Seizing the Enigma (31 page)

The conning tower of the U-559 emerges from the sea, its white donkey emblem picked out by the searchlight of the destroyer
Petard.

Antony Fasson, who lost his life getting cipher documents from the U-559.

Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of U-boats.

The giant wall plot of the North Atlantic, which showed the positions of convoys, escorts, and U-boats, in the headquarters of Western Approaches command in Liverpool. The circles showed areas to be avoided by Allied U-boat hunters because of the presence of Allied submarines.

A high-speed U.S. Navy mechanism, called a bombe, that tested for possible Enigma solutions.

Commander Kenneth A. Knowles, head of the U.S. Navy’s Submarine Tracking Room, which depended heavily on Enigma solutions.

Some of the U.S. Navy personnel of OP-20-GI-2(A) who solved, translated, and evaluated Enigma intercepts. Among them are Erminnie Bartelmez, at extreme left; Marjorie Boynton, with blond hair, looking to her right; Knight McMahan, with hat at his feet; Bernard Roeder, commander of the unit, holding his hat; and Willard Van Orman Quine, standing behind seated William Lindsay.

A depth charge, dropped by a U.S. Navy torpedo-bomber during a U-boat refueling rendezvous, drenches the tanker U-117, whose bow emerges from the spray just before the U-66 dives.

An F4F-4 Wildcat from the aircraft carrier
Card
attacks the U-117, which circles in an effort to escape.

The U-117 races desperately through the sunlit sea as a depth charge explodes near her. Minutes later she was sunk.

T
WO DAYS AFTER THE
M
ÜNCHEN
WAS CAPTURED, AND ON THE
other side of Iceland, Fritz-Julius Lemp’s U-110 was forced to the surface by the attacks of Joe Baker-Cresswell’s Escort Group 3. As the submarine broke water. Baker-Cresswell ordered the heavy guns of his ship, the
Bulldog
, to open up on the U-boat. Then, intending to ram, he swung the
Bulldog
to port and called for 12 knots.

In the submarine, Lemp ordered the crew to put on diving vests and abandon ship. Discipline held. There was no panic, no jostling to be the first out. The young radioman, Heinz Wilde, forgot temporarily that his diving vest was in the radio room, then remembered, got it, and put it on. His brain was half on automatic after the overwhelming terror he had felt under the depth-bomb attack of moments before, when he thought his boat would go down and his life would end. So he got his cap and put it on but left his camera behind. Lemp opened the conning tower hatch, and someone else opened the forward hatch. The first men emerged from the conning tower.

Baker-Cresswell, recalling the story of the codebook recovered from the
Magdeburg
, ordered his ship full speed astern and his guns to cease firing.

The former order worked better than the latter. Within a couple hundred yards, the
Bulldog
had halted. It was harder to get the gunners to stop firing. The heavy weapons—the 4.7-inch, the 3-inch, the pom-poms—indeed ceased. But from behind Baker-Cresswell
“a dreadful noise” shattered his ears: one of his officers was firing the Lewis submachine gun, something the officer had always wanted to do. As the Germans poured out of the conning tower and the forward hatch, the British sailors, perhaps fearing that the enemy was about to man the cannon on the forward deck, continued to fire their small arms; guns on the other British warships, by now in a circle around the U-boat, also shot at her. Some of the Germans were killed. Those who seemed about to serve the cannon scattered and dove into the water. The dots of heads littered the ocean. Some moved; some had arms that flailed in the water; some were motionless. Then one of the other destroyers, the four-stacker
Broadway
, raced toward the submarine, apparently trying to ram her and thereby unwittingly end Baker-Cresswell’s plan to salvage the codebooks. He grabbed a megaphone. “Keep clear!” he shouted at her. But would she hear? He ordered a signalman to flash the message to the
Broadway
, But would she see it? Could she stop in time?