This article was forwarded to me by my Navy Buddy Jan Ouellet and asked if I could post it to Military Gals. We will be celebrating the Battle of Atlantic here on the prairies on Sunday and the Naval Ensign will be flying from our flagpole There was an interesting story on the news at noon today. The anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic is on Sunday and there are 85 surviving veterans (those who served in the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), and the Canadian Merchant Navy) attending a bunch of events around the Capital this weekend. navalassoc.ca/en/battle-of-the-atlantic Did you know that there were a lot of WRENS stationed out east on farms? It was their job to intercept the signals that the wolfpacks transmitted when they surfaced (b/c they couldnt transmit messages from underneath the water). Based in HMCS Coverdale, near Moncton, New Brunswick, WRENS sat off in a field manning the HF/DF (Huff Duff) shack that contained the High Frequency Direction Finding equipment. When WRENS in the Ops Building picked up signals with their Marconi Model CSR5 Receivers, they alerted the Wrens in the field huts that a U-boat was transmitting on such and such a frequency. They would then take the bearings and this data was then transmitted to Whitehall in the UK when the code breakers and Map Plotters at Bletchley Park took over. Fascinating eh? I mean, it must have been incredibly boring for these women to just sit for 8 hours straight, listening through their headphones for noise and then transcribing it and never knowing what the messages said or if it had any impact on the war. (Altho they say that towards the end, someone allowed the WRENS to be informed when their transmissions were involved in taking out a U-Boat.) But they volunteered and put up with not too glamourous conditions to do their part for the war. Heres a history of Coverdale that includes pictures and first person accounts of what it was like: jproc.ca/rrp/rrp2/coverdale.html Hope you enjoy learning about this too!
Posted on: Thu, 01 May 2014 13:36:08 +0000
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