Radio Operators

[Walt's Daughter]

Was reading this on a site: http://www.warchronicle.com/staffsyeo/sold...ii/meredith.htm

 

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“My Sunray is gone.â€

 

On the radio net the commander is normally referred to as “Sunray†in radio-telephone jargon. So a tank commander, if you’re talking about him, is the “Sunrayâ€.

 

I can remember the voice of somebody (whose tank commander had obviously been killed) coming on and repeatedly saying, “My Sunray is gone. What shall I do?†Repeatedly saying this until he got an answer, and I suppose the answer was you just get on with it.

 

But I remember that voice because it was somebody who didn’t know what to do in those circumstances and I could feel for him obviously.

 

I think one thing we weren’t trained well in all our years of training was getting down to that sort of basic. I was lucky in that I had been to a regiment where we were taught something about tactics, we had a stint commanding tanks and that sort of thing but generally once that had finished you weren’t taught how to cope with that sort of thing. I would have thought that was really an essential. On D-Day, particularly those poor people on Omaha beach, couldn’t have known really what they were going in to...