Either way luck played a large role in keeping U-505 afloat. All of the boat’s officers were gone and Holdenried’s actions were taken under trying circumstances, but he still might have been able to sink the boat. If all of the diving cells had flooded properly, his decision would have been the most important one made that day, and he would have emerged a hero (at least on the German side). Even without success he did more to make Albert David’s job a dangerous one than anyone else aboard U-505.
Perhaps ten minutes had transpired since Lange made his decision to surface. All of the officers and most of the crew were gone. Despite Lange’s hurried order to scuttle, the boat was still afloat. An understandable urgency coursed through the submarine, and the remaining engineers made for the tower hatch.
At this point the last man out of the boat, Hans Goebeler, made the last decision of the day. He looked for a way to open one of U-505’s seacocks—the least effective method of getting water into a boat.26
On a theoretical level Goebeler’s intent was simple: open a valve somewhere in a line that led directly to the sea. There was more than one valve and more than one line that met this description. The seawater intake valves themselves (often called seacocks) are usually the best way to scuttle a boat since they are located at the lowest point in a boat and open directly to the sea, but any good chief engineer could find half a dozen alternates in short order, from any of several fittings along the lines that crisscrossed the interior of the boat to either of the two toilets. It was all too easy, in fact, to sink a boat by accident just by opening the wrong valve at the wrong time, as more than one captain can attest.27 But there was no time for any of that and no chief engineer, either.
U-boats took water directly from the sea for a variety of reasons: to cool the engines, to run the toilets and showers, to feed the freshwater distiller. This water was taken into the boat through the seacocks. A seacock was connected with a valve to a feeder line, and the line led to a small pump that directed the water to various locations in the boat. In normal operations the valve between the seacock and the feeder line was left open, but it was an uncomplicated mechanism easily closed for maintenance purposes.
Opening seacocks was as good as a demolition charge in sinking a boat, but it was slower and generally effective only when time was not a factor. The German High Seas Fleet in Scapa Flow was scuttled in this manner, but the operation consumed the better part of an afternoon. Many captains scuttled their boats in 1945 by opening seacocks, but time was not a factor and no one was there to stop them. Unlike the first two options, both of which involved positive force, opening seacocks was a strictly passive move, similar in theory to pulling the plug in a bathtub. Water entering the boat would gurgle rather than gush. The seacock itself, and most lines and valves in the seawater system, were small in diameter, which restricted flow and reduced intake. Depending on the number of fittings opened, the number of compartments sealed, the number of hatches open, the buoyancy of the boat, and the amount of water already on board, it could take hours for a boat to go under.
As a U-Bootwaffe engineer Goebeler knew most or all of these fine points and fully appreciated the boat would sink only if she took on enough water—but he had barely enough time to make one split-second decision. He had to open something; something close at hand; and he had to do it fast. The only thing that occurred to him was the sea strainer.
A sea strainer is just what its name implies: it is a mechanism situated between the seacock and the seawater pump that strains out any large impurities like sand, seaweed, or marine life, all of which might clog the pump or other internal machinery. The strainers are accessible through covers usually bolted or dogged down, and the covers are normally opened only after the intake valves are closed. If the cover is removed without the seacock valve being shut first, or if the seacock is opened after the cover is removed, seawater will begin flowing from the top of the strainer and into the bilges. And so, under enormous pressure, Goebeler removed the cover from the sea strainer under the control room deck plates and opened the seacock valve.
Did Goebeler make the right decision? His instincts were entirely correct, and we can conclude he did the right thing at a theoretical level. He erred only in its execution. A more experienced engineer with more time would probably have selected a different way of doing what Goebeler tried to do, and it is conceivable the boat could have been scuttled this way. For example, if the strainer in the engine room had been opened as well, the flow of water into the boat would have been much higher and would have continued longer. In tearing the cover off the sea strainer, Goebeler performed a completely unrehearsed and ad hoc procedure for which he had not been trained.28
Goebeler never questioned his decision to open the sea strainer, but he lamented until the day he died the very minor and seemingly inconsequential action he took thereafter. In the haste and terror of the moment, Goebeler tossed the cover of the strainer into the corner of the control room. American sailors swarmed aboard a few minutes later. Zenon Lukosius followed Albert David into the boat, found the cover, and replaced it. This is the same cover now given pride of place in the Chicago restoration. If Goebeler had thrown the cover into the bilges or better yet overboard, Lukosius may not have been able to stem the flow of water and U-505 might well have gone to the bottom.
Or so goes conventional wisdom. In fact, the seacock valve could easily have been closed just as fast as Goebeler opened it. Unfortunately Lukosius was in just as much of a hurry as Goebeler, and did not think to look for it. If he had not found the cover, there were other ways to stop the water flow. Goebeler’s description of the water coming out of the strainer, “a dinner plate-sized stream of water…gurgling out of the main pump line into the boat,” indicates low pressure and a manageable flow.29 Any large flat object placed over the strainer, with Lukosius’ weight on top of it, might have been enough to reduce the flow until something better could be found by another member of the boarding party to stop it entirely.
Goebeler was the last man out of U-505. He left thinking, or perhaps hoping, the strainer would let enough water into the boat to sink her. And it might have been enough to send her to the bottom had the boarding party entered the boat two or three minutes later. It was a very close thing.
In the final analysis, eight significant decisions were made by the officers and men of U-505 in the last frantic moments before her capture. Each had the potential to affect the outcome. These decisions were:
1. After an intense depth charge attack from surface units of TG 22.3, U-505’s captain Harald Lange made the decision to surface. He had little choice and it was the right thing to do. The only alternative was to go down, and as Siegfried Koitschka succinctly put it, “up was much better”.
2. Lange made a second almost simultaneous decision not to abandon ship immediately upon surfacing. He evidently believed there was a chance to escape or defend the boat. Lange’s decision made any subsequent evacuation longer and more difficult to accomplish.
3. After surfacing, Lange decided to exit the boat first. This was the right decision to make for all the reasons discussed above, although in hindsight it deprived U-505 of her captain at a critical time.
4. After being seriously wounded, Lange made the decision to abandon and scuttle U-505 rather than attempt an escape or defend the boat. Again, it was the right decision for several reasons.
5. First watch officer Paul Meyer decided to follow Lange onto the bridge of U-505. This was the correct decision under normal operating procedures. In this case it was not the best option, though it was a pivotal one. Meyer was hit immediately after Lange went down, which deprived the boat of her second-in-command and the only other competent officer on board.
6. Chief engineer Joseph Hauser made the next significant decision. He was the officer best placed to scuttle U-505, and the only man left in the boat who could set the demolition charges. He elected instead to leave, claiming later he did so because he believed the boat was going to sink at
any moment. This was a terrible decision for both morale and tactical reasons. The ramifications of Hauser’s choice were compounded by Meyer’s earlier decision to follow Lange topside.
7. Machinist Alfred-Karl Holdenried made the seventh decision. On his own initiative and with no direction from above, he attempted to open the valves on the diving cells and flood them. This was the correct decision and an admirable move on his part. It might have worked if the valves had not jammed.
8. Hans Goebeler made the eighth and final decision. By opening the sea strainer in the control room he might have scuttled the boat if less air had been in the diving cells or if the men in Albert David’s boarding party had waited a little longer to enter U-505.
Obviously there was more to the story than these eight decisions. There were fifty-nine men in U-505, and each of them made decisions of his own: what to bring and what to leave behind, where to go, what to do after capture. And there were mitigating circumstances for each of the decisions we have discussed: a lack of time, a lack of training, noise, fright, darkness, and confusion.
Time was a critical factor. The decisions considered in this chapter take on a slow motion aspect when picked apart and analyzed, like a movie reel that is stopped and started again, or an instant replay in a sporting event played over and over in slow motion so referees can study it frame by frame. Reality was completely different. Everything discussed herein took place within fifteen or twenty minutes. The boat had been heavily damaged and nearly sunk, the interior was without proper lighting, men were being killed and wounded topside, and large amounts of ammunition were hitting the crippled U-boat. Chaos ensued while the fear of sudden death by enemy fire or drowning pervaded every mind and every action. Choices made and actions executed under tight time restrictions, with the benefit of hindsight, often make the decision maker look foolish or inept.
We have discussed training in general terms, and we can stipulate the crew was not trained as well as they should have been—and as they would have been in, say, 1939 or 1940. But not everyone knows that formal training in at least one specific area was never available. “Nobody received training or even theoretical instruction on [how to scuttle a U-boat],” explained Peter Hansen. “It was considered out of the question and totally unlikely to happen, thus the subject was entirely ignored and never even informally discussed as far as U-boats were concerned.”30 Once again, hindsight makes such an omission incredible. The Germans, however, considered the capture of a U-boat at sea so unlikely training for such an event would be a waste of time. Any skill in the art of scuttling was something picked up along the way, like riding out a depth charge attack. In this sense Lange’s crew was as well trained in how to sink its own boat as any crack crew of the early years.
In retrospect it is clear the loss of the boat had nothing to do with the fitness of the officers and men who served aboard her. Many were inexperienced and most made mistakes, but the capture of U-505 did not come about as a result of their incompetence or a lack of courage or resolve.
The purpose of this chapter is to explain, as best as possible, the capture of U-505 from the German perspective using as a framework the decisions made inside the boat during its final minutes. If there is a lesson to be learned it is this: every man in a crew can make a difference; every man has the potential, by acting or failing to act, to affect the course of events around him in ways he can not fully appreciate at the time of his actions.
After Albert David’s boarding party made it inside the boat and stopped the incoming flow of water, the submarine was taken in tow and hauled across the Atlantic to Bermuda. It was a difficult operation and on more than one occasion the boat was nearly lost. After the war she was restored and put on blocks outside The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry for the edification of the public. U-505 was the first and only German submarine captured by the United States Navy in either world war.
But as we know now, with a little luck, a little grace, anyone in the boat—from Captain Lange to the lowest fireman—might have written a different ending to one of the most remarkable events in American maritime history.
The German U-boat spent the next 2½ weeks on the beach waiting on its handlers for the final move to the museum. The beached submarine offered a surreal backdrop for beach lovers and the regular crowds of curious people who marveled at the large size of the boat. Now toothless and landlocked, the once-feared shark of the seas was about to assume a new role its builders could never have envisioned….
Keith R. Gill
Project 356
U-505 and the Journey to Chicago
People are often surprised when they discover a German U-boat on display at a science museum in the American Midwest. And they should be, for it is indeed a most unlikely place to find an enemy submarine serving as both a memorial to our nation’s sea dead and a premier science exhibit.
U-505’s fitful journey from war prize to revered museum exhibit to memorial in Chicago is both logical and fitting. The fascinating story of how it came to rest at 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive is rooted in the logic of the post-World War II and Cold War era. Obtaining title to the U-boat proved to be a frustrating and lengthy process. Transporting the submarine to the Windy City was an adventure requiring large amounts of money, extraordinary seamanship, engineering expertise, the dedicated efforts of dozens of people around the country—and years of patience and hard work. It was so difficult that in 1954, Daniel Gallery exclaimed that the ongoing project was almost as difficult as the boat’s capture on June 4, 1944.
This study is an attempt to tell the story, as fully and as completely as space allows, of how U-505 came to rest outside a Chicago museum and become one of the most visited scientific exhibits and memorials in the world.
The Origins of the Museum of Science and Industry
The Museum of Science and Industry opened its doors to the public on March 1, 1933. It was founded seven years earlier with a $3,000,000 donation by Julius Rosenwald, one of the most influential philanthropists of the 20th Century. The idea for the museum grew out of a Rosenwald family vacation to Europe in the 1920s to visit distant cousins. Once there, they visited the famous Deutsches Museum in Munich and Technical Museum in Vienna. Rosenwald was impressed with his 14-year-old son William’s positive reactions and excitement about his experience at the museum, turning cranks and pushing buttons that operated all kinds of machinery. Rosenwald saw the value in this kind of experience and decided Chicago needed a similar museum. The plans were quietly developed and by 1926 he was ready to make them public.
Once the decision to create a science museum in Chicago was made, the obvious question was where to put it. Many options were explored before the only remaining structure left on the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the former Fine Arts Palace, was chosen as the new home for what would become the Museum of Science and Industry.
The museum board hired experts in all areas of science to form the core staff and begin developing exhibits. Supporters and museum board members talked about the museum as “education in a new form…and never a moment of boredom, nor hint of tedium that often comes with book learning.”1 Some had even talked of a technical training school for prospective workers in modern industrial plants, and that industry had to find a substitute for the dying practice of apprenticeship. The idea to use real moving machinery as big as locomotives and as small as hand tools was new to America, where most of the exhibits were formally presented and untouchable by the visiting public.
By the end of its first decade it was clear the museum would become a preeminent scholarly institution with important interactive exhibits on the sciences. The staff borrowed heavily from the Munich museum and considered it a sister institution. Detailed photographic surveys of each gallery were produced for later study, and the physical layout of themed wings (or zones) proved very useful in planning the new institution.
The German museum also taught its American counterparts how to involve the visitor with f
acilitated demonstrations on multiple topics and hands-on, self-guided exhibits whenever the topic made such a thing possible. The Chicago museum took these ideas one step further by increasing interactivity so effectively it is sometimes erroneously credited with pioneering the interactive exhibit concept. It was, however, the pioneer in this field in America, and still presents important new high quality exhibits which other institutions try to emulate. Other institutions around the world were also studied, but the Deutsche Museum remained the principal inspiration.
The first exhibit to open at the Chicago museum was a replica of a working coal mine, inspired by a similar exhibit at the Deutsches Museum. The popular Coal Mine became synonymous with the Museum of Science and Industry until U-505’s arrival in 1954. The mine defined the museum as an institution specializing in immersive experiences and unforgettable large-scale presentations. Emboldened, many believed no project was too big for the institution. The Munich museum understood that largescale exhibits (such as their cutaway presentation of U-1, Germany’s first U-boat) were often inspiring in and of themselves and presented an extraordinary opportunity for education as well as a memorable visiting experience. Although the Chicago museum did not copy everything about the Deutsches Museum, work to obtain a submarine to mirror Munich’s presentation actually began as early as 1928—long before there was ever a U-505. These efforts were carefully documented and the papers stored in Project File 356. No one dreamt that their desire to display a submarine would not be realized until more than two decades later.2
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