American 6813 Division History October 1945 Page 28

Tony Sale's Codes and Ciphers

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It would be difficult to state precisely the requirements de-
manded of a watchkeeper. It goes without saying that he had to be
thoroughly familiar with the German and English labgiages, but apart from
that he was required to be something of a Jack-of-all-trades--to have a
recognition knowledge of variagated subject-matters although obviously he
could be master of none. He had, for example, to be able to identify a
communication as pertaining to army, air force or navy so that proper
interpretation could be made; to realise that an apparent jumble of
letters and figures was a perfectly good supply return or report of air-
field serviceability and so forth and so on. Fortunately he was not left
to struggle alone.


Specialis consultants. In order to make the neccessary inter-

pretation, interpolation or annotation the watchkeeper referred his ques-
tions to specialis consultants who were experts in a multitude of de-
partments, illustrated below:

Traffic analysis through which traffic could often be identified

by call sign or wireless evidence. (The American representative in
this field was 1/Lt Alfred P. Fehl.)

Language specialists who not only consulted personally with watch-

keepers on translation difficulties but compiled copiuos technical vocabu-
lary indexes;

Interpretation of proformas and periodic returns;
Interpreation of covernames and camouflage numbers;
Interpretation of railway consignment numbers and field post

numbers. (The American representative in this field was Captain Edward
J. Vogel.)

Interpretation of radar and rocket messages;
Problems relative to the Waffen SS;
Messages dealing with propoganda and morale in the German Armed

Forces;

Interpretation of German grid references.

The filing
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