Final Patrol (36 page)

Captain Daniel Gallery escaped any consequences from Admiral King's displeasure. By getting the captured vessel back to Bermuda, and by keeping the secret of its capture, he saved his career. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his efforts.

Of course, the attempt to take a U-boat had been approved by his superiors and sanctioned and supported by the commanders at Tenth Fleet and F-21, so he was completely in the right in what he did. He had accomplished exactly what he had conceived, what he set out to do. He had captured a German U-boat and all the intelligence treasures she held, and he had done it with no casualties among his crew. Then he succeeded in bringing the U-boat back so she could be dissected. That contributed to his country's victory over a crafty enemy.

Now, his quarry safely delivered, Captain Gallery could get back to work. He would not be trying to capture any other boat, though. Instead he and his task group were trying to find other German boats and send them to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. After the war, he eventually made the rank of rear admiral and commanded Carrier Group Six during the Korean War. He retired from the navy in 1960 and became a prolific writer on naval subjects. Gallery also kept up a continuing and spirited correspondence with many of his old adversaries who patrolled in the German U-boats.

But Dan Gallery was not quite finished with his prize.

The day would come when he would help commandeer the
U-505
one more time.

 

 

 

When the European portion
of World War II ended, there was no point in keeping the secret of the
U-505
any longer. The navy issued a short press release in May of 1945. That was the first news the German crew members' families had that their men might still be alive.

Shortly afterward, the Nazi submarine went out on a tour of sorts. The object was to raise money for war bonds to help finance the continuing conflict against the Japanese in the Pacific. In exchange for purchasing a set amount of war bonds, visitors could climb aboard a real, live German U-boat and ramble around inside her. There they could see the very location where the
Pillsbury
's crew members disarmed the scuttle charge. Visitors could touch the valves the boarding party had managed to close only minutes before the vessel would have sunk forever.

The
U-505
visited several cities along the eastern seaboard. It is no surprise that she proved to be a very popular attraction wherever she went.

After the navy learned all they could from the captured submarine, she went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for temporary storage. The plan was to eventually use her for target practice, allowing future submarine torpedomen to get a chance to launch their fish at a real German U-boat.

That's when Daniel Gallery once again steamed across the
U-505
's path.

He got wind that his trophy was about to meet an ignoble end so he went to work, trying to find her a permanent home. He had captured her once upon a time. He could darn well do it again.

That's when the Chicago native hatched a plan. He mentioned to his brother the possibility that the U-boat would be destroyed, and what a shame it was. Father John Gallery, who lived back in the Windy City, contacted the folks at the Museum of Science and Industry over near the lake. As it happened, the museum had been considering adding a submarine to its collection. They had had little luck so far in the more than ten years since they began contemplating the addition of a plunging boat to their collection. They were immediately excited about the possibilities of acquiring such a historic and noteworthy vessel as the
U-505
.

Gallery led a contingent to the office of Under Secretary of the Navy Charles S. Thomas in Washington, D.C. He convinced the undersecretary that the
U-505
belonged on the banks of Lake Michigan, not at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. There was a catch, though. The navy had no interest in paying a single cent of taxpayer money to assist the museum in the move, and they would not continue to pay for her storage in Portsmouth any longer. Either she went to Chicago or to the bottom of the sea. One or the other had to happen soon.

The City of Chicago and private donors ponied up the quarter million dollars needed to pay for the move and to get the submarine prepared to receive visitors. Soon, the U-boat was making another monumental journey while under tow. This time, she was pulled out the Piscataqua River and into the Atlantic. Then she was headed northeast, around New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, and ultimately into the St. Lawrence River. She negotiated two dozen locks in the St. Lawrence Seaway. Then she passed through four of the five Great Lakes before arriving in Chicago in June 1954.

The original plan was to continue the journey another eight hundred feet, across Lake Shore Drive, to the main museum building. That was the most daunting part of the entire trek. Using a series of rails, the sub crossed the busy street in one night. It took them another week to move the submarine from the side of the road to the museum.

On September 25, 1954, the
U-505
was dedicated to the memory of war victims everywhere and became a permanent exhibit at the museum. She was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989.

After the boat was exposed to Chicago weather for half a decade, the museum decided to let her make one more move—inside to a climate-controlled environment. The team used original construction drawings and old photos to restore much of the boat to her original color and condition prior to the move. All the while, the museum management was trying to figure out the best way to accomplish and pay for this enormous and daunting task.

After about two years of planning and work, and at a cost of about $35 million, the
U-505
was rolled along on massive dollies a distance of one thousand feet. Then she was lowered, using monstrous jacks, to a position that was four stories below street level. Special viewing platforms were set up so museum visitors could watch the amazing engineering feat as it played out.

Thousands of miles from the nearest ocean, the old submersible vessel had once again gone deep—into the earth of America's heartland.

 

 

 

The
U-505
and her exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry have become one of the most visited submarine museum sites in the country and a very popular Chicago tourist attraction. As many as thirty million visitors have toured her compartments and examined the various equipment and artifacts that are on display nearby.

The museum features a number of other exhibits as well as an Omni-Max theater.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

T
here were officially 1,682 submarine war patrols during World War II. A total of 465 different skippers commanded at least one of those patrols. Sixty of those who commanded a sub would eventually become rear admirals. Twelve advanced to the rank of vice admiral. Three others became full admirals. Two of them eventually served terms in the U.S. Congress.

One of those former skippers, Tom Dykers (USS
Jack
, SS-259), became a television producer, and in 1957 and 1958 developed the series
The Silent Service
, which told the true stories of many of the submarines that took part in World War II and the Korean War, including some of those covered in this book. Dykers also hosted and narrated the series.

Three former World War II submarine skippers committed suicide. Another, upon his natural death, had his final wishes honored when he was cremated and his ashes were launched from a submarine's torpedo tube off Key West, Florida.

The first submarine force casualty suffered in World War II was G. A. Myers, Seaman Second Class, who was shot through the right lung when the USS
Cachalot
(SS-170) was strafed during the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. The sailor survived and the
Cachalot
left on her first war patrol five days after the attack . . . without Seaman Myers.

The Imperial Japanese vessel
I-176
was the only Japanese sub to sink an American submarine during the war. The USS
Corvina
(SS-226) was lost with eighty-two men on November 16, 1943.

During 1944, Japan lost fifty-six of its submarines. Seven of those were to U.S. submarines. Of the seven, three were sunk by the USS
Batfish
(SS-310) during a period of just over three days in February 1945.

There were so many submarine attacks on the Singapore-to-Japan shipping routes in 1944 that one Japanese commander told his men, “You could walk from Singapore to Tokyo on American periscopes.”

After the war, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded all warships in the Pacific, acknowledged the contributions of the subs and their crews by saying, in his usual understated way, “We shall never forget that it was our submarines that held the lines against the enemy while our fleets replaced losses and repaired wounds.”

Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, who commanded the submarine fleet, was a bit more colorful in his praise: “I can assure you that they went down fighting and that their brothers who survived them took a grim toll of our savage enemy to avenge their deaths.”

I am indebted to the World War II submarine veterans, as well as those who served on these wonderful old boats after the war. They were kind enough to respond to my call for help when I began researching the stories of their gallant old ladies. As I told them, I wanted to tell human stories, tales of the men who went off to war on the plunging boats.

Many of them provided details and fact verification along with far more sea stories than I could ever fit into a book such as this. As you might expect, they are proud of their service and of their submarines. Too many of them are gone—boats and sailors alike—and their stories are dying with them. These veterans are anxious, even desperate, to have their contribution documented and remembered. That is why they work so hard to save as many of the World War II vessels as they can.

I also salute those who work so hard to build the myriad Web sites devoted to these vessels. Their preservation of stories, patrol logs, photos, and the like made my research much easier than it might have been. A simple Web search by vessel name or hull number will generate a listing of many of these sites, which are often produced and maintained by volunteers.

Thanks to Jim Flanders, one of the leaders of the Submarine Veterans Amateur Radio Association, who steered me in the right direction on several occasions. And to Mac Borg, Chairman of the Board of the North Jersey Media Group, both for taking time to talk with me about the USS
Ling
and for not making a big deal of the fact that the New Jersey Naval Museum has apparently not paid his company the one dollar a year rent they agreed upon. Thanks, too, to John Fisher, who took time from dinner one evening to tell me about his view of the capture of the
U-505
, even if we did spend too much time talking about our mutual hobby of ham radio (he's K2JF and I'm N4KC).

The experiences of Kiyoshi Uehara during the sinking of the
Tsushima Maru
by the
Bowfin
and his subsequent rescue were taken from several sources, including an interview conducted in 2003 by Yuko Tamashiro that has been reproduced in many places on the Internet. Uehara had taken his admonitions to not discuss the tragedy seriously and did not talk about it for over sixty years, until that interview. Some accounts suggest he now plans to write his autobiography. I hope he does. The story deserves its own book.

A number of detailed books have been written about many of the submarines covered in this book and they were useful to me in confirming historical and anecdotal accounts of the stories I have chosen to include here. One source was a compilation of all wartime skippers put together by Jon D. Jacques titled
Submarine Skippers of World War II: A Data Study
. By far the best source of detailed and complete history of the action seen by the submarine service in World War II is the late Clay Blair Jr.'s exhaustive book,
Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan
.

I also salute the NavSource Naval History project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making photographs of naval vessels easily available to those who want them. They have pulled together over forty thousand images, many of them from official U.S. Navy sources and in the public domain, and put them into a searchable database on the Internet. That Web site can be accessed at
www.navsource.org
.

The Historic Naval Ships Association is a group made up of those who operate the various naval museums and memorials. They, too, are an excellent source of information about all vessels that have been set up as museums around the United States and in some foreign countries. Their Web site is
www.hnsa.org
. The information in the appendix that lists maritime museums and memorials was compiled in part from their Web site.