Can You Keep A Really Big Secret? New Marconi Center Exhibit Chronicles Station’s Covert Role In WWII

CHATHAMPORT – The year is 1942, and Chatham is coming to grips with wartime existence: rationing, air raid drills, preparation for a potential invasion, and the departure of so many young people to fight in faraway lands. But with all of this activity — and in a small town where secrets were hard to keep — the town hosted a covert operation that was of vital national importance.

 On the shore of Ryder’s Cove, Chatham Radio played a crucial role in winning the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest single battle of World War II. From 1942 through allied victory in 1945, it became the U.S. Navy’s top secret Station C, covertly intercepting encrypted wireless messages from enemy ships throughout the Atlantic. 

A new exhibit at the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center, “Can You Keep A Really Big Secret?” explores this tense period in the nation’s history, the station's role and the changes in everyday life when Chatham became a wartime “Navy town.”

 “German U-boats were lined up all along the coast,” said Marconi Center volunteer Jeff Gordon, one of the organizers of the exhibit. The submarines were destroying an alarming number of merchant ships ferrying critical war supplies to Europe, and crews at Station C — already a vital ship-to-shore radio site — were intercepting the radio traffic that contained their deadly assignments. But the Germans used a revolutionary coding device, the Enigma machine, that made the messages all but indecipherable. 

“We never broke codes here,” Gordon said. The raw information collected in Chatham and at other stations was transmitted to military decoding installations where, eventually, the code was cracked (that story was told in the film “The Imitation Game”); the station also alerted the Navy’s extensive radio direction-finding network to locate and track the enemy subs. By the time of the D-day invasion, the U-boat threat was largely neutralized. It was a tremendous blow to the Nazis, who were absolutely certain that the code was unbreakable. 

“There was a little bit of arrogance there,” Gordon said.

The Chatham Marconi Maritime Center is open Thursdays through Sundays now and begins its summer schedule on June 17, when it will be open Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission is $12 with discounts for students, veterans and others; find details at www.ChathamMarconi.org.