HISTORICAL NOTES: Junior’s Last Voyage

Two Grumman Wildcats droned over the Atlantic, 100 miles off Cap Blanc, on search mission. At almost the same moment, each pilot spotted what he was looking for: the dark, sharklike outline of a German U-boat, slipping along just under the waves. Simultaneously, the two planes flashed the warning, “Sighted sub,” back to their flattop, the Guadalcanal, known to her crew as the Can Do. As the carrier’s five destroyer escorts closed in and depth charges spumed up, the submarine jammed her diving planes into the down position.

That was in June 1944, at the height of World War II. This week in Chicago, the rusting, bullet-riddled submarine, the U-505, will be hauled to her final snug harbor at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, as a memorial to all the U.S. seamen who lost their lives at sea in World Wars I and II, and as a personal tribute to Rear Admiral Dan Gallery, the lean and leathery wartime skipper of the Guadalcanal.

Dumplings & Geysers. When Gallery’s sub-destroying team attacked the U-5O5, most of the Nazi crew was eating Sunday dinner. The depth charges damaged the sub’s external ballast tanks and turned her over on her side, tossing officers and men to the decks in a tumble of crockery and dumplings. The captain ordered preparations for scuttling. Then he surfaced the U-5O5 to let the crew escape.

When the Nazi submariners emerged from the U-boat, they were greeted with a rataplan of small-caliber fire from encircling destroyers. Planes growled overhead, and depth charges still geysered around the stricken submarine. The Ger mans lost no time going overboard, and when Commander F. S. Hall, destroyer division commander, estimated that the entire crew had left, he ordered a ceasefire. From the Germans, bobbing in the waves, came three cheers for the sinking U-505. From the Pillsbury’s loudspeakers came a rarely heard order: “Away boarding parties!”

Whaleboats & Logs. The diesels of the U-505 were still running, and the boat was moving in a tight, righthand circle when Lieut, (j.g.) Albert David and eight crewmen from the destroyer Pillsbury jumped aboard, minutes after the last live German had left (the body of one Nazi, the only fatality in the whole operation, was found aboard the U-boat). Racing below, the boarders shut the seacocks, stopped the engines and searched for booby traps. That evening the U-5O5 —rechristened Can Do, Jr.—rode at the end of a towline behind the Guadalcanal.

It was the first time since 1815 that the U.S. Navy had boarded and captured a foreign man-of-war on the high seas.*

Junior spent the rest of the European war in Bermuda. The capture was a top secret that the German admiralty never fathomed. The captured codebooks, logs and general orders were described by Naval intelligence officers as one of the greatest windfalls of the war. For his heroism, Lieut. David (now dead) got the Medal of Honor.

After the war the battered sub was moved to Portsmouth Navy Yard to be reduced to scrap, but the Korean war postponed that fate. Last year a group of citizens began a campaign to bring the U-boat to Chicago, Dan Gallery’s home town. The Navy was agreeable, and on June 26 Junior was welcomed to Chicago. This week, if weather and Lake Michigan permit, Junior will be hauled ashore in a momentous engineering operation and lugged across South Lake Shore Drive (traffic will be halted for twelve hours) to her final berth at the museum.

* In June 1815, the British brigantine Nautilus surrendered to the American sloop-of-war Peacock after a battle in the Sunda Strait. In the days of relatively unsinkable wooden ships, captures were frequent. Perhaps the most remarkable of such achievements was that of French hussars who discovered a Dutch fleet helplessly frozen in at Texel in January 1795, and captured it by a cavalry charge across the ice.