I know this is a vague question but my grandad was a German/French-English translator attached to the Intelligence Corps. during the second world war. It has always been of great interest to me and something I am very proud of..but it has also been a right bitch in terms of information: he died when I was 2, and for class projects where all my classmates were able to google their grandparents, there was never any information on my grandad for obvious reasons. I guess I'm just interested to see what people think, and if there are any books/lines of enquiry/documents etc. which could tell me more, either about my grandad specifically, or about the people he would have worked with.

 

For 50 years after his service ended (so until 1996) he was forbidden by law from revealing information, with the exception of a couple of stories he told his children (my dad+his siblings). As he died in 2000, we were left with very little information. I once found a piece of paper which was a confirmation thing saying he had signed the Official Secrets Act, but haven't been able to find it since. We had one picture of him, from after the war, in which he is wearing military clothing but with no medals, patches, or anything on there. It's almost as if he were simply given the uniform for the purpose of the photo but if anyone knows if that would have been the case, I'd be grateful if you could tell me. We also have a piece of paper which appears to be a visitation slip, with vague details on the front, and a number on the back which doesn't appear to be any kind of phone number: again we don't know what this is, so if anyone would be interested, I could find the slip and post some photos.

 

Recently, my dad has been successful in obtaining my grandad's military records which are very interesting and give more detail about his postings: they also sent us a guide for the military abbreviations used throughout the documents.

 

We know he spent a fair amount of his time in occupied France, and among stories of blowing up train lines and breaking in somewhere (can't remember where without asking my dad), my favourite story is as follows: at one point he was travelling in an army truck with just the driver and a transceiver, and received word that a nearby town was having real problems with the Nazi soldiers occupying it, so he put in a radio call to the soldiers, in perfect German obviously, telling them there were 12 divisions of Allied troops descending on the town..my grandad and his mate arrived to congratulations, and found the Nazis had scarpered.

 

TLDR: grandad was in the Intelligence Corps, we don't know much, he had some cool stories to tell which appear to check out, and we have some items which raise more questions than they answer, what can we do now?