Listening to German Messages
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- Medium: Video
- Owner: Veterans Affairs Canada
- Duration: 3:15
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Listening to German Messages
Mr. Gauthier explains his work as a telegrapher. His job was to listen to messages from the German Navy.
Gilles Gauthier
Mr. Gauthier grew up in Cap-de-la-Madeleine, near the port. His father had a restaurant where he often heard sailors talk of what was going on during the war and on the ships. Interested, he went to the HMCS Montcalm offices in Québec City to enlist, to no avail. He was 17 years old at the time and was called up when he turned 18. After his basic training, he took a telegraphy course in Saint-Hyacinthe. After the course, he was sent to Halifax to sail for Bermuda to work as a telegrapher. Back in Halifax, he set sail on the HMCS Springhill to escort convoys. After the war he was in the Régiment de Trois-Rivières, the 12th Armoured, until 1953.
Transcription
Listening to German messages
The station was an room barely four feet square and there were three, there were three large wireless sets in it, and there was a set about as big as a television and with that during the day we could detect . . . you had to be quick to catch the bearing from where it came from. We were part of a group of eight ships and when it would come, we sent the message elsewhere, it was the first who caught it, who picked it up, and then everyone fixed on the same thing and made . . . took a bearing. And only once were we told, did we learn that they said "thank you" to us. That's all that we found out [laughter]. We detected it on the coast of Florida and we were in the Gulf of St. Lawrence so it was pretty far away. But our job was to listen and if . . . they gave us certain frequencies to listen to, and we took note of that, and we sent that to the decoder, and if it was a message that came maybe from the United States and things like that, that had nothing to do with us, they didn't decode it; but when it was a message that came, that came from our headquarters, then they decoded it. But there were also wireless operators who did that. But there were many, there were many frequencies, so we had to listen to all the frequencies. They distributed them accordingly. For us, we had the frequencies used by the sailors, by the German navy. But that didn't last for long. In ‘44, they sent their messages so fast that we couldn't pick them up. It was a spool that they made, that played so fast that in thirty seconds, their message was sent. So the others, the guys at the other end, picked them up, then they played them slower. But they didn't know that the English had decoded their message. It happened, it was right around that time that they were able to pretty much know where they were. And it was from that time that with planes that was the end of it for them. Because when the Americans came in, they were escorting, we were escorting, they had escorts. We had an aircraft carrier with us. And with the aircraft carrier, we were OK. Nothing to worry after that! [laughter]
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