The Monday Photo

Why am I showing you some old concrete slabs in a field? Aren’t they just the remains of old farm buildings?

They weren’t farm buildings at all, but the site of an important WW2 military radio station.

The hill top station was called Windy Ridge by the soldiers that manned it, but the field is known as Church Hill and it’s in Whaddon. The station played an important part in Operation Overlord, the invasion of German-held Western Europe that began with D-Day.

There were two huts at the station and the radio hut’s foundation is in the foreground. From there, morse code messages were sent to radio lorries on the battlefield, that kept close to commanders like General Montgomery and the US Army’s General Patton.

The radio lorries were known as SLUs, or Special Liason Units, and were manned by members of the Royal Corps of Signals.

In England, RCS radio operators at Windy Ridge had to cover each day from morning to late evening, working a two shift system. The first shift was 08:00 to 16:00, the second 16:00 to 22:00. Windy ridge also sent messages to agents in occupied Europe.

The second hut held teleprinters that received intelligence from Bletchley Park, which they’d gained from decrypting German military communications. The teleprinter hut’s foundation slab is just in front of those nettles in the middle distance, on the right of the photo.

Just to the left of that slab is another slab, set at a different level. I found iron studs in two of the corners, so I think this might have been an aerial base.

The huts were simply built, with low brick walls and corrugated iron roofs. Some time after the war they were given to the farmer, but some genius set fire to them and now only the bases remain.