Weather Forecasts Were Essential for Successful Military Operations#

In the spring of 1943, the intervention of meteorologists saved a German fighter squadron approaching an Arctic convoy. Reluctantly ordered back after the command received a weather report of a fog bank rolling in toward the coast, 30 of the 32 aircraft that had taken off managed to reach the airfield just in time, while the last two crashed into the fog on the coast.

The successful mine-laying operations of the torpedo boats in January 1942 off the west coast of England and in the Bristol Channel were only possible because days of fog had been forecast for the area from Greenland. Based on the report of “clear visibility in the Arctic Ocean,” reconnaissance aircraft located Convoy PQ 17, of whose 34 ships 23 were ultimately destroyed.

Fishing Vessels Provided Weather Information in 1940#

Initially, the missions relied on reports from neutral Arctic stations, but these were gradually closed from the summer of 1940 onward. Attempts to establish permanent weather stations in Greenland and Jan Mayen were thwarted by British and American countermeasures. Therefore, from March 1940 onward, fishing vessels were used as weather observation ships to provide meteorological support for naval operations.

Over time, a total of nine ships were stationed in the North Atlantic or Arctic Ocean. However, no more than three ships were ever at sea at any one time. Deployments lasted between three and fourteen weeks. In all weather conditions, meteorological and oceanographic measurements were taken two to four times a day and transmitted in encrypted form to Germany. This weather transmission enabled the British to locate and capture the weather ships. Their objective was to seize the radio keys and an Enigma machine (Greek for “riddle”).

The German Air Force Got Involved#

The weather reporting network by ships was still too infrequent, which is why the Luftwaffe began regular survey flights in the summer of 1941. Long-range aircraft flew daily reconnaissance routes along three fixed routes, transmitting altitude data, including pressure and temperature readings, down to an altitude of 6,000 meters, by radio to northern Norway. After the Allied evacuation, the Luftwaffe established its first land-based weather station on Spitsbergen in September 1941.

The locations and staffing periods of German weather stations, 1941–1945. Source: Lexikon der Wehrmacht

Bansø, built via a 1,000‑kilometer airlift, reported the weather several times a day until May 1942, when Norwegian troops landed and the four weather troops left without a fight. In October, the Kriegsmarine also established its first land-based station on the west coast of Spitsbergen, setting up Knospe (Bud) in the area of the Liliehöck Fjord in northern Spitsbergen. Following naval custom, the station was named after its commanding officer, R. Knoespel. Born in Barmen in 1915, he had served on the weather observation ship Sachsen and had ultimately proposed to the MWD (Military Weather Service of the Navy) the establishment of land-based stations that could operate from August until the following spring and be supplied by the WBS (weather observation ships).

The Sachsen and Homann set sail on September 24, 1941, and reached Crossfjord in mid‑October. Entering the fjord was a remarkable feat of navigation, as the lack of accurate charts meant that in the poor weather conditions only sounding leads and swell provided guidance. All equipment had to be laboriously transported ashore by shuttle boats. While setting up camp in Signe Bay, the surrounding area was explored. The comfortably furnished but abandoned main cabin of the fisherman Johannsen from Tromsø was discovered, and the hastily deserted port of Ny‑Ålesund was inspected.

This first land-based weather station conducted 260 radiosonde ascents between October 15, 1941, and August 22, 1942. Shortly before its scheduled departure, Dr. Knoespel was killed in the station’s demolition. The return of the weather team, planned for May 1942, did not take place until August 23, 1942, when it was evacuated by U‑435, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Strehlow.

Due to enemy activity, the return route led around northern Spitsbergen through the Hinlopen Strait. The strait was iced over, forcing Strehlow to dive beneath the ice. U‑435 was therefore the first submarine to dive beneath a sea route blocked by fast ice.

From January onward, the Kriegsmarine also deployed weather buoys. The floating body was ten meters long, the antenna nine meters. The external dimensions were determined by the torpedo tubes of the transporting submarines. Anchored in water depths of up to 2,000 meters, the devices transmitted air pressure and temperature data for up to three months.

A parallel development was the WFL, the weather radio equipment for land. Its operating time was approximately six months. Here, too, the external dimensions of the equipment were adapted to the torpedo tubes. In addition to temperature and pressure, these automatic devices also transmitted wind data. Toad was the code name of the automatic Luftwaffe weather station. The battery boxes formed the base for the weather station, in which air pressure, temperature, and humidity were measured. The antenna was strung between two five‑meter masts. Its operating time was approximately three months.

A weather reporting station was even deployed as far as America, 4,500 kilometers from Central Europe. In October 1943, U‑537 established a weather station ashore in Labrador. However, automatic stations could only provide supplementary information, so the former Knospe station was reactivated the following year.

The positions of automatic weather radio stations, 1942–1945. Source: Lexikon der Wehrmacht (in German)

The Second Spitsbergen Weather Station#

The leader of the second Spitsbergen expedition was Dr. Franz Nusser, co‑founder of the Austrian Archives for Polar Research in Vienna. The station was named Nussbaum (Walnut) after him. His assistants were the weather mapmaker Heinz Köhler and the nautical assistant Rudolf Garbaty. The radio station was operated by Petty Officer Heinz Ehrich, who had already participated in the longest auxiliary cruiser voyage on the Atlantis.

U‑377 was designated for transport. Vast quantities of equipment therefore had to be repacked into standard U‑boat crates to be brought through the conning tower, galley, or torpedo hatches (maximum width 55 centimeters). Provisions, winter clothing, tools, photographic and measuring instruments, sleds, skis, radios, weapons, radiosondes, tents, building materials—the list went on and on. Eventually, with the exception of the control room, one could only move around the boat by crawling. Diving and trimming tests were successful, and the boat remained combat‑ready.

On October 7, 1942, Lieutenant Commander Köhler sailed from Tromsø, arrived three days later in Crossfjord, found the Knoespel cabin undamaged, helped with setting up the storage area, returned, and brought the remaining equipment at the end of October. From November 30 onward, weather reports 063 were transmitted as scheduled.

Radio operator Heinz Ehrich and radio corporal Eduard Müller managed to produce hydrogen for balloon ascents themselves from aluminum grit and caustic soda, since there was no longer any room for hydrogen cylinders on U‑377. From January 15, radiosonde missions were suspended due to a lack of supplies. Supplies were to be delivered by air, but this could not be carried out until May 6 because of frequent polar storms. An Fw 200 dropped the supplies and, along with a bouquet of pussy willows, the eagerly awaited mail.

Later, a British aircraft bombed the winter station. The weathermen intended to retreat to the prepared summer station in the glacier massif but encountered a Norwegian ski patrol. Inspector Köhler was killed in action. The men made their way to the opposite coast and were picked up on June 21 in Magdalenenfjord by Lieutenant Commander Sickel on U‑302.

Establishment of a Weather Station in Greenland#

As the war escalated, consideration for American safe zones was no longer given, so attempts were made to establish forward stations in Greenland. On August 27, 1942, the ship Sachsen transported the weather team Holzauge (Wooden Eye) through the pack ice to Little Pendulum Island on the east coast of Greenland. This fixed land station transmitted regularly until its discovery on March 11, 1943, by a Danish reconnaissance patrol. As a countermeasure, a team of six men, ordered by the OKM (High Command of the Navy), set out to destroy the Danish weather station on Ella‑Ø. During this operation, led by Dr. Weiss, the team covered a total distance of 1,100 kilometers in 40 days under the harshest weather conditions.

On May 25, when American bombers destroyed the weather station hut along with all its instruments, a flying boat, responding to a distress call, brought the weather team home on June 17, 1943.

The Third Weather Station on Spitsbergen#

Since it became difficult to find suitable participants for Arctic expeditions from 1943 onward, the Goldhöhe training camp was established on the Schneekoppe (Sněžka). There, the team also practiced driving sled dogs with the captured dogs that the Holzauge (Wooden Eye) squad had brought back.

In September 1943, the weather ship Garl J. Busch and U‑355 landed the weather team Kreuzritter (Crusaders) on Spitsbergen. Lieutenant Commander Günter La Baume, who had deployed a shore‑based automatic weather station on the northern Bear Island in September, sailed on October 2, 1943, with five civilians and two dogs from the weather team. While the Busch crew and six other weathermen established the station in Lifde Bay starting on October 7, U‑355 conducted reconnaissance patrols along the coast until October 16.

The Adventures of Bass Violinist#

Due to Greenland’s meteorological importance, the weather ship Coburg was then dispatched there with the mission of establishing the Baßgeiger (Bass Violinist) station on Germania Land in Greenland. At the beginning of September 1943, the ship blasted its way into the ice belt but was forced to sail by the Greenland Current. Because of the hopeless situation, Coburg was ordered to operate Baßgeiger as a drift station. However, the ship was unexpectedly freed and was able to dock at the solid coastal ice in mid‑October. Regular weather services began aboard the Coburg.

But on November 18 a severe storm pushed the weather ship onto an ice ridge, and a large part of the equipment was lost. The weather service then established a land-based station on Shannon Island—as camouflage against reconnaissance aircraft, hidden in a cornice. But on April 22, 1944, a Danish sled patrol surprised the Germans, and Lieutenant Röder was killed. In the following weeks, reconnaissance patrols from both sides circled each other, but no further firefights occurred. The damaged Coburg was scuttled in May 1944. In June, a long‑range aircraft finally brought the 26‑man crew back to Norway. The ground measurements had been taken without interruption, even during the storms and on the day of the attack. However, probe ascents had not been possible due to material losses.

German Air Force Weather Station Svartisen#

At the same time as the navy’s Kreuzritter in Spitsbergen and Baßgeiger in Greenland, the Luftwaffe station Svartisen, headed by Dr. Neunteufl, was operating on Hopen Island, southeast of Spitsbergen, in 1943–44. In preparation, the former navy commander Brünner, who had just deployed weather buoy 106 northwest of the Lofoten Islands on July 23, 1943, was ordered to Hopen Island to reconnoiter any potentially occupied huts. Sailing close to the 35‑kilometer‑long coastline, U‑703 spotted a shipwrecked man, Captain Stepan Beljaev, on July 25. His ship, the Dekabrist, had been bombed by German Ju 88s on November 4, 1942.

About 30 sailors from the Russian vessel were able to board the lifeboats; some reached Hopen but later died of exhaustion. In a hut farther north on the island, which is only four kilometers wide, two more Russians and a woman, the doctor Nadezda M. Matalic, were discovered. They received ample provisions, medicine, and other supplies on board and rowed back to the hut in their dinghy, as U‑703 had no room for them while it continued its operations to deploy weather buoy 107 north of Murmansk.

Later the Russian captain experienced the torpedoing of a sentry on the west coast of the southern island of Novaya Zemlya, depth‑charge attacks, and numerous alarm dives aboard the submarine and was handed over to a prisoner‑of‑war camp in Narvik.

After a seven‑week patrol in the Kara Sea, U‑703 received orders to rescue the remaining Russians from Hopen on its return voyage. On October 7, the three shipwrecked men were taken aboard, one of whom died hours later from complete exhaustion and was buried according to maritime custom. As early as October 27, just three weeks after the evacuation, the four‑man weather team Svartisen landed there. Half the crew of U‑354 spent two days transporting the extensive equipment to the coast in inflatable boats. Wading through waist‑deep icy mud, the soaked men repeatedly had to be brought aboard to thaw and dry off, or endured anxious hours on the island when their submarine submerged or ran aground because of air‑raid alarms.

Aggressive polar bears repeatedly created dangerous situations during the landing and transport to the station. The shelter, where the Russian captain had already lived for nine months, now became both refuge and prison for the four weather troops for almost a year. Supplied by air, they were finally picked up again on July 20, 1944.

Schatzgräber—Germany’s Northernmost Weather Station in the Arctic#

In August 1943, WBS 6 transported the weather team Schatzgräber (Treasure Hunters) to Alexandra Land, where the camp was established in Great Cambridge Bay. Throughout the winter, the station was able to transmit weather reports almost regularly. Tired of canned vegetables and meat, the men’s consumption of trichinosis‑ridden bear meat proved fatal. All members of the expedition fell ill. Dangerous scenes unfolded as the illness led to violent aggression. The leader, W. Drees, in particular, suffered from severe nervous breakdowns.

In response to a distress call, U‑354 was ordered to bring medical assistance but could not reach Franz Josef Land because of dense pack ice. Finally, at the beginning of July 1944, an Fw 200 arrived, but instead of parachuting the doctor as ordered, it landed on uneven terrain and broke a landing‑gear wheel. Another distress call followed.

Spare parts dropped from the air enabled the crew to repair the landing gear under the most primitive conditions. With the sick weathermen on board, leaving behind all unnecessary equipment, First Lieutenant Stahnke dared to take off. The takeoff was successful, and on July 11, 1944, the aircraft returned safely to Norway. All the weathermen were then taken to the military hospital in Oslo and recovered.

U‑387 (Lieutenant Commander Buchler) retrieved the equipment left behind on Alexandra Land in October 1944. From 1944 onward, the naval command increasingly used submarines as weather stations. A total of 51 submarines were used for this task until the end of the war; five were lost in the process.

The Rapid Fall of Edelweiss Weather Stations in Greenland#

The Greenland position was to be reoccupied by the weather team Edelweiss, headed by Dr. Weiss. On September 1, 1944, the weather ship Kehdingen was anchored at the edge of the ice when a foreign vessel appeared. An escape route through the ice was immediately sought, but after a chase of more than 70 miles, the ship became trapped. It was blown up, and the weather service personnel were taken prisoner on the pursuing coast guard vessel Northland.

Following this failure, another team was immediately ordered to Greenland, codenamed Edelweiss II. In early October 1944, the modern weather ship Externsteine landed the expedition on the island of Lily Koldewey, commanded by Dr. K. Schmidt, with Lieutenant Allewecht as military leader.

However, aerial reconnaissance immediately detected the station’s location, guided by signals from radio intelligence. The end came within 38 hours: in the early morning of October 4, the weather troops surrendered to a vastly superior force on the coast guard vessel Eastwind. The Externsteine, wedged in the ice, was captured by the Eastwind on October 16, 1944. The two Edelweiss projects demonstrated that coastal stations in Greenland were no longer feasible. A new proposal, therefore, was to bury stations on the ice sheet and supply them by aircraft—an idea that had no chance of being implemented given the war situation.

The alternative was Operation Zugvogel (Migratory Bird): from October 1944 to January 1945, the weather ship Wuppertal regularly reported from the Greenland Sea. It was lost in one of the winter storms, along with its commanding officer, Inspector Hofmann.

In 1944, weather flights had to be suspended because of fuel shortages. To compensate, the Luftwaffe established three stations using U‑boats in the autumn: Helhus, Täget, and Landvik. In preparation for Täget, Lieutenant Commander Vogler, with U‑212, was tasked in July 1944 with reconnoitering the northeast coast of Bear Island, including the enemy weather radio station near Tunheim. He found it unoccupied after an air raid and, with a landing party, destroyed the remaining equipment, buildings, and radio mast. The Täget weather station remained operational there until April 1945.

The third Luftwaffe station, Landvik, after Helhus, was landed on southern Spitsbergen in October 1944 by U‑365 under the command of Lieutenant Commander Haimer Wedemeyer. At the pier of the Tromsø seaplane base, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel von Bredow, the station’s supplies, calculated for a year, were loaded on board. At the last minute, two Norwegians and a German lieutenant, who had prepared the weather operation from Oslo, came aboard. In the stormy bay, ten tons of cargo were brought ashore using a shuttle service of inflatable boats, and the hut was constructed. Work could only be carried out at night, requiring the entire crew to be involved, and the soldiers, soaked through from unloading in the icy glacial water, had to be constantly relieved to dry off.

The two Norwegians, an older man from Tromsø and his younger friend, maintained the Landvik station until the end of the war. As collaborators, they were subsequently sent to a Norwegian re‑education camp for two years.

Weather Squad Tough Guys#

The navy also reoccupied the Spitsbergen station in September 1944. The weather ship Garl J. Busch and U‑307 transported the weather team Haudegen (Tough Guys) to Nordaustland, which began transmitting its weather data at the beginning of December. In addition, the operational order allowed for civilian research; thus, geological‑morphological, microclimatic, glaciological, geomagnetic, and biological studies were pursued.

At the beginning of March 1945, the naval command inquired whether another wintering until 1946 was possible: the weather team was ready. Dr. Wilhelm Dege, who had undertaken three private Spitsbergen expeditions before the war, had been selected by the head of the Naval Weather Service, Admiral Dr. Conrad, to lead Haudegen, and received advanced training in the Giant Mountains. At the training facility on the Schneekoppe (Sněžka) under the direction of G. Weiss, the participants learned the latest Arctic techniques.

Weather squad Haudegen, Dr. Wilhelm Dege. Source and digitalization: Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde e.V., CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Skiing, dog sledding, cooking, baking, treating the wounded, building snow huts, carrying loads on their backs, using hunting weapons, and navigation were practiced extensively. Under arduous conditions, the future station members bonded and got to know one another. Provisions, gasoline, and kerosene for 18 months were planned, so that, by relying on hunting for additional food, a two‑year stay was quite possible.

A total of 1,800 pieces of luggage weighing 80,000 kilograms, containing approximately 3,000 different items worth 1.25 million marks, were loaded. In Narvik, U‑Stahmer took over the main depot, sailed ahead as an escort vessel, became involved in a convoy battle, sank an auxiliary aircraft carrier, and was itself lost on August 24. A replacement had to be procured from the arsenals in Tromsø, and U‑307, commanded by First Lieutenant Herrle, was designated as the escort submarine.

Passing the east coast of Spitsbergen, the flotilla reached the inner Rijpfjord and began setting up camp on September 15. The landing of the 50 barrels of oil and gasoline, each weighing 250 kilograms, presented particular challenges. After the construction of the warehouse and the establishment of alternative anchorages, U‑307 and Busch left the overwintering crew. The men set up a sauna, were only allowed to go to the toilet in pairs, armed with carbines, because of the constant threat of polar bear attacks, and acclimatized to the 126 days of polar night.

The daily launch of a balloon carrying a radiosonde was always a breathtaking undertaking in the prevailing strong winds, as the wildly dancing balloon, powered by a hydrogen generator at 180 to 250 atmospheres, often required seven men to hold it steady. Procuring fresh meat, collecting wood, guard duty, and constant weather monitoring day and night kept the station crew busy. More than 800 encrypted radio messages were transmitted by spring. On April 24, 1945, a request was made for an aircraft landing to deliver supplies for another winter. But then, like a hammer blow, the news of surrender hit the lonely men.

End of the Mission#

From May 7, 1945, onward, weather reports were transmitted unencrypted, the camouflage was removed, and the military postal service was withdrawn. The men, trained in winter mountain warfare by mountain troops in the Wildspitz area at altitudes around 3,000 meters during a three‑week course, now also detonated the prepared defensive line with mines. Allied victory reports, often fantastically exaggerated, flooded the weather observers, who, moreover, received no information about their families or their immediate future. The paralyzing uncertainty was countered with intensified scientific programs and explorations of previously uncharted territory by sled. The months passed, and August brought the first blizzards.

Finally, the Norwegian seal hunter Blaasel picked up the weather team on September 3, and after days of storms, the Blaasel docked in Tromsø on September 13. The Germans were immediately imprisoned, and their luggage was plundered. The geomagnetic survey, the map with the marked plumb lines, and all 20 rolls of Leica film belonging to the station commander were lost.

Source: Lexikon der Wehrmacht (in German)