COAST OF SPIES
A weekend at Cape Agulhas turns up some WW2 mystery
HAVING to attend a family do in Struisbaai, I decided to book myself, my fiancée Annette and her two teenage girls into an old fisherman’s cottage in nearby Cape Agulhas. I saw it as an opportunity to show the children the southern tip of Africa and take them up the iconic lighthouse. But, unbeknown to them, I was also on a historical sleuthing mission of my own.
“You know, just the other day, a bent-over old lady shuffled in here and asked me if I knew where the old radar station was; and before I could say that I did, she told me she’d been an operator there during World War 2,” Maureen Fourie of Cape Agulhas Tourism told us after our excursion to the top of the recently renovated lighthouse.
I was ecstatic. The “old lady” was living proof of the existence of the top-secret Special Signal Services Corps, which manned the 17 radar stations around the western and southern Cape coastline during World War 2, one of which was in Cape Agulhas. On my way out of the lighthouse, Fourie pointed to the ruins of the old radar station up on the ridge behind the town — but told us there was no point going there as there was little to see.
I had stumbled across the activities of this corps, staffed by many female university graduates, while trawling the internet for more information on the wartime U-boat activity off this coast.
If the reports in certain historical journals and posts online are to be believed, the radar operators of the corps didn’t only have the Germans off-shore to worry about.
In their co-authoring of the Military History Journal (Volume 11 — No 2 of December 1998; samilitaryhistory.org) corps veterans Geoffrey Mangin and Sheilah Lloyd write: “Based on readings taken by the Agulhas radar operators, many people in the area believe that U-boats may have been replenished regularly at night near Arniston by farmers who favoured Nazi Germany.”
A forum member on an internet site claims there is a house with a “huge swastika” on its seaward side somewhere on the rocky coast near Agulhas and that it was a rendezvous point for U-boat crews and local collaborators. “The [local] people were the contact and sometimes the submariners used to play soccer with our guys onshore. Also, one of the captains of a U-boat went to an opera house in Cape Town during the war!” the forum member writes.
As they’d declared our fisherman’s shack “old and boring” upon our arrival there the previous evening, the teenagers would, I thought, jump at the chance to go for a walk on the coastal path to the southernmost tip the next day.
When they elected to stay behind “to finish their school projects and stuff” in the bungalow, I figured the ozone-filled air and the roar of the nearby surf must have lessened their initial dislike of the old place.
Enjoying our alone time, Annette and I walked along a narrow, shellstrewn path and ruminated over what life must have been like for the hunter-gatherer San people who lived along these shores for tens of thousands of years, collecting mussels and corralling fish in their rockwalled enclosures.
How we wished it were us, if only for a while.