Scarborough Station

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Antenna field belonging to the station in Irton Moor near Scarborough (2010)
The HRO of the National Radio Company was the most widely used wireless receiver in the British Y stations
The area just outside the base. Some of the antennas can be seen in the background (2010).

Scarborough Station (also: GCHQ Scarborough ) is a base of the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) (secret service). It is located more than 300 km north of London in the English county of North Yorkshire not far from the center of Scarborough on the English east coast. During the Second World War there was an important listening point for the British secret service .

history

Even before the First World War in 1912, the built Royal Navy ( Navy of the United Kingdom ) is a radio station near Scarborough. Their main task during the war was the radio monitoring of the high seas of the German Imperial Navy operating in the North Sea .

During the Second World War Scarborough was an important radio eavesdropping station ( Y station ) of the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) ( German about "State Code and Cipher School"). One of the British War Office Y Groups (WOYG) (radio eavesdropping groups of the War Ministry) was stationed here, whose task it was to intercept and record the enemy, especially German radio traffic. For example, with the German machine Enigma encrypted and in Morse code transmitted ciphertexts and using the Lorenz cipher encrypted secret German radio teletype (British alias Fish ) were collected in Scarborough and recorded. The British Codebreakers in Bletchley Park succeeded in deciphering and analyzing them for intelligence purposes . The German radio messages often contained important war information, which the British grouped under the code name Ultra and used for their own planning.

The radio location was one of the tasks of the station. With the help of Scarborough, it was possible to locate the position of the German battleship Bismarck and thus to contribute to its sinking in May 1941.

After the war, in 1965, the station was taken over by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) , the successor organization of GC & CS , and continued to be used as a listening post. During the Cold War period , mainly Soviet radio transmissions were intercepted. In 2001 it got its current name GCHQ Scarborough .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A short history of Sigint in Scarborough (English). Retrieved March 21, 2017.

Coordinates: 54 ° 16 ′ 1 ″  N , 0 ° 26 ′ 50 ″  W.