re: 82 years ago today, 8 American sailors jumped onto a sinking nazi sub

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So Lt. Albert David and eight men from USS Pillsbury chased her down in a whaleboat, leaped aboard, and climbed down the hatch into a dark, flooding submarine that could explode or go under at any second. They shut the scuttling valves, disarmed the charges, and stopped the flooding.

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Lt. David received the Medal of Honor, the only one awarded in the Atlantic Fleet in all of WWII.

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On that day, shortly after 11 a.m., U-505‘s faulty sound detection equipment picked up faint propeller noises. When Lange rose to periscope depth to investigate, the sight he saw made his blood run cold. U-505 was in the midst of a carrier task group and about to be attacked by three destroyers and several aircraft. The boat immediately dived, but freakish water conditions allowed the aircraft to see the sub and use bursts from its .50-caliber machine guns to mark her submerged position for the destroyers.

‘They really gave it to us!’ Goebeler remembers. ‘They fired hedgehogs and about 64 depth charges at us. The explosions were the biggest I ever heard. One depth charge was so close it damaged torpedoes stored in the upper deck. Other depth charges jammed our main rudder and diving planes. Lange managed to fire one torpedo, but soon there was nothing for us to do but surface and abandon ship before she sank for good. When we reached the surface, Lange opened the hatch but was wounded right away by the gunfire. Men started jumping overboard, but I stayed in the control room to make sure the boat sank. It was the chief engineer’s job to set the demolition charges and scuttle her, but he was already in the water, trying to save his own neck. The boat wasn’t sinking because she was hanging on the air bubble in diving tank No. 7. We tried by hand and by air pressure to open the relief valve for the tank, but it wouldn’t budge because the relief valve shaft had been bent from a depth charge explosion.

‘I went behind the periscope housing and took off the cover of the sea strainer. This let an 11-inch stream of water into the boat and I thought, `This will do it!’ I climbed topside and helped four other men get a big life raft loose. The destroyers and planes were giving us hell, firing anti-aircraft, anti-personnel and high-explosive weapons at our boat. We swam away from the sub as quickly as possible. The planes were shooting the water between us and the boat, chasing us away from U-505 like a cat playing with mice. But none of us was crazy enough to want to go back to that boat because she was sinking fast! Only the very front of the boat and the top of the conning tower was still above the water. Well, the American skipper must have had some men who were very brave, or very crazy, because they boarded the sub, found the sea strainer cover and closed it. They somehow kept the boat afloat and took it in tow.

‘We were picked up by destroyers and brought to the carrier, where they locked us in a cage just below the flight deck. The heat from the carrier’s engines was so terrible that we lost 20 or 30 pounds during those weeks from sweating. They brought us to the Bermudas for about six weeks, where we gained some weight and began looking human again.

‘We were transported to Louisiana and sent to a special prisoner-of-war camp for anti-Nazis. You see, that particular camp wasn’t covered by the Geneva Convention. The Americans didn’t want the Red Cross to interview us and let our navy know that a U-boat had been captured. We worked there in Louisiana on farms and in logging camps until 1945, when we were transferred to Great Britain. We were confined there until December of 1947, when we were finally released.’

Through an incredible series of events, U-505 survives today, on display at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. More than half a million visitors a year tour the boat’s decks and gaze at her battle-damaged conning tower.

Hans Goebeler lives in semiretirement in central Florida with his wife and daughter. He makes a modest living selling coffee mugs emblazoned with pictures of famous U-boat captains and other German war heroes, and his eyes still sparkle with life when telling about his days aboard the U-505 — the U-boat that wouldn’t die.

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I’d never heard that part of the story until now, I wonder if any of the 58 stayed in Louisiana, or came back later?

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Where in Louisiana?

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One group of prisoners was treated differently, with not even International Red Cross inspectors allowed to see them.[2] In late July 1944, the captured surviving 56 officers and crew of U-505 were sent to the camp and kept in isolation in a restricted area in the NE corner of the camp to prevent them from communicating to the enemy that secret German naval codes had fallen into Allied hands. Numerous declassified secret National Archive documents regarding these U-boat POWs are housed in the archives.

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So Lt. Albert David and eight men from USS Pillsbury chased her down in a whaleboat, leaped aboard, and climbed down the hatch into a dark, flooding submarine that could explode or go under at any second. They shut the scuttling valves, disarmed the charges, and stopped the flooding. Down there they found the prize: Enigma cipher machines and roughly 900 pounds of codebooks and charts. Current settings. The keys to the German navy's secret communications.

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And the submarine? In 1954, Chicagoans raised $250,000 to bring her home. She was towed across Lake Michigan and dragged through the streets of Chicago to the Museum of Science and Industry. She's still sitting there right now. You can walk through her.

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Did they ever make a movie out of this?

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The war had basically already been decided at that point, it was just a matter of where we landed on mainland Europe.

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