Weather War

By Cdr. Carl O. Schuster, USN
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The Need

The growing importance of airpower in World War II, combined with its sensitivity to weather, led to an ever greater military reliance on accurate forecasts. Knowing if and when your airfields, your enemy's airfields, or the target area would be "socked in" by bad weather was of vital concern to the combat commanders of that war.

As much an art as it is a science, predicting the weather is dependent on the accurate tracking of weather phenomena, particularly storm fronts, from the areas where they originate. In the North Atlantic and Transalpine Europe, that means gathering weather data in Greenland, the Norwegian Sea, and the arctic regions of Norway itself. Though meteorologists of the 1940s had none of the weather tracking satellites which make that job so much simpler today, they were still able to generate usably accurate forecasts for northern Europe as much as 72 hours in advance - as long as they could get the data they needed from those regions.

The need for that data gave birth to one of the most interesting and unique campaigns of the Second World War, the so-called "Weather War." Although it was not a war of major commands and large numbers of troops, ships, or aircraft, it had an important impact on the fighting in the Atlantic and European Theaters. It was the weather data secured by this campaign which enabled the planning and execution of such critical operations as the Germans' "Channel Dash," the Battle of the Bulge, the Allied landings at Dieppe and Normandy, and the entire strategic bombing campaign against the Third Reich.

The Weather War was fought with great stealth, audacity and innovation. Losses were proportionately heavy, and in the end, the Germans had to turn to technology to try to obtain that which they could not gain on the battlefield. Interestingly, a German weather unit, Group Haudegen, was the last Axis force to surrender to the Western Allies in Europe, on 9 September 1945.

The Weather War Begins

The Weather War began with the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940. Prior to that, those nations' allowed their arctic weather stations to report the weather in the clear (uncoded) so all countries could copy and use the information. Germany's occupation of much of Scandinavia gave Berlin a monopoly over arctic weather data - a development the Allies could not allow.

The British, in fact, began planning to seize the weather stations even as the campaign for Norway progressed. Of course, the Germans had plans for those same stations, but Allied maritime supremacy, coupled with the unexpectedly high German naval losses in the Norwegian invasion, allowed Britain to score the first successes. But the weather itself proved the most serious obstacle to the start of the Weather War's operations, delaying thefirst moves until August. In fact, throughout the Weather War, both sides found the elements a more formidable foe than the enemy.

The Germans were the first to dispatch a ship, the ex-Norwegian whaler Furenak. It carried a four-man meteorological party to eastern Greenland, but they were captured soon after landing. Most of the German ships sent to seize other weather stations were also captured or destroyed. Only the weather ship Sachsen managed to avoid capture, despite transmitting hundreds of reports from around Iceland for almost 76 days. Its relief ship, though, was intercepted in October by a British task force headed by the battlecruiser Repulse.

Meanwhile, Germany relied on weather reports based on flights made by Wetterstaffeln V (Weather Squadron 5), operating out of Trondheim and Banak, Norway. Using specially configured He-l 11 and Ju-88 aircraft, the squadron made twice-daily flights across the Norwegian and Greenland Seas, often reaching out as far west as Greenland, north to Spitzbergen, and east to Novaya Zemlya. The planes' reporting was not as reliable as that from permanent stations however, since the bad weather often precluded flight activity.

The first weather station the British seized was on Jan Mayan Island in the Greenland Sea. Designated "Island V for security purposes, the station there collected data that would help predict weather all over the North Atlantic. Unfortunately, a sudden storm sank the British transport ship, stranding the weather party on the island without supplies. That group soon had to be evacuated, and the station and all its equipment destroyed.

The British attempted to reoccupy the island in October, but again, bad weather forced them to pull out. After that, Jan Mayan Island remained empty until the spring of 1941. During that period, though, the British did succeed in taking all the weather stations in eastern Greenland and on Bear Island.

The horrific northern winter of 1940-41 forced a nearly complete three-month hiatus on both sides' arctic activities. Both were forced to rely on sporadic aerial weather flights, which the Germans also supplemented by having U-boats conduct weather reporting once they had run out of torpedoes.

Spring saw a renewal in operations, as both sides began preparations for a return. The Germans were the first to move, positioning the weathership Miinchen north of Iceland in February 1941. The British moved back on to Jan Mayan in March, rebuilding the weather station and slowly building defensive positions. The Germans conducted their first air attack on that station one month later, but inflicted no damage. April also saw the Germans land an He-111 weather aircraft on Spitzbergen Island, where they left some supplies and firefighting equipment for the local inhabitants, while also surveying for additional landing sites.

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