Aug 17, 1820. Digby Island
, Prince Rupert harbour.
Stabbootsman Lange stood in the bow of the leading yawl. The oarsmen were working hard, and the landing beach lay just ahead. Out of the fog he could see the two towers and the roof of his objective, the Dominion Wireless Station Digby Island.
Prince Rupert’s crew had cut the submarine cable to the station, but operators could still send signals manually. Captain Von Schönberg preferred that they did not. Back on the Nürnberg, the wireless operator was monitoring the airwaves, and prepared to jam on the first dot or dash that the station transmitted.
But that would tip their hand to all the wireless equipped ships in the harbour that some caper was up. If his team was fast, they could storm the wireless station before they got word off. The two boats ground up on the beach, and the men jumped ashore. Most were armed with rifles, some also carried axes and bolt cutters, and a pair of men trailed behind carrying the now obligatory crate of Dynamite.
As the men left the beach they had to clamber over huge logs that had become stranded at the high tide mark. Then they had to scramble up a steep bank that left them almost exhausted when they reached the top. The men caught their breath in the tree line. Lange could see the station was a collection of wood frame buildings. One was two stories and looked like a farmhouse. The others seemed to be storerooms and shacks. All were quite new looking. The buildings sat in the middle of a hundred meter clearing, tangled with shrubs and giant stumps. The masts holding up the antenna were made of wood, stepped like ship’s masts, well over 70 meters tall and supported by guy wires, with the long antenna wire stretched between almost lost in the fog.
Having scouted the location, the main body of men advanced towards the largest building at a walk, covering the building with their rifles and weaving between stumps and shrubs. A pair of men headed towards each mast, running at a crouch, One sailor, the best rifle shot, climbed up onto a stump as tall as a house, and took an overwatch position with his rifle. Some faint sounds of explosions came from the distance. A dog began to bark.
The door opened, and a man stuck his head out. “Paddy! Quiet!” he yelled at the dog, then closed the door again. The dog stopped barking, then started up again. Some more distant explosions sounded. The men broke into a run.
A pair of sailors reached the bottom of one of the radio masts, and noticing the antenna and ground wires wire running up the pole, cut them with their axe.
The Canadian opened the door again, but before he could shush the barking dog, he noticed thirty-odd armed men in German naval uniforms approaching the front door at a full run, only a few paces away. The Canadian ducked back inside shouting. Lange and his men thundered up the stairs onto the veranda and shouldered the door aside without slowing. The dog, a spaniel, stood a distance down the veranda, barking its head off. In the front room the first Canadian was shouting and pointing, and two other men in khaki uniforms sat at a kitchen table, looking up from their card game. Two rifles leaned against the wall in the corner of the room. One of the militiamen looked over at the rifles.
“No, no, no,” said Lange, pointing his Navy Luger carbine at the men. The men remained seated. The front room of the house continued to fill with German sailors.
“Search the building!” Lange ordered. The men in the front room were ushered outside at gunpoint, with their hands in the air. Teams of sailors searched upstairs and down. At the back of the first floor was the radio operations room. The radio operator, having interpreted the commotion, was wildly tapping on his key. The sailors interrupted him. He tried frantically to get a few more words into his alarm message, until one of the sailors said “Antenna,” and made a snipping motion with his first two fingers. Through a small window in the operations room, the Germans could see a spark dancing on the transmitter gear in the next room.
Upstairs were accommodations. Outside was an engine house with a big one cylinder Fairbanks Morse, a generator shed, and sundry storage outbuildings. Beside the engine house was a 500 gallon gasoline tank, half full. The wireless operator and three more men in civilian clothing were produced by the search of the station.
The Canadians were informed they were prisoners of war, and were marched back to the boats under guard. The dog followed them. The radio operations equipment was destroyed with axes. Some sailors were about to do the same with the transmitter and its transformer, when they were stopped by another crewman of the landing party, who was cross-trained as an electrician. “There could be a million volts in those boxes,” he said. “Don’t be in such a hurry to kill yourself. We are burning the building down anyway.” Dynamite charges were placed in the Fairbanks Morse engine and the generators.
At Lange’s direction, sailors opened the drain tap on the gasoline tank and filled some buckets. The men poured gasoline down the halls of the radio building, leading in a trail to the front door. Fuses were lit in the sheds. Lange and the remaining landing party stood by the front steps. A sailor stuck a match. There were sounds of running footsteps from inside. Lange motioned for the sailor to freeze, and the man blew out his match. The men raised their rifles to cover the doorway. A woman and a girl of about 10 years, in long dresses, ran out the front door, their eyes wild. They stopped short when they saw they were looking down a dozen rifle barrels.
Lange motioned for the men to lower their guns. “I ordered the building to be searched,” he said sharply to his men. He turned to face the woman, and dug deep to find the English words. “I apologize ma’am. We thought we had cleared the building.”
The girl clung to her mother, but she did not cry. Instead she looked like she would take all the Germans on by herself, given an opportunity. “We hid,” said the woman. “But then we smelled the fumes. Where is my husband?”
“He is a prisoner of war.” Lange replied. The woman recoiled. “But I give you my word that he is safe,” Lange continued. “And he will be released at the earliest opportunity. You should see him again soon.” The Spaniel returned from across the clearing, and leaned against the girl’s legs.
“Please now,” said Lange, “move back from the building. Your shoes have been walking in gasoline.” The sailors stood back to let them pass. “Is there a place you can walk to from here for shelter?”
The woman responded cautiously, as if she suspected she was being interrogated. “Yes,” she said curtly.
“You should go then.” said Lange. The girl looked at Lange, and then up at her mother. This was not what she expected. “We will be leaving now. Do not return to these buildings, they will all be destroyed. Again I apologize. I am afraid this is what war is like.”
The woman and girl walked away, slowly at first, then they broke into a run. The dog ran beside them.
“That was too close,” said Lange. “Alright. Back to it.” The sailor with the match box lit and threw a match onto the front steps. A fireball burst on the stairs, blasting heat in the men’s faces. The flames raced in through the front door, and the windows lit up orange. The remainder of the party, with Lange at the rear, headed back for the boats. They were halfway across the clearing when the upstairs windows shattered, and the flames reached past the roof of the building. The Dynamite charges went off on the other side of the building. The remaining gasoline in the fuel tank went off in an enormous fireball. The sailors at the bases of the antenna masts waited until the landing party was past. Then they used boltcutters to cut the guywires on the sides of the masts facing away from the station. When the landing party was safely back at the treeline they lit the fuses on the charges placed at the base of the masts.
As these men reached the treeline, the wireless masts were blasted by explosions, and they fell, one after the other towards the blazing wireless operations building. One landed directly on the roof, slicing through the building and raising a burst of sparks and flames. Ten minutes later the party was back in its boats and rowing away.
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