John Connor

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June 4, 1944. A hunter-killer group under Captain Dan Gallery has been chasing a ghost off West Africa for days. Then their sonar pings solid iron. Depth charges go over the side of the destroyer escorts and the ocean starts coughing up a German U-boat, U-505, blown to the surface with her rudder jammed and her crew scrambling out onto a deck that's already awash. The Germans do what German submariners are drilled to do when capture looms: they scuttle. Somebody yanks the cover off a seawater strainer the width of a dinner plate and leaves it open, so the Atlantic can climb in and take the boat down with all her secrets. Then they jump. Here's the part nobody tells you. A nine-man boarding party from the USS Pillsbury rows a whaleboat straight at a sinking, possibly booby-trapped enemy submarine while she's still under fire and still moving in a slow circle. Lt. Albert David goes down the conning tower hatch first. Think about that for a second. A metal tube filling with water, likely wired with demolition charges, maybe still holding armed Germans, and a Missouri farm kid climbs down into it because somebody has to. Torpedoman Arthur Knispel and radioman Stanley Wdowiak go right behind him. They grab codebooks and charts and start hurling them up through the hatch while the water rises. Machinist's mate Zenon Lukosius spots the loose strainer cover lying nearby in the flood, hauls it back over the hole, and muscles the bolts down until the boat stops dying. That cover is the whole ballgame. Without Lukosius finding it in the dark, U-505 goes to the bottom and this is a footnote. Then it gets better. Gallery tows the thing seventeen hundred miles to Bermuda, and the entire U.S. Navy sits on the secret for the rest of the war. Because aboard U-505 were two intact Enigma machines and the codebooks to go with them, and if Berlin ever found out the boat was captured instead of sunk, they'd change everything. Every man on that task group is sworn to silence. The families of the boarding party don't learn what they did for a year. FDR wanted Gallery court-martialed at first for risking the whole intelligence coup. Albert David got the Medal of Honor, the only one awarded to the Atlantic Fleet in the entire war. He died of a heart attack in 1945 and never got to stand next to the boat he saved. But you can. U-505 is sitting in a climate-controlled hall at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago right now, eighty-two years later, because a handful of men climbed into a sinking submarine instead of away from it.

Good Americana Morning

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