On June 4, 1944, sailors under U.S. Navy Captain David V. Gallery, Commander of Task Force No. 22.3, boarded and captured the German submarine U-505 off of the coast of West Africa. A seaman from the sub was the only casualty on either side.
Captain Gallery was very pleased because he had worked very hard to devise a feasible plan where a Nazi submarine could be obtained intact with all of its code books. It was a far more difficult and risky procedure to orchestrate the capture of a sub than to simply sink it with dozens of depth charges. The Americans had to damage the U-boat only to the extent that its crew would abandon it after setting scuttling charges with the Americans then swarming onto the vessel and hopefully removing the charges before it blew up. As events transpired, the American boarding crew discovered that the Germans fortunately had neglected to set scuttling charges and merely had opened valves instead to flood the boat--valves which the Americans simply closed.
Unfortunately, no one had told Captain Gallery that the allies had already broken the Kriegsmarine codes. As a result, his capture of the vessel needlessly increased the risk that the Germans would completely redo their code books from scratch and set the Allied cryptoanalysts back five years.
Fortunately, however, this did not happen, and probably the only reason that Captain Gallery received just a blistering dressing-down instead of a full court-martial from Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King was the need to maintain secrecy.
The German crew members were interred at Camp Ruston in Louisiana with the same concerns about secrecy and without access to the Red Cross, contrary to the Geneva Convention of 1929. Their relatives and the German government thought that they were all dead until 1947, when they were repatriated. During their internment, the prisoners launched hydrogen-filled balloons marked with "U-505 lives!" in a futile attempt to reveal their plight.
Nothing succeeds like success. After the war, when it was clear that the Germans had not suspected a thing and the capture of the sub was not a fiasco after all, Task Force No. 22.3 received a Presidential Unit Citation and Gallery was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Lieutenant Albert David received the Medal of Honor as the leader of the boarding party of the U-boat, which, during its seizure, was foundering and which the Americans thought at the time was about to blow up from scuttling charges. The decorations were partial compensation to the American sailors who were chagrined when, in the interest of security, they were ordered to turn in all of the Lugers, binoculars, and other souvenirs they managed to snag while securing the boat.
Being taken by the enemy had not been the first misfortune to befall U-505. On a prior voyage of the sub, on October 24, 1943, its previous Captain blew his brains out in the middle of a depth charge attack while standing in front of the periscope. This act demoralized the crew. Nonetheless, the surviving crew members did manage to get the U-boat back home.
The U.S. Navy donated U-505 to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in 1954. At the time, the interior of the sub had been thoroughly gutted of all parts and machinery. The Museum sent requests to all of the German manufacturers who had made the components originally in World War II, and they all graciously, at no cost, provided replacements.
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