June 4th, 1944, 11:06 in the morning, 800 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast, Lieutenant Junior Grade Albert David stood on the deck of USS Pillsbury, watching a German submarine break the surface 700 yd off the starboard bow.
The submarine was U505, commanded by Oaloidant Zouray Harold Langanger.
She was crippled, forced to the surface by hours of relentless depth, charging from American destroyer escorts.
The German crew scrambled onto the deck.
Some manned their guns, others prepared to scuttle the boat and abandoned ship.
David had approximately 3 minutes to reach that submarine before it sank.
3 minutes to accomplish what the United States Navy hadn’t done since 1815.
board and capture an enemy warship at sea.
129 years, no boarding parties, no protocols, no one alive who’d done it before.
David grabbed his Colt 45 pistol and shouted to his sevenman team.
They were going over the side.
They were going to take that submarine, and if they failed, they’d go down with it.
The story of how the US Navy prepared to capture a German submarine began 6 weeks earlier with a different submarine and a missed opportunity that haunted Captain Daniel Gallery.
April 9th, 1944.
Task Group 22.3 was hunting German submarines off the African coast when they detected U515, one of Germany’s deadliest boats.
Her commander, Verer Hanka, had sunk 25 Allied ships.
Over 600 men, women, and children had drowned when he torpedoed the British troop ship Ceramic in December 1942.
Now Hanker’s boat was crippled by American depth charges.
She surfaced 700 yd from USS Pillsbury.
The German crew abandoned ship.
American destroyers opened fire with machine guns and rockets.
Within minutes, U515’s bow lifted toward the sky and she slid backward into the Atlantic.
44 German sailors were pulled from the water, including Hanka himself.
The task group had destroyed one of Germany’s most successful submarines.
By every measure, it was an American victory.
But Captain Daniel Gallery, commanding the escort carrier USS Guadal Canal, and the entire Hunter Killer group, saw something different.
He saw a missed opportunity.
Gallery had watched U515 float on the surface for nearly 10 minutes before sinking.
10 minutes.
In that time, his ships had done exactly what the Navy trained them to do.
They destroyed the enemy.
But Gallery realized that if he’d been prepared, if he’d trained boarding parties in advance, he might have captured that submarine instead.
The intelligence value would have been extraordinary.
German code books, Enigma cipher machines, torpedo guidance systems, acoustic homing technology, everything the Allies needed to crack German naval communications, and develop countermeasures against weapons that were killing American sailors.
every single day.
Daniel Gallery was not a typical Navy captain.
Born in Chicago in 1895, he’d graduated from Annapapolis in 1920.
He’d served on battleships and destroyers before transitioning to naval aviation in the 1930s.
By 1944, he was commanding an escort carrier and its associated destroyer escorts in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Gallery understood that the war against German submarines was fundamentally about intelligence as much as firepower.
The Germans had superior submarine technology.
Their type 7 and type 9 boats could dive deeper, stay submerged longer, and carry more torpedoes than anything the Allies possessed.
But if the Allies could crack German codes and predict submarine movements, American destroyers could be waiting at the right place at the right time.
Technology didn’t matter if you couldn’t surprise your enemy.
The problem Gallery faced was immense.
German submarine crews were trained to scuttle their boats within minutes of surfacing under attack.
They opened sea valves, flooding the engine room and control spaces.
They set demolition charges designed to detonate and send the boat to the bottom.
They destroyed code books and smashed equipment with hammers.
Even if American sailors could reach a surfaced submarine, they’d be boarding a sinking ship rigged with explosives while potentially facing armed German crewmen defending their vessel.
The Germans would rather die than let their technology and codes fall into Allied hands.
And the statistics were brutal.
In 1943 alone, German submarines had sunk over 300 Allied merchant ships totaling nearly 2 million tons.
American destroyer escorts faced a simple equation.
Find the submarine.
Destroy it before it destroys you.
There was no time for boarding parties.
No margin for error.
But Gallery decided the United States Navy would learn how to capture submarines anyway.
No American warship had boarded and seized an enemy vessel at sea since 1815.
During the War of 1812, 129 years, the Navy didn’t train sailors for boarding actions.
There were no procedures, no protocols, no equipment designed for the task.
Gallery was proposing to resurrect a tactic that belonged to the age of wooden ships and cannons.
His superiors at Atlantic Fleet headquarters were skeptical, but Gallery had support from the highest levels.
The Office of Naval Intelligence and the Code Breakers at Bletchley Park in England desperately needed fresh German cipher materials.
The Enigma code had been partially broken, but the Germans changed their settings regularly.
Every captured code book, every intact Enigma machine, every technical manual could save Allied lives by revealing German submarine positions and tactics.
Gallery received authorization to proceed.
He issued orders to every destroyer escort in task group 22.3.
Each ship would form a boarding party.
They would train.
They would prepare.
And on their next patrol, they would attempt something the United States Navy hadn’t done in over a century.
Lieutenant Commander George Castleman, commanding USS Pillsbury, assembled his best men.
Pillsbury was an Edsaw class destroyer escort, 1,200 tons displacement, 306 ft long, 3-in guns for surface combat, depth charges, and hedgehog anti-ubmarine mortars built specifically to hunt and kill German submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic.
But now, Castleman had to transform his submarine killer into a capture vessel.
He selected Lieutenant Junior Grade Albert David to lead Pillsbury’s boarding party.
David was 41 years old, significantly older than most junior officers.
He’d enlisted in the Navy as a young man and worked his way up through the ranks over 25 years of service.
He’d earned his commission during the wartime expansion when the Navy needed every experienced sailor it could find.
David served as Pillsbury’s assistant engineering officer.
He knew machinery.
He understood how ships stayed afloat, how pumps worked, how to stop flooding, how to juryrig systems that were damaged.
These skills would be critical on a sinking enemy submarine.
David had never boarded an enemy vessel.
Nobody in the United States Navy had, not in living memory.
But he would figure it out.
The boarding party consisted of eight men total.
David would lead.
Radio man secondass Stanley Widowak would handle any German communications equipment they found.
Torpedo man third class Arthur Kispo knew explosives and could identify and disarm demolition charges.
Motor machinists mate.
First class Xenon Lucosius understood diesel engines and pumping systems.
The remaining four men were selected for their mechanical aptitude and physical courage.
They would need both.
The task group returned to Norfolk, Virginia in late April 1944.
Castleman told his boarding party they had 6 weeks to prepare.
6 weeks to learn how to capture a German submarine when nobody in the entire United States Navy knew how to do it.
The training began immediately after Pillsbury sailed from Norfolk on May 15th.
Every day, David drilled his men on the fan tail.
They practiced climbing over railings with full gear.
They rehearsed jumping from a whaleboat onto a simulated moving deck.
They memorized the general layout of a German Type 9 submarine based on intelligence photographs captured from previous encounters and technical drawings obtained from British sources.
The challenges were staggering.
A surfaced submarine would be circling erratically, its rudder likely jammed by depth charge damage.
The deck would be slick with seawater and diesel fuel.
German sailors might still be aboard, armed and desperate.
The submarine could dive at any moment, taking the boarding party down with it into the Atlantic depths, where pressure would crush them instantly.
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Back to Pillsbury preparing for her mission.
And then there were the explosives.
German submarine commanders followed strict protocols for scuttling.
The moment a boat surfaced under attack, the captain ordered demolition charges armed.
These were placed throughout the submarine, designed to detonate and send the vessel to the bottom within minutes.
The crew also opened sea valves, flooding the engine room and control spaces.
Even if American sailors reached the submarine, they’d be entering a vessel that was simultaneously sinking and rigged to explode.
David’s team had to work impossibly fast.
They estimated 3 to 5 minutes from boarding to catastrophic flooding.
In that narrow window, they needed to locate and disarm demolition charges, find and close sea valves, and stop whatever other scuttling measures the Germans had initiated.
All while navigating cramped, unfamiliar spaces in a foreign submarine in near darkness, possibly under fire from German crew members who hadn’t abandoned ship.
The tools were basic wrenches, flashlights, sidearms for self-defense.
There was no specialized equipment for capturing enemy submarines because nobody had needed any.
Gallery held regular conferences with his destroyer escort captains throughout the 3-week voyage south toward the Cape Verde Islands.
Commander Frederick Hall coordinated the tactical approach.
The plan called for careful use of weapons once a submarine surfaced.
Ships would fire small caliber guns only, enough to suppress the German crew and drive them overboard, but not enough to hold the pressure hull and sink the submarine.
Aircraft would strafe the decks to prevent the enemy from manning their deck guns, but pilots were ordered to avoid hits below the water line.
The goal was to wound the submarine, not kill it.
This violated every instinct American destroyer captains had developed through three years of brutal combat in the Atlantic.
Task group 22.3 sailed south toward the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa.
American intelligence had detected increased German submarine activity in the area.
The submarines were transiting between their bases in occupied France and patrol zones in the South Atlantic where they hunted Allied convoys supplying forces in Africa and the Mediterranean.
The Central Atlantic was a killing ground.
German submarines operated at the extreme range of Allied air cover.
American escort carriers like Guadal Canal had changed that equation.
The carriers brought aircraft to the mid ocean where German submarine captains had previously operated with relative impunity.
June 4th, 1944 arrived clear and hot.
The task group was steaming in a standard search pattern covering hundreds of square miles of ocean.
At approximately 10:45 in the morning, one of Guadal Canal’s aircraft spotted a submarine on the surface.
The pilot immediately radioed the contact to Gallery.
The German boat dove before the aircraft could attack.
Gallery ordered his destroyer escorts to converge on the position.
USS Shatalin detected the submarine on sonar within minutes.
She attacked with depth charges.
The submarine went deep and maneuvered to evade.
For the next hour, American destroyers pounded the ocean with depth charges while the submarine tried desperately to escape.
U505 was a type 9 sea submarine, one of the German Navy’s long range boats designed for extended patrols in distant waters.
She’d been commissioned in August 1941 and had completed 12 war patrols.
Her current commander was Oberloitant Zuray Harold Langanger.
He was young, only in his mid20s, and this was his first patrol as commander.
U505 had mechanical problems.
Her diesels were unreliable.
Her electrical systems malfunctioned regularly.
The crew’s morale was poor after months of mechanical failures and close calls with Allied aircraft.
Now they were being depth charged by American destroyers that seemed to know exactly where they were hiding.
The depth charges came closer with each attack.
Explosions shook the submarine violently.
Light bulbs shattered.
Pipes burst.
Electrical panels sparked and failed.
The submarine’s hull groaned under the pressure.
At approximately 11:03, a pattern of depth charges detonated close enough to spring several hull plates.
Seawater began flooding into the engine room.
Langanger faced the decision every submarine commander dreaded.
Stay submerged and risk the crew drowning as the boat sank uncontrollably or surface and face American guns.
Langga ordered the submarine to surface.
U505 blew her ballast tanks and broke through into sunlight and American firepower.
David and his boarding party were already in Pillsbury’s whaleboat, hanging from the Davids when the submarine surfaced 700 yd away.
They’d been at action stations for over an hour waiting for this moment.
Castleman ordered the whaleboat lowered immediately.
The small boat hit the water and its crew began rowing frantically toward the surfacing submarine.
David stood in the bow, watching the German boat emerge from the Atlantic.
Water cascaded off her deck.
Her conning tower broke the surface, trailing white foam.
German sailors began climbing through the tower hatch onto the deck.
Some were carrying weapons.
David checked his pistol.
This was it.
everything they’d trained for.
Either they’d capture this submarine or they’d die trying.
American destroyers opened fire with machine guns.
50 caliber rounds tore across the submarine’s deck and conning tower.
The fire was deliberately aimed high to force the German crew to abandon ship without holding the pressure hull.
Aircraft from Guadal Canal dove and strafed the submarine with 20 mm cannon fire.
The combined firepower was overwhelming.
German sailors who’d emerged from the conning tower jumped into the Atlantic rather than face that wall of steel.
Within 90 seconds, the deck was clear.
The German crew was abandoning U505 and swimming away as fast as they could, which meant the demolition charges had been set and the sea valves had been opened.
The submarine was sinking.
David’s whaleboat reached the submarine’s side at approximately 11:06.
The boat was still moving through the water, circling slowly as her jammed rudder pulled her in a wide arc.
The boarding party had to time their jump perfectly.
Miss and you’d hit the water and possibly be crushed between the whaleboat and the submarine’s steel hull.
David went first.
He grabbed a stansion on the submarine’s deck and pulled himself aboard.
Widawiak followed, then Canispal, then Lucosius.
The eight-man team scrambled onto the enemy submarine while it circled beneath them.
The deck was covered in diesel fuel and seawater, treacherously slippery.
David moved a toward the conning tower.
The tower hatch was open, water slloshing through it as the submarine’s stern settled lower.
David drew his pistol and looked down into the darkness.
He had no idea if German sailors were still inside.
He had no idea if demolition charges were about to explode.
He had no idea if the submarine would dive with him inside it.
Albert David climbed through that hatch anyway.
He dropped into the conning tower and felt his boots splash into ankle deep water.
The submarine’s interior was pitch dark except for emergency lighting that cast red shadows.
David flicked on his flashlight and saw a narrow passageway leading forward and aft.
The sounds were terrifying.
Water rushing, metal groaning, electrical systems sparking, and somewhere demolition charges ticking down to detonation.
Widowak followed David through the hatch, then Kispel.
The three Americans moved through the submarine, searching for immediate threats.
Kispel looked for demolition charges.
Diak searched for code books and cipher equipment.
David headed aft toward the engine room where the flooding would be worst.
The submarine was German.
Every sign, every gauge, every control was labeled in German.
The layout was similar to American submarines, but not identical.
David had studied diagrams, but diagrams couldn’t capture the claustrophobic reality of being inside a sinking enemy vessel.
The passageways were narrow, barely wide enough for one man.
Equipment protruded from every surface.
Pipes and valves covered the overhead.
Water sloshed around their ankles and rose higher with each passing second.
David reached the engine room and found the source of the flooding.
A sea valve had been opened deliberately.
Water was pouring through it at tremendous rate.
The engine room was already kneedeep and rising fast.
David searched for the valve controls.
Everything was labeled in German.
He tried several wheels before finding the right one.
He cranked it closed with all his strength.
The flow diminished but didn’t stop completely.
The valve had been damaged by depth charges.
David looked around for pumping equipment.
The diesel engines were shut down.
The electrical system was failing, but there were manual pumps.
David and Lucosius, who joined him in the engine room, began working the manual pumps, trying to get water out faster than it was coming in.
Up in the control room, Kispo was searching for demolition charges.
German submarines typically placed them in key locations: control room, radio room, engine room, torpedo rooms.
The charges would be set with time delay fuses giving the crew minutes to abandon ship.
Nispell moved through the submarine methodically, flashlight beam cutting through the darkness, looking for anything that resembled an explosive device.
In the radio room, he found what he was looking for.
Two demolition charges wired to a timer.
The timer showed they had approximately 2 minutes before detonation.
Canispull carefully disconnected the charges and carried them topside where he threw them into the Atlantic.
Two charges found, but there might be more hidden throughout the submarine.
Doak was gathering intelligence materials.
In the captain’s cabin, he found code books, operational orders, patrol reports.
In the radio room, he discovered two Enigma cipher machines intact with their coding rotors still installed.
These machines were supposed to be thrown overboard before capture.
The German crew had abandoned ships so quickly they’d left them behind.
Woviaak collected everything, filling waterproof bags with documents that would be invaluable to Allied codereakers.
900 lb of classified German naval materials.
The intelligence hall was extraordinary, even if they couldn’t save the submarine.
But David was determined to save the submarine.
Up on deck, Pillsbury had come alongside.
Castleman was maneuvering to pass a tow line, but the collision during the approach had damaged Pillsbury’s bow.
Three of her forward compartments were flooding.
She couldn’t maintain the toe.
USS Guadal Canal moved in instead.
The carrier rigged a heavy tow line from her stern to U505’s bow.
With the carrier providing power and stability, the submarine slowly stopped sinking.
David’s team had closed enough valves and operated enough pumps to stabilize the flooding.
The submarine was saved.
Motor machinists mate Wayne Pickles had remained aboard Pillsbury but now transferred to the captured submarine with additional pumping equipment.
Together with David and Lucosius, Pickles worked to juryrig the damaged systems.
They connected intact pumps to functioning power sources.
They rerouted piping around damaged sections.
They plugged leaks with whatever materials they could find.
The work was exhausting and dangerous.
The submarine could sink at any moment.
Additional demolition charges might still be hidden somewhere.
But the American sailors refused to quit.
They’d captured this submarine.
They were going to bring her home.
For the next 15 days, task group 22.3 towed U505 across 2500 m of Atlantic Ocean toward Bermuda.
It was the longest submarine tow in naval history.
Salvage crews remained aboard the submarine around the clock, pumping water and monitoring for new leaks.
Storms threatened to swamp the low-lying boat.
The tow line parted twice and had to be reconnected.
The fleet tug USS Obnaki eventually took over primary towing duties from Guadal Canal, but the danger never lessened.
every day brought new challenges.
Equipment failures, weather damage, mechanical breakdowns, but American determination and seammanship prevailed.
On June 19th, 1944, the task group entered Port Royal Bay, Bermuda.
The German submarine was immediately hidden in a remote corner of the naval base.
She was repainted to disguise her German origins and given a new designation, USS Nemo.
The intelligence materials had already been photographed, and the most critical documents had been flown to Washington aboard transport aircraft, but the submarine herself remained in Bermuda, where naval intelligence teams could thoroughly search every compartment for anything the boarding party might have missed.
The capture had to remain absolutely secret.
This was not negotiable.
If the Germans learned U505 had been taken intact, they would change all their codes immediately.
Every Enigma machine in the German military would receive new rotors and new settings.
Every code book would be replaced.
The intelligence windfall that American and British codereakers were about to exploit would vanish overnight.
Worse, the Germans would realize their submarine communications had been compromised for months.
They would know that Allied convoys had been routing around Yubot patrol lines based on intelligence derived from broken codes.
The entire cryptographic victory would be revealed and lost.
Captain Gallery ordered total secrecy from everyone who’d witnessed the capture.
No radio transmissions about U505.
No written records in ship logs beyond routine patrol reports that mentioned depth charging an unidentified submarine.
No letters home describing what they’d seen.
No mentions in personal diaries.
No casual conversations in port.
Nothing.
The 58 German prisoners, including their wounded commander, Harold Lang, were confined below decks on Guadal Canal during the voyage to Bermuda.
They were transferred to a secret detention facility in Louisiana upon arrival in the United States.
The Red Cross was denied access.
Their families in Germany received official notifications that they were missing, presumed killed in action when their submarine was depth charged and sunk.
The prisoners would not be allowed to contact their families until 1947, three full years after capture, when the war was long over and the intelligence value of their submarine had been completely exploited.
3,000 American sailors who’d witnessed the capture said nothing.
Not one word, not one letter home, not one diary entry, not one casual remark to a bartender or girlfriend.
The secret held perfectly.
Not a single breach occurred in three years.
Gallery had explained the stakes during the voyage to Bermuda.
If word reached the Germans before the war ended, Allied sailors and soldiers would die because of loose talk.
American merchant ships would be torpedoed because submarine positions were no longer predictable.
Allied invasion forces would face stronger opposition because German commanders would adjust their deployments without fear of their communications being read.
Lives depended on silence.
The men understood.
They kept the secret.
Admiral Ernest King, commanderin-chief of the United States Fleet, reviewed the intelligence hall personally in Washington.
The code books were invaluable.
They provided cipher settings valid through the entire summer of 1944.
The Enigma machines confirmed everything Allied codereakers at Bletchley Park suspected about German encryption methods.
The operational orders revealed German submarine patrol patterns, rendevous points, supply procedures, and tactical doctrine.
The acoustic homing torpedoes found in U505’s forward torpedo room were sent to the Naval Ordinance Laboratory for analysis.
These weapons called Zhound Kernig by the Germans used sound to track their targets, homing in on propeller noise.
Understanding how they worked would allow development of countermeasures that could save hundreds of Allied ships.
The captured materials arrived at Bletchley Park within weeks of the capture.
British and American codereakers immediately put them to use.
The fresh code books allowed them to read German submarine communications that had previously been gibberish.
Intercepted radio transmissions suddenly became readable intelligence.
Allied commanders learned German submarine positions across the entire Atlantic.
They discovered patrol routes, attack plans, resupply schedules.
Convoy routes were adjusted to avoid known yubot concentrations.
Hunter killer groups received precise coordinates for their targets.
The intelligence from U505 directly contributed to Allied naval supremacy during the critical months surrounding the Normandy invasion.
The Germans never suspected their codes had been compromised.
Admiral Carl Dernitz, commander of the Yubot fleet, received the final transmission from U505 on June 3rd, 1944.
She reported her position off the African coast and indicated she was returning to base in Lauron, France.
After June 4th, silence.
This was not unusual.
Yubot disappeared constantly in 1944.
Allied hunter killer groups and long range aircraft had turned the Atlantic into a killing ground for German submarines.
Donuts assumed U505 had been sunk by depth charges or aerial attack like hundreds of others.
He ordered no changes to German codes.
He issued no warnings about compromised communications.
The German Navy continued using the same enigma settings, the same cipher procedures, the same operational protocols.
The secrecy held through the summer of 1944, through D-Day on June 6th, through the breakout from Normandy, through the liberation of Paris, through the Battle of the Bulge, through the final collapse of Nazi Germany in May 1945.
For nearly a full year, 3,000 Americans kept the secret.
And in that year, the intelligence from U505 helped the Allies win the Battle of the Atlantic.
German Yubot losses mounted to unsustainable levels.
New submarines left German shipyards only to be intercepted mid ocean by American destroyer escorts, who somehow knew exactly where they’d be.
The yubot war that had nearly strangled Britain’s supply lines was effectively won.
Not through superior technology, not through overwhelming numbers, but through intelligence, through broken codes, through one captured German submarine that eight American sailors had refused to let sink on June 4th, 1944.
The intelligence from U505 continued paying dividends throughout the summer and fall of 1944.
At Bletchley Park in England, American and British codereakers used the captured Enigma machines and code books to read German submarine communications with unprecedented clarity.
Every intercepted radio transmission from German submarines became readable text revealing positions, patrol routes, attack plans, and resupply schedules.
Allied convoy commanders received regular intelligence updates, allowing them to route merchant ships around known yubot concentrations.
The convoys that had been bleeding ships and cargo throughout the early war years suddenly became much safer.
Not because Allied escort forces had become more numerous or better equipped, but because American intelligence analysts knew where the German submarines were hunting and could route convoys to avoid them.
Hunter killer groups like Task Group 22.3 received precise coordinates for their targets.
The US Navy’s anti-ubmarine forces were transformed from hunters searching vast ocean expanses to precision strike units hitting known targets.
German submarine losses mounted to catastrophic levels.
In the 6 months following U505’s capture, over 100 German submarines were destroyed in the Atlantic.
The Germans couldn’t replace them fast enough.
Their shipyards were being bombed by Allied aircraft.
Their training programs couldn’t produce qualified crews fast enough.
And the submarines that did make it to sea were being intercepted and destroyed at rates that made continued operations suicidal.
The acoustic homing torpedoes captured from U505 proved equally valuable to American naval engineers.
The weapons designated T5 Z Koig by the Germans used passive acoustic sensors to track the cavitation noise created by ship propellers.
The technology was sophisticated and represented a significant threat to Allied escort vessels whose propellers created distinctive acoustic signatures.
American engineers at the Naval Ordinance Laboratory in Washington disassembled the captured torpedoes and analyzed every component.
They discovered the frequency ranges the torpedoes tracked and the signal processing methods used to filter target noise from background ocean sounds.
Within months, the US Navy developed countermeasures.
Ships began towing noise makers called foxers, mechanical devices that produced louder cavitation sounds than the ships themselves.
The acoustic torpedoes chased the decoys instead of their intended targets.
The effect was immediate and devastating to German submarine effectiveness.
Yubot commanders reported that their acoustic torpedoes, which had been destroying Allied escort vessels with alarming success, suddenly began missing with inexplicable frequency.
They filed detailed reports with Yubot headquarters describing the failures.
Admiral Donuts suspected the Allies had developed some form of countermeasure, but he never connected it to U505.
He assumed the technology had been captured from a torpedo that had failed to detonate after hitting a ship, not from an intact submarine taken with its entire weapons load.
The Germans never realized how completely their security had been compromised.
USS Pillsbury returned to anti-ubmarine operations after repairs at Norfolk.
The collision with U505 during the capture had damaged three of her forward compartments, but American shipyard crews had her back in fighting condition within weeks.
By late summer 1944, Pillsbury was back on patrol with task group 22.3, hunting the submarines that were still trying to reach Allied shipping lanes.
But the Atlantic was changing.
German yubot activity had collapsed in the central ocean.
The few submarines still operating hugged the European coastline or operated in distant waters where Allied air coverage was thinner.
The Battle of the Atlantic, which had threatened to strangle Britain’s supply lines for four brutal years, was effectively won.
not through a single decisive battle, but through accumulated advantages in intelligence, technology, tactics, and industrial production that overwhelmed German capabilities.
The war in Europe approached its end during the winter of 1944 and spring of 1945.
Allied armies had liberated France and crossed into Germany itself.
Soviet forces were closing on Berlin from the east.
Hitler’s Third Reich was collapsing under pressure from all sides.
But the Yubot War wasn’t finished.
German Naval Command had one final operation planned.
A desperate last strike that would demonstrate Germany could still threaten the American homeland even as the Reich crumbled.
A group of submarines equipped with the latest technology would cross the Atlantic and attack targets along the American East Coast.
The mission was called Operation Seawolf, and American intelligence detected it almost immediately.
Allied codereers using methods and materials derived partly from U505’s capture read, “German submarine communications describing the operation.
Multiple Type 9 long range submarines were heading west across the Atlantic in early April 1945.
The submarines were capable of reaching the American coastline and had sufficient range to operate in American waters for weeks.
But what alarmed American naval planners wasn’t just the submarine threat.
Intelligence reports, some confirmed and some rumored, suggested these submarines might be carrying VW weapons.
The V1 flying bombs and V2 ballistic missiles had devastated London during the previous year.
A single V2 striking New York or Washington could kill thousands of American civilians and create panic across the nation.
American intelligence couldn’t confirm whether the approaching submarines actually carried such weapons.
The Germans had experimented with submarine launched V1s and had developed theoretical concepts for submarine launched V2s, but whether any operational systems existed was unclear.
The US Navy couldn’t afford to assume the threat wasn’t real.
The Navy assembled two barrier forces to intercept the incoming submarines before they reached American waters.
The operation was designated teardrop and it would be one of the final major anti-submarine campaigns of the Atlantic War.
Task group 22.7 included escort carriers Bogue and Core along with over a dozen destroyer escorts.
USS Pillsbury was assigned to the screening force.
Lieutenant Commander George Castleman, who’d commanded Pillsbury during the U505 capture 11 months earlier, would lead his ship into combat one final time.
The barrier force deployed into the Western Atlantic in early April 1945, stretching across the approaches to the American East Coast.
For two weeks, the task group patrolled in shifting fog and heavy seas.
Aircraft flew constant searches from the escort carriers, their radar sweeping the ocean for surfaced submarines.
Sonar operators aboard the destroyer escorts listened continuously for underwater contacts.
The German submarines were out there somewhere, running silent beneath the gray Atlantic swells, attempting to slip through the American barrier and reach the coastal waters where they could strike terror into the American population.
On April 16th, 1945, the barrier scored its first kills.
American destroyer escorts located U235 and U880 within hours of each other.
Coordinated depth charge attacks sent both submarines to the bottom with all hands.
Two submarines down.
Six days later, on April 22nd, aircraft and surface ships working together destroyed U518.
Three German submarines destroyed.
The barrier was working exactly as designed, but the Germans kept coming.
More submarines were detected attempting to penetrate the screen.
American forces were stretched thin, covering hundreds of miles of ocean.
Every destroyer escort was critical to maintaining the barrier’s integrity.
On the morning of April 24th, 1945, USS Frederick C.
Davis was patrolling 650 mi northwest of the Azors when her sonar operator reported contact.
The range was 2,000 yd.
A submarine was attempting to slip through the barrier.
Frederick C.
Davis was a destroyer escort identical to Pillsbury, an Edsaw class vessel built specifically for anti-submarine warfare.
She maneuvered to attack.
The sonar contact faded, lost in her own wake turbulence.
Her officer of the deck ordered a hard turn to relocate the target and reestablish tracking.
At 0839 in the morning with the submarine at only 650 yards range, a torpedo struck Frederick C.
Davis’s port side.
The acoustic homing weapon detonated in her forward engine room.
The explosion broke the destroyer escort in half.
Her bow section sank immediately, taking most of the crew with it.
Her stern section floated for 5 minutes while survivors scrambled into the freezing Atlantic water.
115 American sailors died.
Only 77 were rescued by other ships in the task group.
Frederick C.
Davis became the last American warship sunk by enemy action in the Atlantic theater.
The submarine that killed her was U546, commanded by Capitan Litant Paul Just.
She’d slipped through the barrier undetected, fired her torpedo at pointblank range using the same acoustic homing technology captured from U505 and immediately dove deep to escape the inevitable American counterattack.
USS Pillsbury was 12 mi away when the distress call came.
Castleman ordered flank speed.
Within an hour, eight destroyer escorts had converged on the attack position.
USS Flagerty arrived first and made sonar contact at 0923.
She attacked immediately with depth charges.
The contact faded as U546 dove deeper and maneuvered evasively.
What followed was a 10-hour hunt that tested American anti-ubmarine tactics and German submarine endurance to their absolute limits.
U546 dove to 600 ft far below her design depth, risking hull collapse to escape American attacks.
She ran silent on electric motors, shutting down every non-essential system to minimize noise signature.
The American destroyer escorts spread across the search area, their sonar beams probing the depths methodically.
USS Flerty coordinated the attacks while Pillsbury, Nuner, Varian, Hubard, Jansen, Keith, and others took turns making attack runs.
They dropped depth charges in overlapping patterns designed to bracket the submarine’s probable position.
They fired hedgehog salvos, forwardthrowing mortar projectiles that would detonate on contact with the submarine’s hull.
Each attack forced U546 deeper, but Capotan Litant just refused to surface.
He knew surfacing meant capture or death.
Better to die deep than surrender.
By late afternoon, U546’s batteries were nearly exhausted.
The submarine had been submerged for 8 hours, running on battery power alone.
The air inside was foul, thick with carbon dioxide from the crews breathing.
The men were exhausted, some barely conscious from oxygen deprivation.
The submarine’s life support systems were failing, just faced the same decision Harold Lang had faced aboard U 505 11 months earlier.
Stay submerged and die from suffocation or battery failure, or surface and take your chances with American guns.
At 1943 hours, after a final devastating hedgehog attack from USS Flareity, U546 blew her ballast tanks and broke the surface.
American destroyer escorts opened fire immediately.
50 caliber machine guns swept the submarine’s deck and conning tower.
But Capitan Litant just wasn’t surrendering quietly.
His crew managed to fire two acoustic homing torpedoes at USS Flity as a final act of defiance.
Both torpedoes missed their target, possibly because American ships were now towing Foxer noise makers developed specifically from analyzing the weapons captured from U505.
Machine gun fire killed several German sailors on the Conning tower.
The survivors abandoned ship jumping into the Atlantic.
33 German sailors were pulled from the water, including Capitan Litant Just himself.
He was immediately transferred to the escort carrier Bogue for interrogation.
Navy intelligence officers had one critical question.
Were there more submarines carrying VW weapons heading toward the American coast? Just provided the answer.
There were no VW weapons aboard any of the German submarines.
There never had been.
The entire threat was a phantom.
a combination of German deception, Allied fear, and intelligence reports that confused experimental programs with operational capabilities.
The submarines crossing the Atlantic carried standard torpedoes and nothing more.
The mission was a conventional final attack, a desperate gesture by a dying navy attempting to prove Germany could still threaten America even as the Reich collapsed.
Operation Teardrop had succeeded in stopping that threat.
The barrier forces destroyed five of the seven submarines sent against the United States.
U546 was the last.
The remaining two submarines surrendered when Germany capitulated on May 8th, 1945.
USS Pillsbury was present for one of those surreners.
She and her sister ship Pope escorted U858 from Mid-Atlantic to Cape May, New Jersey after American sailors boarded the submarine and placed a prize crew aboard to ensure she reached port safely.
The war in the Atlantic was over.
Nazi Germany had surrendered unconditionally.
The Yubot force that had nearly strangled Britain was destroyed.
The final accounting revealed the extraordinary contribution USS Pillsbury and her crew had made to American victory.
In 13 months of combat operations from April 1944 through May 1945, the small destroyer escort had participated in the destruction of two German submarines, the capture of a third, and the escort of a fourth to American custody.
No other American warship could claim such a record.
The US Navy began recognizing the extraordinary achievement represented by U505’s capture.
Task group 22.3 received the presidential unit citation, the Navy’s highest unit honor.
The citation praised the coordinated attack that forced the submarine to surface, the swift boarding action, and the successful preservation of invaluable intelligence materials.
Captain Daniel Gallery received the Legion of Merit, though his decoration came with private warnings from Admiral King that the risk he’d taken by attempting the capture could have compromised Allied operations if the secrecy had failed.
Gallery accepted the award and the criticism with equal measure.
He’d gambled and won, but King never forgot how close the operation had come to disaster.
Lieutenant Junior Grade Albert David received the Medal of Honor for leading the boarding party onto the circling submarine.
The citation described how David had voluntarily boarded a sinking enemy submarine that might explode at any moment.
How he’d entered through the conning tower hatch fully aware that German sailors might still be inside armed and fighting.
How he’d worked for hours to stop the flooding and save the vessel from sinking.
The Medal of Honor is America’s highest military decoration awarded only for valor in action against an enemy force.
David’s actions on June 4th, 1944 represented extraordinary courage above and beyond the call of duty.
The medal was America’s recognition that eight sailors had accomplished something the US Navy hadn’t done in 129 years.
Two members of David’s boarding party, Radioman Second Class Stanley Woiak and torpedo man third class Arthur Kispel received the Navy Cross.
the Navy’s second highest decoration for valor.
Wowak’s citation recognized his collection of intelligence materials under fire while the submarine was sinking.
Kispel’s citation praised his identification and disposal of demolition charges that would have destroyed the submarine and killed the boarding party.
The remaining members of the boarding party received silver stars.
Every man who’d gone over the side into that whaleboat and jumped onto a sinking enemy submarine was recognized for extraordinary heroism.
But Albert David never lived to receive his medal of honor.
On September 17th, 1945, just over 3 months after Germany’s surrender, David suffered a massive heart attack.
He was at his home having been discharged from active duty following the war’s end.
He was 43 years old.
His decades of Navy service combined with the stress of combat operations and particularly the physical and psychological strain of the U505 boarding action had taken their toll.
The heart attack was sudden and fatal.
David died before medical help could reach him.
He left behind his widow, Linda May David, and their children.
The man who’d risked his life boarding a sinking enemy submarine died peacefully at home, never knowing he would receive America’s highest decoration for valor.
President Harry Truman presented the Medal of Honor to Linda May David at a White House ceremony in October 1945.
The ceremony was emotional and bittersweet.
The nation was honoring a genuine American hero who’d performed an act of extraordinary courage.
But that hero wasn’t alive to receive the recognition himself.
Linda May David accepted the medal on behalf of her husband, understanding that Albert’s contribution to American victory in the Atlantic had been significant beyond anything she’d imagined when he deployed with Pillsbury.
The medal would become a family heirloom passed down through generations as a reminder of what Albert David had accomplished on that June morning in the Atlantic.
The US Navy honored David’s memory by naming a destroyer escort after him.
USS Albert David, designated DE1050, was commissioned in October 1968.
The ship served with distinction until 1990, conducting anti-submarine operations during the Cold War when Soviet submarines posed the same threat German Yubot had represented during World War II.
The ship that bore David’s name never captured an enemy submarine, but her crew understood they served aboard a vessel honoring one of the Navy’s greatest heroes.
The captured submarine U505 remained hidden in Bermuda until Germany’s surrender made secrecy unnecessary.
Then the US Navy put her to use one final time.
The submarine was repainted and restored to operational appearance, though her engines remained disabled.
She toured American ports during the summer of 1945 as part of the seventh war bond drive.
American citizens who purchased war bonds could climb aboard and walk through the compartments where David and his men had fought to keep her afloat.
The tours were enormously popular.
Thousands of Americans lined up to see the captured German submarine, the only enemy warship taken by the US Navy since the War of 1812.
The bond drive raised millions of dollars that helped finance America’s continued military operations in the Pacific theater, where the war against Japan wouldn’t end until August.
The public finally learned the story that 3,000 American sailors had kept secret for over a year.
Newspapers published accounts of the capture.
Magazine articles described the boarding action in dramatic detail.
News reels showed footage of U505 being towed into Bermuda.
The American public was fascinated by the story of eight sailors jumping onto a sinking enemy submarine and saving it from destruction.
The story embodied everything Americans believed about their military forces.
courage, determination, ingenuity, and the refusal to accept that something was impossible just because nobody had done it before.
After the war bond drive ended, the US Navy had no further use for U505.
She was obsolete technology, a diesel electric submarine.
In an age when nuclear power would soon revolutionize submarine warfare, the Navy made plans to tow her out to sea and sink her with gunfire, using her as a target for gunnery practice.
She would disappear beneath the Atlantic like hundreds of other German submarines destroyed during the war.
Just another piece of military hardware that had served its purpose and was no longer needed.
But Rear Admiral Daniel Gallery, as he’d become after the war, had different ideas.
The submarine his men had risked their lives to capture, deserved a better fate than being used for target practice.
Gallery launched a campaign to save U505 and preserve her as a permanent memorial to the Battle of the Atlantic.
He contacted civic leaders in Chicago, his hometown, and proposed that the submarine be transported to the city and displayed at the Museum of Science and Industry.
The museum agreed enthusiastically.
Chicago had a proud naval tradition despite being over 700 miles from the nearest ocean.
The city had contributed thousands of sailors to the war effort and wanted a memorial that would honor their service.
But getting a 750 ton submarine from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Michigan required engineering on a scale that seemed almost as impossible as the original capture.
The journey began in 1954.
Engineers floated U505 down the Atlantic coast through the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi River system to Chicago.
The submarine was towed by commercial tugs, a strange sight for the cargo ships and pleasure boats that encountered a German Uboat making its way up the American River system.
The final leg of the journey required hauling the submarine overland through Chicago’s streets to the museum grounds.
Engineers constructed special railroad tracks and enormous rollers to move the submarine.
Thousands of Chicagoans lined the route on September 3rd, 1954, watching as the German hubot crept past their homes and businesses at approximately 200 ft per hour.
On September 25th, 1954, Fleet Admiral William Holsey dedicated U505 as a permanent war memorial at the Museum of Science and Industry.
Holsey had commanded American naval forces in the Pacific theater and had no direct connection to the Atlantic submarine war, but his presence represented the US Navy’s official recognition that U505’s capture had been significant enough to deserve permanent commemoration.
The submarine was positioned outdoors on the museum grounds where visitors could climb aboard and walk through the same compartments that Albert David and his men had entered exactly 10 years earlier.
The exhibit was immediately popular, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
For 50 years, U505 remained outdoors at the museum, exposed to Chicago’s harsh weather.
Ice, snow, rain, and temperature extremes gradually deteriorated the submarine’s exterior despite regular maintenance.
By the early 2000s, the museum recognized that the submarine needed better protection if it was to survive for future generations.
In 2004, the museum completed a major renovation project that moved U505 indoors to a climate controlled underground exhibit hall.
The project cost millions of dollars and required excavating an enormous space beneath the museum grounds.
Engineers constructed a waterproof underground gallery that recreated the submarine’s natural environment while protecting it from weather damage.
The renovated U505 exhibit opened to the public in 2005.
Visitors now tour the submarine’s interior preserved almost exactly as it appeared when David’s boarding party came through the conning tower hatch.
The control room where David searched for demolition charges.
The engine room where David and Lucosius closed sea valves and operated manual pumps.
the radio room where Widowiak discovered the Enigma machines.
The torpedo room where the acoustic homing torpedoes were found.
Every compartment tells the story of eight American sailors who accomplished the impossible through courage and determination.
The exhibit includes Albert David’s Medal of Honor loaned to the museum by his family.
The medal is displayed in a case near the submarine’s conning tower, positioned so every visitor sees it before entering the submarine.
The citation is reproduced in full, explaining why the US government awarded its highest decoration to a lieutenant junior grade, who voluntarily boarded a sinking enemy submarine that might explode at any moment.
Alongside the medal are the Enigma cipher machines that Doiaak recovered.
the code books that unlocked German communications, the acoustic torpedo that revealed enemy technology.
The complete intelligence hall is displayed, demonstrating why the capture mattered beyond the simple achievement of taking an enemy vessel.
Over 30 million people have visited the U505 exhibit since 1954.
They walk through compartments where history was made.
They see the valves David closed.
They touch the bulkheads that eight Americans saved from sinking.
They read the stories of men who did something the US Navy hadn’t accomplished in 129 years.
For many visitors, especially children, U505 represents their first encounter with the reality of World War II.
The submarine isn’t abstract history.
It’s a physical artifact they can enter and explore, making the war real in ways the textbooks and documentaries cannot.
George Castleman, the commander of USS Pillsbury, who’d ordered the boarding party over the side and maneuvered his ship to support the capture, returned to civilian life after the war.
He rarely spoke about his wartime service.
Like most veterans of his generation, Castleman believed the war was something you did because your country needed you, not something you talked about endlessly afterward.
He lived quietly, worked at civilian jobs, raised his family, and occasionally attended Navy reunions where aging veterans shared memories of the Atlantic campaign.
Castleman died in the 1980s, largely unknown outside naval history circles.
But every visitor who tours U505 is seeing the result of decisions Castleman made on June 4th, 1944.
USS Pillsbury served until 1947 when she was decommissioned and placed in reserve.
The Navy brought her back to active duty in 1955, converting her to a radar picket ship for cold war operations.
She patrolled the Atlantic approaches, watching for Soviet submarines that now posed the threat German hubot had represented during World War II.
Pillsbury served in this capacity until 1960 when she was decommissioned a final time.
She was sold for scrap in 1966.
No monument marks her service.
No museum displays her artifacts.
The ship that participated in the only German submarine capture by American forces since 1815 exists now only in photographs, official records, and the memories of the men who served aboard her.
But her legacy lives on every time someone tours U505 and learns the story of June 4th, 1944.
The capture of U505 remains unique in American naval history.
It has never been repeated.
No American warship has boarded and seized an enemy vessel at sea since that June morning in 1944.
The tactical and strategic circumstances that made the capture possible haven’t recurred.
Modern submarines are nuclearpowered and can remain submerged indefinitely, eliminating the need to surface where boarding would be possible.
Modern anti-ubmarine warfare emphasizes detection and destruction at long range using sophisticated weapons and sensors.
The age of boarding parties and hand-to-hand combat ended with World War II.
But the story endures because it represents something fundamental about American military capability and character.
Eight sailors accomplished something the US Navy’s entire institutional knowledge base said was impossible.
They improvised solutions to problems that had no standard answers.
They risked their lives because the mission mattered more than personal safety.
They succeeded because failure wasn’t acceptable.
These qualities, courage and determination and the refusal to quit, are what made America’s military forces effective during World War II and what continues to make American forces effective today.
Technology changes, tactics evolve, weapons become obsolete, but the fundamental characteristics that Albert David and his sevenman boarding party demonstrated on June 4th, 1944 remain the foundation of American military excellence.
That is the real legacy of U505’s capture.
Not just that it happened, but what it revealed about the kind of men who served in America’s armed forces and accomplished the impossible when their country
