😱 When Americans Captured This Nazi Sub Alive – They Found Hitler’s Secret Weapon 😱 – HTT

😱 When Americans Captured This Nazi Sub Alive – They Found Hitler’s Secret Weapon 😱

At 11:15 AM on April 9, 1944, Lieutenant Commander George Castleman stood on the bridge of the USS Pillsbury, his eyes fixed on the horizon where a German submarine had just broken the surface.

This was no ordinary encounter; it was a pivotal moment in the relentless battle of the Atlantic during World War II.

The submarine, U-515, commanded by the infamous Verer Hanka, was one of the deadliest vessels in the German fleet.

Hanka had gained notoriety for sinking 25 Allied ships, leading to the tragic loss of over 600 lives when he torpedoed the British troopship Ceramic in December 1942.

Now, after enduring relentless depth charge attacks from the Pillsbury and her sister ships, Hanka’s U-boat was crippled and forced to surface.

As the German crew scrambled onto the deck, some manned their guns while others leaped into the churning Atlantic waters.

In a rapid response, Castleman’s ship opened fire, joined by the USS Flity, as machine guns raked across the submarine’s conning tower.

Rockets fired from circling aircraft lit up the sky, and within minutes, U-515’s bow lifted toward the heavens before it slid backward into the depths, disappearing beneath the waves.

Forty-four German sailors were pulled from the water, including Hanka himself, marking what seemed to be a decisive victory for the Allies.

However, Captain Daniel Gallery, commanding the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal and the entire Hunter Killer Group, viewed the situation through a different lens.

He recognized a missed opportunity.

Gallery had observed U-515 float on the surface for nearly ten minutes before it sank, a window of time that could have been utilized for something far more valuable than mere destruction.

He realized that if he had been prepared, if he had trained boarding parties in advance, they might have captured the submarine instead.

The intelligence value of such a capture would have been extraordinary.

German codebooks, Enigma cipher machines, torpedo guidance systems, and acoustic homing technology were all within reach.

The Allies had spent years attempting to crack German naval codes, and a captured U-boat could potentially hand them everything they needed.

Yet, no American warship had boarded and captured an enemy vessel at sea since 1815, a gap of 129 years.

The Navy had not trained sailors for boarding actions; there were no procedures or protocols in place.

In fact, no one had even considered it a possibility.

Determined to change this, Gallery set out to prepare his men for an unprecedented mission.

The challenges were immense.

German U-boat crews were trained to scuttle their boats within minutes of surfacing.

They would open sea valves, set demolition charges, and destroy codebooks and equipment.

The statistics were brutal; in 1943 alone, German submarines had sunk over 300 Allied merchant ships.

American destroyer escorts faced a grim equation: find the submarine and destroy it before it could destroy them.

There was no room for error.

Every second a U-boat remained afloat was another second it could fire torpedoes.

Castleman’s Pillsbury was an Edel-class destroyer escort, equipped with 3-inch guns, depth charges, and hedgehog mortars, designed for hunting and killing submarines, not capturing them.

But Gallery had given the order.

Every ship in Task Group 22.3 would form a boarding party, and they would train for the next mission.

Upon returning to Norfolk in late April, Castleman assembled his best men, informing them of their audacious plan to board a German submarine.

With just six weeks to prepare, the crew of the Pillsbury began their intense training.

On May 15, 1944, Pillsbury set sail from Norfolk with a mission disguised as a routine anti-submarine patrol.

However, Gallery had received secret authorization from the highest levels of naval command: bring one back alive.

The boarding party from Pillsbury comprised eight men, led by Lieutenant Junior Grade Albert David, a seasoned sailor with 25 years of experience in the Navy.

Despite his extensive background, David had never boarded an enemy vessel, nor had anyone in the United States Navy in living memory.

Training commenced immediately after leaving Norfolk.

Every day, David drilled his men on the fan tail, practicing climbing over railings and jumping from a whaleboat onto a moving deck.

They memorized the general layout of a German Type 9 submarine based on intelligence photographs and technical drawings.

The challenges were staggering.

A surfaced U-boat would be circling erratically, its rudder likely jammed by damage from depth charges.

The deck would be slick with seawater and fuel oil, and German sailors might still be aboard, armed and desperate.

The submarine could dive at any moment, taking the boarding party down with it.

And then there were the explosives.

German commanders followed strict protocols for scuttling; the moment a U-boat surfaced under attack, the captain would order demolition charges armed.

These charges were placed throughout the submarine, designed to detonate and send the vessel to the ocean floor within minutes.

The crew would also open sea valves, flooding the engine room and control spaces.

Even if American sailors reached the submarine, they would be boarding a sinking ship rigged with explosives.

The Germans would rather die than let their secrets fall into Allied hands.

David’s team had to work fast, estimating they had only three to five minutes from boarding to catastrophic flooding.

In that time, 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 the cramped, unfamiliar interior of a foreign submarine in near darkness.

Their tools were basic: wrenches, flashlights, and sidearms.

There was no specialized equipment for capturing enemy submarines because no one had ever needed any.

Gallery held conferences with his destroyer escort captains throughout the three-week voyage.

Commander Frederick Hall coordinated the tactical approach.

The plan called for careful use of weapons once a U-boat surfaced.

Ships would fire small caliber guns only, enough to drive the German crew overboard but not enough to sink the submarine.

Aircraft would strafe the decks to prevent the enemy from manning their guns, but pilots were ordered to avoid hits below the waterline.

The goal was to wound the submarine, not kill it.

Pillsbury’s role was critical.

She would be the first ship to lower a boarding party.

Castleman positioned his whaleboat crews for rapid deployment.

The moment a U-boat broke the surface, David and his men would be over the side and racing toward it.

However, there was no guarantee the plan would work.

The Navy had never attempted anything like this before.

Intelligence suggested that German crews could complete scuttling procedures in under four minutes.

If David’s team was even thirty seconds too slow, they would go down with the submarine.

The task group sailed south toward the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa, where intelligence reports indicated U-boat activity in the shipping lanes.

Guadalcanal’s aircraft flew constant patrols, searching for periscopes and snorkel masts.

Days passed without contact, and the men grew restless.

David continued drilling his boarding party, but the repetition wore on them.

They had memorized every procedure and rehearsed every scenario.

Now, they simply waited.

On the morning of June 4, 1944, the task group was 150 miles west of Cape Blanco when the sonar operator aboard the USS Chadlane reported contact.

Bearing 045, range 800 yards.

A submarine was running submerged directly toward the carrier Guadalcanal.

David’s team had trained for six weeks.

Now they had minutes.

Chadlane turned hard to starboard and accelerated toward the contact.

Two FM2 Wildcat fighters from Guadalcanal dove toward the sea, their pilots spotting the dark shape of a submarine just below the surface.

They opened fire with their machine guns, stitching lines of spray across the water to mark the position for the destroyers below.

At 11:16, Chadlane released her first pattern of depth charges, sending white columns of water erupting skyward.

Oil bubbled to the surface, indicating the submarine had been hit.

Six and a half minutes after the first attack, the U-boat broke the surface 700 yards from Chadlane.

She came up bow first, her gray hull streaming seawater, and her conning tower scarred with rust.

The depth charges had jammed her rudder, and her lights were out.

Seawater poured through cracked pipes in her engine room, causing the submarine to circle to starboard at five or six knots, unable to steer.

German sailors scrambled through the hatches onto the deck, some attempting to reach their deck guns.

Chadlane and the other escorts opened fire with everything they had.

Machine gun rounds sparked off the conning tower, and one German sailor fell dead on the deck.

The rest threw up their hands and began jumping into the Atlantic.

On Pillsbury’s bridge, Castleman watched the submarine spiral through the water.

This was the moment.

He gave the order to lower the whaleboat.

David and his eight-man team were already waiting.

They dropped into the boat and cast off, the coxswain steering directly into the submarine’s circling path.

The U-boat was still moving, still turning, and they would have to intercept it like chasing a wounded animal.

The whaleboat cut inside the submarine’s arc, and the men could see the gray hull looming larger with each second.

Oil slicked the water around them, and German sailors thrashed in the waves nearby, shouting and waving for rescue.

David ignored them; his focus was on the submarine.

The whaleboat pulled alongside, and David grabbed a railing to pull himself onto the deck.

His men followed him, but the submarine rolled beneath their feet, still circling and sinking by the stern.

One German body lay face down near the conning tower hatch, but no other enemy sailors were visible.

David did not hesitate.

He climbed through the hatch and dropped into the control room, where the interior was nearly dark.

Emergency lighting cast red shadows across unfamiliar machinery, and water sprayed from broken pipes.

The deck tilted at an angle, and the submarine was flooding.

David could hear the rush of seawater somewhere below.

The Germans had opened the sea valves before abandoning ship.

He had minutes, maybe less, before the boat went down.

His men spread through the compartments, and one found the sea strainer valve, a large pipe allowing ocean water to flood the engine room.

The cover had been removed and thrown aside.

David located it nearby and screwed it back into place, slowing the flooding.

Others searched for demolition charges and found thirteen throughout the submarine, placed in the engine room, torpedo compartments, and control spaces.

Each one had to be located, examined, and disarmed.

The charges had timers, and some were set to detonate within minutes.

David’s team worked in near darkness, crawling through the oily water and tracing unfamiliar pipes and cables.

They pulled wires, removed detonators, and sealed valves and hatches.

The submarine continued to settle by the stern, her aft deck already submerged.

Above them, the circling submarine posed a new danger.

Without steering, the U-boat swung toward Pillsbury herself, forcing Castleman to maneuver his ship to avoid a collision.

The whaleboat that had delivered David’s team was crushed between the two hulls, and three of Pillsbury’s compartments flooded from the impact.

Despite this, the boarding party remained aboard the submarine, having stopped the scuttling.

The U-boat was wounded but not sinking.

At 11:30, a second boarding party arrived from Guadalcanal, led by Commander Earl Trino, the carrier’s chief engineer.

He found David’s men still working in the flooded compartments, still pulling demolition charges from hidden corners.

They had captured a German submarine, but now they had to keep her afloat.

Commander Trino crawled through the flooded compartments for hours.

He was a merchant marine engineer before the war, experienced with ship systems and machinery, but he had never been inside a German submarine.

The Type 9 U-boat was larger than he expected, over 250 feet long, with eleven compartments connected by watertight hatches.

The design was foreign, the labels in German, and the equipment unfamiliar.

Trino traced pipelines by hand, following them through the oily bilge water until he understood how the submarine’s systems connected.

The stern was already underwater, and the depth charge damage had cracked pipes and ruptured tanks throughout the aft section.

Seawater continued to seep in through dozens of small leaks.

If they could not stop the flooding, the submarine would sink within hours.

Trino organized the salvage effort, directing men to specific valves and identifying which pumps still functioned.

He jury-rigged connections between compartments to redirect the flow of water, and slowly, the flooding stabilized.

While Trino worked on keeping the submarine afloat, David’s team collected intelligence materials.

They found two Enigma cipher machines intact, complete with their coding rotors.

They gathered stacks of codebooks, signal documents, and operational orders.

They located charts showing U-boat patrol zones across the Atlantic, totaling 900 pounds of classified German naval documents.

The haul was extraordinary.

Allied codebreakers at Bletchley Park in Britain had been working to crack German naval communications for years.

They had achieved partial success, but the Germans regularly changed their cipher settings.

Fresh codebooks and an intact Enigma machine could unlock months of intercepted messages.

But there was more.

In the forward torpedo room, salvage teams found two acoustic homing torpedoes, known as Zhoig.

The Allies had heard rumors of these weapons but had never examined one.

The torpedoes used sound to track their targets, homing in on the propeller noise of Allied ships.

Understanding how they worked could save hundreds of lives.

Captain Gallery faced an immediate problem.

His task group was now responsible for a captured enemy submarine 150 miles off the African coast.

The U-boat could not move under her own power, barely staying afloat, and 3,000 American sailors had just witnessed her capture.

If the Germans learned that U-505 had been taken intact, they would change their codes immediately.

Every advantage gained from the captured materials would vanish, rendering the entire operation worthless.

Gallery ordered absolute secrecy.

No radio transmissions about the capture, and no written records in ship logs.

The German prisoners, 58 men including their wounded captain, were confined below decks on Guadalcanal, forbidden from speaking with anyone.

Then Gallery received new orders from Washington.

The original plan had been to tow the submarine to Casablanca, but now he was directed to take her to Bermuda instead, a journey of 2,500 miles across the open Atlantic.

The timing was critical.

Allied forces were about to invade Normandy.

D-Day was scheduled for June 5th but pushed to June 6th due to weather.

If German intelligence discovered that their codes had been compromised just days before the largest amphibious invasion in history, the consequences could be catastrophic.

Pillsbury attempted to take the submarine under tow, but the collision during the capture had damaged her hull.

Three compartments were flooded, and she could not maintain the strain.

Guadalcanal rigged a tow line from the carrier to the U-boat and began the slow journey north.

The voyage took 15 days, during which storms threatened to swamp the waterlogged submarine.

Salvage crews remained aboard around the clock, pumping water and monitoring leaks.

The fleet tug USS Abnaki eventually took over towing duties, but the danger never lessened.

On June 19th, the task group entered Port Royal Bay, Bermuda.

The U-boat was immediately hidden in a remote corner of the naval base, repainted to disguise her German origins, and given a new designation: USS Nemo.

The 58 German prisoners were transferred to a secret camp in Louisiana, with the Red Cross denied access.

Their families in Germany received notifications that they were missing, presumed dead.

They would not learn the truth until 1947.

Admiral Ernest King, commander-in-chief of the United States Fleet, reviewed the intelligence haul.

The codebooks alone were invaluable.

But King had another concern: Gallery had taken an enormous risk.

If the capture had failed or if the Germans had learned their codes were compromised, the damage to Allied operations could have been incalculable.

The admiral’s response was measured.

Gallery would receive the Legion of Merit, but he would also receive a private warning.

The secrecy had to hold.

If it did not, there would be consequences.

The German Navy never learned what happened to U-505.

Admiral Carl Dönitz, commander of the U-boat fleet, received the final transmission from the submarine on June 3rd.

She reported her position off the African coast and indicated she was returning to base in Lorient, France.

After June 4th, silence.

This was not unusual; U-boats disappeared constantly in 1944.

Allied hunter-killer groups and long-range aircraft had turned the Atlantic into a killing ground for German submarines.

Dönitz assumed U-505 had been sunk by depth charges or aerial attack like hundreds of others before her.

He ordered no changes to German codes and issued no warnings about compromised communications.

The marine continued using the same Enigma settings, the same cipher procedures, and the same operational protocols.

The secrecy held.

Three thousand American sailors who had witnessed the capture said nothing.

They wrote no letters home describing what they had seen and made no mentions in personal diaries.

Captain Gallery had explained the stakes during the voyage to Bermuda.

If word reached the Germans, the intelligence value would be destroyed, and Allied sailors and soldiers would die because of loose talk.

The men understood.

Not a single breach occurred.

At Bletchley Park in England, British codebreakers received the captured materials within weeks.

The Enigma machine and its rotors confirmed their understanding of German cipher methods.

The codebooks provided settings valid through the summer of 1944.

Intercepted U-boat transmissions that had been gibberish suddenly became readable.

The intelligence revealed German submarine positions across the Atlantic, exposed patrol patterns and attack strategies, and identified supply routes and rendezvous points.

Allied convoy commanders adjusted their courses to avoid known U-boat concentrations.

Hunter-killer groups received precise coordinates for their targets.

The acoustic homing torpedoes proved equally valuable.

American engineers at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington disassembled the Zhoig weapons and analyzed every component.

They discovered the torpedoes tracked the cavitation noise created by ship propellers.

Within months, the Navy developed countermeasures.

Ships began towing noise makers called “foxers,” decoys that produced louder cavitation sounds than the ships themselves.

The torpedoes chased the decoys instead of their intended targets.

German U-boat commanders noticed the change.

Their acoustic torpedoes, which had been devastating Allied escorts, suddenly missed with alarming frequency.

They reported the failures to headquarters.

Dönitz suspected the Allies had developed some form of countermeasure, but he never connected it to U-505.

He assumed the technology had been captured from a torpedo that failed to detonate, not from a submarine taken intact.

The war in the Atlantic continued through the summer and fall of 1944, with U-boat losses mounting.

New submarines left German shipyards equipped with snorkels, devices that allowed them to run their diesel engines while submerged.

This technology extended their underwater endurance and made them harder to detect.

But the Allies had the codes.

They knew where the new submarines were going before they arrived.

Hunter-killer groups intercepted them in mid-ocean, and aircraft caught them during surface transits.

The Battle of the Atlantic, which had threatened to strangle Britain’s supply lines for four years, was effectively won.

Pillsbury returned to operations after repairs in Norfolk.

The collision with U-505 had damaged three compartments, but shipyard crews restored her within weeks.

By late summer, she was back on patrol with Task Group 22.3.

The Hunter Killer Group continued sweeping the Atlantic through the fall, but they found no submarines.

German U-boat activity had collapsed in the central ocean.

The few boats still operating hugged the European coastline or lurked in distant waters where Allied air cover was thin.

The war in Europe approached its end.

By April 1945, Allied armies had crossed the Rhine and were driving into Germany.

Soviet forces closed in on Berlin from the east.

Hitler’s Reich was collapsing, but the U-boat war was not finished.

German Naval Command had one final operation planned.

A group of submarines equipped with the latest technology would cross the Atlantic and strike the American coast.

The mission was desperate, a last attempt to prove that Germany could still threaten the enemy homeland.

On April 8, 1945, Pillsbury sailed from Norfolk as part of a new task group.

Their mission was to intercept the incoming submarines before they reached American waters.

Operation Teardrop was born from fear.

Allied intelligence had detected a group of German submarines heading west across the Atlantic in early April 1945.

The boats were Type 9 long-range submarines capable of reaching the American coastline.

But what alarmed naval planners was the cargo they might be carrying.

Rumors had circulated for months about German plans to launch V-1 flying bombs or V-2 rockets from submarine platforms.

These weapons had devastated London, and a single V-2 striking New York or Washington could kill thousands.

American intelligence could not confirm whether the approaching submarines carried such weapons, but they could not rule it out.

The Navy assembled two barrier forces to intercept the incoming boats.

Task Group 22.7 included the escort carriers Bogue and COPS, along with over a dozen destroyer escorts.

Pillsbury was assigned to the screen, and the barrier stretched across the western Atlantic approaches, a net of ships and aircraft designed to catch any submarine attempting to reach American waters.

For two weeks, the task group patrolled in shifting fog and heavy seas.

Aircraft flew constant searches, and sonar operators listened for contacts.

The submarines were out there somewhere, running silent beneath the gray swells.

On April 16th, the barrier scored its first kills.

Destroyer escorts located U-235 and U-880 within hours of each other, and depth charges sent both to the bottom.

Six days later, aircraft and surface ships destroyed U-518, bringing the total to three submarines down.

The barrier was working, but the Germans kept coming.

On the morning of April 24th, the USS Frederick C. Davis was patrolling 650 miles northwest of the Azores when her sonar operator reported contact.

The range was 2,000 yards.

A submarine was attempting to slip through the barrier.

Frederick C. Davis maneuvered to attack, but the contact faded, lost in her own wake.

Her officer of the deck ordered a hard turn to relocate the target.

At 8:39, with the submarine only 650 yards away, a torpedo struck her port side.

The acoustic homing weapon detonated in the forward engine room, breaking the destroyer escort in half.

Her bow section sank immediately, while her stern floated for five minutes as survivors scrambled into the water.

One hundred fifteen men died, and only 77 were rescued.

Frederick C. Davis was the last American warship sunk by enemy action in the Atlantic.

The submarine that killed her was U-546, commanded by Captain Lieutenant Paul Just.

She had slipped through the barrier undetected, fired her torpedo at point-blank range, and then dove deep to escape.

Pillsbury was 12 miles away when the distress call came.

Castleman ordered flank speed, and within an hour, eight destroyer escorts had converged on the datum point.

Flity arrived first and made sonar contact at 9:23, attacking with depth charges.

The contact faded, and the hunt lasted ten hours.

U-546 dove to 600 feet and ran silent, evading detection.

Pillsbury circled the perimeter while Flity coordinated the attacks.

Shadowlane, Nunzer, Varian, Hubard, Jansen, and Keith joined the pursuit, dropping depth charges in overlapping patterns and firing hedgehog salvos at suspected positions.

Each attack forced U-546 deeper, but she refused to surface.

By late afternoon, the submarine’s batteries were nearly exhausted.

She had been submerged for eight hours, her air foul, and her crew exhausted.

At 19:43, after a final hedgehog attack from Flity, U-546 blew her tanks and broke the surface.

The destroyer escorts opened fire immediately.

U-546’s captain ordered two torpedoes launched at Flity as a final act of defiance, but both missed.

Machine gun fire swept the submarine’s deck, forcing the German crew to abandon ship.

Thirty-three survivors were pulled from the water, including Captain Lieutenant Just, who was taken aboard the escort carrier Bogue for interrogation.

The Navy needed to know one thing: were there more submarines carrying secret weapons?

Just had the answer.

The interrogation of Captain Lieutenant Paul Just lasted for days, with Navy intelligence officers pressing him about secret weapons, submarine-launched rockets, and plans to strike American cities.

Just answered their questions.

There were no V-weapons aboard the German submarines.

There never had been.

The boats crossing the Atlantic carried standard torpedoes and nothing more.

The mission was a final conventional attack, a desperate gesture by a dying navy.

Operation Teardrop had succeeded.

The barrier forces had destroyed five of the seven submarines sent against the United States.

U-546 was the last.

The remaining two boats surrendered when Germany capitulated on May 8, 1945.

Pillsbury was present for that surrender as well.

She and her sister ship Pope escorted U-858 from mid-Atlantic to Cape May, New Jersey, after placing a prize crew aboard.

The war in the Atlantic was over.

The final accounting revealed the scale of Pillsbury’s contribution.

In 13 months of combat operations, the small destroyer escort had participated in the destruction of two German submarines and the capture of a third.

No other American warship could claim such a record.

U-515 had been one of the most successful U-boats in the German Navy, with her commander, Verer Hanka, sinking 25 Allied ships totaling over 150,000 tons.

Pillsbury’s depth charges had forced her to the surface in April 1944.

U-505 was the only German submarine captured by American forces during the entire war.

The intelligence materials recovered from her hull provided months of insight into German naval operations.

The Enigma machine and codebooks allowed Allied cryptographers to read enemy communications during the critical summer of 1944 when the Normandy invasion hung in the balance.

U-546 was the last German submarine to sink an American warship.

Pillsbury had joined the ten-hour hunt that brought her to the surface and ended her threat.

The Navy recognized the achievement with its highest unit honor.

Task Group 22.3 received the Presidential Unit Citation for the capture of U-505, praising the coordinated attack, the swift boarding action, and the successful preservation of invaluable intelligence materials.

Lieutenant Albert David received the Medal of Honor for leading the boarding party onto the circling submarine.

His citation described how he had plunged through the conning tower hatch, fully aware that the U-boat might sink or explode at any moment.

He had risked his life above and beyond the call of duty.

It was the only Medal of Honor awarded to a Navy sailor in the entire Atlantic theater of World War II.

Two members of David’s boarding party, Radioman Second Class Stanley Woviaak and Torpedoman Third Class Arthur Kisipell, received the Navy Cross.

The remaining boarders received Silver Stars.

Captain Daniel Gallery received the Legion of Merit, but the recognition came with a shadow.

Admiral King had made it clear that the secrecy surrounding U-505 had to hold until the war ended.

Gallery had taken an enormous risk.

If the capture had been revealed prematurely, if the Germans had changed their codes before D-Day, the consequences could have altered the course of the invasion.

King respected Gallery’s audacity but never fully forgave the danger he had created.

The captured submarine remained hidden in Bermuda until Germany surrendered.

Then the Navy put her to use one final time.

Repainted and restored, U-505 toured American ports as part of the seventh war bond drive.

Citizens who purchased bonds could climb aboard and walk through the compartments where David and his men had fought to keep her afloat.

The bond drive raised millions.

The public finally learned the story that 3,000 sailors had kept secret for nearly a year.

After the war, the Navy had no further use for the submarine.

Plans were made to tow her out to sea and sink her with gunfire, a target for gunnery practice.

She would disappear beneath the Atlantic like the hundreds of other U-boats destroyed during the war.

But Gallery had other ideas.

The submarine that his men had risked their lives to capture deserved a different fate.

Rear Admiral Daniel Gallery, as he had become after the war, launched a campaign to save U-505.

He contacted civic leaders in Chicago, his hometown, proposing that the submarine be transported to the city and displayed as a permanent memorial to the Battle of the Atlantic.

The Museum of Science and Industry agreed to host the exhibit, but getting the submarine to Chicago required moving a 750-ton vessel from the Atlantic Ocean to the shore of Lake Michigan.

The journey would cover over 1,000 miles, much of it overland.

In 1954, engineers floated U-505 down the Atlantic coast, through the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Mississippi River system to Chicago.

The final leg required hauling the submarine across city streets on specially constructed rollers.

Thousands of Chicagoans lined the route to watch the German U-boat creep past their homes and businesses.

On September 25, 1954, Fleet Admiral William Halsey dedicated U-505 as a permanent war memorial.

She was placed outdoors on the museum grounds, where visitors could climb aboard and walk through the same compartments that Albert David and his men had entered a decade earlier.

David himself never saw the memorial.

He died of a heart attack on September 17, 1945, three weeks before he was scheduled to receive the Medal of Honor.

He was 43 years old.

President Harry Truman presented the medal to his widow, Linda May David, at a White House ceremony the following month.

The Navy honored David’s memory by naming a destroyer escort after him.

USS Albert David was commissioned in 1968 and served until 1990.

George Castleman returned to civilian life after the war.

The lieutenant commander who had watched two submarines sink and ordered the boarding of a third resumed a quiet existence far from the Atlantic.

Like most veterans of his generation, he rarely spoke of what he had done.

Pillsbury herself served until 1947 when she was decommissioned and placed in reserve.

The Navy brought her back in 1955, converting her to a radar picket ship for Cold War duty along the Atlantic barrier.

She patrolled for Soviet submarines until 1960 and was decommissioned a final time.

She was sold for scrap in 1966.

No monument marks her service, and no museum displays her artifacts.

The ship that participated in the only submarine capture by American forces since 1815 exists now only in photographs and official records.

But U-505 endures.

In 2004, the Museum of Science and Industry completed a major renovation.

The submarine was moved indoors to a climate-controlled underground exhibit hall.

Visitors can now tour her interior, preserved almost exactly as she appeared when David’s men came through the conning tower hatch.

The Medal of Honor that David never lived to receive is displayed alongside the submarine, as are the Enigma machines his team recovered, the codebooks that unlocked German communications, and the acoustic torpedoes that revealed enemy secrets.

Over 30 million people have visited the exhibit since 1954.

They walk through the control room where David searched for demolition charges, see the valve that Trino closed to stop the flooding, and stand in the compartments where eight American sailors saved a sinking enemy vessel through courage and determination.

The capture of U-505 remains the only time the United States Navy boarded and seized an enemy warship at sea since the War of 1812.

It has never happened again.