by Don Keith
Still, though, shipping losses continued to pile up, even if most Americans were unaware of it. That information was not given to the media, primarily for morale reasons. It appeared it would be a long time yet before Allied shipping could move in the Atlantic Ocean without fear of attack from the U-boats.
One of the groups, hunter-killer Task Group 22.3, consisted of a small aircraft carrier, the USS Guadalcanal (CVE-60), which carried a contingent of fighter planes and torpedo bombers, and five light destroyer escort vessels. Pilots could leave the decks of the carrier and search vast areas of the ocean for submarines, using their own eyes or radar. They also had a relatively new device called a sonobuoy that could be dropped into the sea, then used to listen for the subtle sounds of U-boats that might be submerged, out of sight of human eyes or radar equipment.
When an enemy submarine was located, the pilots marked the spot and allowed the trailing warships to move in and launch depth charges. Those light destroyers were faster and more maneuverable than their larger destroyer sisters. They were faster than the U-boats, too. They were also equipped with sensitive radar and sound gear, and they carried a special arsenal, some only recently developed, including guns and torpedoes for attacking surfaced boats, little “hedgehog” bombs that only exploded upon contact with submerged vessels, and deadly depth charges that could be set to explode when they reached a predetermined distance downward.
It is appropriate that the only captured enemy U-boat is now in Chicago, because the commander of Task Group 22.3, the group that took the U-505, was a native Chicagoan. Captain Daniel Gallery was a Naval Academy graduate who had previously served as a pilot and flight instructor, then as head of a seaplane base in Iceland. There, his job was to seek out and destroy U-boats and other threats to the Atlantic trade routes. His pilots sank six German subs. He was awarded the Bronze Star for the work he did there.
In 1944, Gallery left solid ground for a seagoing command. He took the helm of the Guadalcanal and, simultaneously, command of hunter-killer Task Force 22.3. His success continued. He led the task group as they sank three more U-boats.
While proud of what he and his crews had accomplished, Daniel Gallery harbored a bold idea that he could not shake. His job was to destroy enemy submarines and he was good at it. But what if he could capture one of them? What if he could hook a line to one of the U-boats and tow it to someplace safe and secluded? It had become an obsession for the no-nonsense, by-the-book commander.
There was no doubt that it would be worth the risk and effort. The Allies would finally have access to secret German submarine technology, a chance to study exactly how the boats worked so well. But they would also have—if they pulled off the capture correctly—details on the tactics used by the Germans, and, maybe most important, the top secret communication codes the U-boats used.
That would be a treasure of mammoth proportions and, Gallery suspected, it could even be a major turning point in the war.
When he and his task group returned from patrol in the spring of 1944, he went right to work preparing a detailed plan for how such a bold capture could be carried out. For the most part, he and his officers were guessing on the fine details.
Such a high-seas capture of an enemy submarine not only had never happened, it had never been attempted. No manual on how to do such a thing existed.
They knew it wouldn’t be easy. The reason the U-boats had been so successful was that they were so swift and elusive, their commanders and crews so adept. They were accustomed to cruising on the surface, scanning the horizon for smoke that indicated a ship was passing, and boldly making their move. Even in the twentieth century, the best way to spot a ship at a distance was the trail of smoke from her stacks. Once a victim was sighted, the U-boat dove and stalked its prey, using the periscope. When in range, and once the firing parameters had been plotted, torpedoes were launched. The Germans were uncannily accurate and seldom missed. For the first three years of the war, they usually swam away safely, ready to attack again.
The German boats and their crews were feared and respected, both for the design and efficiency of their equipment and for the skill with which they used it. Although the U.S. Navy approved Dan Gallery’s capture plan and gave the green light to begin training his crews for a capture attempt, they did not have high hopes that anyone could actually pull it off. Still, Gallery’s commanders reasoned, the prize was well worth the risks involved.
As the assault crews trained in methods of boarding a U-boat, and as others practiced how to tow such a vessel without accidentally sinking it, Commander Gallery ran up to Washington from Norfolk for a special briefing. He was allowed admittance to the Tenth Fleet, which, in reality, was no real fleet of ships at all. It was the code name for the U.S. Navy’s antisubmarine command. Even deeper inside the Tenth Fleet was F-21, the highly secret room where German boats were constantly being tracked.
Gallery learned that F-21 had been keeping an eye on one particular U-boat for the past month. They followed her as she left the coast of occupied France and swam southward toward Africa. There was no way to tell specifically which submarine it was, but they knew enough to guess that it was one of the older German boats, and that it would most likely be out on patrol for about three months.
It was, of course, the U-505.
The Nazi submarine had had an up-and-down life so far. She had been quite successful on her first two war patrols, operating off the coast of West Africa and in the Caribbean Sea. On her third run, her luck ran out. A British aircraft attacked her near Trinidad. Three bombs struck the submarine. One was a direct hit, striking just behind the conning tower, inflicting near-mortal damage. Somehow her crew was able to make emergency repairs and she managed to limp all the way home for maintenance and a complete overhaul.
After the incident, the U-505 was declared the most heavily damaged submarine ever to make it home for repairs and then survive to fight again. But somehow she seemed jinxed from that point forward. Her next three patrols were fruitless, each cut short by vicious depth-charge attacks. After the final one, and even though they were able to elude their pursuers without any more heavy damage, the captain of the boat calmly left the control room, went to his stateroom, and committed suicide.
As Dan Gallery watched the plots of the mysterious submarine on the maps in F-21, he had no idea of the adventures that this lone U-boat had gone through. He silently vowed that this boat, this unnamed enemy submersible, would be the one he and his crew would bag and tow off to a harbor somewhere for study.
He had identified a quarry. He had approval to try to capture it. He had a crew, trained as well as they could be trained, ready to go out there and take it.
Now, it was time to begin the stalk.
It was May 15, 1944, when the task group sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, bound for a patrol area in the North Atlantic, not far from the Canary Islands. That was also the vicinity in which they expected the U-boat to be operating. When the ships arrived in the area, they received regular updates from F-21 about the probable location and course of the U-boat they had identified.
As he stood on the bridge of his light carrier, Dan Gallery tried not to think about all the things that could go wrong with the plan. First, they were trying to find one minnow in a very big lake. As they looked for that fish, other boats were probably out there too, eagerly looking for targets just like the Guadalcanal and her accompanying destroyers. And the minnow they sought had mighty big teeth, along with the capability of using them.
Even if they could somehow get the submarine to the surface and subdued, they knew that the Germans would do all they could to keep their boat from falling into American hands. They would certainly open valves to the sea so the sub would quickly take on water and sink to the far, distant bottom. They would get the crew off the sub and into lifeboats, but the boat would be well on her way to sinking by then.
It would be a reasonable assumption, too, that explosive scuttle charges would be set and armed, just to m
ake sure the boat went to the bottom before the Americans could get a line on her—charges that may or may not go off before a boarding party climbed up on her decks and went down her ladders.
As he scanned the horizon, peering intently for any sign of a periscope poking above the waves, Gallery ran through the checklists in his head. He hoped his men were prepared for whatever they might encounter if they actually got this fighting fish on the hook. In the distance, he could see several of his Wildcat fighter planes getting smaller and smaller as they went off to hunt. He knew his sonar operators were listening intently to the returned signals from the sonobuoys, too. They hoped to get an inkling of noise from the submerged U-boat to let them know F-21 was right, that the thing was down there.
Two weeks had passed on the patrol already. The tedious search had everyone’s nerves on edge. Now, they were short on fuel. They desperately needed to steer toward Casablanca for refueling at the American base located there before continuing the search.
But the odds would be hopelessly stacked against them by then. The hunted boat could have gone off in any direction by the time they returned to their assigned patrol box. Even if F-21 could somehow reacquire the target, it might be too far away for Gallery’s group to make a run at her.
Finally, reluctantly, Gallery knew they were at the end of their rope. They would soon be running on fumes, and this was no place to have ships dead in the water. He sent out the message to retrieve the planes. They would turn and head east toward the African coast, temporarily abandoning the search. The commander tried to keep the disappointment from his voice as he gave the order to let the U-boat go for now.
It had been a long shot at best, he told himself. If it were easy to latch on to a U-boat, somebody would have done it already.
Then, not ten minutes later, as he turned to go belowdecks to try to get some rest, Dan Gallery received an urgent message from one of his escort destroyers, the USS Chatelain (DE-149).
“Possible contact. Sounds like a U-boat!”
The commander glanced at the clock on the bridge and made an entry in his ever-present notebook: 11:09 a.m., June 4, 1944.
Quickly he gave the order to maneuver the Guadalcanal in order to put distance between the carrier and where the suspected U-boat appeared to be, beneath the surface of the ocean. Though only a small aircraft carrier, she was still a luscious target for an enemy submarine. It was not his nature to run, but he needed the carrier to stay afloat. So did the aircraft that circled in the distance. Besides, he had other vessels better designed than his to approach and attack the U-boat.
The USS Pillsbury (DE-133) and USS Jenks (DE-665) joined the Chatelain as she pointed her bow toward where the sonar thought they had heard the German boat. Then, without hesitation, the attack began the instant there was confirmation that a submarine most definitely lurked beneath them.
The Chatelain was on top of the enemy vessel much too quickly. Depth charges dropped there would fall harmlessly behind the U-boat by the time they drifted down to where they suspected she was running. Instead, the destroyer launched a barrage of twenty-four hedgehogs, scattering them out in the direction where they calculated the sub would be headed. Crew members watched the surface of the sea, looking for the hull of a surfacing submarine, or for the flotsam and oil that would indicate they had damaged something down there below them.
There was nothing.
The Chatelain maneuvered quickly to run out ahead of the U-boat. There she would be able to drop depth charges that would intercept the sub a couple of hundred feet below.
From above, two fighter planes circled, and then fired a barrage into a spot in the ocean where they believed they could see something hovering in the depths. The Chatelain circled again and, as she approached a position ahead of the spot marked by the planes’ bullets, began jettisoning depth charges from the launchers on her decks. The detonators on each package were set for a relatively shallow explosion.
These big barrels were much more powerful than those used earlier in the war. Filled with thirty-five pounds of a new explosive called Torpex, they were more than half again as intense as TNT. They were designed to explode at a depth that was determined before they were shot overboard. That setting was determined by the reports from the circling pilots who had visual contact with what still appeared to be a U-boat.
“You struck oil!” one of the fighter pilots yelled.
Just under seven minutes after the first geyser of water from the initial depth charge erupted from the sea, there was evidence they had created some havoc. Sure enough, a sizable oil slick was forming in the area that was neatly surrounded by the depth-charge blasts. They had done damage. Now they were eager to see how much.
Back on the Guadalcanal, Dan Gallery watched and monitored the activity from a distance, waiting for reports. He could see the eruption of the depth-charge explosions and hear their muffled whooomp! as each one detonated. He had already given his boarding parties on the destroyers the command to get ready to launch their boats. The report of the oil slick was promising, even if it did cause some mixed emotions. Even if they were not able to capture the sub, which was their first and fondest wish, they may well have sent the deadly enemy vessel to the muddy, cold Atlantic bottom.
Would the German skipper ever consider bringing his boat to the surface if he knew she was mortally wounded? Or, if the depth charges had not destroyed his sub already, would he decide to plunge it and his crew to their deaths rather than surrender to the Americans?
Gallery had to wonder what decision he would make were he in the same situation. Those were the kinds of instantaneous life-and-death decisions commanders were required to make in wartime.
Before he had time to ponder the situation, though, the call came. The U-boat was surfacing! The vicious, pinpoint depth-charge attack had done its job. The Germans had been forced up!
Now, Gallery thought, the fun really begins.
Soon, through his binoculars, he could see the broached German submarine, first her shears, then her sail, then the tops of her decks emerging from the foamy water. She appeared to be awfully close to the Chatelain, only seven hundred yards or so away from her. If someone on the sub’s decks managed to get to her guns, there could be a point-blank battle out there.
Then, just as planned and before the Germans had time to shoot back, the Chatelain opened fire on the submarine’s decks. So did the crewmen aboard the Jenks and the Pillsbury, raking the boat with a vicious barrage. Even the two Wildcat fighter planes came in on screaming dives, guns rattling.
Meanwhile, aboard the enemy sub, Lieutenant Harald Lange, the commander of the U-505, had ordered the setting of the timers on the scuttling charges and the opening of valves in the boat. As soon as he realized the boat was heavily damaged and uncontrollable, he knew he had no choice but to surface. He told his crew to open all hatches and abandon ship as soon as the hatch covers were above water, then to try to get the lifeboats into the water. Otherwise they would all be dragged down with the U-505 when the scuttle charges blew.
With the damaged rudder stuck hard to starboard, the sub circling drunkenly, and with the flooding already under way, Lange knew they only had minutes to get up the ladders, out the hatches, and into the sea.
When he opened the hatch to the bridge and popped through, the German skipper was struck almost at once by a bullet from the hail of gunfire that was pinging off his boat’s hull. He was slightly wounded. Lange yelled to his crew to stop whatever they were doing and get out of the submarine immediately.
The men did as ordered, leaving their stations so quickly that the engines were left running. Their attempts at scuttling the boat were unfinished, too. Still taking on gunfire, the crew members scrambled out the hatches, across the deck, and into the roiling sea. Better to take their chances with a hailstorm of bullets and the ocean waves than to stay aboard and go down with their doomed submarine.
Back on the Chatelain, her skipper, Lieutenant Commander Dudley Knox, watched th
e submarine circling. There was immediate concern that some crew members remained aboard the sub and that the looping route they were running might mean they were lining up for a desperate torpedo attack on his ship. Knox ordered the firing of a single torpedo, but it ran ahead of the U-505, missing her by only a few yards.
Commander Gallery ordered that the destroyers and planes cease firing and sent the first boarding party away from the Pillsbury. He told the other ships to begin pulling survivors from the sea, to have their weapons ready, and to take them all alive if possible.
Now, facing the dangerous but very likely possibility that the captured submarine had been rigged to explode right in their faces, Gallery could only hope the boarding party could get the next step accomplished. Things had gone according to plan so far. But they would have to hurry or they would almost certainly lose the U-boat.
Even if she was not a ticking time bomb, she was obviously taking on water and already rode alarmingly low in the water.
With the Chatelain and the Jenks busily plucking the German submariners from the water at gunpoint, a motor whaleboat crossed the distance from the the Pillsbury to the now-empty-but-still-steaming submarine. Aboard that boat were nine sailors under the leadership of a young lieutenant junior grade named Albert David.
There was no way for them to know what awaited them below the decks of the submarine. There could certainly still be Germans aboard, ready to kill anyone who came down the hatches. The Americans would have to be ready to fight—hand to hand if necessary—in order to commandeer the boat.