Weather War

By Cdr. Carl O. Schuster, USN
Page 3

Those stations, combined with the re-porting by the weather ship Sachsen, in Greenland waters, provided Berlin with the accurate data needed to plan submarine "Wolfpack" operations and the audacious "Channel Dash" of the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

Uncertain of the new German locations on Spitzbergen and around Greenland, the Allies conducted aggressive aerial and sea patrols throughout those areas. A company of Free Norwegian ski troops was landed on Spitzbergen in May 1942. Caught by German Fw-200 Condors while unloading, the Norwegians lost both their transports; their commander, a Capt. Sverdrup, was killed and several other men were wounded. But most significantly, the unit's only radio was destroyed. What followed on Spitzbergen was a game of cat and mouse, as the Norwegian patrols searched for the German weathermen, while Luftwaffe bombers sought out and attacked the patrollers.

The Allies landed more supplies and meteorological equipment in June, but were still unable to find and destroy the German weather party. On 15 July, they returned with a full battalion of troops, supported by two cruisers and four destroyers. The Germans spotted that landing force, however, and managed to evacuate before being located. Germany still continued to receive weather data throughout that summer; its team had left an automated weather station hidden on the island.

The German navy returned to Spitzbergen in the fall and secretly landed a six-man party on the island's northeast corner on 25 October. The Allies were never able to track down that party, and their station remained in operation through the spring of 1943. Another ten Germans and a ton of equipment were brought in by U-boat in November. Additional supplies and logistics support came via other submarines or were para-dropped.

The Germans also managed to smuggle two weather parties into eastern Greenland in August 1942. Codenamed "Operation Holzauge," the weathermen wintered in northern Greenland and also managed to stay unlocated until March 1943. Numbering 27, they had a brief encounter with a Greenland army patrol that month, killing its leader and capturing 2 others. One patrol member escaped, though, and made a 600 mile trek across the ice to report the Germans' location. The Allies struck back in late May, launching a B-24 raid, which completely destroyed the German station. The surviving Germans then scuttled their supply ship, the Sachsen, and evacuated by seaplane in mid-June. But, almost as a show of resolution that they were not giving up, they took their Danish sled dogs with them to help establish an arctic training center in Bavaria.

Both sides then began to step up their efforts. The Allies recognized their greatest problem was in locating the German weather stations. Sleigh patrols and offshore cruising had not proved effective, so they established radio direction finding (DF) stations on Iceland and Jan Mayen lsland. DF-equipped ships were also added to the Greenland patrol groups, in the hope of pinning down the locations of any German stations there.

The Germans, meanwhile, added a security element of 4 ski-troops to their weather teams, and also gave military training to those groups' scientific specialists. They also accelerated their research on improving remote, unmanned weather stations.

In mid-1943, Hitler began to take an interest in the Weather War. Frustrated by the inactivity of his navy's major surface ships, he asked if they couldn't be used to do something about the Allied presence on Spitzbergen. The result was "Operation Zitronella," an amphibious raid on that island.

Supported by the battleship Tirpitz, the battlecruiser Scharnhorst, and nine destroyers, the plan called for landing an entire infantry battalion. They approached the main settlement at dawn on 7 September, quickly suppressed the Free Norwegian battery of 3-inch guns there, and began to land troops at the main pier. The entire operation was completed in four hours.

On the debit side, German fire coordination was poor, with the battleship at one point shelling their own infantry, and much of the Norwegian garrison managed to escape in the confusion. The Germans did manage to capture the garrison commander, though, along with most of his files. All the facilities, including the weather stations, were destroyed.