In WWII, Germany built a secret weather station in Canada that wasn’t discovered until 1977.

German Kriegsmarine, 1941

Though it tends not to receive as much credit as its neighbor to the south, Canada made significant contributions to World War II. Entering the conflict just nine days after Germany invaded Poland — and more than two years before the United States — Canada fought in both the European and Pacific theaters of the war. It also faced an incursion that few knew about until decades later, as Germany established a secret weather station in Labrador that wasn’t discovered until 1977.

Weather Station Kurt (Wetter-Funkgerät Land-26) was built by the crew of the U-boat U-537 in October 1943 and disguised with camouflage steel drums. It was established to gain an advantage in the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic by predicting the weather in Europe, as weather systems generally move west to east.

Despite being quite sophisticated — it was powered by both batteries and a wind generator and used Morse code to send encrypted data back to Germany via a shortwave radio transmitter — the station stopped working after a few days. Installed on what was then the British-controlled Dominion of Newfoundland and is now Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s easternmost province, the weather station was in a remote location that received few visitors — which is why Canada didn’t even know about the site until a geographer happened upon it decades after the war.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Japan attacked a Canadian lighthouse in 1942.

Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan launched a much smaller attack on Canada when a submarine that had been stationed near Seattle shelled a humble lighthouse on Vancouver Island. The events of June 20, 1942, were largely inconsequential — no one was injured, and Estevan Point Lighthouse wasn’t damaged — but they did mark the first time that a military force had attacked Canadian soil since the War of 1812.

The minor impact didn’t prevent conspiracy theories, however. Some Canadians were of the belief that the “attack” was actually part of a government plan to increase support for conscription, which Canadian Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King had promised would never come to pass. “It seemed to me,” King wrote the following day, “that these events could not but have their effect upon Canadian feeling with regard to conscripting men to be sent overseas.” There was no conspiracy, as Japanese naval records confirmed they had been responsible for the incursion, but Canada nevertheless implemented conscription in 1944.