 Sauvage's wireless operator, Flight Sergeant Eddie Wheeler, ignored this instruction and was briefly detained by Algerian police who thought his blue RAF uniform looked German.Sauvage himself did have tropical kit, but there had been no time to add rank badges and, when he walked into the US officers’ mess for a meal, one of the Americans accused him of not being an officer.Sauvage, in the French accent that made him so popular with the girls in the pubs of Cambridge, treated the American to an exhibition of colloquial English invective which only an officer would dare to use, and encountered no further problems.