Weather War

By Cdr. Carl O. Schuster, USN
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Still the Germans had to withdraw against almost immediately. For Adm. Donitz, head of the German navy, knew, even if Hitler did not, the island could not be held in the face of overall Allied maritime supremacy. The task force returned to occupied Norway on 8 September, and the Allies were back on Spitzbergen, with a new weather station and garrison, one month after that.

Operation Zitronella remains significant in that it marked the only time the Battleship Tirpitz fired her main batteries in a surface engagement. It was also the German navy's last major fleet operation outside the Baltic Sea area.

But Germany also managed to land several of her own weather parties that month as well. The Luftwaffe used Zitronella as cover, allowing them to land a team unseen on nearby Hope Island. The trawler Kehdingen also delivered a team to Franz Josef Land on 15 September, and the trawler Cobura did the same, under the codename "Bassgeiger," in northern Greenland. All of those groups remained on station until mid-1944.

The Allies remained ignorant of the German weather station on Hope Island until winter had set in. By then the weather had become so uniformly bad it precluded their doing anything about it. The same was true about the new stations in Greenland.

Spring eventually comes, though, even in the arctic, and by mid-June 1944, the Allies had again forced the Germans out of Greenland and the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted their replacements. But the"Bassgeiger" group was able to hide an automated station on Greenland before departing, and the meteorologists on Franz Josef Land did the same there.

Those stations were deficient, however, in that they couldn't report "ballistic" (high altitude) winds - a vital kind of data for airstrike (and air defense) planners. Moreover, Germany's weather planes could not reach Greenland's northeastern comer. Berlin therefore exercised its only remaining option, and dispatched a weather ship into those waters.

The icebreaker Wuppertal was chosen, and she left Tromso in August 1944, with a 12-man weather party on board. The ship moved west of Spitzbergen in September, sending twice-daily reports as it passed by. A U-boat then landed still another party on northeastern Spitzbergen, giving Germany its best observations from the region since 1940.

The operation ended in tragedy for the Wuppertal and her crew; they were operating too far north too late in the year. The ship became ice bound 120 nautical miles south of the North Pole during the first week of October. Its weather reports ceased a month later, and neither the ship or the crew has ever been found.

The loss of the Wuppertal left Germany with only one manned weather station active - Group Haudegen, another navalunit off Spitzbergen's northeast. This forced Berlin to rely more and more on the inadequate remote stations. The last version consisted of submerged buoys laid by U-boats. The buoys surfaced twice each day to record data and transmit for about an hour before resubmerging again. Advertised to have a nine-month life, those buoys were testimony to the technological prowess of the Germans; several were still operating in 1946.

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Hummelchen, G. and Rohwer, J. Chronology of the War at Sea: 1939-1945. Military Book Society, Addlestone, 1972. Liversidge, Douglas. The Third Front. Souvenir Press, London, 1960.

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