The weather war

Shots fired for a better forecast

The weather helped or hindered every war since the dawn of history, and World War II was no different. For just two examples, Typhoon Cobra destroyed three destroyers and killed 790 men in in 1944, and the D-Day landings had to be delayed by a day (and almost cancelled) due to bad weather. An accurate forecast could be just as helpful to an operation, and its lack just as detrimental, as artillery support or a commando outfit. Today’s article is about the lengths both the Allies and Nazi Germany went to in order to have earlier and more accurate weather reports in the North Atlantic and the theater influenced by it.

Weather was both especially critical and unusual harsh in the North Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans. Almost 10,000 planes, mostly piloted by their combat crews, flew from America to Britain through the Arctic region with stops in Greenland and Iceland, and some sources claim close to 10% of them were lost, many due to storms and other bad weather. The North Atlantic maritime convoys that brought vital cargo to Britain and the Soviet Union were hampered not only by storms, but also German U-boat wolfpacks, bombers, and the ever-present threat of surface attacks by the battleship Tirpitz, which spent most of its career docked in occupied Norway exactly for this purpose. The weather could spell fortune or disaster for these operations, too: for could hide a convoy from the Luftwaffe, or a storm could hinder the navigation of German submarines. It is not surprising that neither side spared effort in getting reliable weather forecasts.

Weather patterns in the North Atlantic usually move from west to east, while much of the weather in Europe is a result of meteorological processes in the Arctic. This means that the further to the west and north you can establish weather stations, the sooner you’ll get measurements you can use to predict changes. One way of establishing stations in the right locations was to use weather ships.

The first attempt to use dedicated weather ships dates back to the 1860s, when Britain attempted to put ships out in the open Atlantic and connect them to land with underwater telegraph cables. The experiment was a failure, but further attempts followed in the 1920s. The U.S. Coast Guard and the Atlantic Weather Observation Service established ships for the purpose from 1939 and 1940 onwards, respectively, with the original goal of making transoceanic flights safer. The Coast Guard originally used small, quick cutters that spent three weeks at sea followed by 10 days in port. By 1942, however, these cutters were needed for the war effort and were replaced by six cargo ships equipped with weather balloons. These ships were valuable targets for German U-boats, which would try to sink them and deny the Allies accurate weather forecasts. The vessels were armed with two deck guns, anti-aircraft guns and depth charges, but lacked radar to notice incoming enemy planes, sonar to hear submarines, or high frequency (“huff-duff”) radio direction finders to intercept enemy messages. One weather ship, the USS Muskeget, was lost with all hands on deck after it was torpedoed by an U-boat on September 9, 1942; it’s been speculated that the presence of the right equipment might have allowed the ship to detect and evade its attacker. All of the military crewmen of the Muskeget were immediately awarded a posthumous Purple Heart, but the four civilian meteorologists onboard only got theirs in 2015.

The British and the Germans also used weather ships. Of the four German vessels originally used for the purpose, three were sunk by late 1940, prompting the Kriegsmarine to use converted fishing trawlers and sealer ships as disguise. These ships, however, were still considered important targets by the British not only to deny the Germans weather information, but also for what they carried onboard: Enigma machines and codebooks which they used to receive orders. The machine and the book could be quickly thrown overboard when attacked, but a British cryptologist correctly guessed that the ships also carried the next month’s codebook in a safe, which could be captured if the crew panicked during a raid and neglected to get and destroy it. Two task forces of cruisers and destroyers were dispatched to raid two of these “fishing ships,” and successfully netted several pieces of the Enigma machine and codebooks, greatly helping Bletchley Park in cracking the more secure naval version of the cypher.

The Luftwaffe took similar measures, but their job was even harder: they had to contend not only with dangerous weather and Arctic waters that could kill a man in minutes, but also the Royal Air Force. The “Grossraum Wettererkundungsstaffeln” (Greater Weather Reconnaissance Squadrons), often abbreviated to Wekusta or Westa, flew a motley assortment of converted military planes from bases along the German coast. Many meteorologists were conscripted into these squadrons, and over 200 of them were killed during the war.

Flying northwest from Germany towards the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, Wekusta planes had to fly past Fair Isle, located halfway between the Orkney and Shetland Isles north of Scotland, well inside British radar range. To avoid detection, they had to maintain an altitude of 30-50 ft (9-15 m) above the ocean for much of the 9-hour trip, then had to climb 22,000 ft (6,5 km) above the Faroes. The dangerous adventure was recorded in the insignia of the first Wekusta squadron, depicting a rainbow over Fair Isle: one of the few cases in history when a military unit’s insignia depicted enemy territory.

The British became aware of the clandestine flights by early 1941 and started actively hunting for the planes, causing mounting casualties to the weather squadrons. As the war progressed, the Wekusta took on new roles, such as Arctic meteorological flights after German-controlled weather stations were destroyed on the Svalbard Islands (read on for more information), as well as ice recon flights, supply runs to hidden weather stations, and, in 1945, evacuations of those stations. Throughout the war, their flights were characterized by constant losses, not so much to enemy fighters as the cruelty of the very weather they were trying to gauge even at the cost of their own lives.

Two years later, the Germans established another weather station on Greenland, which was promptly found by the Sledge Patrol. This presented a legal problem. The patrolmen were civilians, and Greenland was officially a part of German-occupied Denmark. If the patrol attacked the Germans and was captured, they could have been executed as partisans. In order to give them legal combatant status, Brun designated the patrol into the official Greenland Army, the world’s smallest, led by a captain and counting about 15 men. The army’s uniform was a single armband.

German weather stations on Greenland might have gotten worryingly close to America, but it actually got even worse on one occasion. Weather Station Kurt was a German automatic station comprising two masts with instruments and barrel-like canisters holding the batteries. It was erected by a U-boat crew on Labrador in the Dominion of Newfoundland, today part of Canada, in October 1943. To prevent destruction by the Allies, it was marked as property of the nonexistent “Canadian Weather Service,” and American cigarette packets were strewn around it. The ruse worked, if a bit too late: the station was only discovered in 1977 by a geomorphologist who thought it was a Canadian military installation.

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