This is a continuation of a message I wrote on just-chat
regarding George Orwell's book 1984 and totalitarian technology.
While cable television systems as we know them today did
not exist in 1948 when Orwell penned 1984, there was something
that one could call the precursor of cable systems and that was
called "cable radio."
The Germans installed such systems in occupied Holland
and all their other seized lands while confiscating all normal
radios from every house. The idea was that everything you needed
to hear would be piped to you on a hard-wired loudspeaker that
you could turn up or down, but not off. Possession of radios,
especially short wave radios, would land you in front of a
firing squad or in jail. It was that simple.
Such systems still exist in a very few parts of the
world such as North Korea, but cable radio as I just described
it was an odd artifact of Nazzy and communist governments of
times gone by.
An interesting story I heard once on Radio Netherlands
describes some of the home-grown resistance measures that Dutch
citizens took against the Germans at no small risk to
themselves.
One such incident involved the cable radio system in a
dutch town whose name escapes me, but it seems that the Germans
only fed audio down the lines during certain hours of the day.
The speakers were silent the rest of the time, but not as silent
as the Germans would have liked.
It seems that a 16-year-old boy figured out that if you
could feed sound down the wires from wherever the Germans
feed point was, one could feed sound up the lines by tapping in
to the distribution system.
This boy had a record player and a good amplifier and
began doing a nightly D.J. gig on at least his branch of the
distribution system. Other houses could hear his entertainment
program and the Germans soon began hunting for the source of
this phantom broadcaster.
The Germans actually came to the boy's door and spoke
with him briefly but never cought on to the fact that they had
found their man. Apparently the boy was clever enough to hide
his system well enough that the Germans never figured it out.
There were other interesting stories regarding how
telephone workers would secretly wire special routes in local
telephone exchanges such that if you knew the correct digits,
you could ring a telephone in another city and plot the next
sabotage operation against the Nazzies.
The Germans probably knew these things were happening
but couldn't keep up with them as I am sure that those who
created these special routes took them down as soon as the need
for them was done.
For me, reading about all these electronic measures and
counter measures during war time is exciting as this is the sort
of stuff that would put any spy novel to shame.
The UK had a whole branch of the military devoted to
clandestine broadcasts designed to sound like the Nazzy programs
but not quite and there was also a program to hire British girls
who had been born in Germany and could speak German without an
accent to pretend to be German air force communicators and
confuse fighter and bomber pilots by speaking to them on the
radio and giving false instructions.
The German pilots flying in the dark would hear a
confusing babble of female voices shouting contradictory
instructions in flawless German so it must have been a
terrifying three-ring circus.
The allies also fiddled a German electronic navigation
system that was supposed to put them over their target at night,
but our modifications to the system often-times made the bombs
fall in empty fields or miles off the targets.
If you get chances to read about the electronic warfare
and propaganda machines of that era, you should find it
interesting.
Martin
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