A Radio Operator's

Heroism

NOW stationed as an AWA radio operator at Suva, Fiji, is an Austra lian, Mr. H. W. Brown, who into one year packed sufficient war adven tures to last him a lifetime.

In the middle of 1940, when France surrendered to the Nazis, the Message ries Maritime Co.’s liner, “Commissaire Kamel” (10,000 tons) which ran between France and her Pacific colonies, was commandeered at Suva by the British authorities and manned with an Austra lian crew. Mr. Brown became chief

radio operator.

The “Ramel” left Australian waters for the United Kingdom in September last year. Half way across the Indian Ocean, at 1 a.m., a strange ship ap proached and a Morse lamp demanded her name. As the mate replied, Brown, on the captain’s orders, commenced to transmit a Morse warning of the raid er’s presence. The corsair’s reply was a rain of shells, from 650 yards range.

While the searchlight * sought out the wireless cabin, machine-guns and “pom poms” swept the “Ramel’s” decks. Brown continued his SOS until the power failed.

The shelling stopped: but when Brown got the emergency set working, the guns roared again. A shell hit the upper cor ner of the wireless room, then another, and still another. Brown went uncon scious from shrapnel wounds.

Brought around by his assistant, the defiant operator again started to trans mit on the spark set. Then, as Mr.

Brown told the “Fiji Times” recently, “the whole room seemed to fold up on top of me—l have a vague recollection

of trying to get out, but there seemed to be a mass of tangled wire, radio gear and timber blocking my way. Somehow I managed to scramble through it.”

Brown and a couple of sailors got away in a ship’s boat, but they were captured, and were prisoners for months on enemy ships, and finally at Moga dishu. capital of Italian Somaliland.

There, under filthy conditions, they were kept prisoners until the British took Somaliland and released them.