JSIW Ashford - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

During my time as a flying instructor at the RAF College Cranwell in the late 1960s, I was sent on a 2-week combat survival course at RAF Mountbatten near Plymouth. Successful completion of this course would qualify me as a Combat Survival and Rescue Instructor and allow me to train aircrew on my own squadron and station. This was a course that most aircrew tried to avoid, especially in the winter months, because it culminated in several days roughing it on Dartmoor. At the end of the survival phase, when the students were all suffering from sleep deprivation and hunger and were disgustingly dirty and dispirited, there was an escape and evasion exercise. When you were captured, and everyone was by fair means or foul, you were transported to an old fort overlooking Plymouth Harbour and then interrogated for a total of up to 8 hours in the next 24 hour period. Stories about what happened during the interrogation phase were legendary amongst aircrew which is why all but the most masochistic of aircrew tried to avoid being sent on the course. For several years I’d succeeded in avoiding the course but was finally trapped when my flight commander put my name down for it while I was on leave.

One day we were taken outside the Plymouth harbour breakwater in an RAF launch. Those were the days when the RAF had its  own Marine Branch with its own high speed launches and crews. (The RAF Marine Branch was finally disbanded in 1986.) When the Plymouth skyline seemed about to disappear below the horizon, we were unceremoniously dropped into the sea wearing a parachute  harness from which dangled a dinghy pack complete with a survival pack of goodies. We were left for half an hour or so while we each inflated and boarded our rubber dingy and experimented with the various other survival aids contained in the pack. From  time to time the RAF launch came past at high speed causing waves and swamping us with water just as we had baled out all the water from our dinghies. In due course a helicopter appeared and one by one we had to slip back into the sea so that we could  be winched up – the helicopter winch men would not, or could not, winch straight from the dinghy in those days. We all ended up back on the deck of the launch and returned to dry land. The following day we repeated the drills but this time using  multi-seat dinghies large enough to accommodate 10 persons. Because this course took place in June the sea was relatively warm but the wind chill on the deck of the launch and whilst dangling from the helicopter’s strop was a chilling experience.  Later in my career I had to repeat the sea drills in the middle of winter and that was much less pleasant.

The second week of the course was devoted almost entirely to the survival exercise on Dartmoor. My parents at that time lived in Princetown, very close to Dartmoor Prison where my Dad was a Prison Officer. I used to enjoy telling folk that Dad was in  Dartmoor and it was always entertaining to watch their faces as they wondered whether they should ask me what he was in for! Having spent many holidays in Princetown, I knew Dartmoor almost like the proverbial back of my hand. I knew all the major landmarks  and their relationship to each other. The 200 metre television mast standing proud on the top of North Hessary Tor, a 517 metre peak just behind Princetown village, was a dead giveaway anyway. I knew the rivers and streams, the roads and tracks, the farms  and most of the marshes, and I knew that I was not likely to get lost on the Moor even in the dark or fog. What I had not catered for was the duplicity of the staff at the end of the survival phase. When they gave us the co-ordinates of several “safe havens” we were to head for, we didn’t know that they had provided the “enemy”, regular soldiers from a nearby regiment, with exact details of where the safe havens were located so that it was inevitable that we should  all be caught and then taken off, bound and blindfolded, for interrogation.

The interrogation started with a strip search. It was actually quite a relief to offload the filthy, mud-soaked, smelly clothes we’d been wearing for the past week and don a relatively clean pair of denims, but there was no underwear, no footwear  and no shower or opportunity to wash. We were led blindfolded to and from the interrogation rooms by silent guards so we never saw who they were. The interrogators were dressed in nondescript military uniforms; there were the proverbial ‘nice guys’ and ‘nasty guys’ and sometimes both together. Usually the interrogator removed our blindfold as soon as the guard had withdrawn. The interrogators’ aims were quite simple – to get us to say something other than service number,  rank, name and date of birth, which is the only information prisoners of war are required by the Geneva Convention to provide for their captors. Even though I was weary, hungry and fed up, there was no way I believed that this was anything other than  an exercise so I had no difficulty in sticking to the rules.

We all knew that we would not be harmed, whatever the interrogators might threaten. The entire scenario was unrealistic but, to be fair, it was intended as a learning experience. One of my interrogators spoke with a thick pseudo-Russian accent and threatened  me with all kind of nasty things if I didn’t co-operate. When we were not being interrogated we were blindfolded, led to various underground cellars and forced to remain for long periods in ‘stress positions’, spread-eagled against  a wall with our feet apart at an uncomfortable distance from the wall. Very loud ‘white noise’ was played over loudspeakers all the time we were in the stress positions. Long before the 24 hours in the interrogation centre had expired I  was thoroughly bored and could not see the point of it all. Eventually the Course Officer came to each of us individually, removed our blindfold and informed us that the exercise was over. We were taken to the Officers’ Mess for a shower and a  good breakfast.

In those days the only real “enemy” the RAF had to worry about was the Soviet Union. It seemed to me and most of my aircrew colleagues that the likelihood was pretty small of surviving a V Bomber crash or a missile strike somewhere over  the vast expanses of the Soviet Union. The need to learn about evading the enemy seemed somewhat academic. Furthermore the Conduct After Capture training, the official name for Resistance to Interrogation, could be summed up in a single sentence: ”When questioned give only your number, rank, name and date of birth”. It didn’t work in the second world war, although many brave prisoners of war died trying to stick to that, and it certainly didn’t work for those captured during  the Korean War when the interrogation techniques had become psychologically much more sophisticated instead of being only brutal. (At that time I was on this course we didn’t know of the appalling treatment being meted out to the captured Americans  in Vietnam.) Nevertheless, I passed the course and went back to Cranwell where, when I was not teaching the cadets to fly the Jet Provost, I was qualified to teach them dinghy drills in the College’s large swimming pool in case they ejected from  their aircraft and had to paddle to the safety of land.

As my tour in Berlin was coming to an end I was told that my next posting would be to JSIW, a unit and location that I’d never heard of. Clearly this was another example of the RAF’s long memory: someone had noticed that I was qualified  as a Combat Survival and Rescue Officer as well as being a Russian linguist and, therefore, fitted the bill for the vacancy coming up at Ashford. I arrived in June 1980, already rather sceptical about my new role. The unit was commanded by an Intelligence  Corps lieutenant colonel. The three senior instructors were a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, an Army major and me. Apart from my duties with JSIW I discovered I would also be the Officer Commanding No 7630 Flight of the RAF Volunteer Reserve, about  which I knew nothing, but at least that sounded promising.

At JSIW we had several different roles. In peacetime we were each responsible for training selected personnel of our own Sevice in Conduct After Capture and Resistance to Enemy Interrogation so that they could then run courses at their own unit for their  own personnel. As a group we were responsible for training selected officers of all three services, four services if you count the Royal Marines as a separate service as they themselves always do, in Tactical Questioning and Interrogation of captured  enemy in time of war. The Army section of JSIW, much larger than either the RN or RAF sections, had additional tasks concerned with the situation in Northern Ireland at the time. We were the only serving military officers who were authorised to supervise  the interrogation of our own Service personnel for training purposes.

On my first day, when I was being introduced to the staff of JSIW, there was one civilian I remembered from my own interrogation 12 years earlier at the end of the Combat Survival Course. He was the interrogator who I’d thought had spoken with  a fake Russian accent. He was, in fact, a real Russian émigré! He didn’t remember me because he had interrogated hundreds of students on the Mountbatten courses in his career.

At the end of my first week at Ashford I was sent down to Plymouth to be assessed on my competence to supervise the interrogation phase of the latest Combat Survival and Rescue Course. And, being still a bit of a train anorak, it provided me with my very  first ride on what was then British Rail’s brand-new Inter-City 125 express trains.

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