled shallow-draft vessel which could carry 45 infantrymen, two light vehicles or 20 tons of cargo and land on an open beach, unloading via a pair of clamshell doors at the bow. But by late September 1940 only two prototypes had been delivered. Recognising the need for an even larger craft capable of landing both tanks and infantry onto a hostile shore, the Kriegsmarinebegan development of the 220- ton Marinefährprahm (MFP) but these too were unavailable in time for a landing on English soil in 1940, the first of them not being commissioned until April 1941. Given barely two months to assemble a large seagoing invasion fleet, the Kriegsmarine opted to convert inland river barges into makeshift landing craft. Approximately 2,400 barges were collected from throughout Europe (860 from Germany, 1,200 from the Netherlands and Belgium and 350 from France). Of these, only about 800 were powered (some insufficiently); the rest had to be towed by tugs. Barge types Two types of inland river barge were generally available in Europe for use in Sea Lion: the peniche, which was 38.5 meters long and carried 360 tons of cargo, and the Kampine, which was 50 meters long and carried 620 tons of cargo. Of the barges collected for the invasion, 1,336 were classified as peniches and 982 asKampinen. For simplicity’s sake, the Germans designated any barge up to the size of a standard peniche as Type A1 and anything larger as Type A2. Type A Converting the assembled barges into landing craft involved cutting an opening in the bow for off-loading troops and vehicles, welding longitudinal I-beams and transverse braces to the hull to improve seaworthiness, adding a wooden internal ramp and pouring a concrete floor in the hold to allow for tank transport. As modified, the Type A1 barge could accommodate three medium tanks while the Type A2 could carry four. Type B This barge was a Type A altered to carry and rapidly off-load the submersible tanks (Tauchpanzer) developed for use in Sea Lion. They had the advantage of being able to unload their tanks directly into water up to 15 metres (49 ft) in depth, several hundred yards from shore, whereas the unmodified Type A had to be firmly grounded on the beach, making it more vulnerable to enemy fire. The Type B required a longer external ramp (11 meters) with a float attached to the front of it. Once the barge anchored, the crew would extend the internally stowed ramp using block and tackle sets until it was resting on the water’s surface. As the first tank rolled forward onto the ramp, its weight would tilt the forward end of the ramp into the water and push it down onto the seabed. Once the tank rolled off, the ramp would bob back up to a horizontal position, ready for the next one to exit. The Navy High Command increased its initial order for 60 of these vessels to 70 in order to compensate for expected losses. A further five were ordered on 30 September as a reserve. Type C The Type C barge was specifically converted to carry the Panzer II amphibious tank (Schwimmpanzer). Because of the extra width of the floats attached to this tank, cutting a broad exit ramp into the bow of the barge was not considered advisable as it would have compromised the vessel's seaworthiness to an unacceptable degree. Instead, a large hatch was cut into the stern, thereby allowing the tanks to drive directly into deep water before turning under their own motive power

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 4 and heading towards shore. The Type C barge could accommodate up to four Schwimmpanzeren in its hold. Approximately 14 of these craft were available by the end of September. Type AS During the planning stages of Sea Lion, it was deemed desirable to provide the advanced infantry detachments (making the initial landings) with greater protection from small-arms and light artillery fire by lining the sides of a Type A barge with concrete. Wooden slides were also installed along the barge’s hull to accommodate ten assault boats (Sturmboote), each capable of carrying six infantrymen and powered by a 30 hp outboard motor. The extra weight of this additional armour and equipment reduced the barge’s load capacity to 40 tons. By mid-August, 18 of these craft, designated Type AS, had been converted, and another five were ordered on 30 September. Type AF The Luftwaffe had formed its own special command (Sonderkommando) under Major Fritz Siebel to investigate the production of landing craft for Sea Lion. Major Siebel proposed giving the unpowered Type A barges their own motive power by installing a pair of 600 hp surplus BMW aircraft engines on them driving propellers. The Kriegsmarine was highly sceptical of this venture, but the Heer (Army) high command enthusiastically embraced the concept and Siebel proceeded with the conversions. The aircraft engines were mounted on a platform supported by iron scaffolding at the aft end of the vessel. Cooling water was stored in tanks mounted above-deck. As completed, the Type AF had a speed of six knots, and a range of 60 nautical miles unless auxiliary fuel tanks were fitted. Disadvantages of this set-up included an inability to back the vessel astern, limited manoeuvrability and the deafening noise of the engines which would have made voice commands problematic. By 1 October, 128 Type A barges had been converted to airscrew propulsion and, by the end of the month, this figure had risen to over 200. The Kriegsmarine later used some of the motorized Sea Lion barges for landings on the Russian-held Baltic islands in 1941 and, though most of them were eventually returned to the inland rivers they originally plied, a reserve was kept for military transport duties and for filling out amphibious flotillas. Army Panzers ashore Providing armour support for the initial wave of assault troops was a critical concern for Sea Lion planners and much effort was devoted to finding practical ways of rapidly getting tanks onto the invasion beaches. Though the Type A barges could disembark several medium tanks onto an open beach, this could be accomplished only at low tide when the barges were firmly grounded. The time needed for assembling the external ramps also meant that both the tanks and the ramp assembly crews would be exposed to close-quarter enemy fire for a considerable time. A safer and faster method was needed and the Germans eventually settled on providing some tanks with floats and making others fully submersible.

Schwimmpanzer The Schwimmpanzer II was a modified version of the Panzer II which, at 8.9 tons, was light enough to float with the attachment of long rectangular buoyancy boxes on each side of the tank's hull. The boxes were machined from aluminium stock and filled with Kapok sacks for added buoyancy. Motive power came from the tank's own tracks which were connected by rods to a propeller shaft running through each float. The Schwimmpanzer II could make 5.7 km/h in the water. An inflatable rubber hose around the turret ring created a waterproof seal between the hull and turret. The tank's 2 cm gun and coaxial machinegun were kept operational and could be fired while the tank was still making its way ashore. Because of the great width of the pontoons, Schwimmpanzer IIs were to be deployed from specially-modified Type C landing barges, from which they could be launched directly into open water from a large hatch cut into the stern. The Germans converted 52 of these tanks to amphibious use prior to Sea Lion's cancellation. Tauchpanzer A Panzer III Tauchpanzerunder test (1940) The Tauchpanzer or deep-wading tank (also referred to as the U- Panzer or Unterwasser Panzer) was a standard Panzer III or Panzer IV medium tank with its hull made completely waterproof by sealing all sighting ports, hatches and air intakes with tape or caulk. The gap between the turret and hull was sealed with an inflatable hose while the main gun mantle, commander’s cupola and radio operator’s machine gun were given special rubber coverings. Once the tank reached the shore, all covers and seals could be blown off via explosive cables, enabling normal combat operation. Fresh air for both the crew and engine was drawn into the tank via an 18m long rubber hose to which a float was attached to keep one end above the water’s The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 5 surface. A radio antenna was also attached to the float to provide communication between the tank crew and the transport barge. The tank's engine was converted to be cooled with seawater, and the exhaust pipes were fitted with overpressure valves. Any water seeping into the tank's hull could be expelled by an internal bilge pump. Navigation underwater was accomplished using a directional gyrocompass or by following instructions radioed from the transport barge. Experiments conducted at the end of June and early July at Schilling, near Wilhelmshaven, showed that the submersible tanks functioned best when they were kept moving along the seabed as, if halted for any reason, they tended to sink into the sand. Obstacles such as underwater trenches or large rocks tended to stop the tanks in their tracks, and it was decided for this reason that they should be landed at high tide so that any mired tanks could be retrieved at low tide. Submersible tanks could operate in water up to a depth of 15 metres (49 ft). The Kriegsmarine initially expected to use 50 specially-converted motor coasters to transport the submersible tanks, but testing with the coaster Germania showed this to be impractical. This was due to the ballast needed to offset the weight of the tanks, and the requirement that the coasters be grounded to prevent them from capsizing as the tanks were transferred by crane onto the vessel's wooden side ramps. These difficulties led to development of the Type B barge. By the end of August the Germans had converted 160 Panzer IIIs, 42 Panzer IVs, and 52 Panzer IIs to amphibious use. This gave them a paper strength of 254 machines, about the equivalent of an armoured division. The tanks were divided into four battalions or detachments labelled Panzer-Abteilung A, B, C and D. They were to carry sufficient fuel and ammunition for a combat radius of 200 km. Specialised landing equipment As part of a Kriegsmarine competition, prototypes for a prefabricated "heavy landing bridge" or jetty (similar in function to later Allied Mulberry Harbours) were designed and built by Krupp Stahlbau and Dortmunder Union and successfully overwintered in the North Sea in 1941–42. Krupp's design won out, as it only required one day to install, as opposed to twenty-eight days for the Dortmunder Union bridge. The Krupp bridge consisted of a series of 32m-long connecting platforms, each supported on the seabed by four steel columns. The platforms could be raised or lowered by heavy-duty winches in order to accommodate the tide. The German Navy initially ordered eight complete Krupp units composed of six platforms each. This was reduced to six units by the autumn of 1941, and eventually cancelled altogether when it became apparent that Sea Lion would never take place. In mid-1942, both the Krupp and Dortmunder prototypes were shipped to the Channel Islands and installed together off Alderney, where they were used for unloading materials needed to fortify the island. Referred to as the "German jetty" by local inhabitants, they remained standing for the next thirty-six years until demolition crews finally removed them in 1978–79, a testament to their durability. The German Army developed a portable landing bridge of its own nicknamed Seeschlange (Sea Snake). This "floating roadway" was formed from a series of joined modules that could be towed into place to act as a temporary jetty. Moored ships could then either unload their cargo directly onto the roadbed or lower it down onto waiting vehicles via their heavy-duty booms. The Seeschlange was successfully tested by the Army Training Unit at Le Havre in France in the autumn of 1941 and later chosen for use in Operation Herkules, the proposed Italo-German invasion of Malta. It was easily transportable by rail. A specialised vehicle intended for Sea Lion was the Landwasserschlepper (LWS), an amphibious tractor under development since 1935. It was originally intended for use by Army engineers to assist with river crossings. Three of them were assigned to Tank Detachment 100 as part of the invasion; it was intended to use them for pulling ashore unpowered assault barges and towing vehicles across the beaches. They would also have been used to carry supplies directly ashore during the six hours of falling tide when the barges were grounded. This involved towing a Kässbohrer amphibious trailer capable of transporting 10–20 tons of freight behind the LWS. The LWS was demonstrated to General Halder on 2 August 1940 by the Reinhardt Trials Staff on the island of Sylt and, though he was critical of its high silhouette on land, he recognised the overall usefulness of the design. It was proposed to build enough tractors that one or two could be assigned to each invasion barge, but the late date and difficulties in mass-producing the vehicle prevented this. Other equipment to be used for the first time Operation Sea Lion would have been the first ever amphibious invasion by a mechanized army, and the largest amphibious invasion since Gallipoli. The Germans had to invent and improvise a lot of equipment. They also proposed to use some new weapons and use upgrades of their existing equipment for the first time. These included:

1. New antitank guns and ammunition. The standard German antitank gun, the 37 mm Pak 36, was capable of penetrating the armour of all 1940 British tanks except the Matilda and Valentine. Armour-piercing ballistic capped (tungsten-cored) ammunition (Pzgr. 40) for 37 mm Pak 36 had become available in time for the invasion. The 37 mm Pzgr.40 would still have had trouble penetrating the Matilda II’s armour so the first echelon units replaced theirs with French or Czech 47mm guns (which weren't much better). The Pak 36 began to be replaced by the 50 mm Pak 38 in mid-1940. The Pak 38, which could penetrate a Matilda's armour, would probably have seen action first with Sea Lion as it would have been issued initially to the Waffen-SS and the Heer's elite units, and all those units were in the Sea Lion force. These included the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler regiment, theGroßdeutschland regiment, 2 mountain, 2 Jäger, 2 Fallschirmjäger, 4 panzer, and 2 motorised divisions. In addition, the 7th Infantry division was considered one of the best in the Heer, and the 35th almost as good. 2. Captured French armoured tractors. The use of these tractors by the first wave units was intended to reduce their dependence upon horses and probably would have reduced the problems of getting supplies off the beaches. In addition to their proposed use on the beaches, the Germans later used them as tractors for antitank guns and munitions carriers, as self-propelled guns, and as armoured personnel carriers. There were two main types.

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 6 The Renault UE Chenillette (German name: Infanterie Schlepper UE 630 (f)) was a light tracked armoured carrier and prime mover produced by France between 1932 and 1940. Five to six thousand were built, and about 3,000 were captured and overhauled by the Germans. They had a storage compartment that could carry 350 kg, pull a trailer weighing 775 kg for a total of about 1000 kg, and could climb a 50% slope. The armour was 5–9 mm, enough to stop shell fragments and bullets. There was also the Lorraine 37L, which was larger, of which 360 fell into German hands. In that vehicle a load of 810 kilograms could be carried, plus a 690 kg trailer pulled for a total of 1.5 tonnes. The use of such captured equipment meant that the first wave divisions were largely motorised, with the first wave using 9.3% (4,200) of the 45,000 horses normally required. 3. 48× Stug III Ausf B Assault Guns- 7.5 cm StuK 37 L/24, 50mm armour and improved suspension. Some were to be landed with the first wave. 4. Panzer III F/G upgraded with more armour on the mantlet and progressively from 3.7 cm KwK 36 L/46.5 to 5 cm KwK 38 L/42 5. 72 Nebelwerferen (until then a secret weapon) to be landed with the second and third waves. 6. 36× Flammpanzer II flamethrower tanks, 20 to land with the first wave. 7. 4 or more 75 mm Leichtgeschütz 40 recoilless guns, to used by the paratroopers. The LG 40 could be split into four parts with each part being dropped on a single parachute. The Plan: Broad versus narrow front The German Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, OKH) originally planned an invasion on a vast scale, landing over forty divisions from Dorset to Kent. This was far in excess of what the Kriegsmarine could supply, and final plans were more modest, calling for nine divisions to make an amphibious assault on Sussex and Kent with around 67,000 men in the first echelon and an airborne division to support them. The chosen invasion sites ran from Rottingdean in the west to Hythe in the east. The Kriegsmarine wanted a front as short as possible as they regarded this as more defensible. Admiral Raeder wanted a front stretching from Dover to Eastbourne, stressing that shipping between Cherbourg/Le Havre and Dorset would be exposed to attacks from the Royal Navy based in Portsmouth and Plymouth. General Halder rejected this, saying, "From the army's point of view I regard it as complete suicide, I might just as well put the troops that have landed straight through the sausage machine.". One complication was that the different British seaports had significantly different tidal markings, which ruled out the element of surprise. This was another reason to favour landing craft. The battle plan called for German forces to be launched from Cherbourg to Lyme Regis, Le Havre to Ventnor and Brighton, Boulogne to Eastbourne, Calais to Folkestone, and Dunkirk and Ostend to Ramsgate. Fallschirmjäger (paratroopers) would land near Brighton and Dover. Once the coast was secured, they would push north, taking Gloucester and encircling London. There is reason to believe that the Germans would not attempt to assault the city but besiege and bombard it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion - cite_note- 58German forces would secure England up to the 52nd parallel (approximately as far north as Northampton), anticipating that the rest of the United Kingdom would then surrender.

German coastal guns With Germany's occupation of the Pas-de-Calais region in Northern France, the possibility of closing the Strait of Dover to Royal Navy warships and merchant convoys by the use of land-based heavy artillery became readily apparent, both to the German High Command and to Hitler. Even the Kriegsmarine's Naval Operations Office deemed this a plausible and desirable goal, especially given the relatively short distance, 34 km (21 mi), between the French and English coasts. Orders were therefore issued to assemble and begin emplacing every Army and Navy heavy artillery piece available along the French coast, primarily at Pas-de-Calais. This work was assigned to the Organisation Todt and commenced on 22 July 1940. The huge 21 cm K12 railway gun was only suitable for bombarding targets on land. By early August, four 28 cm (11 in) traversing turrets were fully operational as were all of the Army’s railway guns. Seven of these weapons, six 28 cm K5 pieces and a single 21 cm (8.3 in) K12 gun with a range of 115 km (71 mi), could only be used against land targets. The remainder, thirteen 28 cm and five 24 cm (9.4 in) pieces, plus additional motorised batteries comprising twelve 24 cm guns and ten 21 cm weapons, could be fired at shipping but were of limited effectiveness due to their slow traverse speed, long loading time and ammunition types. Better suited for use against naval targets were the four heavy naval batteries installed by mid-September: Friedrich August with three 30.5 cm (12.0 in) barrels; Prinz Heinrich with two 28 cm guns; Oldenburg with two 24 cm weapons and, largest of all, Siegfried(later renamed Batterie Todt) with a pair of 38 cm (15 in) guns. Fire control for these weapons was provided by both spotter aircraft and by DeTeGerät radar sets installed at Blanc Nez and Cap d’Alprech. These units were capable of detecting targets out to a The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 7 range of 40 km (25 mi), including small British patrol craft inshore of the English coast. Two additional radar sites were added by mid-September: a DeTeGerät at Cap de la Hague and a FernDeTeGerät long-range radar at Cap d’Antifer near Le Havre.

A German 30.5 cm naval gun on a coastal mounting, similar to those at the Friedrich August battery near Wimille. To strengthen German control of the Channel narrows, the Army planned to quickly establish mobile artillery batteries along the English shoreline once a beachhead had been firmly established. Towards that end, 16th Army’s Artillerie Kommand 106 was slated to land with the second wave to provide fire protection for the transport fleet as early as possible. This unit consisted of twenty-four 15 cm (5.9 in) and seventy-two 10 cm (3.9 in) guns. About one third of them were to be deployed on English soil by the end of Sea Lion's first week. The presence of these batteries was expected to greatly reduce the threat posed by British destroyers and smaller craft along the eastern approaches as the guns would be sited to cover the main transport routes from Dover to Calais and Hastings to Boulogne. They could not entirely protect the western approaches, but a large area of those invasion zones would still be within effective range. The British military was well aware of the dangers posed by German artillery dominating the Dover Strait and on 4 September 1940 the Chief of Naval Staff issued a memo stating that if the Germans "…could get possession of the Dover defile and capture its gun defences from us, then, holding these points on both sides of the Straits, they would be in a position largely to deny those waters to our naval forces". Should the Dover defile be lost, he concluded, the Royal Navy could do little to interrupt the flow of German supplies and reinforcements across the Channel, at least by day, and he further warned that "…there might really be a chance that they (the Germans) might be able to bring a serious weight of attack to bear on this country". The very next day the Chiefs of Staff, after discussing the importance of the defile, decided to reinforce the Dover coast with more ground troops. The guns started to fire in the second week of August 1940 and were not silenced until 1944, when the batteries were overrun by Allied ground forces. They caused 3,059 alerts, 216 civilian deaths, and damage to 10,056 premises in the Dover area. However, despite firing on frequent slow moving coastal convoys, often in broad daylight, for almost the whole of that period (there was an interlude in 1943), there is no record of any vessel being hit by them, although one seaman was killed and others were injured by shell splinters from near misses. Whatever the perceived risk, this lack of ability to hit any moving ship does not support the contention that the German coastal batteries would have been a serious threat to fast destroyers or smaller warships. Cancellation Both the British and the Americans believed during the summer of 1940 that a German invasion was imminent, and studied the forthcoming high tides of 5–9 August, 2–7 September, 1–6 October, and 30 October-4 November as likely dates. The Germans were confident enough to film it in advance. A crew turned up at the Belgian port of Antwerp in early September 1940. For two days they filmed tanks and troops landing from barges on a nearby beach under simulated fire. It was explained that as the invasion would happen at night, Hitler wanted the German people to see all the details. On 17 September 1940, however, Hitler held a meeting with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt during which he became convinced the operation was not viable. Control of the skies was still lacking, and coordination among three branches of the armed forces was out of the question. Later that day, Hitler ordered the postponement of the operation. He ordered the dispersal of the invasion fleet in order to avert further damage by British air and naval attacks. The postponement coincided with rumours that there had been an attempt to land on British shores on or about 7 September, which had been repulsed with large German casualties. The story was later expanded to include false reports that the British had set the sea on fire using flaming oil. Both versions were widely reported in the American press and in William L. Shirer's Berlin Diary, but both were officially denied by Britain and Germany. Author James Hayward has suggested that the whispering campaign around the "failed invasion" was a successful example of British black propaganda to bolster morale at home and in occupied Europe, and convince America that Britain was not a lost cause. After the London Blitz, Hitler turned his attention to the Soviet Union, and Seelöwe lapsed, never to be resumed. However, not until 13 February 1942, after the invasion of Russia, were forces earmarked for the operation released to other duties. Chances of success The great majority of military historians believe Operation Sea Lion had little chance of success. Kenneth Macksey asserts it would have been possible only if the Royal Navy had refrained from large-scale intervention and the Germans had assaulted in July 1940 (although Macksey conceded they were unprepared at that time),https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion - cite_note-73 while others such as Peter Fleming, Derek Robinson and Stephen Bungay believe the operation would have most likely resulted in a disaster for the Germans. Len Deighton and some other writers have called the German amphibious plans a "Dunkirk in reverse". Robinson argues that

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 8 the massive superiority of the Royal Navy over the Kriegsmarine would have made Sea Lion a disaster. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, believed the invasion could not succeed and doubted whether the German air force would be able to win control of the skies; nevertheless he hoped that an early victory in the Battle of Britain would force the UK government to negotiate, without any need for an invasion. Adolf Galland, commander of Luftwaffe fighters at the time, claimed invasion plans were not serious and that there was a palpable sense of relief in the Wehrmacht when it was finally called off. Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt also took this view and thought that Hitler never seriously intended to invade Britain and the whole thing was a bluff to put pressure on the British government to come to terms following the Fall of France. He observed that Napoleon had failed to invade and the difficulties that confounded him did not appear to have been solved by the Sea Lion planners. In fact, in November 1939, the German naval staff produced a study on the possibility of an invasion of Britain and concluded that it required two preconditions, air and naval superiority, neither of which Germany ever had. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz believed air superiority was not enough and admitted, "We possessed neither control of the air or the sea; nor were we in any position to gain it." Grand Admiral Erich Raeder thought it would be impossible for Germany to successfully invade the UK; he instead called for Malta and the Suez Canal to be overrun so German forces could link up with Japanese forces in the Indian Ocean to bring about the collapse of the British Empire in the Far East, and prevent the Americans from being able to use British bases if the United States entered the war. As early as 14 August 1940, Hitler had told his generals that he would not attempt to invade Britain if the task seemed too dangerous, before adding that there were other ways of defeating the UK than invading. Logistics Four years later the Allied D-Day landings showed just how much material had to be landed continuously to maintain an amphibious invasion. The problem for the Germans was worse, as the German Army was mostly horse-drawn. One of its prime headaches would have been transporting thousands of horses across the Channel. British intelligence calculated that the first wave of 11 divisions (including the airborne divisions) would require a daily average of 3,300 tons of supplies. In fact in Russia in 1941, when engaged in heavy fighting, a single German infantry division required up to 1,100 tons of supplies a day, though a more usual figure would be 212-425 tons per day. British intelligence further calculated that Folkestone, the largest harbour falling within the planned German landing zones, could handle 150 tons per day in the first week of the invasion (assuming all dockside equipment was successfully demolished and regular RAF bombing raids reduced capacity by 50%). Within seven days, maximum capacity was expected to rise to 600 tons per day, once German shore parties had made repairs to the quays and cleared the harbour of any block ships and other obstacles. This meant that, at best, the nine German infantry and two airborne divisions landed initially would receive less than 20% of the 3,300 tons of supplies they required each day through a port, and would have to rely heavily on whatever could be brought in directly over the beaches or air-dropped. The capture of Dover and its harbour facilities was expected to add another 800 tons per day, raising to 40% the amount of supplies brought in through ports. However, this rested on the rather unrealistic assumption of little or no interference from the Royal Navy and RAF with the German supply convoys which would have been made up of underpowered (or unpowered, i.e. towed) inland waterways vessels as they shuttled slowly between the Continent to the invasion beaches and any captured harbours. Weather From 19 to 26 September 1940, sea and wind conditions on and over the Channel where the invasion was to take place were good overall, and a crossing, even using converted river barges, was feasible provided the sea state remained at less than 4, which for the most part it did. Winds for the remainder of the month were rated as "moderate" and would not have prevented the German invasion fleet from successfully depositing the first wave troops ashore during the ten days needed to accomplish this. From the night of 27 September, strong northerly winds prevailed, making passage more hazardous, but calm conditions returned on 11–12 October and again on 16–20 October. After that, light easterly winds prevailed which would have actually assisted any invasion craft travelling from the Continent towards the invasion beaches. But by the end of October, according to British Air Ministry records, very strong south-west winds (force 8) would have prohibited any non-seagoing craft from risking a Channel crossing. German intelligence At least 20 spies were sent to England by boat or parachute to gather information on the British coastal defences under the codename "Operation Lena"; many of the agents spoke limited English. All agents were quickly captured and many were convinced to defect by MI5's Double-Cross System, providing disinformation to their German superiors. It has been suggested that the "amateurish" espionage efforts were a result of deliberate sabotage by the head of the Hamburg's army intelligence bureau, Herbert Wichmann, in an effort to prevent a disastrous and costly amphibious invasion; Wichmann was critical of the Nazi regime and had close ties to Wilhelm Canaris, the former head of the Abwehr who was executed by the Nazis for treason. While some errors might not have caused problems, others, such as the inclusion of bridges that no longer existed and misunderstanding the usefulness of minor British roads, would have been detrimental to German operations, and would have added to the confusion caused by the layout of Britain's cities and the removal of road signs. Planned occupation of Britain Administration

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 9 According to the most detailed plans created for the planned post-invasion administration, Great Britain and Ireland were to be divided into six military-economic commands, with headquarters in London, Birmingham, Newcastle, Liverpool, Glasgow and Dublin. Hitler decreed that Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of Winston Churchill, was to serve as the overall headquarters of the German occupation military government. A certain source indicated that the Germans only intended to occupy Southern England, and that draft documents existed on the regulation of the passage of British civilians back and forth between the occupied and unoccupied territories. Some Nazi planners envisaged the institution of a nationalities policy in Western Europe to secure German hegemony there, which entailed the granting of independence to various regions. This involved detaching Scotland from the United Kingdom, the creation of a United Ireland, and an autonomous status for Western England. The OKW, RSHA, (the Reichssicherheitshauptamt) and Foreign Ministry compiled lists of those they thought could be trusted to form a new government along the lines of that in occupied Norway. The list was headed by Oswald Mosley. The RSHA also felt that Harold Nicolson might prove useful in this role. OKW also expected to face armed civilian resistance. After the war rumours also emerged about the selection of two candidates for the "vice regal" office of Reichskommissar für Großbritannien (Reichskommissar for Great Britain), which in other occupied territories (such as Norway and the Netherlands) actually entailed the granting of near-dictatorial powers to its officeholders (Josef Terboven and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, respectively). The first of these was Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister and previously an ambassador to Great Britain, the second was Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, an undersecretary in the Foreign Office and the Gauleiter of the NSDAP/AO. However, no establishment by this name was ever approved by either Hitler or the Reich government during the Second World War, and was also denied by Bohle when he was interrogated by the victorious Allies (von Ribbentrop not having been questioned on the matter). After the Second Armistice at Compiègne with France, when he expected an imminent British capitulation, Hitler did however assure Bohle that he would be the next German ambassador to the Court of St. James's "if the British behave sensibly".

British monarchy

A Channel 5 documentary broadcast on 16 July 2009 repeated the claim that the Germans intended to restore Edward VIII to the throne in the event of a German occupation. Many senior Nazi officials believed the Duke of Windsor to be highly sympathetic to the Nazi government, a feeling that was reinforced by his and Wallis Simpson's 1937 visit to Germany. However, despite German approaches, "The Duke never wavered in his loyalty to Great Britain during the war", according to a statement by the British Foreign Office. Death squads Dr. Franz Alfred Six at Nuremberg (1948) Had Operation Sea Lion succeeded, Einsatzgruppen (lit., "task forces" which operated as death squads) under Dr. Franz Six were to follow the invasion force to establish the New Order. Six's headquarters were to be in London, with regional task forces in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh. They were provided with a list (known as the Black Book) of 2,820 people to be arrested immediately. The Einsatzgruppen were also tasked with liquidating Britain's Jewish population, which numbered over 300,000. Artworks and newspapers Six had also been entrusted with the task of securing "aero-technological research result and important equipment" as well as "Germanic works of art". There is also a suggestion that he toyed with the idea of moving Nelson's Column to Berlin. The RSHA planned to take over the Ministry of Information, to close the major news agencies and to take control of all of the newspapers. Anti-German newspapers were to be closed down. It appears, based on the German police plans, that the occupation was to be only temporary, as detailed provisions for the post-occupation period are mentioned. Deportation According to captured German documents, the commander-in-chief of the German Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, directed that “The able-bodied male population between the ages of 17 and 45 will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be interned and dispatched to the Continent”. This represented about 25% of male citizens. The UK was then to be plundered for anything of financial, military, industrial or cultural value, and the remaining population terrorised. Civilian hostages would be taken, and the death penalty immediately imposed for even the most trivial acts of resistance. The deported male population would have most likely been used as industrial slave labour in areas of the Reich such as the factories and mines of the Ruhr and Upper Silesia. Although they might have been treated less brutally than slaves

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 10 from the East (whom the Nazis regarded as sub-humans, fit only to be worked to death), living and working conditions would still have been severe. In late February 1943, Otto Bräutigam of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories claimed he had the opportunity to read a personal report by General Eduard Wagner about a discussion with Heinrich Himmler, in which Himmler had expressed the intention to kill about 80% of the populations of France and England by special forces of the SS after the German victory. In an unrelated event, Hitler had on one occasion called the English lower classes "racially inferior".

Operation Sea Lion (wargame) Operation Sea Lion was a major wargame conducted at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1974. Its aim was find out what might have happened had Nazi Germany launched Operation Sea Lion, their planned invasion of southeast England during World War II, in September 1940. The wargame was organized by the Daily Telegraph and Dr Paddy Griffith from the Department of War Studies at Sandhurst. The British umpires were Air Chief Marshal Christopher Foxley-Norris, Rear AdmiralTeddy Gueritz and Major General Glyn Gilbert. The German umpires were General Adolf Galland (air), Admiral Friedrich Ruge (naval) and General Heinrich Trettner(land). After the game's conclusion, the umpires unanimously concluded that the invasion was a devastating defeat for the German invasion force.

Scenario The game was played using a scale model of southeast England, the English Channel, and northern France. Available troops and resources were based on known plans from both sides, and weather conditions were based on contemporary British Admiralty records that had, until then, never been published. The scenario assumed that the German military had taken until September to assemble the shipping necessary for a Channel crossing, and that the Luftwaffe had not yet established air supremacy. The Luftwaffe also had to continue to bomb London. As happened historically, in the main the Germans had only converted river barges available as transport ships.

Invasion The German attack was launched at dawn on 22 September 1940 and consisted of 8,000 airborne troops and 80,000 infantry landed in amphibious operations. The invasion fleet suffered only minor losses to Motor Torpedo Boats, however the Germans lost about 25% of their unseaworthy barges. During this 24 hour period the Royal Air Force lost 237 aircraft (about 23% of its fighting strength), the Luftwaffe losses amounted to 333, also about 23% of its aircraft. Naval engagements were indecisive at this stage as the Royal Navy was still assembling its main destroyer fleet to attack. The larger ships of the Home Fleet (including battleships, heavy cruisers and aircraft carriers) were not to be committed due to their vulnerability to air attack and U-boats. The Germans managed to advance a dozen or so miles inland and even captured the ports of Folkestone and Newhaven but the docks at Folkestone had been thoroughly demolished by the British rendering the port more or less unusable. British and Commonwealth forces were moved to fully engage in the battle with the first counter attack on 23 September, halting the advance of the Germans towards Hastings and recapturing Newhaven. German paratroops were also pinned down by long-range artillery and harassment by stay-behind forces. At this stage the Germans had few tanks and only light artillery ashore. An increasing shortage of ammunition was slowly forcing them back towards the sea. The Germans asked "Hitler" if the bombing of London could stop and the aircraft used to support the invasion. The request was denied. By dusk on 23 September the Germans had 10 divisions ashore, but most were halted by counter attacks or awaiting supplies and reinforcements. The second wave of the German invasion was launched on the morning of 24 September, but only the short crossing from Calais and Dunkirk to Kent. At dawn on 24 September the second German landing, which was to include tanks and heavy artillery as well as supplies and men, was intercepted by a Royal Navy fleet of 17 cruisers and 57 destroyers plus Motor Torpedo Boats. 65% of the German barges, three German destroyers and seven E-boats were sunk for the loss of only two British destroyers (sunk by U-boats) plus two cruisers and four destroyers damaged. Some of the faster German ships broke away and headed for Folkestone, but the port was so badly damaged they could not unload. With the Royal Navy suffering only minor losses, the Home Fleet was ordered to stand by to sail for the English Channel. The German divisions ashore only had enough ammunition for 2 to 7 more days of fighting. Fast steamers and ferries were pressed into service to start an evacuation of German troops from Folkestone and Rye. "Hitler" ordered the remaining reserves to stand down and prepare for redeployment to Poland. Further British air and sea attacks disrupted the German evacuation over the subsequent four days. The remaining German troops in England finally surrendered on 28 September. Conclusion The German navy's relative weakness, combined with the Luftwaffe's lack of air supremacy, meant it was not able to prevent the Royal Navy from interfering with the planned Channel crossings. The Navy's destruction of the second invasion wave prevented resupply and reinforcement of the landed troops, as well the arrival of more artillery and tanks. This made the position of the initially successful invasion force untenable; it suffered further casualties during the attempted evacuation. Of the 90,000 German troops who landed only 15,400 returned to France. 33,000 were taken prisoner, 26,000

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 11 were killed in the fighting and 15,000 drowned in the English Channel. All six umpires deemed the invasion a resounding failure. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia

Allied-occupied Germany

The Allied powers who defeated Nazi Germany in World War II asserted governmental authority over all territory of the German Reich which lay west of the Oder–Neisse line, having formally abolished the German government of Adolf Hitler. (See1945 Berlin Declaration.) The four powers divided Germany into four occupation zones for administrative purposes. This division was ratified at the Potsdam Conference (17 July to 2 August 1945. In Autumn 1944 the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union had agreed on the zones by the London Protocol. The powers approved the eventual detachment of much of the German eastern territories, lying east of the Oder- Neisse line, from Germany; the contemplated Final German Peace Treaty would determine the Polish-German and USSR-Polish border lines for the former German territories. The Final German Peace Treaty would result in the "shifting westward" of Poland's borders back to approximately as they were before 1722. In the closing weeks of fighting in Europe, United States forces had pushed beyond the agreed boundaries for the future zones of occupation, in some places by as much as 320 kilometres (200 mi). The so-called line of contact between Soviet and American forces at the end of hostilities, mostly lying eastward of the July 1945-established inner German border was temporary. After two months in which they had held areas that had been assigned to the Soviet zone, U.S. forces withdrew in the first days of July 1945. Some have concluded that this was a crucial move that persuaded the Soviet Union to allow American, British, and French forces into their designated sectors in Berlin, which occurred at roughly the same time (July 1945), although the need for intelligence gathering (see Operation Paperclip) may also have been a factor. Territories annexed by Germany 1938–1945 All territories annexed by Germany before the war from Austria and Czechoslovakia were returned to these countries. The Memelland, annexed by Germany from Lithuania before the war, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945 and given to the Lithuanian SSR. All territories annexed by Germany during the war from Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Poland, and Yugoslavia were returned to those countries.

The zones of occupation The Allied zones of occupation in post-war Germany, highlighting the Soviet zone (red), the inner German border (black line), and the zone

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 12 from which American troops withdrew in July 1945 (purple). The provincial boundaries are those of Nazi Germany, before the present Länder (federal states).

American Zone of Occupation The American zone consisted of Bavaria and Hesse in Southern Germany, and the northern portions of the present-day German state of Baden-Württemberg. The ports of Bremen (on the lower Weser River) and Bremerhaven (at the Weser estuary of the North Sea) were also placed under American control because of the American request to have certain toeholds in Northern Germany. The headquarters of the American military government was the former IG Farben Building in Frankfurt am Main. Beginning in May 1945, many of the American combat troops and airmen in and around Germany were sent back to the United States based on their Advanced Service Rating Scores. Some of the experienced officers and non-commissioned officers were selected to be sent to the Pacific Theatre of Operations for the proposed Invasion of Japan, but most of those men who had served the longest in combat were discharged from the U.S. Army, the Army Air Forces, and the U.S. Navy upon their returns home. Following the surrender of the Japanese Empire in mid-August 1945 – by its acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration – a higher percentage of soldiers, airmen, and sailors were granted their final discharges from service. The signing of the surrender of Japan took place on September 2, 1945 officially ending hostilities in World War II in the Pacific, but active combat within the Pacific theatre had ended weeks earlier. British Zone of Occupation

Road sign delimiting the British sector of occupation in Berlin The Canadian Army was tied down in surrounding the Netherlands until the Germans there surrendered on May 5, 1945 – just two days before the final surrender of the Wehrmacht in Western Europe to U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower. After the liberation of the Netherlands and the conquest of northern Germany by the British Army, the bulk of the Canadian Army returned home, leaving northern Germany to be occupied by the British Army and (around Bremen and Bremerhaven) by the U.S. Army. Then in July 1945, the British Army withdrew from small slices of Germany that had previously been agreed to be occupied by the Soviet Army. The Control Commission for Germany - British Element (CCG/BE) ceded some slices of its area of occupation to the Soviet Union – specifically the Amt Neuhaus of Hanover and some exclaves and fringes of Brunswick, for example, the County of Blankenburg and exchanged some villages between British Holstein and Soviet Mecklenburg by the Barber-Lyashchenko Agreement.

Flag used by ships registered in the British zone. Within the British Zone of Occupation, the CCG/BE re-established the German state of Hamburg, but with borders that had been drawn by Nazi Germany in 1937. The British also created the new German states of Schleswig-Holstein – emerging in 1946 from the Prussian Province of Schleswig-Holstein; Lower Saxony – the merger of Brunswick, Oldenburg, and Schaumburg-Lippe with the state of Hanover in 1946; and North Rhine-Westphalia – the merger of Lippe with the Prussian provinces of the Rhineland (northern part) and Westphalia – during 1946– 1947. Also in 1947, the German state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen became an exclave of the American Zone of Occupation located within the British Zone. 1946, the Norwegian Brigade Group in Germany had 4000 soldiers in Hanover. French Zone of Occupation French forces in front of the Reichstag, Berlin 1946 Despite its being one of the Allied Powers, the French Republic was at first not granted an occupation zone in Germany. Later, however, the British and American governments recognized the role of France during World War II in Europe, and agreed to cede some western parts of their zones of occupation to the French Army. This created a French zone of occupation in the westernmost part of Germany. It consisted of two barely contiguous areas of Germany along the French border that met at just a single point along the Rhine River. It included the Saargebiet, which was disentangled from it on 16 February 1946. By 18 December 1946 customs controls were established between the Saar area and allied occupied Germany. The French zone ceded further adjacent municipalities to the Saar (in mid-1946, early 1947, and early 1949). Included in the French zone

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 13 was the town of Büsingen am Hochrhein, a German exclave separated from the rest of the country by a narrow strip of neutral Swiss territory. The Swiss government agreed to allow limited numbers of French troops to pass through its territory in order to maintain law and order in Büsingen.

Soviet Zone of Occupation Main article: Soviet occupation zone Pink: portions of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line attached to Poland (except for northerly and the adjoining Memel Territory, not shown here, which were joined directly to the Soviet Union.) Red: the Soviet Occupation zone of Germany.

1949 Soviet visa from occupied Germany in a Polish service-passport.

The Soviet occupation zone incorporated Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The Soviet was headquartered in Berlin-Karlshorst. Minor zones Belgian zone The Belgian Zone formed part of the British Zone, forming a corridor from the Belgian-German border to the edge of the Soviet zone, and including the town of Cologne. It was initially under British command, but the Belgians were given autonomy from 1946. The Belgian Forces in Germany (FBA-BSD) were created from former soldiers of the Free Belgian Brigade Piron, and was commanded by Jean-Baptiste Piron. Luxembourgish zone From November 1945, the Luxembourgish army was allocated a zone within the French sector. The Luxembourgish 2nd infantry battalion was garrisoned in Bitburg and the 1st battalion was sent to Saarburg. The final Luxembourger troops in Germany, in Bitburg, left in 1955. Polish "Zone" Poland (governed by the Communists after liberation from Nazi Germany) was given two land pockets as part of its Potsdam Conference defined "Temporary Administration pending the Final World War Two German Peace Treaty". One was in the southern part of the former German province of East Prussia. The other area under Polish administration was the large tract of territory between the River Oder and the 1937 Polish-German frontier. This occupied territory was annexed by Poland in 1949 in accordance with the peace treaty between Poland and the DDR/East Germany (which also recognized the cession of East Prussia/Warmia; Note: East Germany (AKA DDR) was not recognized as a Nation State by the United Nations until September 1973). In 1970, West Germany subsequently relinquished its claims to all previous German territory then under Polish control, following the historic visit to Poland of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.

Other German territory In 1945 Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line (Farther Pomerania, the New March, Silesia, and southerly East Prussia) was assigned to Poland by the Potsdam Conference to be "Temporarily Administered" pending the Final Peace Treaty on Germany; eventually (per that September 1990 2+4 Peace Treaty) the northern portion of East Prussia became the Kaliningrad Oblast within the Soviet Union. A small area west of the Oder, near Szczecin, also fell to Poland. Most German citizens residing in these areas were subsequently expropriated and expelled. Returning refugees, who had fled from war hostilities were denied return. The Saar Protectorate

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 14 Saarprotektorat; French: Protectorat de Sarre) was a short- lived protectorate (1947–1956) pa rtitioned fro m Germany after its defeat in World War II; it was administered by the French Fourth Republic. On rejoining West Germany in 1957, becoming the smallest "area state" (Flächenland), the Saarland, not counting the "city states" (Stadtstaaten) of Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. It is named after the Saar River. The region ar ound the Saar R iver and its tributary valleys is a geographically folded, mineral rich, ethnically German, economically important, heavily industrialized area. It possesses well- developed transportation infrastructure that was one of the centres of the Industrial Revolution in Germany and around 1900 formed the third-largest area of coal, iron and steel industry in Germany (after the Ruhr Area and the Upper Silesian Coal Basin). From 1920 to 1935, as a result of World War I, the region was under the control of the League of Nations as the Territory of the Saar Basin. Near the end of World War II it was heavily bombed by the Allies as part of their strategic bombing campaigns. Geographically, the post World War II protectorate corresponded to the current German state of Saarland (established after its incorporation into West Germany on 1 January 1957). A policy of industrial disarmament and dispersal of industrial workers was officially pursued by the allies after the war until 1951 and the region was made a protectorateunder French control in 1947. Cold War pressures for a stronger Germany allowed renewed industrialization, and the French returned control of the region to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957. The Saargebiet, an important area of Germany because of its large deposits of coal, was turned into the Saar protectorate. The Saar was disengaged from the French zone on 16 February 1946. In the speech Restatement of Policy on Germany on 6 September 1946 the U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes stated the U.S.' motive in detaching the Saar from Germany as "The United States does not feel that it can deny to France, which has been invaded three times by Germany in 70 years, its claim to the Saar territory." By 18 December 1946 customs controls were established between the Saar and Allied occupied Germany. Most German citizens residing in the Saar area were allowed to stay and keep their property. Returning refugees, who had fled from war hostilities, were allowed to return, especially refugees who had fled the Nazi dictatorship were invited and welcomed to return to the Saar. The protectorate was a state, nominally independent of Germany and France, but with its economy integrated into that of France. The Saar territory was enlarged on the expense of the French zone in mid-1946, early 1947 (when 61 municipalities were returned to the French zone), and in early 1949. On 15 November 1947 the French currency became legal tender in the Saar Protectorate, followed by the full integration of the Saar into the French economy (customs union as of 23 March 1948). In July the Saar population was stripped its German citizenship and became of Sarrois nationality. Berlin While located wholly within the Soviet zone, because of its symbolic importance as the nation's capital and seat of the former Nazi government, the city of Berlin was jointly occupied by the Allied powers and subdivided into four sectors. Berlin was not considered to be part of the Soviet zone.

The Supreme Commanders of the Four Powers on June 5, 1945 in Berlin: Bernard Montgomery, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Georgy Zhukov, and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny

Governance and the emergence of two German states The original Allied plan to govern Germany as a single unit through the Allied Control Council broke down in 1946–1947 due to growing tensions between the Allies, with Britain and the US wishing cooperation, France obstructing any collaboration in order to unwind Germany into many independent states, and the Soviet Union unilaterally implementing

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 15 from early on elements of its political-economic system (mass expropriations of land, nationalisation of businesses). Another dispute was the absorption of post-war expellees. While the UK, the US, and the Soviet Union had agreed to accept, house, and feed about six million expelled German citizens from former eastern Germany and four million expelled and denaturalised Czechoslovaks, Poles, Hungarians, and Yugoslavs of German ethnicity in their zones, France generally had not agreed to the expulsions approved by the Potsdam agreement (a decision made without input from France). Therefore France strictly refused to absorb war refugees who were denied return to their homes in seized eastern German territories or destitute post-war expellees who had been expropriated there, into the French zone, let alone into the separated Saar protectorate. However, the native population, returning after Nazi-imposed removals (e.g., political and Jewish refugees) and war-related relocations (e.g., evacuation from air raids), were allowed to return home in the areas under French control. The other Allies complained that they had to shoulder the burden to feed, house, and clothe the expellees who had to leave their belongings to Poles and Soviets. In practice, each of the four occupying powers wielded government authority in their respective zones and carried out different policies toward the population and local and state governments there. A uniform administration of the western zones evolved, known first as the Bizone (the American and British zones merged as of 1 January 1947) and later the Trizone (after inclusion of the French zone). The complete breakdown of east-west allied cooperation and joint administration in Germany became clear with the Soviet imposition of the Berlin Blockade that was enforced from June 1948 to May 1949. The three western zones were merged to form the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1949, and the Soviets followed suit in October 1949 with the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In the west, the occupation continued until 5 May 1955, when the General Treaty (German: Deutschlandvertrag) entered into force. However, upon the creation of the Federal Republic in May 1949, the military governors were replaced by civilian high commissioners, whose powers lay somewhere between those of a governor and those of an ambassador. When the Deutschlandvertrag became law, the occupation ended, the western occupation zones ceased to exist, and the high commissioners were replaced by normal ambassadors. West Germany was also allowed to build a military, and the Bundeswehr, or Federal Defence Force, was established on 12 November 1955. A similar situation occurred in East Germany. The GDR was founded on 7 October 1949. On 10 October the Soviet Military Administration in Germany was replaced by the Soviet Control Commission, although limited sovereignty was not granted to the GDR government until 11 November 1949. After the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, the Soviet Control Commission was replaced with the office of the Soviet High Commissioner on 28 May 1953. This office was abolished (and replaced by an ambassador) and (general) sovereignty was granted to the GDR, when the Soviet Union concluded a state treaty (Staatsvertrag) with the GDR on September 20, 1955. On 1 March 1956, the GDR established a military, the National People's Army (NVA). Despite the grants of general sovereignty to both German states in 1955, full and unrestricted sovereignty under international law was not enjoyed by any German government until after the reunification of Germany in October 1990. Though West Germany was generally independent, the Allies maintained some responsibilities for West Germany. At the same time, East Germany was a satellite state of the Soviet Union. The provisions of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, also known as the "Two-plus-Four Treaty," granting full sovereign powers to Germany did not become law until 15 March 1991, after all of the participating nations had ratified the treaty. As envisaged by the Treaty, the last Occupation troops departed from Germany when the Russian presence was terminated in 1994. A 1956 plebiscite ended the French administration of the Saar protectorate, and it joined the Federal Republic as Saarland on 1 January 1957, being its 10th state. The city of Berlin was not part of either state and continued to be under Allied occupation until the reunification of Germany in October 1990. For administrative purposes, the three western sectors of Berlin were merged into the entity of West Berlin. The Soviet sector became known as East Berlin and while not recognized by the Western powers as a part of East Germany, the GDR declared it its capital (Hauptstadt der DDR). From Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia

British Forces Post Office Germany

In the immediate post war era facilities for both official and private mail to and from the UK as well as internally within BAOR were the responsibility of the Royal Engineers Postal Services organisation. Within the British Zone the equivalent of the modern Post Code system was introduced with BAOR numbers being allocated to every major Garrison or RAF Station. Mail for the subordinate or outlying units was redistributed from these nodal points. JPW

BAOR 1 - Bad Oeynhausen/HQ BAOR BAOR 24 - Iserlohn/Menden BAOR 2 - Berlin/RAF Gatow BAOR 25- Emden/Oldenburg/Wilhelmshaven/RAF Jever BAOR 3 - Hamburg BAOR 26 - Hildesheim/RAF Scharfoldendorf BAOR 4 - Düsseldorf/Duisburg/Essen/Mulheim/Wuppertal? BAOR 27 - Not in use BAOR 5 - Hannover/Hameln?/RAF Wunstorf BAOR 28 - Delmenhorst?/RAF Ahlhorn? BAOR 6 - Kiel/Plön/Neumünster BAOR 29 - Minden BAOR 7 - Not in use (1) BAOR 30 - Fallingbostel BAOR 8 - Lüneburg BAOR 31 - Schleswig?/RAF

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 16 BAOR 9 - Wuppertal? Schleswigland/Flensburg/Rendsburg BAOR 10 - Osnabrück BAOR 32 - Verden/Rotenburg/Lienenau/Nienburg BAOR 11 - Braunschweig/Wolfenbuttel? BAOR 33 - Goslar/Bad Harzburg BAOR 12 - Münster BAOR 34 - Bracht/RAF Laarbruch/RAF BAOR 13 - RAF Sylt Geilenkirchen/Krefeld/Willich BAOR 14 - Dortmund/Witten Annan/Wetter BAOR 35 - RAF Eindhoven BAOR 15 - Herford/Detmold/Bad Salzulfen? BAOR 36 - BAOR 16 - Paderborn/Bad Lippspringe/Sennelager BAOR 37 - Not in use BAOR 17 - Not in use BAOR 38 - Bad Eilsen/HQ RAF (G)/RAF Buckeburg (2) BAOR 19 - Köln/Bonn/RAF Wahn/Wahnerheide/RAF BAOR 39 - Bielefeld/HQ 1 (BR) Corps/RAF Butzweilerhof Gütersloh/RAF Sundern BAOR 20 - Soltau?/Munsterlager BAOR 40 - Mönchengladbach/Rheindahlen/HQ BAOR/HQ BAOR 21 - Frankfurt/Baden Baden RAF (G) (3) BAOR 22 - Lübeck BAOR 41- Lippstadt BAOR 23 - Celle/Hohne/RAF Fassberg BAOR 42 - Lübbecke BAOR 43 - BAOR 44 Hilden? NOT YET IDENTIFIED/CONFIRMED:

AACHEN, BAD SALZUFLEN, BRITISH TROOPS BELGIUM, BUNDE, GOTTINGEN, HAMM, HILDEN, HUSUM, ITZEHOE, MUNSTERLAGER, SOLTAU, WOLFENBUTTEL, WUPPERTAL

1) The sequence BAOR 7, BAOR 17, BAOR 27 and BAOR 37 were never used to avoid confusion surrounding the handwritten English and German style figures 1 and 7. 2) Bad Eilsen/ HQ RAF (G) originally BAOR 1? Allocated separate Post Code in 19?? due to volume of mail. 3) HQ BAOR/HQ RAF (G) moved from Bad Oeynhausen/Bad Eilsen to Rheindahlen in 1954 and were reallocated to BAOR 40.

Bad Oeynhausen

Bad Oeynhausen played host to many formations at one time or another at the end of World War 2 and in the following years. Many of these formations and units were founded here and then moved on to other locations. Home to: HQ BAOR 1945 to October 1954 (1) HQ BAOR Signal Regiment (2) HQ NORTHA G Signal Regiment (3) 18th Army Group Signal Regiment (4) 1 Corps Signal Regiment (5) 4 Base Workshops REME circa 1955

(1) HQ BAOR was established here before moving to Rheindalen in about October 1954. (2) Redesignated HQ NORTHAG Sig Regt 1952. (3) Redesignated 18th Army Group Sig Regt 1953. Moved to Krefeld possibly 1958. (4) Remained in Bad Oeynhausen after HQ BAOR moved to Rheindalen. (5) Formation date possibly 1951.

BFPO Numbers Germany (1957- 1990) In 1957 the current world wide system of BFPO numbers was first introduced to British Forces based in Germany. This necessitated some changes to the previous BAOR numbers to both avoid duplication and reflect the major reorganisations being implemented throughout the former British Zone of Germany.

BFPO 15 - Herford BFPO 36 - Osnabrück BFPO 16 - Sennelager/Paderborn BFPO 37 - Soltau, also Brannenburg BFPO 17 - Münster BFPO 38 - Fallingbostel BFPO 18 - Maastricht (Netherlands) BFPO 39 - Bielefeld BFPO 19 - Köln/Bonn BFPO 48 - Nienburg BFPO 20 - Dortmund BFPO 49 - Brussels (Belgium) BFPO 21 - Emblem (Belgium) BFPO 101 - Wolfenbüttel

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 17

BFPO 22 - Lübbecke BFPO 102 - Hildesheim BFPO 23 - Celle BFPO 103 - Hamm/Werl BFPO 24 - Iserlohn BFPO 104 - Munsterlager BFPO 25 - Brüggen BFPO 105 - Düsseldorf Isodets BFPO 27 - Hannover Isodets BFPO 106 - Soest BFPO 28 - Brunssum (Netherlands) BFPO 107 - Lippstadt BFPO 29 - Minden BFPO 108 - Kiel BFPO 30 - Hohne BFPO 109 - Ramstein BFPO 31 - Hameln BFPO 110 - Willich BFPO 32 - Verden BFPO 112 - Menden BFPO 33 - Hannover BFPO 113 - Mansergh Barracks, Gütersloh (1) BFPO 34 - Düsseldorf BFPO 114 - Körbecke BFPO 35 - Krefel BFPO 140 - HQ BAOR

(1) The reason for this was some silly idea of security when 47 Fd Regt RA moved into Mansergh Bks. The idea was that the BFPO number and the unit shouldn't have the same number, despite the fact that the address would have both the BFPO number and the unit title on the envelope.

Current BFPO Numbers & Postcodes BFPO 16 BF1 0AB Sennelager Germany BFPO 18 BF1 2AE Maastricht Holland BFPO 19 BF1 0AE Monchengladbach Germany BFPO 22 BF1 0AF Paderborn Germany BFPO 28 BF1 2AH Brunssum Holland BFPO 39 BF1 0AP Bielefeld Germany BFPO 44 BF1 0AR Dulmen Germany BFPO 46 BF1 0AT Goch/Wessel Germany BFPO 47 BF1 0AS Gutersloh Germany

Cold War Remembered BRIXMIS

BRIXMIS emblem The British Commanders'-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany (BRIXMIS) was a military liaison mission which operated behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany during the Cold War. BRIXMIS existed from 1946 – shortly after the end of the Second World War – until the eve of the reunification of Germany in 1990. Created by an agreement to exchange military missions, the stated object of BRIXMIS – and the Soviet equivalent in the British Zone, SOXMIS – was "to maintain Liaison between the Staff of the two Commanders-in-Chief and their Military Governments in the Zones". This liaison was undertaken by 31 members – 11 officers and no more than 20 others – appointed to each mission. These liaison staff were issued passes allowing freedom of travel and circulation, with the exception of certain restricted areas, within each other's zone. Such "tours", as they became known, were conducted in uniform and in clearly identifiable vehicles. Nevertheless, although never openly stated, this liaison role also presented an ideal opportunity for the gathering of military intelligence through reconnaissance and surveillance and the occasional 'borrowing' of military matériel. This opportunity was fully exploited by both sides. BRIXMIS was ideally placed to "test the temperature" of Soviet intentions from its privileged position behind the Iron Curtain. However, and perhaps more importantly, it offered a channel for communication between West and East via its secondary but significant role of liaison – the initial reason for its establishment.

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 18 History

Following the establishment of the four Allied zones of control in Germany after the Second World War, it became clear that some mechanism was needed to facilitate liaison between the occupying military governments, particularly between those of the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. The exchange of military liaison missions appeared to offer a convenient solution.

Flash worn on the upper arm by uniformed BRIXMIS personnel. The reciprocal agreement establishing the first of these, between the British and Soviet zones – the Robertson-Malinin Agreement – was reached on 16 September 1946 between the respective chiefs of staff. Subsequent agreements in 1947 led to the exchange of similar missions between the Soviet zone and those controlled by French and US forces, although the British–Soviet arrangement was significantly larger than either of the others, with 31 individuals allowed passes in each case. The British Mission comprised members of the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force who conducted uniformed liaison activities in marked cars and in two Chipmunk light aircraft – the latter ostensibly to allow aircrew to maintain crew currency while posted to the Mission. BRIXMIS maintained a permanent presence in its nominal home, the Mission House in Potsdam, East Germany, but its actual headquarters and operational centre were in West Berlin. These were located in London Block, a part of the Olympic Stadium complex which housed the military government of the British Sector of Berlin. The original Potsdam Mission House at Wildpark was in fact damaged during anti-British disturbances in 1958, and a new one (34 Seestrasse) was provided by the Soviet authorities, together with a sum of money in reparation. BRIXMIS number plate, with Russian words "Британская военная миссия" (lit. British Military Mission) below.

Although symbolically highly significant, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 simply returned the situation to what it had been before its erection in 1961, and the need for liaison and the gathering of intelligence became no less pressing. The agreements therefore remained in place until 2 October 1990, when all three were suspended on the eve of Germany's reunification. While BRIXMIS formally disbanded on 31 December 1990, a small number of its staff remained to conduct similar operations covertly and without the quasi-diplomatic immunity of the Robertson-Malinin Agreement during the course of the next three years. The rationale for this 'son-of-BRIXMIS' unit is as curious as the paradox of the liaison-spying roles of the previous 45 years. In 1990, the fact remained that the West could not be certain that the Soviet Union would fully withdraw from the now united Germany.

Liaison

Other than via the occasional formal message, most official liaison consisted of formal events attended by both sides. Such events included, for example, a parade on the Queen's birthday, receptions at the Mission House, and a Remembrance Day religious service at the Stahnsdorf War Graves cemetery, just south of Berlin. There were also regular wreath-laying visits to the British memorials at the former concentration camps of Buchenwald, Sachse nhausen, and Raven sbrück. Informal contact was maintained through parties – usually in celebration of some one-off event – to which members of SERB, the Soviet External Relations Branch, were also invited. Members of the Mission holding a full "touring"’ pass could also go on what were known as "cultu ral tours", in which tourers and their families could stay, usually for several nights, in hotels of some of the main cities of East Germany. Such trips offered excellent opportunities for getting to know members of the Soviet and East German armed forces (and civilians) who might not have otherwise been met in the course of normal duties.

Intelligence gathering

The liaison agreement allowed staff to travel throughout the respective zones of control with only limited restrictions on movement. Some areas remained restricted on a permanent basis, whereas others were subject to temporary restriction, with processes established to notify respective missions when these were imposed. Typical sign intended to prevent Missions from entering prohibited areas in East Germany. Whilst these were to a large extent respected, there were also many unnotified "Missions prohibited" signs around most military installations, which were invariably ignored and even at times taken home as souvenirs. Tours found in places where they were not supposed to be were usually pursued and, if caught, arrested and detained for a while at the nearest Kommandatura. The main risk to persistent offenders was that they might be declared persona non grata and have their passes withdrawn – a complete waste of the expensive specialist

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 19 training they had undergone before being posted to BRIXMIS. This freedom of movement throughout East Germany allowed the collection of intelligence on Warsaw Pact forces, particularly those of the Soviet Union and East Germany, which included force disposition and movement, orders of battle, equipment and professional standards. The configuration of liaison teams was established in the initial agreement and remained in place throughout the life of the programme. These were made up of a tour officer, a tour NCO and a driver, all of whom in later years received similar training. Their ground operations tours were conducted in cars, reconnoitring either on an ad-hoc basis or as directed by Defence Intelligence in London. Such tours could take a number of days with the teams being entirely self-sufficient, cooking their own meals and sleeping in the countryside either in the vehicle, as the driver always had to, or, as the other two normally did, in bivouacs or one-man tents. Once they had left Potsdam, they were entirely out of contact with their headquarters, and therefore left to their own devices to deal with any unforeseen circumstances, whether they be problems or opportunities. Incidents of open hostility to tourers – such as being physically attacked or shot at, or having the vehicle deliberately rammed – were infrequent, but they did nevertheless happen occasionally.[11] What was very common, however, was the tailing of crews by so-called "narks" – members of the East German State Security Service (Stasi). A combination of superior equipment, driving skills and the ever-increasing knowledge of the local terrain possessed by the BRIXMIS crews meant, however, that they could usually be shaken off. The British Mission was almost entirely overt, in that all personnel operated in uniform and in marked vehicles, although there were occasions when the officer and tour NCO would leave the driver in the vehicle and explore on foot, while deliberately concealing any obvious evidence of their military identity.[13] The reciprocal Soviet Mission to the British zone operated in a more covert manner, however, in that it also had an Agent Handling capability. BRIXMIS was also noted for many technical intelligence coups, including:

 Secretly bringing a Yak-28 Firebar's Skip Spin radar and jet engines back to Farnborough for inspection after it crashed into the embankment of lake "Stössensee" on the river Havel enlargements [Berlin]  Measuring the calibre of the gun of the then brand-new BMP-2 Armoured personnel carrier

 Stealing "reactive armour" from a Russian tank, for analysis.

Vehicles

BRIXMIS Opel Kapitän stuck in the snow, Winter 1957–8 The BRIXMIS contingent used Opel Kapitän cars in the 1950s, followed by Opel Admiral cars and their later replacement, the Opel Senator, converted to four-wheel drive in the UK. However, the operational need for a vehicle with a higher degree of cross-country performance than the mainly on-road Opel Senator led them to acquire a number of extensively modified Range-Rover vehicles. These proved to be fragile and expensive to run and maintain in Germany. With this in mind, they acquired a single Mercedes- Benz G-Class for trials purposes in 1980–81. After extensive evaluation, they adopted the Geländewagen as the general tour vehicle, and in various models, it lasted in service until they ceased operations in 1990. An ex- BRIXMIS G-Wagen is on display at the Military Intelligence Museum at Chicksands, England.

A De Havilland Chipmunk T10 – a type used for photo-reconnaissance missions by BRIXMIS BRIXMIS also exercised the British legal right under the Potsdam Agreement to use the airspace over both West and East Berlin, as well as the air corridors to and from West Germany to the city. Two De Havilland Chipmunk T10s were based at RAF Gatow and RAF aircrew posted to BRIXMIS had access to them for the conduct of photographic reconnaissance flights within the designated airspace; a radius of 12 nautical miles within the Berlin Control Zone (BCZ) from the Berlin Air Safety Centre (BASC) located in West Berlin. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chipmunk reconnaissance flights soon ceased and the two Chipmunks were flown to RAF Laarbruch, in Western Germany to await disposal action. Chipmunk WB466 was flown back to Berlin and was donated to the Allied Museum in Berlin, where it remains on display today. WG486 is still in RAF service with the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.

Havalsee Plane Crash

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 20 The Cold War was at its peak when on April 6, 1966, a top secret Soviet fighter aircraft crashed into the Havelsee, a lake straddling the British and Russian sectors of Berlin. The British immediately mounted a salvage operation, promising to return the aircraft and the bodies of its two pilots to the Russians. But as a barge and a crane were set up on the lake's surface to recover the aircraft, beneath the surface a very different operation was in train - to take its top-secret technology back to Britain where it could be examined. Now details of one of the most important intelligence operations of the Cold War are to be revealed in a television programme about the British Military Mission to the Soviet Zone of Germany, Brixmis. The first the British knew of the Havelsee incident was when radio operators at Berlin's RAF Gatow picked up a message from the aircraft's controllers ordering the pilot to try to land in the lake, but inside the Soviet sector. Despite a valiant attempt, he failed, his aircraft falling short and inside the British zone. Brig David Wilson, then head of Brixmis, was playing squash when the aircraft came down. A quarter of an hour later, still in his shorts, he was already co-ordinating one of the most astonishing espionage coups of the Cold War. British military police cordoned off the scene and a Brixmis interpreter was sent to the lakeside, where Russian troops commanded by Gen Vladimir Bulanov were trying to force their way through. They watched as Sqd Ldr Maurice Taylor, who unknown to them was the Brixmis operations officer, rowed to the wreckage to take photographs. The top-secret fighter was later identified as a Yak-28, NATO codename Firebar, with what was already clearly a unique radar capability. Britain and America were desperate to know what made it so good. Now they had their chance. It was 10.09pm on day one, nearly seven hours after the crash. The Brixmis interpreters were ordered to do everything they could to buy time, trying to mollify the by now clearly concerned Bulanov. At the same time, technical experts were flown out from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough to examine the aircraft's Skipspin radar, which unlike the then western systems could look up and down as well as straight ahead. Down below the water, one British serviceman was trying to get the pilots out of the aircraft so they could be examined by the intelligence experts. By 1.45pm on the second day the bodies had been bagged up and, below the water, work was going on to remove the radar. Meanwhile, Major Geoffrey Stephenson, one of the British interpreters, persuaded Bulanov that they were still trying to recover the bodies of the crew. But the Russians were suspicious the British might spirit something out under cover of night. Bulanov accused the British of having troops ready to shoot any Russian who got near the site. Major Johnathan Backhouse, the Brixmis interpreter on duty, denied this. Bulanov's response was to order up a platoon of Soviet guardsmen and to march them down a track towards the lakeside. "We hadn't gone a dozen yards when suddenly two riflemen jumped out of the dark," Major Backhouse recalled. Both sides clicked off their safety catches and there was a long pause as the British officer frantically thought of a way to defuse the situation. Hoping the British infantryman would back up his claim that there was no attempt to stop the Russians finding out what was going on, he asked: "Are you authorised to let this Soviet officer pass?" "Not on your f***ing life, sir," the British soldier replied. Fortunately, Bulanov roared with laughter and ordered his men back before turning to Major Backhouse and saying: "I think, major, Russian intelligence is superior to yours." At 4.07 that morning the bodies were slipped back on to the raft. As dawn broke, the Russians were informed they had been recovered and would be handed over that evening. The cockpit radar unit was already on its way back to Britain to be examined but they needed more time to get the radar dish out of the nose cone, which was buried in the mud. At 2.40pm that day, the Russians noted a launch arriving at the raft to offload a couple of apparently unimportant passengers before departing towards the shoreline of the British sector. What they did not see was the divers attaching the jet engines by line to the launch which dragged them along behind it taking them to a jetty a mile from the wreck where they were loaded into crates and flown back to Farnborough for examination. Meanwhile the pilots' bodies were handed over to Bulanov. Within

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 21 48 hours, the engines and the cockpit radar unit had been carefully returned to the Firebar's wreckage. It was at midnight on April 13, that the raft sailed to the Soviet sector where piece by piece the wreckage was handed over to the Russians. As the engines were handed over, Bulanov looked at them and could clearly see that the tips of some of the rotor blades had been sawn off. "He didn't say a word," Stephenson said. "He simply looked at me and shrugged, as if to say: 'I've been screwed', and of course he had." Then the Russians discovered that something was missing. The British insisted that everything had been handed over. If anything was missing it must still be down on the floor of the Havelsee. What was missing? The Russians were unable to reply. They could hardly say it was a top secret radar dish. They just had to hope the British were right and it was on the bottom of the lake. It had taken a long time to get the radar dish out. But Brixmis had managed it. They hadn't had time to put it back but they had pulled it out and the resultant changes to RAF aircraft to deceive the Skipspin radar restored parity in the Cold War.

Invasion of Czechoslovakia 1968 The Prague Spring After a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), and continued until 21 August when the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the country to halt the reforms. The Prague Spring reforms were a strong attempt by Dubček to grant additional rights to the citizens of Czechoslovakia in an act of partial decentralization of the economy and democratization. The freedoms granted included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel. After national discussion of dividing the country into a federation of three republics, Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia and Slovakia, Dubček oversaw the decision to split into two, the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic. This was the only formal change that survived the end of Prague Spring, though the relative success of the nonviolent resistance undoubtedly prefigured and facilitated the peaceful transition to liberal democracy with the collapse of Soviet hegemony in 1989. The reforms, especially the decentralization of administrative authority, were not received well by the Soviets, who, after failed negotiations, sent half a million Warsaw Pact troops and tanks to occupy the country. Invasion As these talks proved unsatisfactory, the Soviets began to consider a military alternative. The Soviet Union's policy of compelling the socialist governments of its satellite states to subordinate their national interests to those of the "Eastern Bloc" (through military force if needed) became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. On the night of 20–21 August 1968, Eastern Bloc armies from five Warsaw Pact countries – the Soviet Union, the GDR, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary— invaded the ČSSR. That night, 200,000 troops and 2,000 tanks entered the country. They first occupied the Ruzyně International Airport, where air deployment of more troops was arranged. The Czechoslovak forces were confined to their barracks, which were surrounded until the threat of a counter-attack was assuaged. By the morning of 21 August Czechoslovakia was occupied. Neither Romania nor Albania took part in the invasion. During the invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies, 72 Czechs and Slovaks were killed (19 of those in Slovakia), 266 severely wounded and another 436 slightly injured. Alexander Dubček called upon his people not to resist.[49] Nevertheless, there was scattered resistance in the streets. Road signs in towns were removed or painted over—except for those indicating the way to Moscow.[50] Many small villages renamed themselves "Dubcek" or "Svoboda"; thus, without navigational equipment, the invaders were often confused.[51]

Czechoslovaks carry their national flag past a burning Soviet tank in Prague. Although, on the night of the invasion the Czechoslovak Presidium declared that Warsaw Pact troops had crossed the border without the knowledge of the ČSSR government, the Soviet Press printed an unsigned request – allegedly by Czechoslovak party and state leaders – for "immediate assistance, including assistance with armed forces". At the 14th KSČ Party Congress (conducted secretly, immediately following the intervention), it was emphasized that no member of the leadership had invited the intervention. More recent evidence suggests that conservative KSČ members (including Biľak, Švestka, Kolder, Indra, and Kapek) did send a request for intervention to the Soviets. The invasion was followed by a previously unseen wave of emigration, which was stopped shortly thereafter. An estimated 70,000 fled immediately with an eventual total of some 300,000. This large wave of emigration swept the nation. A spirited non-violent resistance was The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 22 mounted throughout the country, involving attempted fraternization, painting over and turning street signs (on one occasion an entire invasion force from Poland was routed back out of the country after a day's wandering), defiance of various curfews, etc. While the Soviet military had predicted that it would take four days to subdue the country the resistance held out for eight months, and was only circumvented by diplomatic stratagems. There were sporadic acts of violence and several suicides by self-immolation (such as that of Jan Palach), but there was no military resistance. Czechoslovakia remained controlled until 1989, when the revolution ended pro-Soviet rule peacefully, undoubtedly drawing upon the successes of the non-violent resistance twenty years earlier. The resistance also became an iconic example of civilian- based defence, which, along with unarmed civilian peacekeeping constitute the two ways that nonviolence can be and occasionally has been applied directly to military or paramilitary threats. At the time of this dangerous event I was a Sapper (Driver Radio Op) in 35 Engineer Regiment based in Hameln. It was also the 'Quick Train' season for BAOR. Most wise squadies thought the Soviets would attack on a Saturday or Sunday and this invasion proved them all wrong. That morning of the invasion I must have been pottering around (Hiding really) in the RHQ signal wagon which had a telex machine in it. The machine started with a clatter and started to print out the following from the TASS Soviet news system. The Royal Signal lad had managed to tune in on the TASS service from Prague. "I can hear the tanks approaching and will continue to send from this machine until I can no longer do so...... They have stopped outside the office and are breaking the door down...... They are at the door. Long live our freedom they will never stop our hopes and dr...... "

At this point the machine stopped. It was certainly a time for thoughts of what could have happened. Needless to say there was no "Quick Train" that autumn. However later that year I did watch the most viscous ice hockey match between USSR and Czechoslovakia in the world Ice Hockey championships on German TV. A number of Russians were injured in the first minutes of the match and the ice turned red (Dark it was a black and white TV). The Czech won the match but lost the championship Larry Peacock

Medal update

The Pingat Jasa Malaysia Medal

"Pingat Jasa Malaysia" can be translated as "The Malaysian Service Medal". The medal was offered at the end of 2004 to the Commonwealth countries who served Malaysia in her fight against aggression and terrorism. Those Commonwealth countries include Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the United Kingdom and, never to be forgotten, the Ghurkhas.

The Citation

The citation that accompanies the medal reads:

"Pingat Jasa Malaysia

This medal is awarded to the peacekeeping groups amongst the Communion countries for distinguished chivalry, gallantry, sacrifice or loyalty in upholding Peninsula of Malaya or Malaysia sovereignty during the

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 23 period of Emergency and Confrontation." Foreign and Commonwealth medals have to be accepted by The Queen on the advice of the Government of each Commonwealth country involved where she is head of State. After a short period of consultation the Governments of Australia and New Zealand accepted the medal without restriction for their citizens. The British Government, however, announced in the House of Lords that they would refuse the Malaysian medal for British citizens on the basis that the award was contrary to British Medals Policy. In early 2005 intensive lobbying commenced to try and reverse that decision and after a few months the Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) announced that the FCO had submitted a paper to the Committee on the Grants of Honours, Decorations and Medals (known as the HD Committee which advises The Queen on these matters) asking them to review their policy in respect of foreign awards and the PJM. After several months the HD Committee met on the 7th December 2005 to carry out the review but their recommendation was not announced until a written Ministerial Statement was made in the Commons on the 31st January 2006 - the day after medals were presented in Australia where the Pingat Jasa Malaysia can now be worn with pride. The British HD Committee’s recommendation, however, was that British citizens could accept the medal but they would not be allowed to wear it. This astonishing situation means that The Queen has granted a wearable medal to her Australian and New Zealand citizens, but has refused the right to wear the PJM to her British citizens. This has now been granted after a review in 2011. We are delighted to report that the Fight4thePJM Campaign has succeeded. Our campaign has won its case! On the 26th October 2011 in the House of Lords, the Defence Minister stated that the HD Committee will effectively be guided to recommend to the Queen that the PJM should have Unrestricted Permission for wear on all occasions, effective from this Remembrance Day, 11th November 2011 if not earlier .Furthermore, we have been promised that there will be a fundamental review of the HD Committee. That signals that it should never again be possible for ex-servicemen and women to be treated as shabbily as PJMers have been treated. This is a victory for common sense, for justice, for British ex-servicemen and women who served in Malaysia, and for Malaysia. What a wonderful, historic, day.

Categories of eligibility

Category One: Those who were on the posted strength of a unit or formation, and who served in the prescribed operational area of Malaysia and Singapore, in direct support of operations in Malaysia, for 90 days or more, in the aggregate, as follows: (1) Malaysia during the period 31 August 1957 to 31 December 1966 inclusive; or (2) Singapore during the period 31 August 1957 to 9 August 1965 inclusive. Service between 12 August 1966 and 31 December 1966 will only be aggregated as qualifying service if a member was posted for operations to Malaya or Malaysia on or before 12 August 1966. The prescribed operational area of Malaysia and Singapore is the landmass of East Malaysia (that is: the States of Sabah and Sarawak on the Island of Borneo), the Malay Peninsula, and the Island of Singapore. The prescribed operational area also includes the sea area of Malaysia.

Category Two: Those members of the UK Armed Forces , who had their period of service in the operational area terminated by death, or by evacuation due to illness or injury or other disability due to that service, during the period 31 August 1957 to 12 August 1966 inclusive, and before the completion of the period of qualifying service prescribed in Category One.

PJM Application Forms At the time of writing, the British authorities say that they do not know the criteria for the Pingat Jasa Malaysia - despite having accepted the medal! Par for the course, say we. We suggest you follow the criteria as set out by the Malaysians for Australian and New Zealand veterans. Please note that this is an award that can be accepted posthumously by next of kin. The British Government have introduced some doubt about the end-date (they do not mention the cooling off period through to the 31st December). If you served between the 31st August 1957 and the 31st December 1966 (Singapore - 9th August 1965), we suggest you submit an application form shown on the "Fight4thePJM" website or contact the PCS branch secretary and I will send you the application form.

Post notes

Congratulations to June Lowe joining the Chelsea pensioners!!!!

CHAIRMANS ANNUAL ADDRESS ROYAL ENGINEERS ASSOCIATION (PCS BRANCH) ANNUAL REUNION.

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 24 The above event was held at the De Vere Urban Village Hotel in Edinburgh over the 11/12 April 2015. This year’s event was organised by our president, Graham Meacher with two willing helpers from north of the border, Dot Gosling (nee Douglas) and Harry Eagle. Liaison with the hotel management was unusual in that the booking of the event and the reservation of suitable accommodations were made before the hotel had been built. Chris Connaughton dealt with the financial aspects of the reunion at the same time as selling a business and moving home. Stress, what stress? Travel north for many was via the A1 road and I for one, had forgotten that there is no east coast motorway north of Newcastle so most of that part of the journey was spent at lorry speed. Others came by train and some by plane. One member who shall remain nameless travelled by train but unfortunately left his coat on the train which had continued on to Glasgow. What made his situation worse was his only set of car keys and mobile phonewere in his coat and his car was parked on Peter Cussons drive. Frantic phone calls reported the loss but with no immediate positive outcome. Fortunately the finder handed the coat and its contents in at Glasgow and for a fee they were recovered by the following Wednesday. There was the usual Friday evening gathering with a good turnout and an opportunity for a payment of £38 to see an Abba tribute band with a glass of champagne and a three course meal thrown in. I don’t believe there were any takers from our members but on visiting the gents the music was loud enough to be heard and with a bit of care to tap your foot to. On Saturday while others arrived, the Friday nighters took the opportunity to visit some of Edinburgh’s attractions. In the company of Chris Goodwin and Peter Poppleton, I went on board the Royal Yacht Britannia which is permanently moored there. There was an entry fee however, the staff at the entrance would not accept us as servicemen but, the 10% discount vouchers afforded us by the hotel applied to the OAP rate was cheaper. Peter is not an OAP but he has enough grey hair to pass off as one. On Board we bumped into Geoff Manning and Wally Damant with their ladies. I last met Dora Damant in 1988. We also spotted three plaques above the bar in the senior rates mess, one of which was from HPCCD/RE. The last and only time I had been on board was a very brief visit to deliver mail in Gibraltar in 1981. Britannia was there to take Prince Charles and his new bride Dianna on their honeymoon. The evening gathering was commenced with drinks in our private bar prior to a piper leading us into diner and he was appreciated with cheers and applause. 0ne hundred and thirty five sat down for diner which is more than in the previous few years. Yours truly addressed the attendees with the usual greetings and prior to grace read out the names of the 25 old comrades that we had lost since the last reunion and this was followed by one minutes applause to celebrate their lives. Harry Eagle said grace. The food was excellent and the service was just as good. Chris Connaughton offered up the loyal toast and then the President took to the floor and gave an amusing five minute introduction to our guest speaker, Brigadier Tweedie Brown CBE. Tweedie kept us entertained for fifteen minutes and displayed admirable skills in holding a tablet in one hand and a microphone in the other while never forgetting the position of the microphone, something I had failed to achieve earlier.

The post dinner entertainment was in the form of a Ceilidh which according to my research is a traditional Gaelic social gathering which usually involves playing Gaelic folk music and dancing. My ignorant observation would describe it as a Gay Gordon with a bit of shin kicking thrown in. Everyone enjoyed it and comments the following morning included “one of the best reunions we have ever had” and this was endorsed at the AGM. The AGM took place on the Sunday morning and Sheffield was voted in as the 2016 event on the 9/10 April .

Minutes of Annual General Meeting on the 12th April 2015 The Chairman brought the meeting to order and welcomed all those present at 1035hrs at the “The Village Hotel” Edinburgh. 56 Members attended including committee. .

1. The President's Address. Apologised for Pete Wescott not attending Good to see old and new members attending this year. Thanked Sue Harman for her work on the PCS Website and Dave Muckle for assisting the Facebook site to be thriving. 135 attended the dinner and pleased with

2. The Minutes of the Previous Meeting. The Secretary read the minutes of the previous meeting which were accepted as a true record

Proposed By: Dick Legg Seconded By: Harry Eagle

Matters arising. Please try and increase "The easy fund raising" contributions and thanks for Harry Eagles £100 contributions from the sales of "Posthorn" badge.

3. The Financial Summary. The Treasurers report was given and the financial statement for the year subject to audit. Again vote of thanks were given to the ladies on the raffle committee for the efforts in increasing the branches funds from the Raffle held on Saturday night.

Income/Expenditure 2014

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 25

Expenditure Income

Reunion (Disco) £200.00 Subscriptions £1125.00 Admin/Newsletter £975.05 Raffle profits £ 102.50 Website £ 85.95 Bank Interest £ 3.65

Total £1261.00 Total £1231.15

Bank Balance as at 31 December 2014 £1436.09 Fixed Assets Branch Standard. £650.00 Branch worth as at 10 April 2015 £4347.04

Cheque received from Easy Fundraising £51.91 and £240 raised from Post Horn badges

Proposed by Lou Lister Seconded by John Jacket The summary was accepted.

4. Old Comrades. The Chairman read out the names of the Old Comrades and friends lost since the last meeting. ( See Last Post List)

A minutes silence was held in memory of our old comrades and friends.

5. Re-election or Election of the Committee. The committee offered up their posts for re-election and after a show of hands all were retained. . President: Lt Col. (Retired) Graham Meacher RE MBE Chairman: Maj. (Retired) Brian Felks RE Treasurer: Maj. (Retired) Chris Connuaghton RE Secretary: Larry Peacock Committee assistant Member: Mr Mick Atkinson

6. Easy Fundraising. Please continue to support the Easy Fund raising site details given: You can help REA PCS Branch AND save money at the same time? It's very simple - just visit www.easyfundraising.org.uk/causes/pcsbranch to register and shop with over 2000 well known retailers like Amazon, Argos, M&S, eBay and many more. Whenever you buy something the retailer makes a donation to the PCS Branch. Look out for special offers and vouchers to save you money! .

7. The Date and Location of the 2016 Reunion. The Chairman briefed the meeting on Locations which had been suggested and researched, namely:

a. Victory Services Club, London b. Nottingham. c. Middle of Great Britain d, Sheffield The Village Hotel, Blackpool

The proposal for Holiday Inn Sheffield was carried and details will be published on the website and the next edition of the Posthorn.

Proposed by Lou Lister Seconded by Pete Refern

8. AOB.

a) Thanks were given to Dot Gosling for arranging and organising this year's event in Edinburgh

b) Thanks were also given to Harry Eagle for his support in raising money for the branch.

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 26

c) Pete Refern reminded members that we are at the time in our lives where we should not be shy in getting the prostate test done with our Doctor . (Some might even enjoy it).

There being no further business, the meeting closed at 1100 hrs.

Committee Members

President: Lt. Col. (Retired) Graham Meacher RE MBE Chairman: Maj. (Retired) Brian Felks RE Last Post Treasurer: Maj. (Retired) Chris Connaughton RE Secretary: Larry Peacock Committee Members Mr Mick Atkinson

Secretary details Larry Peacock 31 Pennine Crescent REDCAR TS10 4 AE Over the year the following Posties(members and Telephone: non-members) are no longer with us and have 01642-476380 moved to a higher association. We honour:- Email [email protected] John BINT, Keith BLAKE, George BRETT, Membership Eligibility Nick CHANDLER, Keith DEATH, Lester If you have served in the RE (PS) or (PCCU) or (PCS) FAULKNER, Paul FORRESTER, Reg you are eligible to join the PCS Branch of the REA. (Any FOULKES, Sandy GARDNER, Johnny other H.M. Armed Forces (Royal Navy and Royal Air GRAHAM, Tony JAMES, Ronald JESSIMAN, Forces) member who has served with or associated with george KEHOE, Richard LEGG, Bert Postal & Courier Units then you can join as an Associate Member).If you served in the ATS or WRAC and were LEIGHTON, John McGOVERN, Bob trained as a Postal & Courier Operator you are entitled to McKEEVER, Lance NOBLE, Brian Taff join the PCS Branch as an Associate member. SAYCE (1998), Ivor SIDDELL, Graham Subscriptions £10 per year. Please make cheques STEWART, Ivor THOMAS, Vanessa MYERS payable to: Nee WARD, Leslie WILSON, Stan Wynn

“The Treasurer PCS Branch REA” (2003)

Lost & Found Membership Subscription List Members, who have lost contact (LC) with the branch, Listed below are the current details of all members wish to leave (WL) and those that are over three years subscriptions, paid up to the date shown. Any concerns behind in their subscriptions (BS): about the dates shown, then please contact me, Larry Peter CLIFTON (WL) Peacock, and I will make the correction or confirm that the details are correct. Welcome to new and old branch members: The list has been updated to reflect the increased yearly subs of £10. Those paid fully for that year show (2014) or New Members: part payment (14+£5 2014 and £5 towards next year)

Mick FIELD and Stuart TENNYSON No First Name SURNAME Year 1 Michael ALLEN 2014 (Returned) 2 Brian ANDERSON 2013 3 James ANDREWS Dick MACKENZIE 2015 4 David APPLEBY 2013 5 ...... Peter ASKEW 2017 6 Michael ATKINSON 15+£5

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 27 7 Mark ATWELL 14+£5 53 Audrey CROOK 2016 8 Terence BAKEWELL 2013 54 Humphrey CRYER 14+£5 9 Alan BARKER 2016 55 Michael CUMMINS 2015 10 Martyn BARRETT 15+£5 56 Anthony CURTIS 2014 11 Douglas BAXTER 16+£5 57 Peter CUSSONS 2016 12 Joseph BEEDLES 15+£5 58 Wally DAMANT 2016 13 Melvyn BELLAMY 14+£5 59 Alan DAVIES 2015 14 Christopher BENNETT 2016 60 Joan DAVIES PNSR 15 Gina BERTIE 14+£5 61 John DOHERTY 2014 16 David BINNINGTON 2011 62 John DOUGLAS 2014 17 Reg BLACK 14+£5 63 Henry EAGLE 2016 18 David BLANE 2016 64 14+£5 19 John BOWMAN 2014 Dennis EASON 65 Patrick ELLIOTT 2014 20 James BRADSHAW 2016 66 Derek EWAN 2014 21 Peter BRAITHWAITE 2015 67 Brian FELKS 17+£5 22 Eric BRICE 2015 68 Simon FENWICK LM 23 David BROWN 2016 69 Frederick FERGUSON 2014 24 Elizabeth BROWN PNSR 70 Jeremy FIELD 2015 25 Anthony BRYAN 14+£5 71 Michael FIELD 2015 26 Richard BULLOCK 2011 72 Don FOWLER 17+£5 27 Mark BURTON 2014 73 Christine FRETWELL 2014 28 Goeff BUSHELL 2014 74 John GADSBY 2015 29 William BUTT 15+£5 75 Paul GAFFNEY 15+5 30 Karen CALDWELL 2012 76 John GALLAND 2015 31 Stuart CAMBRIDGE 2015 77 Albert GARRIOCK 14+£5 32 Alexander CARSON 2014 78 Alistair GEE 2014 33 Terence CHADWICK 14+£5 79 Ernest GENT 2011 34 George CHANDLER 14+£5 80 R GIBBONS 2013 35 Douglas CLARK 14+£5 81 Michael GIBERTSON 2013 36 George CLEASBY 2011 82 Ralph GILCHRIST 2012 37 Nicholas CLIFTON 2014 83 Christopher GOODWIN 15+£5 38 Tilly CLIFTON PNSR 84 Melanie GOODY 2013 39 Leslie CLYDESDALE 14+£5 85 Dorothy GOSLING 2015 40 Robert COATSWORTH 14+£5 86 Margaret GRANT 2016 41 Gilbert COLE LM 87 Robert GRAY 2017 42 Adrian COLLINS 2013 88 Patricia GRAY 2017 43 Thomas COMPSON 17+£5 89 Peter GRIFFITHS 2012 44 Christopher CONNAUGHTON 16+£5 90 Steven GRIFFITHS 2013 45 Donald COOPER 2015 91 Norman GRUNDY 15+£5 46 John CORRIGAN 15+£5 92 Peter GRUNDY 2013 47 John COULING 2015 93 Norman HARMAN 2015 48 Alasdair COWAN 2013 94 David HARMER 2013 49 Andrew COWBURN 2015 95 Brian HARRIS 14+£5 50 Carl COX 2014 96 2013 51 Stuart CRAIG 2017 Rebecca HART 97 John HARVEY 2011 52 Neil CRAWFORD 2014 98 Andrew HAWKESWORTH 2016

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 28 99 William HAWKINS 2015 146 Frank LEA 15+£5 100 William HEATH 2012 147 Harry LEES 2011 101 Dwight HEDDLE 2015 148 Jean LEGG 2015 102 Gerald HERNANDEZ 2017 149 Kathleen LEIGHTON 2017 103 Simon HEYS 2017 150 Alistair LENNIE 14+£5 104 Francis HIDDERLEY 2014 151 Brian LEVEY 2013 105 Geraldine HIGGINS PNSR 152 Penny LIDDICOT 2014 106 Pete HOLMAN 14+£5 153 Barry LINDEN 15+£5 107 Alex HORSBURGH 2017 154 Ian LISTER 2017 108 Clifford HOWES 2014 155 June LOWE 2015 109 John HUDSON 2014 156 Raymond LYALL 15+£5 110 Rita HUDSON PNSR 157 Edward LYONS 2015 111 Howard HUGHES 158 16+£5 Dick MACKENZIE 2015 112 Jacqueline HUGHES 2017 159 Gerald MAGUIRE 2014 113 Roger HUGHES 2014 160 Michael MALLEY 2015 114 Terry HUGHES 2016 161 Geoffrey MANNING 2017 115 Yvonne HUGHES 2011 162 Patrick MARSHALL 2015 116 John HUMPHRIES 2011 163 Peter MASLIN 2014 117 Colon HUNTER 2013 164 Mary MCCABE 2013 118 Pat HYNES 17+£5 165 Sean MCARTHY 2013 119 Peter IVE 2012 166 Billy MCLEOD 2014 120 Adam 167 Ann MCLEOD JACK 2014 2014 121 John 168 Adam MCQUILLAN JACKETT 17+£5 14+£5 122 JACKSON 169 Laura MEACHER John 2016 2015 123 Kerry JAMES 2014 170 Charles MEACHER 2015 124 Fausta JAMES 2015 171 Graham MEACHER 17+£5 125 Raymond JENNINGS 2018 172 Raymond MILFORD 2013 126 Ronald JESSIMAN 15+£5 173 David MILSTEAD 2012 127 David JOHNSON 2015 174 Raymond MITCHELL 14+£5 128 David/Paul JOHNSON 2015 175 Paul MORRIS 14+£5 129 Christopher JOHNSTONE 2013 176 David MUCKLE 15+£5 130 177 Ronald MURRAY Michael JONES 2013 2015 131 Samuel JONES 2014 178 Christopher NELSON 2016 132 James JOWETT 2014 179 Rodney NORMAN 15+£5 133 Brig Neil KELLY 2015 180 Tomas O GRADY 2011 134 Willam KENEFEC 2015 181 Neville ORTON 2014 135 Colin KENNEDY 2016 182 Keith OXER 2016 136 Ian KENNEDY 2014 183 John PALMER 2011 137 Donald KENT 2011 184 Steve PATCH 2015 138 Arthur KERR 15+£5 185 Lawrence PEACOCK 2015 139 Mavis KIRK 2015 186 Gillian PEACOCK PNSR 140 Julian KOSTYSZYN 14+£5 187 John PEARCE 2015 141 Dennis LACEY 2016 188 Adrian PROSSER 15+£5 142 189 Sharon PROWSE Mike LAMBERT 14+£5 2012 143 Frederick LATHAM 2013 190 Edward REARDON 2015 144 Gerald LAUDER 2014 191 Ella REAST 2016 145 William LAWRENSON 2013 192 Dorieen REDDEN 2015

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 29 193 Peter REDFERN 14+£5 240 Peter WESCOTT 14+£5 194 Arthur ROBINSON 2012 241 Stephen WHITE 2014 195 Robert ROBINSON 2015 242 Michael WHITEHEAD 14+£5 196 Joan ROUND 14+£5 243 John WHITTAKER 2011 197 Bryan ROWNEY 2014 244 Dennis WHITTALL 2014 198 Geoffrey SALMON 2015 245 Barry WILDING 2015 199 Elizabeth SAMPSON 246 2015 Robert WILLIAMS 2013 200 John SAMUEL 247 2015 Eric WILLIAMSON 2015 201 Valerie SANDERS 14+£5 248 William WINFIELD 2011 202 Tommy SANDS 249 2016 John WINTERBOTTOM 2012 203 Howard SCOTT 2015 250 Edward WOOFFIT 2015 204 James SEAR 2015 251 Stewart WRIGHT 2018 205 Mark SEARLE 2012 206 Aidan SHOEBRIDGE 14+£5 207 John SHOULDER 2015 208 Richard SILSBY 2017 209 Neil SIMS 2013 210 Sam SINGLETON 2014 211 William SKEEL 2015 212 Eddie SMITH 2012 213 Gordon SMITH 20+£5 214 Kenneth SMITH 2014 215 Alan STANDING 2014 216 James STEER 15+£5 217 Goerge STEIN 2015 218 Paul STODDART 2013 219 Edward STUART 2012 220 Norman SUSSEX 2015 221 Pamela SUSSEX 2015 222 Douglas SWANSON 2017 223 Gordon TAIT 2011 224 David TEDDER 2013 225 Stuart TENNYSON 2014 226 Frederick THOMPSON 2014 227 David THORNTON 2011 228 Charles TIMOTHY 14+£5 229 Ken TREVOR 2015 230 George URBAN 2011 231 David VAUTIER 2013 232 Maurice VESSEY 2016 233 Roy WALKER 2015 234 Albert WALL 2015 235 Doulas WALTER 2017 236 Gordon WARDELL 2015 237 Frances WARDELL 2015 238 Derek WATT 2015 239 Margret WATT 2015

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 30 2016 REUNION AND AGM HOLIDAY INN ROYAL VICTORIA, SHEFFIELD 8th- 10th APRIL 2016

A block of rooms have been reserved at the Royal Victoria at £72 per night for bed and breakfast or alternatively at the much less grand Holiday Inn Express at £62 per night for Bed and Breakfast. The hotels are next door to each other. Reservations can be made for either hotel on 0114 2526511Monday to Friday 9am -5pm.Please quote the Royal Engineers Association.

Car Parking. Car parking is included is included in the accommodation rate if staying overnight and it is complimentary for guests just attending the dinner. Any guests who wish to leave their car overnight who are not staying at the hotel will have to pay a fee of £5.00. Please be aware that the parking area is not owned by the hotel and these arrangements have been negotiated. Sat Nav. For the Royal Victoria use S1 2AU and for the holiday Inn Express use S1 2AB. The Dinner. A choice of set menus were available and the committee selected the following:

Homemade cream of tomato soup served with a crusty bread roll;

Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding;

Apple tart with vanilla sauce;

Tea and Coffee.

The meal is priced at £33 and comes with a half bottle of wine per person and, this menu gives us a complimentary disco for the evening.

Reservations for the dinner should be made through me, Brian Felks, preferably through email on [email protected] by telephone on 01724 712082. Any special dietary requirements must be made to me at least one month prior to the event. Payment for the meal should be paid in full to the Treasurer. Cheques should be made payable to REA PCS Branch and sent Chris Connaughton, 7 Sibsey Court, Great Coates, Grimsby. DN37 9FD.

The POSTHORN November 2015 Newsletter Page | 31