Code and Cypher Clerk Duties

In wartime nothing goes in plain language. It all has to be coded. What we call cyphers, you know, we had machines and books and different codes in them. But I didn’t do, it wasn’t like cryptography where you broke the codes or anything. We just did it. We coded and decoded the messages.We did shift work. So, you were either on the eight ‘til three or, three ‘til ten, or ten ‘til eight in the morning because you didn’t go out after ten o’clock at night. Like the tubes stopped running. Yeah and we just, the messages would come in. We were in a locked room, and they’d put the messages in teletype or wireless would get them, put them in to us and then we would decode them and send them to where they had to go.The worst thing we had to decode was casualty lists, or code. We had to do the casualty lists to send to Canada. We got messages from India and Cairo, just general business of the Air Force