4. H. S. Hyde [probably Herbert Stanley Hyde] is interviewed by broadcaster Neville Webber.
Webber: Mr Hyde, do you recall the radio mast at Samoa?
Hyde: Yes, on one occasion we were stationed at Malifa Camp and on our time off, we could find our way up to the radio station. Well, I went up there and decided I would like to climb up to the top there. It would be, one mast, at least four hundred feet high, and the base of it was resting on glass roundels, I should say about a foot in diameter, only held by guy ropes, out to three or four hundred yards out.
Well I climbed up the mast, up through a ladder up the centre and there were rings that you could lean back on when you were tired. About every hundred feet there was a landing which you could get out on, and when you got out on the top, there was one of our men from the Auckland Regiment on look-out up there, who slept up there in ground sheets, tied from side to side.
Webber: Had the Germans used this as a look-out as well as a radio station do you think?
Hyde: I can't recall that. I only went up there on a day's leave and I climbed to the top and I felt very tired going up and also coming down again.
Webber: Did you get much of a view from the top?
Hyde: You had a lovely view. You could see the sea and it was a really good look-out position.
Webber: Of course Samoa was an important coaling station for the German Navy in World War I, wasn't it?
Hyde: Yes, they had great big piles of coal hundreds of feet high, on the beaches there. Two ships, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau came inside the reef when we were there, but they didn't stay.
Webber: They didn't shell you, possibly because ...
Hyde: They would have killed more of their own population, Germans, than they would have us.