NAZI GUARDS FOOLED

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 92, 10 February 1947, Page 6

NAZI GUARDS FOOLED

GADENER RAN UNDERGROUND RADIO % To the guards at Stalag Luft 111, Peter Mace, 31 year old peaceime poultry farmer, of Romsey, Hants, seemed the model-prisoner. On his little garden patch outside the prison hut he worked several hours'a day among his potatoes, carrots and pumpkins. When he was not gardening he worked as an orderly or learned the cello.

The guards thought that this quiet-voiced AC2 was clearly not cut out for the intrigues and dangers of secret duty. Yet for two years Peter Mace, a Morse expert, helped to run the camp's “underground” radio and monitored all the coded radio messages from England.

The receiver was a few feet from his bed, hidden in a cavity in the double wall.

Look-outs were posted to warn him if Germans came too near. Then Peter would put the set back in its hiding place and slip out to resume his gardening. The baffled Germans frequently brought in detector apparatus. But Peter, unruffled, would carry on with his hoeing and weeding. The guards never found a clue nor caught a single member of the organisation.

Eventually Peter left for another camp, unsuspected and never questioned. It is now announced that the innocent AC2—who was captured at Crete and spent four years in prison camps—has been awarded the B.E.M.

When a Daily Herald reporter spoke to him on the telephone all he would say was: “The radio team was already organised when I reached the camp. I had no part in the dangerous business of collecting component parts for the set. “Mine was a minor role in a clever British organisation, which must have had marvellous brains at the top.” And men like Peter Mace to run it.