German Wireless off the Galway Coast during WW2

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.'

 Siemen's technician Dr. Kurt Sommermeyer aboard U-537 in the Labrador Sea listening to signals transmitted by Weather Station Kurt (named for Sommermeyer) broadcasting from Marin Bay, Newfoundland, 

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.