Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor: Subs and Spies
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Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor:
"Subs and Spies" 

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German submarine messages and suspected spies

At this time, German submarines had appeared off the coast, not far from the station, and had sunk several ships and barges. We used to get a lot of anonymous calls from various shore resorts telling of strange lights seen at sea. When our men arrived with night glasses in hand, there was never anything to see. However, we did get a little excitement at one time, when Snell discovered strange signals on a considerably higher frequency than any we were normally receiving, and coming at very irregular and very brief intervals. These were pure continuous wave signals, yet could not be connected with any of the harmonics from our own or any other nearby stations. We could not help but feel that some of these might have been an attempt to communicate between German submarines and spies on shore, because everyone felt at the time that the German subs were being refueled, or at least given food, from our side of the Atlantic.

I dispatched Young on the motorcycle, with a portable receiver, and he cruised all of that part of New Jersey in an attempt to find where these signals came from, but couldn't pin them down. After coming back, he built a portable loop direction finder with an attached receiver, mounted in an old truck, and located the source of the trouble at our own station at New Brunswick. They came on only when the Alexanderson alternator was working and were relatively weak. We never found out just what caused them, but decided it had something to do with the speed regulating mechanism on the alternator, which kept it exactly on the same frequency. Young got a broken arm out of this business while he was attempting to crank the old truck. This direction finder was probably one of the first Navy portable radio direction finders.
Page updated December 30, 2003  page created September 02, 2000

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