Fury And Ice: The Role of Top Secret Allied Codebreaking in the Battle for Greenland

Featured photo: Members of the US Coast Guard disembark on Greenland’s icy east coast in bid to track down German weather forecasters (via National Archives).

By Peter Harmsen | 4 min read

In the summer of 1940, Royal Navy Intelligence Officer Edward Thomas was dispatched to Iceland as part of a British force occupying the North Atlantic territory to deny it to the Nazis. Thomas was tangentially involved in highly confidential efforts to read encrypted enemy communications. During the first weeks of his stay, he was alerted to clandestine German plans to send agents to Greenland to secure meteorological data that was vital for the war effort in Europe.

More specifically, the Germans planned to send a group of citizens from recently occupied Denmark to Greenland on board a ship, Furenak, which was dispatched from a port in Norway, also under German occupation. Once they had settled down on the coast of Greenland, the Nazi-controlled agents were to radio regular weather reports to their German handlers in Europe. The plan came to naught as the Norwegian coast guard vessel, Fridtjof Nansen, an Allied service, was sent to Greenland to apprehend the expedition members and sail them to the British Isles for internment.

Despite his security clearance, Thomas was not among the small group of men and women informed about British efforts to break the German Enigma code, but in retrospect he concluded that the Greenland Operation was one of the early successes in what was later to become the Ultra Operation: the Allies advantage gained by being able to read encrypted German signals.

Another example of how Ultra affected the events in Greenland was during the spring of 1943, when British codebreakers decoded a message from the German Navy’s Group North headquarters revealing that a weather station manned by German sailors on the northeast coast of Greenland was to continue its work even though it had been recently discovered by members of a US-backed Danish sledge patrol.

This information was passed on to Washington DC, prompting General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the US Army, to issue an order to “annihilate” the Germans. This was achieved by US Army Air Force bombers stationed in Iceland under the command of Bernt Balchen, a Norwegian aviator who had gone into American service at the beginning of the war.

Given the highly confidential nature of the subject in the first decades of the post-war period, many sources refer to Ultra only in an oblique manner. When he drafted his war memoirs years later, British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill described the American establishment of an air base in Greenland in the spring of 1941, then adding: “It was known that the Germans intended similar action.” This particular sentence was deleted from the published version of Churchill’s work as part of a general editorial effort to remove any direct or even indirect reference to Ultra, which was still a closely guarded secret known only to a few.

But the fact is that in this case Ultra yielded flawed intelligence. At the time, the Germans had no intention of establishing a permanent air base in Greenland. However, Churchill’s words point to the possibility that the mere belief that the Germans did indeed have such plans may have precipitated US efforts to establish a military presence on the islands.

In this way, Allied codebreakers also played a role in determining events in isolated Greenland, as it did in most other parts of the world during the war years. It serves to underline that most history-writing in the immediate aftermath of the war was necessarily incomplete, missing the important piece of the puzzle known as Ultra.

WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT the strategic significance of Greenland? Be sure to read FURY AND ICE by Peter Harmsen.

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