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Cpl. Peter Masters was a member of 3 Troop. Born in Vienna in 1922, he was there when the Germans marched into Austria on March 12, 1938, “so I lived under the Nazis for six months, which was quite sufficient to turn me from a kid that had been brought up as a pacifist to a volunteer eager to get into the action.” In August 1938 he managed to get to London; soon he joined the commandos. “Can you shoot?” he was asked by the recruiting officer. “Can you handle a boat? What do you know about radio?” Masters said he had once shot a BB gun, that he had rowed a boat but never sailed, and that he knew nothing about radios. He was so enthusiastic that the commandos took him anyway. Told to take a new name so as to avoid German retribution if captured, but only given a couple of minutes to think about it, he chose “Masters.” He got a dog tag with “Peter Masters” on it, plus “Church of England.” He and all the others in 3 Troop had to invent stories to explain why they spoke English with an accent. Masters’s story was that his parents traveled extensively and he had been raised by a German-speaking nanny who didn’t have much English.
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Stephen E. Ambrose (D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II)