Roles, Fred

Fred Roles was born in 1920s London, the son of a firefighting family.  He vividly remembers the beginning of the Blitz in 1940; when his neighbourhood was bombed, he and his mother had the good fortune to be at the back of the family home.  He vowed to shoot down those German planes as soon as he could, and he went on to join the RAF.  He wanted to be an air gunner, but the RAF needed communications specialists, so Fred was trained in Morse Code, and deployed to various RAF bases, where ho participated in the defence of Britain during the intense battles of 1940-41.  At the midway point of the war, Fred was deployed to Ceylon, where he joined the Wire Service, helping to decipher Japanese messages and working towards victory in the Pacific.