Story: Intelligence services

At the outbreak of war in 1914 the Post Office's coastal radio Morse stations were taken over by the navy. The Post Office radio operators continued to work the stations, listening for enemy Morse-code messages. The relatively small amount of radio traffic in the 1910s meant that messages could be heard from very long distances without interference. The ZLW station on Tinakori Hill (later called Te Ahumairangi Hill), Wellington, was one of three established in 1911. The other two were ZLD in Auckland and ZLC in the Chatham Islands. By 1914 two more stations had been set up, ZLA at Awanui, in Northland, and ZLB at Awarua, near Bluff.

Transcript

When war broke out the Morse station on the Tinakori Hills actually became a naval station. Everything we heard we had to copy down and it was telegraphed and cabled to various parts of the world. The Main Body had left on a Sunday morning and late that night I intercepted a message which I thought to be a German signal. I took it down and it was cabled to Melbourne and deciphered there and it turned out that there was a German fleet in the Pacific and from the message they knew quite a lot about our doings here in New Zealand. The message was from the flagship Gneisenau to, or at least from the Scharnhorst to the Gneisenau. And they knew all about the sailing of our Main Body and so they were recalled by the authorities of course and were incamped in New Zealand for three or four weeks before they subsequently left. 

So Clyde Drummond's highly trained ear was able to recognise the disguised German signal for what it really was and avert what could've been a disaster for our troopships.