In the last weeks of World
War II, the censorship rules were relaxed in Ireland and some of the stories hidden
from the Irish public began to appear and they demonstrated the fragility of
our neutrality. As details were revealed in the newspapers, the use of wireless
as a weapon of battle began to emerge.
As the Battle of the
Atlantic raged between the Germans and the Allies, their common enemy was the
weather, as both sides battled for supremacy. For both sides, if you had the
best metrological reports, your forces had the upper hand. For the Germans, the
leading manufacturer of wireless equipment Siemens was tasked with developing ‘wireless’
technologies that could remotely report the weather from the Atlantic. They
were highly ambitious and in 1943, the Germans on board a submarine, landed on
the coast of Canada’s province of Newfoundland at Martin Bay and established a
weather station codenamed KURT, that transmitted coded weather forecast back to
the German Navy who used it to identify storms which helped in both identifying
merchant convoys and allowing their naval fleet to hide from their British pursuers.
According to a Naval warfare historian,
‘KURT
was comprised of a telemetry system; 150-watt short-wave antenna; a 10-meter
(33-foot) tall antenna mast complete with an anemometer and wind vane on its
own separate shorter mast; a 150-watt Lorenz 150FK-type radio transmitter;
various meteorological measuring instruments; and ten 100-kilogram (220-pound)
steel barrels that contained nickel-cadmium and dry-cell high voltage batteries—each
measuring 1 meter (3.3 feet) high by 47 centimetres (1.5 feet) in diameter.’
The
WFL-26 station had six-month’s worth of batteries and would collect and record
atmospheric conditions—automatically broadcasting the information back to
German receiving stations via radio signals. The transmissions were sent for no
more than two minutes (one of these precious minutes being allotted for warming
up the system) every three hours on a 3940-kHz band, in coded form no less.'
24th October 1943.
But not only on land did
the Germans establish secret weather stations on the continent of North America,
Siemens developed sea-based stations. These German ‘robot wireless stations’
were either dropped into the sea from aircraft or launched by submarines and
anchored along the Western Irish coast. The Atlantic was an unforgiving sea and
the tethers for these ‘robot’ stations often broke loose. One of these was
anchored off the coast of Galway near Slyne Head. A fishing trawler from Inishturk
snared the device in their nets and hauled it ashore. The Belfast Telegraph
reported when the censorship rules were relaxed that,
‘This
ingenious apparatus was anchored under the sea and at certain fixed time
regulated by an electric clock, pushed up an aerial over the surface and
transmitted a report of the prevailing weather conditions in the locality.’
For some of the most technically
minded locals in Galway and Mayo, they were able to intercept the signals and
while in 1944 and early 1945 the signals from the wireless off the Galway coast
was coded, the Germans had dispensed with some of the coding towards the end of
the war and local fishermen were taking advantage of the German weather
forecasting to assist their fishing, finding themselves forewarned of incoming
storm fronts.
The captured German weather
station was handed over to the Irish Army who paid the fishermen £ 200 for the
salvage of the weapon. It was then transported to Dublin and the Army’s G2
intelligence headquarters. The fishermen all along the West coast not only
netted German weather buoys but they also scooped up Allied equipment in their
nets. The Allied weather stations were handed over to the Irish authorities who
then repatriated them back to Britain who then paid the fishermen salvage
recompense. The Examiner reported,
‘During
the last two years of the war, a large number of robot weather
indicators were either washed ashore on the West Coast of Ireland or caught by
fishermen in their nets and brought to ports on the West Coast. The indicators,
it was learned yesterday, all bore British Admiralty markings, and were handed
over by the Irish authorities to the British Admiralty. Salvage was paid in all
cases to the finders. It is believed that the indicators were dropped by planes
in the Atlantic and were driven to the Irish coast by winds and currents. They
were designed to send out from their delicate mechanism at pre-determined
intervals wireless signals regarding the weather in the North
Atlantic. So far as can be ascertained, all the indicators were of British
origin.’
The importance of the
weather off the Irish coast and how it was transmitted especially to the
British forces had come to the fore in 1944. According to an article in the
Irish Independent,
‘As
he cranked the telephone and delivered his news over a crackly line from Co
Mayo's most westerly point, Irish Coast Guardsman and lighthouse keeper Ted
Sweeney had no idea the lives of more than 150,000 Allied troops would hang on
his words.
It
was a fateful call. As he watched the barometer fall precipitously, Ted
Sweeney's report from the Coast Guard station convinced General Dwight D
Eisenhower to delay the D-Day invasion for 24 hours – a decision which averted
a military catastrophe and changed the course of the Second World War.
This
Friday, June 6, marks the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy –
codenamed Operation Overlord. The assault on Hitler's 'Fortress Europe'
signalled the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime in Europe with the German
surrender less than a year later. Some 5,000 ships and over 11,000 aircraft
carried approximately 156,000 Allied troops into battle on D-Day across a
60-mile front.’
The secret wireless
station that the Germans based in Newfoundland in 1943 was not discovered until
1977.
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