“Cease firing,” the skipper ordered. Minutes later, the ship’s loudspeakers broadcast a command not heard on a Navy vessel since 1815. “Away all boarding parties,” the captain barked, as wooden whaleboats hurriedly were lowered over the sides of three destroyer escorts and into the choppy waters of the North Atlantic. The 26-foot diesel-motor vessels were on their way to rendezvous with a large, black Nazi submarine, lying dead ahead like a giant beached whale, foundering and spurting sea water from its damaged sides.1
When sailors from the destroyer escorts USS Pillsbury, Jenks, and Chatelain scrambled on board their boats, they were excited at the prospect that they soon would capture a Nazi U-boat, something that had eluded American forces over the course of the entire war. Although they were about to make naval history with the first capture of an enemy vessel at sea since the War of 1812, that did not cross their minds as they plowed through heavy seas off the coast of West Africa. “We had a job to do, and that’s what we were thinking about,” said Wayne M. Pickels, boatswain’s mate on board the Pillsbury, one of the nine-man boarding party who climbed on board U-505 and descended into the eerily dark and cramped quarters of the German submarine.
It all began on a peaceful Sunday morning in June 1944, bright and clear with a stiff wind blowing. The destroyer escorts were part of a group of ships under the command of Daniel V. Gallery, skipper of the carrier USS Guadalcanal, churning through the North Atlantic on its way to search for Nazi submarines in the area around the Cape Verde Islands. “Hunting submarines is big game hunting,” Captain Gallery noted, “but 99 percent of the time it is a most monotonous and discouraging occupation. Your planes scour the ocean continuously, day and night. The gun crews practically live at the stations. For a month at a time nothing may happen except, perhaps, a false alarm or two, when the lads get desperate and begin imagining things. Then, just about the time you decide that there are no submarines in the ocean, all hell busts loose.”2
“I had just come up to the bridge after attending divine services,” Gallery wrote, “when the radio loudspeaker announced: ‘USS Chatelain to task-group commander. I have a possible sound contact.’” Gallery, who was planning to depart for Casablanca for refueling, was not alarmed as sound contacts were not uncommon in the North Atlantic. Sound gear often would pick up submerged whales, which appeared similar to a submarine on the sonar screen. Alarms would sound as sailors rushed to their battle stations and prepared to open fire on the suspected submarine. Suddenly a whale would surface, eye the convoy of ships, and blow before descending once again into the depths of the ocean.3
But this was no whale. Gallery ordered his carrier away from the scene as the destroyer escorts Pillsbury, Pope, Flaherty, Chatelain, and Jenks swiftly sped to the site of the contact to subdue the submarine. The Chatelain’s captain, Dudley S. Knox, reported, “Contact evaluated as sub. Am starting attack,” as the DE dropped its first depth charges.4
Two wildcat fighters launched from the carrier flew over the site, hoping to spot the U-boat. They did. The submarine, which had made the mistake of rising to periscope level, now tried to make a run for it, but the fighter planes fired their machine guns into the water to mark the sub’s location for the Chatelain. The fighter planes radioed the U-boat’s position and the destroyer escort swung around, chasing the submerged vessel, continuing to fire depth charges. “We struck oil,” Knox jubilantly radioed. The submarine, with its damaged hull and jammed rudder, began to surface some seven hundred yards from the Chatelain. Gallery did not want this one to get away, so he broadcast over the loudspeaker, “I want to capture this bastard, if possible—I want to capture this bastard, if possible.”5
“Match pointers,” ordered the gun commander on board the Pillsbury, which along with the Jenks had joined their sister ship in the attack. Boatswain’s Mate Pickels, whose battle station was on the 40-mm gun, was using non-armor-piercing bullets so the submarine would not sink. Pickels, along with sailors from the Chatelain and Jenks, commenced firing their deck guns at the U-505’s conning tower, as the fighter planes, swarming overhead, peppered the vessel’s deck with machine-gun fire.
Captain Harold Wilhelm Lange gave the order to his crew of fifty-nine men to abandon ship. The submarine’s hatch popped opened and German sailors scrambled to get off the vessel, diving into the churning ocean waters to avoid the hail of bullets coming from the destroyer escorts and airplanes. Lange and his first officer, Paul Meyer, both were hit by antiaircraft fire before diving over the side. But the gunfire barrage was short lived as the order to cease fire came within minutes.6
“Away all boarding parties,” the loudspeakers blared, as the wooden whaleboats were lowered over the side heading to the first rendezvous and capture of an enemy ship at sea in more than 129 years. “Save us, comrades, save us!” the German sailors, struggling in the water, yelled as the American whaleboats sped toward the U-boat. The Pillsbury’s engineer, Zenon Lukosius, shouted back that help would be on the way soon as the whaleboat passed the German sailors bobbing in the heaving seas. The crew of Pillsbury’s whaleboat had been ordered to board the submarine, while whaleboats from the Chatelain and Jenks were on their way to pick up German sailors.
Arriving at the submarine, the crew of the Pillsbury whaleboat noticed one German sailor dead on deck, killed by wildcat gunfire as he attempted to train the U-boat’s deck guns on the approaching whaleboats. Hans Fisher, one of the original crew of U-505, was the only sailor on either side killed during the historic capture. Now, the job of these young American sailors, none of whom had ever set foot on board any type of submarine, was to descend into the vessel’s cramped quarters and search for the booby traps and explosive devices that they expected the Germans had rigged before jumping overboard. On a runaway course at six knots, in a tight circle to starboard, U-505’s valves had been opened by the German sailors and the boat was flooding with sea-water. The American sailors also feared that explosive charges had been set to scuttle the boat, sending it with all of its secrets to the bottom of the sea.
The Pillsbury, in what Gallery calls “the wildest seagoing chase I’ve ever seen,” took off after the submarine, darting around outside of the circle while the destroyer escort’s whaleboat cut across inside the circle. “It looked for all the world like a rodeo with a cowboy trying to rope a wild horse,” Gallery noted. The boarding party, led by Lt. Albert L. David, leaped from the wooden boat on board the submarine, holding on tightly to prevent slipping on the wet deck and into the water. Now their job was to climb up the conning tower ladder and plunge through the hatch and attempt to coral the submarine and stop the boat from exploding and sinking.7
But the boarding party was not certain that all the Germans were off the boat, so the men took precautions to make sure any Germans left on board the sub could not close the hatch and dive the boat with the Americans on top. Pickels brought along a heavy tool box and thirty feet of chain on board. “Before anybody went down the hatch,” he recalled, “I was to lower the tool box down into the control room and secure the chain topside in case the Germans were on board, [so] they couldn’t close the hatch on us,” Pickels said. But as the U-boat rolled side to side, Pickels lost his chain overboard when he tried to rescue the gunner’s mate, Chester Moscarski, who also slipped and fell in between the submarine and the whaleboat as the sailors jumped on board. Fortunately, they had brought along another chain and were able to secure the hatch before entering.
Overcome by the strong stench of diesel when they entered the submarine, Pickels and his shipmates likened the odor to that of a mix of diesel, oil, bilge water, kitchen, and “outhouse” smells, all combined to produce an unforgettable stink. Armed with Tommy guns, sailors rushed through the narrow passageways of the vessel, rapidly flooding with seawater, in search of any Germans still on board. The Germans were gone, but a crew member had opened the seawater intake valve and removed its cover. A steady stream of seawater was pouring into the compartment. Engineer Zenon Lukosius hurried to find the cover to the sea strainer. Of course, the sailor knew that the Germans often booby-trapped the valves so they would explode if an attempt was made to close them. Tension filled the air and everyone held their breath as Lukosius said, “Here goes nothing” and replaced the cap, which the Germans had tossed nearby in the corner of the control room. Seawater stopped entering the submarine.
Racing through the boat, sailors looked for explosive charges that could sink the vessel at any moment. Torpedoman Arthur Knispel, the first American sailor to enter U-505, hurried through the submarine looking for the demolition bombs. He found six bombs that had been rigged by the Germans before leaving the boat and yanked the wires off each of them. What Knispel did not know was that the boat’s chief engineer, Joseph Hauser, whose duty was to set the timers for the demolition charges as ordered by Lange, had failed to do so. The engineer, in fact, had quickly climbed up the conning tower ladder and jumped into the water right behind the captain and his first officer, Paul Meyer, leaving his mission unfulfilled. U-boat sailors, many still in their teens, were—like their American counterparts—young and inexperienced, which may account, in part, for the engineer not carrying out the captain’s demolition order. Once Lange and Meyer left the boat, panic may have overtaken the crew, who no longer had an officer directing their actions.8
Captain Lange recalled the moment he knew U-505 was doomed, which, because of a series of failed missions and low morale, had become known as an unlucky boat. “When the boat surfaced,” Lange said in a statement given while prisoner on board the USS Guadalcanal, “I was the first to the bridge and saw now four destroyers around me, shooting at my boat with caliber and anti-aircraft.” After being wounded by shrapnel, Lange said, “I gave the order to leave the boat and to sink her. My chief officer, who came after me onto the bridge, lay on the starboard side with blood streaming over his face. Then I gave a course order to starboard in order to make the aft part of the conning tower fire lee at the destroyer to get my crew out of the boat safely.”
Lange lapsed into unconsciousness. Later he awoke to find his crewmen scrambling with their life jackets on the submarine’s deck. The captain does not remember going overboard, but he did recall ordering his men to give three cheers for what he thought was his sinking boat. But thanks to the quick and heroic efforts of the American destroyer escort sailors, the boat did not sink, and it, along with its valuable cargo was saved, providing a windfall for Allied intelligence.9
Rushing through the boat, Wayne Pickels and the other sailors grabbed confidential documents and other material, stuffing it into canvas sacks and tossing them topside, after which the top-secret cargo was loaded into the waiting whaleboats. “I made at least four trips with bags loaded with data,” Pickels said. “Once we cleaned out the radio room, the last thing they gave me was the Enigma machine,” he said, noting that the code encryption device resembled an old manual typewriter. Pickels passed the last bag and the Enigma machine topside. But when Ernest Beaver, whaleboat bow hook, took the machine, he remarked that the boat already was overloaded and was going to toss the Enigma machine overboard. “I don’t think anybody will want this old radio,” Beaver said, not knowing the importance of the device, as he prepared to drop it into the ocean. Phil Trusheim, the boat coxswain, realized the value of the “old radio” and told Beaver to stow it away with the rest of the loot.10
After the radio room was cleared out, the captain’s cabin was next. Pickels broke open Lange’s locked cabinets and desk and retrieved all the books, manuals, charts, code books, paperwork, and other documents, placing them in a canvas sack before sending it topside. “I got his fountain pen,” Pickels said, describing a Mont Blanc pen that he slid into his pocket and brought home to America. They also retrieved several pairs of binoculars and a German pistol in the cabin but were told to place the name, rank, and serial number of the owners on the items, which they promised would be returned to them after the war. “They wanted to keep [the capture of the boat] a secret,” Pickels said, and they thought that news of the capture might leak out if any of U-505’s items were kept by the sailors. Mission accomplished, the USS Jenks was speeding to Bermuda with all of the submarine’s top-secret loot, and the carrier, with its German submarine in tow, was ordered to Casablanca, some one thousand miles away.11
“Coming on the eve of ‘Overlord,’ the capture of U-505, with everything from acoustic torpedoes to her most secret code books and tactical publications intact, proved one of the war’s major windfalls for Allied intelligence,” noted historian Philip. K. Lundeberg, who also served as ensign on board another destroyer escort, the ill-fated USS Frederick C. Davis. The capture of the submarine proved to be a veritable goldmine of information—more than a half ton of documents and equipment—and remains one of the most significant events in World War II.12
The Pillsbury suffered serious damage as it came alongside the U-boat in order to pass over some pumps so the crew could remove the water flooding the submarine’s control room. The ship drew too close to the submarine’s diving planes, which pierced the thin hull of the destroyer escort’s engine room, and seawater flooded the DE’s engine compartment. With the ship now out of commission as far as the towing plan was concerned, that duty would fall to Gallery and his carrier. U-505, the Nazi vessel that had sunk at least eight vessels during the war, was now a war prize, sporting a giant American flag placed proudly on top of the sub’s periscope.13
Hooking a cable from the carrier to the submarine was not without its own risks. Chatelain signalman Frank P. DeNardo and his whaleboat crew delivered the tow rope and attached cable from the carrier to the submarine. The whaleboat crew attached the cable to U-505 but neglected to pull the rope out of the water. The line wrapped around the shaft of the whaleboat, stalling the engine. As the wooden boat bounced around in the water, it was clear that somehow the rope would have to be removed from the shaft if they ever hoped to get the engine started.
Knife in hand, DeNardo dived overboard into the choppy seas, swimming under the boat to cut the line. After he came up for air a couple of times, he was told that the carrier was signaling them. Climbing back in the whaleboat to answer the signal, the coxswain jumped into the choppy seas in order to finish the cutting job. Mission complete, the engine kicked over and the whaleboat and its crew headed back to the Guadalcanal and some much welcome dry clothes.14
As night fell sailors on board the Pillsbury went to work making repairs to its damaged hull and flooded engine room. Pickels said they used a canvas and fiber collision mat, similar to a giant bandage, to patch the gashes made by the submarine’s diving planes. Once the work was complete, the destroyer escort caught up with the carrier, but much to everyone’s surprise, the tow line to the submarine broke around midnight, setting U-505 free.
“Our pleasant dreams were rudely interrupted at midnight when the towline broke,” Gallery said. The Pillsbury was assigned to continue circling the submarine all night to ensure that it remained stationery until daylight, when the carrier returned with a stronger tow cable. Once the new cable was in place, the carrier received orders to change course and head to Bermuda, some 2,500 miles away, where Navy officials believed it could better hide its prize catch. Gallery gave the order, and Guadalcanal started what would be a nerve-wracking fifteen-day journey towing U-505 slowly across the Atlantic Ocean, through the primary submarine travel lane, en route to its secret hideaway in Bermuda.15
Aware of how excited the young sailors were to tell everyone they had captured a German submarine, Gallery issued a top-secret, one-page order to all members of the task force group in which he called the capture of U-505 “one of the major turning points in World War number two provided repeat provided we keep our mouths shut about it. The enemy must not learn of this capture.” He added, “I fully appreciate how nice it would be to be able to tell our friends about it when we get in, but you can depend on it that they will read about it eventually in the history books that are printed from now on.” Gallery went on to say, “If you obey the following orders it will safeguard your own health as well as information which is vital to national defense.” He concluded with this crude yet clear directive that left no room for confusion: “Keep your bowels open and your mouth shut.”16
Meanwhile the USS Chatelain had its own special cargo—some thirty-eight prisoners from U-505, along with the submarine’s skipper, Captain Lange. Joseph Villanella, son of an Italian immigrant who shined shoes for a living in New York City, was a radarman on board the destroyer escort and said each prisoner was given a shopping bag containing clothes, underwear, toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, and towels. Villanella said they were warned not to take any souvenirs from the Germans in order to protect the secret capture. Although Villanella did keep a diary of his wartime exploits, following orders to keep the secret, he made a one-word entry in his diary for the U-505 capture: “Sub” was all he wrote. But the young radarman did decide to “rescue” one souvenir—an article of clothing from one of the prisoners. He kept a pair of swimming trunks with the name REH marked inside, belonging to U-505’s machinist’s mate, Werner Reh.17
Three U-505 prisoners, including Paul Meyer, the boat’s executive officer, came on board the USS Jenks, which had been assigned to transport the submarine’s loot to Bermuda. Arthur Overacker, then a twenty-three-year-old sonarman from the little town of Milford Center, Ohio, will never forget seeing the Germans as they stepped on board his vessel. Meyer, who had been wounded in the head and shoulder as he followed Lange out of the conning tower, was clutching a small item close to his chest when he was helped on board the Jenks. “He was holding a picture frame when he came aboard,” Overacker said. Sailors grabbed the frame from the first officer only to discover it contained a photograph of his wife. They dried it off and returned the picture to Meyer, who was rushed to sick bay to treat his scalp and shoulder wounds.18
With its treasure trove of top-secret materials, the destroyer escort sped at flank speed to deliver its cargo to Bermuda in four days. Overacker said they were going so fast that the sonar, designed to locate German submarines, would not operate properly. “We never slowed down,” he said, even though the captain, J. W. Dumford, was warned several times by his crew that, if they did not slow down, they would run out of fuel. Dumford acknowledged the advice but continued to rush at top speed to his destination. “When we came into Bermuda, we came in on fumes,” Overacker recalled.
U-505’s confidential documents, code books, and two Enigma machines were loaded into waiting trucks and taken to a Navy seaplane for transport to Washington, D.C., where eager intelligence officers poured over the material. Dumford went along to provide Washington officials with a firsthand account of the capture. The boat’s acoustic torpedoes and other equipment was inventoried and loaded onto various ships, including the USS Slater, that left for Norfolk. Prisoners also were transported to the United States and held incommunicado at a camp in Ruston, Louisiana.19
Although the destroyer escort USS Frost had played no role in the capture of U-505, one of its crew members had a previously unknown connection to the submarine’s skipper, Captain Lange, who had been transported to a military hospital in Bermuda following his boat’s capture. Nineteen-year-old Robert Storrick, signalman on board the Frost, developed a close relationship with Lange while the young sailor was recuperating from surgery for mastoiditis in the same hospital where the submarine captain secretly was being held.
Growing up in Washington, Pennsylvania, Storrick had tried to join the Army Air Corps in 1943 but was turned down because he had a “bad heart” according to doctors. That same day, Storrick recalled, he walked across the hall and joined the U.S. Navy, immediately boarding a steam train in Pittsburgh for training at the Navy facility in Sampson, New York. Storrick scored high enough in a battery of tests to be a chosen as a candidate for the Navy’s V-12 officer’s training program and was sent to Cornell University to study mechanical engineering.
Eventually he received his orders to board the USS Frost waiting at Pier 92 in New York City. The ship left for submarine training off Bermuda and later was assigned to patrol west of the Azores. Although he didn’t know it at the time, Storrick soon would leave his ship after developing a serious ear infection, causing severe pain and swelling. The sailor was sent to the hospital in Bermuda where a mastoidectomy was performed. The disappointed teenager was ordered to stay behind to recuperate as the rest of his shipmates left to join a convoy escorting the USS Quincy with President Franklin Roosevelt on board, on his way to the last summit meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta.20
Storrick was about to be introduced to Lange, the captain of the captured U-505, secretively held in the same hospital where he was recuperating. The young DE sailor was assigned to perform orderly duties for Captain Lange, who was recuperating from injuries received during the historic capture of his submarine. “I took him to breakfast every day in the officer’s mess or solarium, pushing him in his wheelchair,” Storrick said. “I had no idea who he was except he was a German captain. They never told me, and I never learned who he was until after the war.” For the next five weeks, Storrick said, he was with Lange from the time he first woke up until it was time for bed. “The only time we were apart was when I had to go get my own meals because I (not being an officer) had to eat separately, of course.”
The German told him he had worked for eleven years at the Philadelphia Naval Yard prior to the war and only returned to Germany after Adolph Hitler summoned all German nationals home, threatening to harm their relatives if they did not return. “He was angry at Hitler for having to go back to Germany. He was not a Hitler lover,” Storrick said, noting that upon his arrival in his homeland, he was inducted into the German navy without delay.
Lange spoke English well. Together they listened to war reports on the shortwave radio in the hospital’s officer wing solarium. Lange would translate the German broadcast for Storrick, and they were amused at how differently the American and German radio reports, both laced with a heavy dose of propaganda, portrayed the war. “When we compared the reports, it was like two different wars were being fought,” Storrick noted. “It was comical. We said we shot down one hundred of their planes, and they said we shot down twenty-five, and the reverse was true.” He said the pair engaged in a lot of small talk but stayed away from subjects dealing with the United States, President Roosevelt, or specific details about U-boats, even though the young American sailor questioned the captain on technical aspects of German submarines. “We are not to talk about that,” Lange politely replied.
After the captain had healed sufficiently, he was sent to the United States by airplane. The day he left Bermuda, Lange was wearing dungarees with a big P, for “prisoner,” emblazoned across his back. Parting was bittersweet for the Nazi captain and American sailor. “I actually saw a tear in his eye—here he goes from captain to a lowly prisoner of war, and heading for where he didn’t know,” Storrick said.21
Capture of an enemy submarine with its treasure trove of top-secret documents and equipment had never been a stated goal during the Battle of the Atlantic. The orders for Allied forces was to find and sink the U-boats, sending their valuable secrets to Davy Jones’ locker. Destroyer escorts were good at that, as the record shows. In fact, Gallery’s boys had done just that when it discovered another German submarine about three months before its encounter with Captain Lange and his ill-fated boat.
It was Easter Sunday eve when the USS Guadalcanal, with Gallery in command, and his destroyer escorts were combing the waters between the Azores and Gibraltar for German submarines. As night fell, Gallery decided to launch four night-flying Avengers, even though they had little experience landing airplanes on the baby flattops in the dark. “It was a scary business,” Gallery noted. “We went at it gingerly, but it worked out well.” Gallery pointed out that the radar in the airplanes was able to determine “something” was down there, but it could not differentiate between an enemy submarine, an Allied ship running without lights, or a Portuguese fishing trawler. But on this night the airplanes would have the good fortune of a full moon to help guide their flight.22
As midnight approached, the first three bombers returned to the ship without spotting anything. “Secure operations until sunrise,” Gallery ordered as the Avengers returned empty-handed. However, when the last plane landed on board the carrier, the plan quickly changed. “Cap’n, I almost got him,” the pilot announced to a startled Gallery and his officers, who were crowded in the ship’s combat information center. The pilot was quizzed as to whether he really had spotted a submarine, to which he exclaimed that he was absolutely certain since he looked right down the sub’s conning tower and saw the lights on inside the vessel, about forty miles from the Gualdalcanal. Gallery ordered planes back in the air and within a short time, one of the planes had found the 1,120-ton submarine, U-515. The sub was surfacing to charge its batteries, about fifteen miles from the first sighting. Gallery ordered the destroyer escorts to the area.
By now the submarine was only fifteen miles from the Allied ships, which were closing in fast on their target. The airplanes continued to transmit additional sightings as the U-boat tried to surface. The destroyer escorts USS Pope, Flaherty, Pillsbury, and Chatelain rushed to the site and closed in for the kill. Dropping depth charges throughout the morning, the DEs continued to pick up sonar contacts but were not able to hit their target. The U-boat captain had taken his boat deep, some eight hundred feet down. Next he launched several sonar decoys—canisters containing a compound of calcium and zinc that produced a massive amount of underwater bubbles, simulating the echo of a submarine—in order to fool the DEs’ sonar. It worked. “This chap that we were after was obviously a tough customer who knew his business,” Gallery said, noting that the U-boat’s Captain Werner Henke, whose submarine sunk more ships than any other U-boat commander after 1942, was able to maneuver his boat with great skill to avoid being hit by one of the depth charges.23
The pummeling the boat received from hedgehogs and depth charges finally took its toll on the damaged vessel. With water and oil pouring in and with significant damage to the boat’s engine room, the submarine finally began to surface. Joseph Villanella, radarman on board the USS Chatelain, raced to his battle station in the radar shack that day. The Pope was picking up contact with the submarine and then losing it. His ship then picked up contact and continued to join with the Pope in firing depth charges. “We were the only ship in the immediate area when the sub came shooting out of the water bow first and laid on top of the water. We knocked the hell out of it,” Villanella said. The other DEs rushed to the scene and joined in the assault. “We threw everything at it,” Villanella remembered, adding that the hatch opened and Germans started pouring out, jumping into the churning waters.24
Two German sailors rushed out of the conning tower and ran over, aiming the submarine’s deck cannons directly at his ship. Roger Cozens, sonarman on board the USS Flaherty, said the Nazi sailors were within range of the deck guns from the Flaherty and Chatelain, and as the DEs took aim at the submarine, the Germans quickly abandoned their efforts and jumped into the sea to avoid being shot. The other members of the crew followed suit. “We then spent several minutes sinking U-515 with cannon fire,” Cozens remembered. He added, “We shot it full of holes and it sunk. Later, it was realized that we might have boarded and saved U-515 or at least its important documents.”
Henke, U-515’s thirty-five-year-old commander, still hoped to make a run for it. But once he surfaced and realized the destroyer escorts were surrounding him, he knew his fate was sealed. “All hands, abandon ship,” Henke ordered as destroyer escorts started shelling the surfaced boat. Wildcat fighter planes also continued to dive, strafing their machine guns at the submarine and the crew who were floundered in the waters below. The submarine finally sunk, and sixteen German sailors went along with it to their deaths. Some forty-four survived, many suffering bullet and shrapnel wounds. They were taken prisoner on board the Chatelain.
Henke, who was tough and smart and had become a national hero for sinking some twenty-six Allied and merchant vessels, still demonstrated a defiant spirit, even though he had been defeated and his boat sunk. As the crew from the Chatelain picked him up in their rubber life raft, the U-boat captain tried twice to capsize the small raft, according to Joseph Villanella, who watched from his ship’s deck. “After several attempts [to capsize the raft],” Villanella said, “Henke was threatened by B.M. Coleman, who raised his oar and would have clobbered him if he hadn’t quit.” The captain gave up and was hauled on board. Once on board the Chatelain, he was escorted to the ward room, where he protested to the DE captain about excessive firing upon his men. “You didn’t have to kill so many of my men, we would have surrendered,” Henke declared.25
Wayne Pickels, the USS Pillsbury’s boatswain’s mate, was on the fantail of his ship when they first picked up contact with the submarine, which fired an acoustic torpedo at his destroyer escort. “It [the torpedo] came to us,” he said, “and when it crossed our wake, it made a turn and followed us.” The captain zigzagged to avoid the torpedo, which used the sounds of the ship’s propellers to hone in on its target. But it still followed the ship. “Here comes one of those SOBs with ears,” one of Pickel’s shipmates yelled as the torpedo continued on course toward the ship. The ship outmaneuvered the deadly fish, and “the torpedo with ears,” fooled by the DE’s “foxer gear,” passed harmlessly into the ocean. Henke had four of the acoustic torpedoes on board his boat.26
Over the course of the battle in the Atlantic, the goal was to sink, rather than capture, Nazi U-boats. Although capturing them, as was done in the case of U-505, could have provided a wealth of important information about tactics and deployment—and may have resulted in the saving of Allied lives— it was not until Gallery and his men made history by keeping the boat afloat and seizing its valuable cargo. Around the same time that U-505 was captured, destroyer escorts sunk another German submarine, which, it turned out, was laying mines off the harbor of Nova Scotia.
A light south wind was blowing over calm seas as the sun set on 5 July 1944. The USS Thomas was prowling the North Atlantic in a zigzag fashion near the Grand Banks, one hundred miles southeast of Sable Island. The destroyer escort was part of a hunter-killer group, a collection of Allied warships whose mission was to seek out and destroy Nazi U-boats. Suddenly the sonarmen on board the USS Baker heard a series of “pings” indicating the American fleet was not alone. A U-boat was dead ahead, 1,200 yards. The USS Thomas quickly sped at full speed to assist its sister DE.
Racing to their battle stations, sailors on board the Baker fired a series of depth charges in the area where they thought the U-boat was moving. Within a short time a large black vessel broke the ocean’s surface and tried to make a run for it. The destroyer escort fired all its guns at the German boat, U-233, and launched a full pattern of depth charges in the U-boat’s path. American sailors reporting a huge geyser of water and fuel oil spewing upward from the enemy vessel. Even though it was severely damaged, the U-boat took off on a high-speed escape as flames and smoke poured from its conning tower. There was only one way left to stop it.
“We are going to ram!” Capt. David M. Kellogg ordered. Charlie K. Field, the twenty-two-year-old only son of an Indiana telegraph operator, was assigned to the Thomas as a yeoman and assumed additional responsibilities as the captain’s talker, the sailor whose duty was to pass the captain’s orders to the crew, usually by sound-powered telephones in those days. As he conveyed the captain’s order to ram, Kellogg told the engine room to be ready to reverse the engines quickly upon contact with the U-boat. Field repeated the order: “It’s flank speed, not full speed, and then back-up.” An apprehensive Field, who had been at sea for only about six months, didn’t quite know what to expect. “We could sink, since other ships ramming have sunk,” he recalled thinking.
With seawater splashing over the bow of the racing ship, the destroyer escort bore down on the U-boat at flank speed, firing its 3-inch, 20-mm guns to keep the German sailors from manning their deck guns. “Suddenly, within seconds, we hit the sub with our bow about twenty feet aft of the conning tower and drove right into her water tight pressure hull, breaking the U-233 in two,” Field recalled. There was a “horrendous blow” as the steel ships collided and the U-boat rolled on its port side, disappearing into a sea of white foam and sending thirty-two sailors to an ocean grave. Some twenty-nine German survivors, including the boat’s badly injured commander, Captain Hans Steen, were fished from a sea littered with debris, bodies, and blood. The Thomas suffered damage during the ramming, including a badly bent lower stem.27
Shivering from the cold, the German sailors were glad to be helped on board the vessel. For many U-boat sailors, not unlike their American DE counterparts, this was their first time at sea, some barely out of their teens, having little or no experience on the water, let alone engaging in deadly naval combat. Although Field said the Germans feared the Americans would torture and kill them, in fact, the enemy sailors—after being stripped and searched—were given hot showers, blankets, dry clothes, hot soup, coffee, cigarettes, and an “alcoholic stimulative where necessary” before being transferred to the escort carrier, the USS Card, where the thirty-six-year-old U-boat captain later would die from injuries sustained during the battle. Two secret Nazi code wheels were found on the prisoners. The captain was buried at sea with full honors.
U-233, commissioned only ten months earlier and on its first patrol, was a large mine-laying boat that had sailed from Norway some forty days prior to this encounter, traveling mostly submerged across the North Atlantic. Surfacing in Canadian waters, its job was to lay sixty-six moored mines off the harbor in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a mission cut short by the swift action of the American hunter-killer group. The group, which sailed from Norfolk after being alerted to the mine-laying U-boat’s route by Allied codebreakers, consisted of the Thomas, Baker, and Card, as well as the destroyer escorts USS Bronstein, USS Bostwick, and USS Breeman.28
This was not the first time the USS Thomas and its sister DEs would find U-boats prowling very close to the East Coast of the United States. In fact, U-boat commanders frequently targeted Allied merchant ships silhouetted against the glow of U.S. coastal cities. Lighted buoys also helped U-boats locate merchant ships, making them easy targets for the submarines.
In a little over eight months following the Pearl Harbor attack, 609 Allied ships traveling in American waters were sunk by 184 U-boats, sending more than 3 million tons of vital supplies and material to the bottom of the sea. Allowed to continue unchecked, the U-boats threatened to cripple all commerce along the North American shipping lanes. Brazenly operating along America’s shores, coastal residents frequently watched ships burning in the nearby distance. Field himself was shocked one Sunday while on liberty when he took his wife and oldest daughter to Miami Beach for some sun and surf. Instead he and other beachgoers watched in horror as a U-boat torpedoed and sunk an Allied ship.
Back on board his ship, Field was about to come face to face with the fury of Hitler’s marauders once again. One calm evening on 29 February 1944, radarmen on board the Thomas reported contact with a submarine in the North Atlantic. All hands hurried to their battle stations, manning the guns and getting ready to fight. Although this turned out a false alarm, a couple hours later sonar picked up another signal, and this time it was the real thing. A U-boat was racing on a direct course for the destroyer escort, closing fast at only eight hundred feet.
The PA crackled to life, calling all hands to battle stations. The night sky suddenly lit up as the USS Bronstein fired a series of star shells, revealing the surfaced U-boat running straight for the Thomas. Captain Kellogg ordered a hard turn to port as the DE set a new course. “No sooner had we straightened up on the new course, than we sighted in the dark sea, two fluorescent trails of light caused by two torpedoes fired at us by the U-boat,” Field said. “They went by us on either side,” he said, adding that “we up on topside sweated for a few minutes, and realized how very, very close we had come to being blown out of the water!”29
The submarine quickly disappeared under the dark sea. But the destroyer escorts were not about to let this one get away. As the midnight hour approached, the DEs still followed the U-boat on sonar as it moved invisibly beneath the waters. The ships fired hedgehogs and dropped depth charges in order to flush out the U-boat. The submarine was patrolling the North Atlantic together with other U-boats in search of Allied vessels. Sound echoing indicated that there were more than one U-boat prowling beneath the Allied convoy. “We gained then lost, then regained contact with the subs,” Field said, noting that the dangerous hide-and-seek operation went on until the wee hours of the morning of 1 March. Before dawn it would come to an explosive, history-making end.
Around 3:30 AM the Thomas laid a pattern of depth charges, producing a huge explosion beneath the water. The end had come for U-709, a combat submarine commanded by twenty-six-year-old Captain Rudolf Ites. Fifty-two hands and the captain were lost. Later that morning the USS Bronstein, commanded by Sheldon Kinney, would sink U-603, another combat submarine, commanded by Captain Hans-Joachim Bertelsmann. None of those fifty-one crew members survived.30
But dangerous times were not yet over for Field and his rookie shipmates. On 16 March, Captain Hans-Joachim Brans, the twenty-eight-year-old commander of U-801, a combat vessel, was en route for West African waters when he ordered the submarine to surface so the crew could brush up on some gunnery practice. Unfortunately for Captain Brans, two Navy Wildcat fighters, launched from a carrier escort, spotted the German vessel and began firing on it. One German sailor was killed and nine were injured, including the captain. In an emergency dive U-801 made a quick escape from the Navy planes. Later that night, under the cover of darkness, Brans brought the U-boat to the surface to bury his dead crewman. He also radioed to U-488, one of several submarine milk cows used to supply fuel and provisions to other submarines. Brans said he needed the boat’s doctor to treat him and his wounded crewmen.31
That radio transmission, however, would spell the beginning of the end of their mission. The message was intercepted and Navy Wildcat fighters were sent out to find the submarine. A little after dawn on St. Patrick’s Day they found the U-boat west of the Cape Verde Islands and repeatedly bombed it. The U-boat dived to 984 feet to escape the onslaught. The hunter-killer group, including the USS Thomas, USS Bronstein, and destroyer USS Corry, rushed to the site and began tracking the submarine. Sonar contact was made and the ships immediately started pounding the boat with depth charges and hedgehogs. Suddenly the U-boat surfaced off the Thomas’ port beam. The destroyer and the Bronstein, fresh from two U-boat kills earlier in the month, sprayed the surfaced submarine with gunfire. Apparently not all crewmen on the U-boat received the captain’s order to abandon ship and scuttle the boat, as many stayed with the vessel as it sunk to the bottom of the sea. Forty-seven survivors were rescued by the Bronstein and Corry.32
David M. Graybeal, a rural Virginia high school teacher turned DE sailor, was serving as assistant engineering officer and supply officer on board the USS Snowden in the summer of 1944. As the Snowden and other members of its hunter-killer group were planning to head back to port in order to receive a fresh supply of depth charges, they picked up something on sonar northwest of the Azores. U-490, a milk cow commanded by thirty-five-year-old Captain Wilhelm Gerlach, was unaware of the DEs’ presence and was caught by surprise. Allied ships launched a barrage of depth charges and hedgehogs. Captain Gerlach ordered an emergency dive to 1,000 feet, out of reach of the DEs’ depth charges. Although the U-boat was certain it could escape, the hunter-killer group tracked it for fifteen hours, pounding it with depth charges and hedgehogs along the way.
As night fell the frustrated DE commanders decided to lure the U-boat into revealing itself. The three destroyer escorts, the USS Snowden, USS Frost, and USS Inch, all departed the area. The U-boat, assuming the ships had given up, surfaced a little after midnight on 12 June. The DEs were waiting and started firing star shells, brilliantly illuminating the submarine. They pounded it with gunfire. Graybeal of the Snowden said the U-boat captain sent a message in English to the American ships: “Save our crew.” The ships trained their searchlights on the vessel, as crewmen climbed out and jumped into the water. All sixty crewmen were rescued.33
“We were eager to get it [the submarine],” Graybeal said. “As a matter of fact, it was my job to go over and go aboard to see what I could find down there by way of valves that were open and so on. I took a couple of seamen with me.” Graybeal started to collect his gear as the whaleboat was readied. “Away the whaleboat,” Capt. A. Jackson Jr. ordered. But suddenly orders changed. The U-boat was starting to sink. There would be no inspection of the vessel, which took all its secrets to the bottom of the sea. Only the crew survived.34
“They were virtually frozen when we got them aboard,” Graybeal said. “They were wearing coverall kind of things and so we stripped them as quickly as we could and put them in a shower to keep them from dying of being frozen.” Graybeal described them as looking like they were eighteen or nineteen years old, “just like a lot of our crew.” Although they interrogated the sailors, he said they were “very well trained,” aware they only needed to provide name, rank, and serial number. “They’d just repeat that again and again,” he added. Reflecting on the German sailors, Graybeal said that “there weren’t hard feelings then. I mean, we’d been trying to kill each other all right, but the sea is the great enemy, and so sailors from all over the place feel like we have something in common. We got them on board, we saw they had something to eat, and they got some clothes. They seemed like nice guys.”35
Field recalled one Nazi psychological tactic that proved unnerving to him and his shipmates. While traveling in the vast loneliness of the North Atlantic near the Azores, the ship’s radio shack picked up a radio broadcast playing popular music: “Welcome back, DE-102, to your station,” an announcer interrupted. “We’ll be visiting you shortly and help you find the bottom of the ocean.”
The broadcaster was Axis Sally, who played American hit parade tunes and spewed plenty of Nazi propaganda from her radio station in Germany. While the sailors enjoyed hearing the popular music and her seductive voice, they were less fond of some of the messages. Field said they were puzzled over how she knew their location, unless a U-boat had spotted the ship through its periscope. “How did she know, and who’s watching us out here?” his shipmates wondered with a certain amount of anxiety and trepidation. Axis Sally, in fact, was an American-born woman, Mildred Gillars, who had joined the Third Reich as a military propagandist, broadcasting her messages from Germany to American sailors and soldiers around the world.36
In addition to the weather, enemy submarines, and the likes of Axis Sally, sailors also had to cope with loneliness and homesickness as they traveled the vast oceans of the world. One welcome relief was a letter from home—from a mother, father, or sweetheart. Sailors would wait anxiously for word from home, which frequently was delivered via a mail sack in a breeches buoy to the ship. The young bluejackets quickly lined up to see whether the sack contained a letter or package addressed to them.
For Earl Charles White Jr., a twenty-year-old radioman on board the destroyer escort USS Halloran, virtually every mail call brought news, advice, love, and encouragement from his home in Brighton, New York, where he had graduated high school in 1943 before enlisting in the Navy. In meticulously written letters, his father, Earl Charles Sr., began each with “Hello Son” and asked, “How is every little thing with you today?” followed by “the best I hope.” The remarkable collection of more than fifty letters, painstakingly preserved for more than half a century by the young sailor, were all written in careful longhand, beginning in late 1944 and stretching to 28 September 1945, when young Charles returned home, wounded but alive, from his duty in the Pacific theater.
White wrote his son, sometimes several times a week, about his plans to plant a victory garden and other events going on back home, encouraging him and letting him know just how proud he and his family were of their young Navy man. The letters detail simple things—things that young Charles must have missed—like the robins returning in spring to the neighborhood, the activities of Cokey, the family dog, the bowling league, his siblings buying an orchid for their mother at Easter, little sister Patty’s first time away at summer camp, or playing a round of golf at the Oak Hill Country Club, where the family also swam, dined, and celebrated holidays.
The letters were filled with plenty of details about the family, including many of the wartime sacrifices required on the home front. Charles Sr. writes his son about having a steak for dinner—courtesy of a friend and a very rare treat since he said beef required red points under the rationing program, and they didn’t have too many of those ration stamps. Meat rationing, which went into effect in 1943, required red ration stamps to buy fresh, frozen, cured, or canned meats. Charles about he and his son never liking canned fish. “Remember how we used to stick up our noses over canned tuna fish or salmon— well right now we can’t buy it and it is a delicacy.” He explains to his son why he has not been able to send him any pipe tobacco: “Can’t get it—tobacco for pipes is as scarce as cigarettes.” After Easter, he promises, he may be able to send him some the next time they mail a “care box” from home, which regularly included copies of the daily newspaper sports pages that Charles carefully folded and saved each day for his son.
In a 21 March letter, Charles Sr., who operated a lumber business in East Rochester, New York, is struck by his son’s thoughtfulness in sending his little sister, Patty, twenty-five dollars for her birthday—five for her and twenty so she could get some new clothes, a big help for families struggling to keep their children fed and clothed during the lean war years. “All I can say about it is that you are a 4-0 brother, pretty nice of you, believe me—I know Pat thinks you are pretty nice—Mother and me think you are tops—but it is a lot of fun making people happy. I mean, you are missing the expression on their faces when you do these things, son, but there will come a time when you won’t— but I can tell you it is well appreciated and damn fine of you.”
Charles’ ship, the USS Halloran, spent its entire time in the Pacific, serving as a screen for replenishment forces as well as during the invasion and capture of Iwo Jima. As part of the Okinawa assault forces, the Halloran repelled six attacking Japanese aircraft, splashing one and damaging two others while narrowly being missed by a Japanese torpedo. It would not be so lucky on 21 June, when a kamikaze attacked the Halloran and, although the ship’s gunners shot it down, an exploding bomb killed three men and caused significant damage to the ship. Charles Jr. received a Purple Heart for injuries sustained during that attack, which reportedly killed his fellow radioman, who had just switched seats with White before the assault.
Charles’ little sister, Patty, wrote her big brother on 30 August, the day before she was about to start the fifth grade. “When you come home will you take me fishing. Please. I want to go so badley [sic],” Patty wrote. “Dad is going to take me swimming later. I wish you were going with me. When you come home will you dive off the high diving bord [sic]. One of the fish died. Now we have one.” Her P.S. states: “Say helo [sic] to some of the boys on the ship.”
The White family, like so many other American families, worried about their young sailors and soldiers and gathered around the radio every day to hear broadcasts about the war while anxiously watching their mailboxes for some word. “Waiting, waiting, and then a letter—then all smiles for a few days,” Charles Sr. wrote. A father’s longing to see his son—“to have you home with us, to eat and talk with us”—comes across in so many of the letters, which are representative of the anguish and pain felt by millions of American families during the war.
“I can’t tell you, son how many times my thoughts are of you lately, guess I am getting a little homesick to see my boy,” Charles Sr. wrote. “At night, at home, when I am all alone, everyone gone to bed—I just try to picture you, what you are doing, where you are, how you look, and if you have changed much.” He added, “Well, son, every day brings it just one day nearer to the time we will be together again and one happy day that is going to be—so we will just keep saying it won’t be long now.” He signed each letter “As ever, your Dad.”37
Letters like these from the home front helped sustain America’s young DE sailors, the vast majority of whom were still teenagers away from their homes and families for the first time. Lonely and worried mothers, fathers, wives, and girlfriends would write letters—sometimes every day—sharing their feelings and telling how they long to have their boys back home. Since they were not able to telephone, letters became the only way to communicate with their men at sea. Hearing about the events in their hometown, the comings and goings of their parents and siblings, and the pride their families had in them for the important work they were doing, helped to give these young sailors hope that they would someday—in the not too distant future—be back home with their family and friends, even while Nazi U-boats and Japanese kamikazes and suicide submarines were trying their best to keep that dream from being fulfilled.
Although the DE sailors may not have been prepared for the loneliness, homesickness, or especially the unsettling propaganda of Axis Sally, most had undergone intense and very specialized training at the new Subchaser Training Center on Biscayne Bay in Miami, Florida. The Navy took over eleven hotels—much to the chagrin of the local chamber of commerce—to house and train sailors in the techniques of submarine fighting. Ballrooms and warehouses became makeshift classrooms. The Naval Reserve officers and recruits would undergo a seven-day-a-week training regimen for about two months at the school, whose commandant was Lt. Cdr. E. F. McDaniel. Having just completed grueling escort duty on a destroyer in the North Atlantic, the tough, no-nonsense commander was ready to whip the sailors into shape before sending them out to battle enemy submarines.
Grover Theis, a magazine writer who was allowed to sit in on the classes, said McDaniel was “a far cry from the layman’s conception of a ripsnortin’, fightin’ seadog type of man, who usually is pictured as a cross between a walrus and an English bulldog. Probably most of the trainees class him at a glance as the professor or clergyman type. They soon find out that appearances are deceiving.” Regarded as a “mean, lean, thin-lipped officer whose eyes burned with hatred for the enemy,” McDaniel started the school on 8 April 1942 with 50 pupils. By the time 1943 had drawn to a close, more than 10,000 officers and 37,000 enlisted men had received training in antisubmarine warfare. Students from fourteen foreign navies, battling on the side of the Allies, also attended the school. Some 360 foreign officers and 1,374 foreign enlisted men passed though the facility.38
Originally dubbed the “Donald Duck Navy” because of the small size of the vessels on which his sailors would serve, McDaniel ran a tight ship and pupils underwent a strenuous curriculum of classroom instruction—ten hours a day, seven days a week—and hands-on field experience on board the school’s training ships, even doing battle with friendly “enemy” submarines. McDaniel insisted on hiring only instructors who had actually hunted submarines so they could convey real-life techniques to the pupils. “The course work at SCTC was highly concentrated and demanding with much homework,” recalled James Edward Day, who would eventually be assigned to a sub chaser and, later, to the USS Fowler. “At least we didn’t have to do a lot of marching and drilling or worry about keeping our rolled up socks in straight rows in our dresser drawers.”39
Recruits already had gone through boot camp, and this training was highly specialized and designed to teach sailors how to detect and destroy enemy submarines. A specially constructed “dark room” was built atop a Miami warehouse to train pupils in a variety of aspects of submarine detection, including real night darkness, false dawn light, and other conditions and illusions they might encounter at sea. Because there are no dry docks at sea, recruits were taught to use their ingenuity and skill in making repairs to their ships. Although not every sailor made it through the grueling training, those who did soon would find themselves on board tiny sub chasers, patrol boats, converted luxury yachts, or the United States’ newest class of warships, the destroyer escort. The pupils were taught to think fast, act fast, and snap to their battle stations instantly on command. An engine instructor in a Miami factory, who had gone through the long school of seamanship in Scandinavia, praised the raw recruits, saying, “Listen, there ain’t any boys anywhere like those boys. The European system by which I was brought up made us go up by slow stages and after a good many years, we were pretty good. I ain’t criticizing my ancestors, but these boys can absorb enough so much faster that they’ll quick be good enough for the job. You got to hand it to these kids.”40
President Roosevelt’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., arrived in Miami early in 1944 for two and a half months of specialized officer training at the SCTC. Lieutenant Roosevelt, scheduled to take command of one of the new destroyer escorts under construction at Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Newark, New Jersey, would undergo intense classroom instruction as well as fieldwork designed to make him an expert at detecting and destroying enemy submarines.
Like other soon-to-be DE commanders, Roosevelt would embark on a six-day officer’s training cruise off the coast of Florida. Designed to provide the maximum amount of training in the shortest period of time, the cruise covered topics such as ship handling, convoy control, formation steaming, damage control, ship armament, and antisubmarine instruments. The DE also would come under “friendly” attack from torpedo bombers and submarines.41
School ships departed Miami on Monday mornings at 8:30 and remained training at sea until returning to port Saturday morning. Even though this was a training cruise, crews were in a state of readiness because German U-boats were traveling within sight of Miami Beach and certainly would not shrink from an opportunity to sink any American ship. Because there were no facilities on board for doing personal laundry, students were instructed to bring enough clothing to last for one week, plus towels and toiletry articles. Bedding, furnished by the ship, would be washed on board, and students would pay thirty-five cents for each load. Students also were charged five dollars for the meals they would eat during the six-day cruise. After completion of the training, Roosevelt and the other students soon would learn the identity of their ship command. On 10 April 1944, FDR Jr. received his orders to report to Norfolk for a one-week indoctrination before heading to Newark for his new ship, the USS Ulvert M. Moore.42