I was watching an old movie from 1942 and the main character is complaining that he don’t know what the weather will be like anymore. The wife says “Well you can thank the Japs for that, newspapers don’t tell you what the weather will be anymore. They only tell you what it is or was.”
Did the newspapers really not publish forecasts of weather information during World War II or is this some joke I don’t get. It was an old comedy.
Weather was censored in British and European newspapers and radio broadcasts (at least the combatant countries); I assume it was the same in North America and the Pacific.
Weather reports were regarded as “essential information” in a number of areas during the war, and as such were restricted from being broadcast for fear that it would give the enemy useful information.
And hence the need for Wetter-Funkgerät Land-26, which in addition to being the best name for a non-existent Kraftwerk album, is one of the neatest displays in the Canadian War Museum.
I’m sure I have seen some British wartime newspapers from 1944 where they have actually quoted German newspaper weather reports. I suppose the thinking was that if the Germans already had this information it could safely be published in British papers.
That would be news to the Swiss. I know that in English it is strongly associated with that specific German force of 1935-1945 but in the German language it’s a generic term for “air force.” To an American a German newspaper referring to the “US-Luftwaffe” would probably seem a bit odd.
Not just the Luftwaffe, it was of use to the German Army as well. There is an argument that one of the reasons for the success of D-Day on 6 June 1944 was the lack of a good weather forecast available to the Germans. Eisenhower was advised that there would be a period of reasonable weather on the 6/7th and launched Overlord while Rommel, believing the bad weather of the 4/5th would continue, headed for Germany and many senior commanders were away from their headquarters.
I don’t think we cared very much what the Swiss knew, although I know very well that “Luftwaffe” is just German for “Air Force” (and that the Swiss had an air force of their own, featuring a number of exported German aircraft). So far as anyone cared at the time “Luftwaffe”, unqualified, meant Goering and his boys. The Germans were free to call anyone’s air force a Luftwaffe (it’s their language, after all) and any Germanophones free to call their own what they liked, but when you’re talking about who the English didn’t want to give weather information to, there’s only one “Luftwaffe” meant by the term.
Similarly “U-boat” invariably means a German submarine in English parlance, even though an Unterseeboot is the same no matter whose flag it flies.
True of course but that doesn’t make “German Luftwaffe” tautological. Tautology is the needless repetition of the same thing in different words. In common use the “German” may be redundant but there is no repetition - you cannot use German on its own in the sentence and have it make sense!
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