Final Patrol (33 page)

She floated there at the pier for the next four years. The bridge where the legendary Slade Cutter stood was rusting away. The controls manned by hundreds of brave men through the forty years of her history were deteriorating and disappearing at the hands of vandals. The historic old vessel would soon become a boating hazard, parked for a spell in the middle of the river.

Then, in May of 1990, she was finally towed to the Tampa Shipyard to get her out of the way and to prepare her for another life. The old girl had attracted some new suitors. They included some people with enough political clout to get the job done if they ultimately determined that she was up to the trip.

A long, strange trip that would go down as an amazing first for one historic old submarine.

 

 

 

On February 21, 1990,
Senator John Heinz from the state of Pennsylvania introduced a bill in the United States Congress—Senate Bill S.2151. That piece of legislation, once passed and signed, allowed for the transfer of a particular submarine, the USS
Requin
, from Tampa, Florida, to the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There it would be berthed on the north shore of the Ohio River and become an exhibit for the Carnegie Science Center.

It was an excellent idea, but a quick glance at a map of the United States tells anyone that there is no ocean anywhere near Pittsburgh in which to float a submarine to its new home. Other museum boats were located in or near the sea. The
Drum
at Mobile is on Mobile Bay, which spills into the Gulf of Mexico. The
Pampanito
is in the cold waters of San Francisco Bay. Even the
Silversides
and the
Cobia
are located in slips on Lake Michigan.

Granted, the
Batfish
made a similar journey upriver and to an inland berth at Muskogee, Oklahoma. The Carnegie Museum is located on the Ohio River in Pittsburgh, and the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers offered a marginally wider path for this similar-sized submarine. So there was only one obvious way to get her to Pittsburgh.

On August 7, 1990, the
Requin
was hooked to a tug and towed out into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. She was carefully rigged and prepared beforehand. Nobody wanted a wave to wash over her, maybe founder her, and send her on her last dive before she had the opportunity to complete her final patrol.

The tow continued past New Orleans on the Mississippi and all the way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There she was lifted onto four barges and the really tricky part of the journey began, up the Mississippi to just south of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, then a right turn into the Ohio River. There were tight squeezes through the locks on either side of Paducah, through the Cannelton Lock and Dam, and through others along the way, but she made it.

On September 4, the
Requin
arrived in her new, oceanless hometown. For the next month, preparations were made for visitors. On October 20, she was formally dedicated as a memorial and museum exhibit and the public were welcomed to come aboard and have a look around. Since then, thousands have taken the museum up on its offer.

 

 

 

As part of the submarine's sixtieth birthday,
the Carnegie Science Center completed a major renovation of the
Requin
in 2005. Some of the interior compartments were re-created to attempt to bring them to a state very similar to how they were in 1945. A complete external makeover was also accomplished with the help of volunteers and various businesses.

Oral histories have been recorded by a number of former crew members, including some from World War II crews. Their recollections aided in the accurate re-creation of the various compartments in the boat.

The museum has taken care to emphasize how the crew members lived aboard these submarines and what they did in their everyday lives. Exhibits show visitors what the submariners ate, how they breathed, how they generated electricity and desalinized seawater, and more. The object is to give visitors a good feel for life aboard a World War II submarine.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

 

Class:
IX-C German submarine

Launched:
May 24, 1941

Named for:
The Germans used a simple numbering system for their submarines, beginning with the letter
U
, which stood for “underwater.”

Where:
Deutsche Werft, Hamburg, Germany

Sponsor:
None

Commissioned:
August 26, 1941

 

Claim to fame:
She was the most heavily damaged U-boat to ever go back to Germany for repairs and then return to the war. She became the first enemy ship boarded and captured on the high seas by U.S. forces since the War of 1812. That capture included some real prizes in addition to the U-boat—two German M4 Enigma code machines and codebooks. Allied intelligence was able to use those to crack the Third Reich's wartime code and begin to listen in on and make sense of top secret German communications.

W
ars—and especially one of the magnitude of World War II—are really a series of events, of battles large and small, of victories that make the newsreels and front pages of newspapers, and of those much less conspicuous successes that are either never fully appreciated or require later analysis before they get their due credit. Sometimes it is years before the importance of an event is completely realized.

The capture of the German submarine
U-505
falls into the category of lesser-known conquests, and one that was only fully appreciated after the conflict was over. Still, today, many visitors who crawl through her hull at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago do not totally comprehend what the effect of her seizure was on the outcome of the war. One of the reasons the capture was not so well known is obvious. The Americans made sure nobody knew anything about it—especially the Germans—until the war was over. Because of a couple of top secret devices that were ensnared with the
U-505
, it was essential that the enemy be allowed to assume the submarine was lost with all hands, and all equipment. They could never even be allowed to suspect that she had passed intact into American hands.

It was a complicated dance, and one that would keep the spectacular capture a secret until peace was assured. At the time of the capture, the Allies were employing more than five thousand people in the effort to break the Japanese and German war codes. Oswald Jacoby, the famous expert in the card game of bridge, was even called in to help in the effort. Code breakers worked around the clock, trying to decipher intercepted messages.

The endeavor was paying big dividends. Unbeknownst to the enemy, the Allies were having more and more success in cracking the top secret transmissions as they were picked up. If the Germans knew the
U-505
and her code machine had been seized, however, the communication codes would have been changed immediately. The effort to understand those transmissions would have had to begin from scratch once more.

The German U-boats' success was legendary, the exploits of their captains almost mythical. They exacted a terrible toll on shipping—warships and noncombatants alike. The
U-505
alone claimed over forty-seven thousand tons of Allied shipping before her capture. That included at least three American ships. Their real effect on the war effort, though, was the U-boats' ability to intercept vital supplies and munitions on vessels crossing the Atlantic, bound for Europe, just as the American subs had disrupted supply routes to Japan.

The tide of the fight against the U-boats had begun to turn by 1943 with the progress of Allied antisubmarine warfare. There were also improvements in intelligence, tracking, and the use of aircraft in finding and destroying the German subs. The Americans had also devised a special collection of vessels, specially chosen to seek out and destroy the elusive submersibles. These were termed “hunter-killer task groups,” and their effect on the U-boat menace was immediate. They certainly lived up to their name.

Still, though, shipping losses continued to pile up, even if most Americans were unaware of it. That information was not given to the media, primarily for morale reasons. It appeared it would be a long time yet before Allied shipping could move in the Atlantic Ocean without fear of attack from the U-boats.

One of the groups, hunter-killer Task Group 22.3, consisted of a small aircraft carrier, the USS
Guadalcanal
(CVE-60), which carried a contingent of fighter planes and torpedo bombers, and five light destroyer escort vessels. Pilots could leave the decks of the carrier and search vast areas of the ocean for submarines, using their own eyes or radar. They also had a relatively new device called a sonobuoy that could be dropped into the sea, then used to listen for the subtle sounds of U-boats that might be submerged, out of sight of human eyes or radar equipment.

When an enemy submarine was located, the pilots marked the spot and allowed the trailing warships to move in and launch depth charges. Those light destroyers were faster and more maneuverable than their larger destroyer sisters. They were faster than the U-boats, too. They were also equipped with sensitive radar and sound gear, and they carried a special arsenal, some only recently developed, including guns and torpedoes for attacking surfaced boats, little “hedgehog” bombs that only exploded upon contact with submerged vessels, and deadly depth charges that could be set to explode when they reached a predetermined distance downward.

It is appropriate that the only captured enemy U-boat is now in Chicago, because the commander of Task Group 22.3, the group that took the
U-505
, was a native Chicagoan. Captain Daniel Gallery was a Naval Academy graduate who had previously served as a pilot and flight instructor, then as head of a seaplane base in Iceland. There, his job was to seek out and destroy U-boats and other threats to the Atlantic trade routes. His pilots sank six German subs. He was awarded the Bronze Star for the work he did there.

In 1944, Gallery left solid ground for a seagoing command. He took the helm of the
Guadalcanal
and, simultaneously, command of hunter-killer Task Force 22.3. His success continued. He led the task group as they sank three more U-boats.

While proud of what he and his crews had accomplished, Daniel Gallery harbored a bold idea that he could not shake. His job was to destroy enemy submarines and he was good at it. But what if he could capture one of them? What if he could hook a line to one of the U-boats and tow it to someplace safe and secluded? It had become an obsession for the no-nonsense, by-the-book commander.

There was no doubt that it would be worth the risk and effort. The Allies would finally have access to secret German submarine technology, a chance to study exactly how the boats worked so well. But they would also have—if they pulled off the capture correctly—details on the tactics used by the Germans, and, maybe most important, the top secret communication codes the U-boats used.

That would be a treasure of mammoth proportions and, Gallery suspected, it could even be a major turning point in the war.

When he and his task group returned from patrol in the spring of 1944, he went right to work preparing a detailed plan for how such a bold capture could be carried out. For the most part, he and his officers were guessing on the fine details.

Such a high-seas capture of an enemy submarine not only had never happened, it had never been attempted. No manual on how to do such a thing existed.

They knew it wouldn't be easy. The reason the U-boats had been so successful was that they were so swift and elusive, their commanders and crews so adept. They were accustomed to cruising on the surface, scanning the horizon for smoke that indicated a ship was passing, and boldly making their move. Even in the twentieth century, the best way to spot a ship at a distance was the trail of smoke from her stacks. Once a victim was sighted, the U-boat dove and stalked its prey, using the periscope. When in range, and once the firing parameters had been plotted, torpedoes were launched. The Germans were uncannily accurate and seldom missed. For the first three years of the war, they usually swam away safely, ready to attack again.

The German boats and their crews were feared and respected, both for the design and efficiency of their equipment and for the skill with which they used it. Although the U.S. Navy approved Dan Gallery's capture plan and gave the green light to begin training his crews for a capture attempt, they did not have high hopes that anyone could actually pull it off. Still, Gallery's commanders reasoned, the prize was well worth the risks involved.