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Notes from an undisclosed location
The S.I.A.M. Company 3151 spent the last months of 1944, and six months of 1945 in France, Alsace, and east across the Rhine into Germany.
While Abe would always date his letters up top, in none of them from the theater of war, did he reveal or name the present location.
This was one tenet of his company’s “operational security.” Other information about his S.I.A.M. Group and their exploits made it past the censors, but his present locations never show up in his letters.
But he did keep a little brown book where his notes specify locations and abbreviations describing front line activities. This information came from the voice radio traffic the S.I.A.M. company grabbed off the air from the friendly troops in forward positions. The little brown book returned to the USA with him, when Abe came home in October 1945.
The monitoring Process: How it worked-----
Listening day or night, Lt. Sacks made notes describing the over-the-air voice radio traffic he picked up with the compliment of radio receivers in the S.I.A.M. company’s gear package.
Then he’d prioritize and summarize in plain English the front-line action reports. These words were encoded, one letter at a time, by a clerk using the M-209 encryption machine. That jumble of letters, unreadable by a normal person, were then transmitted by radio, in Morse code with a telegraph key. Received at division headquarters, this jumble of letters was put through an identical M-209 machine, set to the DECRYPT function, and the message Lt. Sacks had written, was again, readable by the command officers.
Below are images of two pages from his pocket notebook. Using abbreviations, Sacks' hand-written entries record this activity he heard the front-line troops describe near Deyfosse, France. He brought this notebook with 32 similarly inscribed pages, home to Brooklyn after the fighting stopped.
The notes Sacks made on two pages in his little brown book describer these and other events:
- 15 meeting scattered resistance Deyfosse – found mines at CR
- 60 enemy taken under fire
- 15 infantry cleared Deyfosse woods
- Enemy appears to be coming from Vin La Voiure
- 19 PW taken
- Enemy on foot, bycycles, horse drawn …
- Houses on fire
- Bridge blown up by enemy
Above: The Little Brown Book
On the map:
Deyfosse, near the Rhine River n France.
On the map:
Deyfosse, near the Rhine River n France.
