Quote:
Originally Posted by Matti Salonen
German documents are relatively easy, because the only anomaly is German summer time. But what about other countries? Did UK authorities use always GMT? ...
Finally, Merry Xmas to you and to every TOCH member, who is reading this,
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Merry Christmas, to Matti and all!
I have a partial answer to your question about times used in wartime reports, Matti. First, there is a helpful reference for the dates when Germany changed the clocks during the war, on page
xxxiii of the book U-Boat Attack Logs: A Complete Record of Warship Sinkings from Original Sources, 1939-1945 by Daniel Morgan and Bruce Taylor
"Times are given in the twenty-four-hour clock, both in the original KTBs and in the translations. U-boat timekeeping was based on the Kriegsmarine’s adoption of German official or ‘legal’ time (Deutsche Gesetzliche Zeit – DGZ) which varied according to the season as well as for other reasons. The variants were Mittlere Greenwich-Zeit (MGZ – Greenwich Mean Time/GMT), Mitteleuropäische Zeit (MEZ – Central European Time: GMT +1) and Deutsche Sommerzeit (DSZ – German Summer Time: GMT +2). The timekeeping observed by the U-Boot-Waffe during the Second World War was as follows, though it should not be regarded as absolute since there were departures from it at certain times and in certain waters, not to mention a number of irregularities specific to individual U-boats.
Dates Timekeeping
3 September 1939–1 April 1940 either MGZ (GMT) or MEZ (GMT +1)
1 April 1940–2 November 1942 DSZ (GMT +2)
2 November 1942–29 March 1943 MEZ (GMT +1)
29 March–4 October 1943 DSZ (GMT +2)
4 October 1943–3 April 1944 MEZ (GMT +1)
3 April–2 October 1944 DSZ (GMT +2)
2 October 1944–2 April 1945 MEZ (GMT +1)
2 April 1945 onwards DSZ (GMT +2)"
In July 2016, Mark Hood made a
very helpful post on the
RAF Commands forum, which included pages from the book
RAF Records in the PRO by Christina Goulter, Simon Fowler, Roy Conyers Nesbit and Peter Elliott
The images from that book made available by Mark show the dates when the times were changed both in Britain and Germany, and state that Italy conformed to German time when it was an Axis ally.
There is also the online file entitled
Time calculation 1940-1945, originally written by Rob de Bruin. This extract is a translation contained within Jaap Woortman’s
Handbook for the (re)search of Luftwaffe personnel dating from 2001.
Warm regards,
Dan