Jack Grinham

	This page: in France with the Maquis
	Behind Japanese lines in Burma

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Jack Grinham

I was born in 1918 in Stoke, Coventry. My father worked in the car industry as a coach builder. I left school at fourteen and I went to work in a factory, just for a few months but I found that I didn’t like working inside so I found a job as an errand boy in the fruit trade in Coventry and I stayed there for about four years. I started driving a van and after that I changed my job to another shop, better work with more pay. The manager there suggested that I should join the police force, he said I had ‘the build’. His son was in the Metropolitan Police and was enjoying it. So he put the idea into my head and I went for a medical examination and interview and was accepted and I joined the police on the 16 August 1939.

I went to Birmingham Police Headquarters for the interview but I finished up on the beat at a place called Moseley Street, an industrial and slum area of Birmingham and that’s where I served for several years.

When the war began we didn’t deal so much with crime.  We had ARP training, dealing with incendiary bombs and that kind of thing, how to deal with unexploded bombs of which we had quite a few, and, of course, dealing with casualties and reporting to the ARP centre so that they could make a complete log. It was very hairy hearing bombs coming down, the earth would shake and you had to keep going along the streets very, very carefully because slates and the tiles were rushing off the roofs and they could do quite a lot of damage.

The things I used to hate having to deal with was the injured and terrified animals, hysterical people, and there were quite a few, and children that had been hurt or trapped. They were terrible things to deal with. I didn’t deal so much with fires, the fire brigade would deal with those but we used to co-operate very well with our local fire brigade.

I was called up into the Army on 3 September 1942. I expressed a preference for the Royal Armoured Corps, but first of all I had to go through some very primary training down at Bodmin which was an infantry unit, but after six or seven weeks I was transferred up to Barnard Castle in Durham to join a RAC training unit and I did three or four months there before I was posted to 42nd Armoured Division.

Jack Grinham, reading.

I went through another course of radio training, which was quite important and I got a trade rating which helped me earn a few coppers a week extra in pay and then I went into the scout car troop. I wasn’t very happy there and I wanted to get away but one has to go and do as the Army tells you, but eventually I had the opportunity to leave and join the Special Forces. That’s something I never, never regretted. The troop officer got hold of us radio operators in a very confidential way and we were told they wanted some radio operators for special operations which would include parachuting into enemy occupied territory to do whatever was necessary and then get out. We were bound to secrecy and I jumped at the opportunity.

I retained the Royal Armoured Corps badge but my divisional signs came off, and I started some pretty intense radio training. When we had reached a certain standard, we were transferred to another unit at Mildenhall near Peterborough where we went through our field training, but also carried on with our radio training. We had to do that to keep up to date with it.

One of the things that they were very hot on was physical fitness. We did our ground para training and then we went up to Manchester and did our three parachute drops. That’s all we did, we didn’t do seven drops as the Airborne had to do, we weren’t Airborne troops we’d kept our black berets. We were a completely separate unit.

At Henley-on-Thames, we had to get our radio operating speed up and be very accurate with sending and receiving and from twelve words a minute in the RAC, we had to get up to eighteen words a minute and with hundred per cent accuracy. That was very necessary. We also did a lot of code and cipher work, which we would need for when we were in the field. It was hard work, but our esprit de corps started there and it never, ever went away.

Jack cleaning his Bren Gun.

Once we had successfully completed our Special Forces training we got our ‘Wings’, Special Forces and a Parachute Badge.

There were three men in each Jedburgh team. We were teamed up at Peterborough. I didn’t know the officers at all until then.  There was always a French officer in the team, the team leader would usually be British or American, and the radio operator could be of any of the three nationalities.

My team consisted of Captain Oswin Craster. The Frenchman was known as Carliere - not his proper name, it was an alias and myself and our team was called Stanley. Each team was briefed individually as to what was wanted.  My own team was to gather as much information as we could and to prevent destructive demolitions, because the advancing armies were coming so quickly, they wanted to make certain that they could progress as fast as possible, so that’s what we were to do. Get the information out and provide targets for the RAF which we did very successfully.

I went in August 1944.  We were hyped up, of course.  The one thing I knew I could never do was let the side down and as I went out of the plane I said to myself, “Right, you’re in it, you can’t go back. Make a man of yourself and get on with the job”, and that’s what I did. I did my best to anyway.  We were dropped in uniform, but we took civilian clothes with us and had civilian identity cards - if we had been caught with those we would have been in trouble We headed for a place near Bussèiers with Belmont in Haute Marne south of Chaumont and north of Dijon. The family there was very, very good. They looked after us with what they had, even though they hadn’t got a lot. They were virtually forced to have us but they were very hospitable.

On patrol in the Far East.

To read more go to Page Two.

Oswin, our team leader, didn’t like radio operating and I had to stay at the farm so that I could receive messages and deal with the radio operating while he was out. We had to stick to a strict schedule of operating times.  We had certain precautions to take, particularly with the times we were operating, it varied every day over a monthly period and our call signs used to vary too.  If Oswin wasn’t there, then I had to carry on with a French farmer there who would help me with the radio. At first the Maquis had distrusted this family because they spoke with a German accent.

We always worked with what they called the ‘letter one time pad’, which is virtually unbroken. It was still in use fairly recently.  We would sit and encode and decode – the three of us. You needed one man to read, one to transcribe and one to write, and I was the one that wrote when we were going to send a message and I always used to read my letters when it went the other way and they had got to decode the messages. It worked out very, very well.

I can give you an example of the sort of messages we were transmitting. We had to send in information about German positions and so on so that the RAF could go and deal with them. One afternoon some locals come dashing over to us and said, “There’s a German convoy in Bussières. There’s a lot of vehicles there, can you do something”? So it was reconnoitered and I got on the emergency channel, and sent a very brief but very quick message and within a few hours a squadron of American Thunderbolts came over and they attacked the convoy, killed about 120 Germans and made a mess of the village too. But it wiped the lot out. I remember watching the planes going down low to fire, disappearing behind the trees and then we could see the smoke and the explosions from this convoy. I felt that I had done something useful.

I never went out to find targets or organize ambushes. No, I was a bit disappointed in that, but Oswin didn’t like radio operating and he made me stay. He told me how far I could go away from the farm, because I used to like to help and do little jobs around the place rather than just sit on my backside at the farmhouse.

Hidden camp in the Far East

To read more go to Page Two.

Germans once attacked us, but with the fire from the Maquis at the farm, they soon left. They had two French Citroens with machine-guns on the top and they shot at us and one of the Maquis was hurt, in fact he died later.  The first thing I did was grab my wireless set and get round the corner because without the radio set we were lost.

The Maquis had to rough it. They were living in the farm buildings, in the hay and so on.  At least we did have a reasonable billet inside the farmhouse itself. The farmers shared what they had with us and made certain that we were looked after.

We were only there for a few weeks because the 1^st French Army came up from the south and overran our position. We gave a lot of information to their forward scouts and then when they arrived they fought with the Germans. They brought a load of prisoners, some were Russians, and I was talked to these Russians and they told me they had only gone back into the Army because they were starving in the concentration camps. We were redundant and we had to make our way back to England, which we did. We scrounged a lift, scrounged some petrol and we got back to Paris. We found the liaison officer and we got on a Dakota back to Heathrow and back to camp at Peterborough.

	This page: in France with the Maquis"
	Behind Japanese lines in Burma