According to
Ed Davey, the Rivers Monitoring Station
was opened in Manitoba in 1937 and was the fourth monitoring station in
Canada to be operated by the Radio Branch of the DOT. At the time, the
Radio Branch also operated three other monitoring stations:
Ottawa,
Ontario, Strathburn, Ontario and
Vancouver, British Columbia. So
Rivers was also the first western Canadian
Monitoring Station. The name of the first OIC was
G.A. "Duke" Coutanche.
Upon the collapse of France in
1940, the British Admiralty requested that the Royal Canadian Navy assume all coverage of French Naval frequencies. All French
Naval code and cypher intercepted was forwarded to the Admiralty by
cable and Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) teletype. The preambles and
signatures of the messages were coded. Over the years, Winnipeg was
responsible for neutral shipping, German shipping and Japanese naval
intercept.
The Royal Canadian Navy in turn,
asked DOT for the use of Forrest Manitoba to
cover these targets. This site, about 29 kilometres south east of the
Rivers Monitoring Station was also known as
DOT3. Beginning in May 1942, the
Forrest monitoring site was manned by DOT
personnel until relocating to Stevenson Field in
Winnipeg, about eight miles to the west of the city proper on
Whytewold Road. Winnipeg, like other wireless
facilities, housed two separate sites; one being the "Y" site, the other a
DF site. The "Y" site was DOT operated and controlled, but the DF site was
manned by naval personnel.
DOT continued to operate the
Rivers Monitoring station during World War
II, while monitoring operations were also carried out at
Forrest and then
Winnipeg. Following the war, the Rivers
Monitoring Station continued to operate and the other monitoring sites
were closed down.
