The Navy Radio Building is a small brick one-story building in Amagansett that was constructed in 1942 as part of a top secret military program to keep track of the whereabouts of German submarines during World War II. Its entrance is on Bluff Road at the corner of Atlantic Avenue. It’s rear windows look out onto the Atlantic Ocean 300 yards away. When it was built, 10 sailors each working eight-hour shifts sat at desks amidst radio equipment and maps for the duration of the war to keep an eye on the ocean and report their findings. The sailors lived in a two-story barracks building nearby.
That building today is the Amagansett Marine Museum and is also still standing. But it does not offer the incredible history that this much smaller brick building does. Today the Navy Radio building is simply a garage for a historic sea rescue Coast Guard boat. And it is attached to a new and larger building that is the offices for the Town Trustees, a government agency.
Between 1940 and 1942, with the war on, the United States was sending freighters filled with tanks, guns, ammunition and supplies to Britain in the hopes of keeping the British safe from an assault by the Germans. Hundreds of these American freighters were sunk by the German submarines as they tried to cross the Atlantic. Should it continue, Hitler and Germany might very well win the war.
Late in 1941, scientists in America realized that if you could listen to the radio signal of a German sub at sea and simultaneously track the direction from which it had come from three different land based locations along our coast, you could, by triangulation, discover the German sub’s location by where the lines crossed.
The three radio stations were built along the ocean in Florida, Maine and Amagansett with the triangulation done in Washington after all coordinates were phoned in. Destroyers and aircraft carriers could then be rushed to the scene and the German submarine destroyed by depth charges thrown into the water. It was a top secret solution. And it changed the balance of the war.
Old postcards today show this modest 20 x 40 foot Navy radio building. On either side of it were two 60-foot-high antennas that could catch the sound. Local residents could only speculate on what those antennas were for. Approaching the radio building was off limits.
At two o’clock in the morning on June 21, 1942, the 10 men monitoring the information on their radio receivers inside the Navy Radio Building in Amagansett were so busy they did not notice that just outside out at the beach a German submarine had surfaced and was dispatching four Nazi saboteurs in a rubber boat being paddled through the surf and up onto the shore.
Fortunately, the saboteurs landed just 100 yards from the Amagansett Coast Guard Station where an ensign at that hour was walking the beach. He ran to the station to report the saboteurs and cause an alert to go out to a nearby Army unit in a tent camp in Napeague. The soldiers quickly came to the scene, but they were not quick enough. The sub made its getaway, the saboteurs disappeared only to be caught later in New York City by one of them turning the others in to the FBI before anybody could do any damage.
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By Dan Rattiner
