A short documentary produced by Edward Fouhy, a local resident and journalist, is the first to detail the station’s role in locating and sinking German U-boats that torpedoed American supply ships and tankers as they carried fuel and supplies to embattled Britain.
The film is playing at the former listening post, which is now the Chatham Marconi Maritime Museum. The museum opens today for its second season.
“The more I heard, the more I was struck by these brave young people,’’ Fouhy said yesterday. “Working here was a hard job, with no glory at all.’’
From 1939-1945, during the Battle of the Atlantic, German U-boats sank 2,600 Allied merchant ships, killing more than 30,000 American merchant marines, according to the museum.
But after this station and others along the coast began intercepting messages from U-boats to Berlin command centers, the Allies sank more Nazi submarines and got more supplies to England, turning the tide of the war.
Nearly 600 Navy men and later women worked around the clock on two tasks: sending intercepted code to Washington to be translated through a captured German code machine called Enigma; and working with other stations on the East Coast to pinpoint U-boats.
Tuning to a certain radio frequency created an invisible line between sender and receiver, Fouhy said. When multiple stations listened to a German submarine’s transmissions, the intersection of those lines determined the U-boat’s position.
The number of submarines the Allies sank spiked, and the number of Allied vessels bringing supplies to Europe soared after Chatham began helping. Soon, the station was the busiest in the Western Hemisphere, said Charles Bartlett, the museum president.
Chatham’s job was made easier by Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the U-boat program and later head of the German Navy, who became head of state after Hitler died. Fouhy called Dönitz a talkative control freak who insisted that his submarines surface each night for the next day’s orders.
