Ron Levett's memories of his time in the British Liberation Army during World War II.

Ron Levett, born in Alfriston, East Sussex, enlisted in 1943 and joined the Royal Armoured Corps. After completing his training as a Driver Operator he was sent to Belgium to join the British Liberation Army, where he was posted to the Royal Scots Grays and then to the Regimental Headquarters (RHQ) signals troop. After the liberation of Germany he was based in Münster, where he met his German fiancée Ruth, then on to Lüneburg.

We had a lot of spare radio sets and power supply units in the IM's workshop and I talked the Signals mechanics into letting me cannibalise some of them for spares. Electrolytic capacitors were in very short supply, even in England and they fetched a high price on the Black Market.

My friend the electrician had a ready market for them. He introduced me to a man and his wife who lived in the town who could supply almost anything if the price was right. A small portable immersion heater cost 60 cigarettes, which were the only valid currency in Germany at that time.

I provided a lot of these, making a profit of ten cigarettes on each one. If anyone wanted a civilian suit the cost was 600 cigarettes. I would collect the material samples from my 'Schwarz- Handler', which is the German name for a black marketer, get my customer to choose the colour, and then arrange for him to visit the tailor to be measured.

When the suit was ready he would collect it, pay me and I would pay my 'Schwarz-Handler.' There was a shop in the town called a Tausch-Zentral. People would hand in unwanted goods and be given a voucher to its real value. They could then use the voucher to purchase goods to that value. Money could not be used at all in this shop. All my dealings produced for me a great many Deutsch-Marks.

My mother had been sending me parcels all the time I had been overseas and I now asked her to send me tins of Lyons Coffee beans. These cost three shillings a tin in England. For some reason coffee had never been rationed at home throughout the war. A one-pound tin of coffee fetched the equivalent of fifteen pounds in Reichsmarks (600 DM.)

Suddenly, overnight, without any warning the Military Government decided to reform the currency. Only German nationals could change their money for the new Deutsch-Marks. The army and British civilians were henceforth to be paid in BAFVS or British Armed Forces Special Vouchers.

The Germans were only allowed to change a small number of the old money for the new and it must have come to quite a blow to people like my 'Schwarz-Handler.' The German government had received generous aid from America under Marshall Aid and people's food rations had improved.

My friend Heinz the electrician had taught me quite a lot about the practical side of radio servicing but I thought it was about time that I started to learn the theory.

The army was offering correspondence courses complete with a one-to-one tutor for the magnificent sum of one pound. I took the course on Radio Telegraphy Grade 2 to start with. I had to buy the course manual, which was the Admiralty Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy, Volumes 1 & 2. Volume 1 cost 6 Shillings, Volume 2 cost 4 Shillings.

These were not paperbacks, but hardback books, very substantial tomes. I sent off my lessons regularly and finished the Grade 2 course in about a year. I then signed up for the Grade 1 but was demobilised before I finished it.

I came home to England on a week's leave and went up to Oxford Street. There was a radio shop, which specialised in build-it-yourself radios. I bought all the parts that I needed and took them back to Germany. It was rather advanced, a seven-valve superhet using all army valves, with a mains power unit.

It worked surprisingly well. I also converted a Motorola car radio to work on the mains, which the lads used in their barrack room. During the war the German radio industry had produced a 'People's Radio,' or Volksenfänger. This was the type of radio known as TRF, or Tuned Radio Frequency.

This is the opposite of a superhet, which is very sharply tuned and can distinguish between local and distant stations. In this way Dr.Goebbels, The German Minister of (mis) information made sure that the Germans could not listen to the BBC.

Ever since that time I have always mistrusted any government, which calls anything 'People's'. The Volkswagen (People's Car) was supposed to be a cheap form of transport for civilians but actually turned out to be a light field car for the German Army.

The People's Army in China seems to be more interested in killing locals than any foreign enemies. The People's Police in East Germany spent all their time preventing East Germans from getting to the West.

Ron Levett, 2001