For thirty-four years, a cluster of metal canisters sat undisturbed on a barren hillside near Cape Chidley, at the northern tip of Labrador. Labeled with the name of a nonexistent Canadian meteorological firm, the equipment looked official enough that the few people who stumbled across it assumed it was some forgotten government project. In 1977, a geomorphologist named Peter Johnson, working in the area on unrelated research, found the canisters and reported them. It took four more years before anyone realized what they actually were: a Nazi weather station, planted by the crew of U-537 in October 1943, the only known armed German military operation on land in North America during the Second World War. The submarine that placed it would travel halfway around the world before meeting its own end in the Java Sea, sunk by an American submarine in one of the war's most improbable encounters.
By 1943, Germany's weather forecasting had become a strategic liability. Atlantic weather systems move from west to east, giving the Allies a natural advantage: their stations in North America, Greenland, and Iceland fed data into forecasts that shaped convoy routes, bombing raids, and naval operations. Germany, denied access to the western Atlantic, was forecasting blind. The Kriegsmarine's answer was the Wetter-Funkgeraet Land series, automatic weather stations designed to be deployed by U-boat in remote locations and transmit readings by radio. U-537 departed Kiel on September 18, 1943, under the command of Kapitanleutnant Peter Schrewe, carrying WFL-26, codenamed Kurt. Aboard was meteorologist Dr. Kurt Sommermeyer and his assistant Walter Hildebrant, tasked with installing the device. On October 22, U-537 surfaced in Martin Bay on the Labrador coast. The crew hauled the canisters ashore, set up the transmitter, and scattered empty American cigarette packs around the site to mislead anyone who might find it. The station was designed to broadcast weather readings every three hours on 3940 kilohertz.
Weather Station Kurt was an engineering accomplishment and a strategic failure. Within days of activation, the signal began to degrade. Within three weeks, transmissions ceased entirely. Whether the batteries failed, the harsh Labrador conditions overwhelmed the equipment, or a technical flaw doomed the project from the start remains unclear. Germany never sent another U-boat to repair or replace it. The station sat silent through the rest of the war, through the decades that followed, through the entirety of the Cold War. When Peter Johnson found the equipment in 1977, the deception worked as intended: he assumed it was Canadian. Not until 1981, when retired German engineer Franz Selinger published research identifying the WFL program, did the pieces fall into place. The Canadian military recovered what remained of the station and transferred it to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, where it sits today, an artifact of a war that touched even the most remote corners of the continent.
After planting Weather Station Kurt, U-537 continued her first patrol on anti-shipping operations off Newfoundland. She survived attacks from Canadian aircraft, including rockets from a Hudson bomber of No. 11 Squadron RCAF and depth charges from Catalina flying boats of No. 5 Squadron RCAF. Damaged but intact, she reached the U-boat base at Lorient, France, on December 8, 1943. Her second patrol was an epic transit: departing Lorient on March 25, 1944, U-537 sailed south around Africa and across the Indian Ocean to Batavia, present-day Jakarta, arriving on August 2 after 131 days at sea. It was one of the longer submarine voyages of the war, a testament to both the endurance of the Type IXC/40 design and the desperation of Germany's strategy in sending U-boats to operate in the Far East alongside their Japanese allies.
On October 1, 1944, U-537 moved from Batavia to Surabaya. On November 9, she departed on what would be her third and final patrol. The following day, the USS Flounder, a Gato-class submarine patrolling the Java Sea north of the Lombok Strait, spotted what her crew initially took for a small sailboat. Closer inspection through the periscope revealed a conning tower. Flounder went to battle stations submerged and fired four torpedoes. One struck home; a second detonation followed as U-537 exploded beneath the surface, smoke and flame erupting from the water. All fifty-eight officers and men aboard died. It was one of the rare instances during the war of an American submarine sinking a German one, a collision of two naval traditions separated by an ocean and a hemisphere, meeting in tropical waters neither would have predicted as a battlefield. Peter Schrewe, who had commanded U-537 from her commissioning through her secret mission in Labrador and her marathon voyage to the Pacific, went down with his boat.
Sinking site located at approximately 7.22S, 115.28E in the Java Sea, east of Surabaya and north of Bali. From the air, the position is open water between the north coast of Madura Island and the Kangean Islands. Nearest major airport is Juanda International (WARR/SUB) in Surabaya to the west. The Lombok Strait, visible as the channel between Bali and Lombok, lies to the south. Weather Station Kurt's location in Labrador, near Cape Chidley at approximately 60.05N, 64.40W, is the other end of this story's geography.