[CW] We really were (radio) smarter years ago

Wed Jul 15 23:04:52 EDT 2015

THANKS DAVID

I REALLY ENJOYED THAT STORY

73
BENNY K5KV

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 7:33 PM, D.J.J. Ring, Jr. <n1ea at arrl.net> wrote:

> Fascinating story about Chopmist Hill ... Rich K2RR
>
>         Rhombic Antennas on Chopmist Hill (Rhode Island) Help Win World
>         War II
>
> The bristling antennas, miles of wire and all the technicians are gone
> now, but the old Suddard Farm on Chopmist Hill in Scituate is still
> dotted with the ghostly reminders of one of World War II's best-kept and
> most important secrets.
> For it was here on Chopmist Hill in March, 1941, that the Federal
> Communications Commission (FCC) under Commissioner George E. Sterling,
> established and began operating a top-secret, radio-monitoring station.
> It was the largest in a nationwide network of 13 similar installations,
> and -- due to peculiarities of the terrain and certain atmospheric
> conditions -- it was the most effective. The station on Chopmist Hill
> could intercept distant radio signals with astonishing clarity, and in
> wartime, that was a critical advantage.
> While Rhode Island joined the nation in home-front sacrifice -- severe
> gasoline rationing, ersatz chocolate and horsemeat instead of beef, to
> name a few -- the band of 40 radio operator-technicians from the FCC's
> Radio Intelligence Division (RID) conducted a superb spy operation that
> directly affected the waging and final outcome of the war.
> Personnel in Scituate routinely monitored weather reports that were a
> key to troop movements and bombing missions in Europe. With uncanny
> frequency, the station intercepted the radio transmissions of German
> spys positioned in South America and North Africa. Chopmist's reception
> of North Africaa was so good, in fact that the station had no difficulty
> picking up -- and turning to good use -- radio transmissions between the
> tanks that comprised the Desert Fox's infamous Afrika Korps.
> But to this day -- 40 years after Japan's devastating attack on Pearl
> Harbor and 36 years after the war ended -- few Rhode Islanders are aware
> of the spectacular battles fought on the little hill right in their own
> backyard.
> "C'mon, you're pullin' my leg" or "You gotta' be kidding" typify the
> responses of skeptics when told or asked about the illustrious history
> of the North Scituate farm.
> Originally, the station was set up in peacetime to police the airwaves
> for illegal radio transmissions and to assist in air-sea rescue
> operations. On one occasion, actress Kay Francis, en route home from a
> USO tour in Europe, was aboard a plane that was lost off the coast of
> Florida. No formal radio installation on the seaboard was able to pick
> up the pilot's signals, but the Chopmist Hill station did, and the
> monitors in Scituate directed the plane home safely.
> As the war intensified, so did the role of the Chopmist Hill station --
> and the secrecy surrounding it.
> The installation became a virtual mini-city, complete with its own
> power-generating station in the concrete blockhouse. Nearby stood a
> wooden barracks building that housed the RID crew. Antennas were
> everywhere, anchored by guide (sic) wires attached to heavy metal plates
> cemented to the ground.
> The station itself was jam-packed with supersensitive radio receivers,
> transmitters and direction finders, and it was all so top-secret that
> not even the 40 technicians working there knew its purpose. Armed guards
> patrolled the area, and even visitors on official business could not
> approach the farm without a state police escort.
> Even the Narragansett Electric Company, which played a key role in
> establishing the Chopmist Hill station, didn't realize just what it was
> doing.
> Company crews were sent to the station with instructions not merely to
> install utility poles, but to sink them more deeply into the ground than
> normal, thereby ensuring that the tops of the poles would be below
> tree-top level and hidden from view outside the farm.
> No sooner was the work completed than Thomas B. Cave, who supervised the
> facility for the RID, ordered all the poles moved to a different spot.
> "I thougth we'd have a revolt on our hands in Scituate," said former
> commissioner Sterling. He is 87 now and lives in quiet retirement with
> his wife, Margaret, on an island in Maine's Casco Bay. "The folks at
> Narragansett (Electric Company) thought we were crazy. We called in
> their utility crews to dig holes and install a whole bunch of telephone
> poles. Next day, we called them back to move all the poles about two feet."
> Regardless of how much consternation and confusion the unexplained move
> may have caused, the relocated utility poles gave the station optimum
> radio reception. By the end of the war, the inconvenience was gladly
> forgiven anyway. When the role of the Chopmist Hill station was
> publically explained, a Narragansett Electric official said, "Hell, if
> I'd known what they were doing up there, I would gladly have dug holes
> all the way to Cairo!"Z
> But no one knew.
> Clandestine messages, encoded cryptographically, were being intercepted
> and copied verbatim by radio operators working 24 hours a day, who would
> then relay the messages to Washington, D.C., for deciphering.
> Commissioner Sterling said during a recent interview that he has never
> been able to figure out why the United States was caught napping at
> Pearl Harbor 40 years ago tomorrow. He said that for several months
> before the December 7, 1941, attack, the Sictuate monitors were
> routinely intercepting Japanese messages that indicated military action
> was pending.
> RID supervisor Cave said that "Every three weeks, like clockwork, a
> Japanese submarine would surface in Tokyo Bay and broadcast to higher
> military headquarters the number of foreign ships that went in and out
> of the bay during the period" Cave recalls.
> The Scituate monitors helped thwart the Japanese attempts to bomb the
> United States with TNT-laden hot-air balloons. To keep track of the
> silent craft, the Japanese placed radio transmitters on aboard the
> deadly balloons. But the RID eavesdroppers heard the signals, related
> the information to Washington and U.S. fighter planes were promptly
> dispatched to destroy the balloons.
> In the entire course of the war, only a few balloons penetrated the
> electronic screeen; one landed harmlessly in Wisconsin, and others
> drifted off into the Canadian wilderness.
> One of the most important jobs of the Scituate station was to intercept
> German weather reports from Central Europe. Broadcast in such a
> frequency that they could not be picked up in England, the signals
> bounced across the Atlantic Ocean to Chopmist Hill. the information
> played a vital part in British planning for bombing raids against Nazi
> Germany.
> Most amazing was the stations ability to intercept virtually all radio
> transmissions sent by German spies in South America and North Africa. In
> fact, said Cave, who is now 79 and lives in Holmes Beach, Fla., Wilhelm
> Hoettl, one of Germany's foreign intelligence area chiefs, affirmed
> during his interrogation by the U.S. Third Army in June, 1945, that
> German intelligence had not been able to establish a single wireless
> connection, either in the United States or England.
> It was the Chopmist Hill station that discovered installations of German
> transmitters on the West coast of Africa. Even the British, who had
> their own monitoring stations in the region, were totally unaware of the
> existance of the enemy stations. It wasn't long, said Cave, before the
> British, via Washington, were breathing down the necks of Scituate
> operators for more and more information.
> Little wonder. During the seesaw battles between British forces and
> General Erwin Rommel's infamous Afrika Korps, the Chopmist Hill station
> frequently picked up coded messages containing battlefield strategy from
> the German military leader to his subordinate commanders. The
> information was relayed to the British, who under Field Marshall Bernard
> Montgomery defeated the legendary Desert Fox at El Alemein.
> "That's nothing," Cave said. "At one time, we saved the British liner
> Queen Mary, from being sunk with more than 10,000 Allied troops on board."
> The Queen Mary was docked in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil awaiting departure
> for Australia. German spies in South America learned the ship's sailing
> schedule and precise Southerly route down the Atlantic, around Cape Horn
> and across the Pacific Ocean. The information was radioed to Nazi forces
> in Africa, then relayed to German submarine wolf packs prowling the
> ocean. Orders went out to sink the pride of England's maritime fleet.
> "We intercepted the German transmissions, alerted the British, and they
> ordered the ship to change course," Cave said. "Who knows," he said with
> a chuckle, "maybe there's still a U-boat commander out there somewhere
> wondering where the hell the Queen Mary is."
> On another occasion, the British asked the RID operators in Scituate to
> determine the nationality of a remote transmitter near the Aleutian
> Islands. It turned out to be a Russian station and, therefore, was
> spared the annihilation which was planned for the suspected Japanese
> facility.
> Does it seem far-fetched? Is it asking too much to believe that a secret
> radio station up on Chopmist Hill in little old Rhode Island could have
> done so much so efficiently for so many?
> Early on, the U.S. Army was skeptical, too, Cave said, so Army officials
> challenged the RID operators on Chopmist Hill to prove themselves. RID
> supervisor Sterling picked up the gauntlet. He told Army brass that his
> operators could pin down the exact location of any station within 15
> minutes from the time it began operating.
> So, the Army set up a phony station inside the Pentagon, without
> notifying the FCC, and began transmitting. Sure enough, the team on
> Chopmist Hill pinpointed and identified the source within seven minutes.
> Perhaps, like people, every place has its day in the sun, too. World War
> II was Chopmist Hill's. It could not be so again.
> "The problem with Scituate now is one of population growth," said
> Anthony M. Gates, a former Navy radioman now employed by the FCC as a
> program analyst in Washington.
> "There are a lot of new homes, buildings and factories in the area, all
> of which tend to produce extensive interference with radio signals,"
> Gates said. "that was not the case during the '40's."
> After the war, the station site was used as headquarters for Rhode
> Island's office of Civil Preparedness. The agency moved to Providence in
> 1965.
> Today, the rusting steel door to the blockhouse groans in protest every
> time farm owner Frederick Leeder goes inside to get some hay for his
> small dairy herd. The barracks building is gone, and its cement-slab
> foundation now serves as a platform for Leeder's large woodpile.
> The small concrete blockhouse is there, guarded still by its six-foot,
> barbed-wire topped hurricane fence. And nearby, a few stubby telephone
> poles still stand in the pasture next to Darby Road, like dedicated
> sentries ready to carry messages that will never come.
> Reproduced with permission of the Providence Journal-Bulletin.
> Originally authored by Journal-Bulletin staff writer Jim McDonald. First
> printed December 6, 1981.
> Special thanks to John "Cranston John" O'Rourke W1LZY (first licensed
> April 1939)
>
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> =30=
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