On June 4, 1944, the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal and its escort destroyers picked up a sonar ping. A U-boat was hiding off the coast of Cape Verde. U.S. Navy Captain Daniel V. Gallery was in command of his second hunter-killer cruise as skipper of the Guadalcanal. Having already sunk three U-boats, he was determined to capture one and get the trove of valuable intelligence information hidden aboard it. He was so ready to make history; he had several boarding teams and a film crew ready and waiting.
The U-Boat Chase Begins
Charles Lachman, a journalist whose work includes The New York Post, Fox News, and “Inside Edition,” has written a new book about the capture of U-505. Called “Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and The Elusive Enigma Machine,” he goes into painstaking detail, having researched the story for three years and digging up interviews from both the American and German stories of the tale. The result is a fast-paced, thrilling adventure at sea filled with great American heroes.
Before we continue with the story of the Guadalcanal and U-505, let’s take a step back in time to 1815. The War of 1812 had been raging on the high seas for years. It had finally ended on December 24, 1814, but word had yet to spread to all the ships at sea. Historians are unsure of whether Master Commandant Lewis Warrington, commander of the USS Peacock, knew the war was over or not. What he did know is that the British East India Company’s brig HCS Nautilus was his for the taking. Peacock’s capture of the Nautilus was the last time the U.S. Navy captured an enemy ship at sea. That is the last time until Capt. Gallery’s task force picked up U-505 on sonar.
Codename Nemo: The Secret Mission Unveiled
Gallery had long strategized about the possibility of capturing a German U-boat. He first got the idea while stationed in Iceland in 1942. At the time, the World War II Battle of the Atlantic was still in its early days, and U-boat “wolfpacks” were wreaking havoc on Allied shipping. Advances in radar, aircraft, and convoy protection took its toll on the U-boats, forcing many to hunt alone and stay submerged until the cover of darkness could hide their locations on the surface.
He believed it wasn’t necessary to utterly destroy a submarine at every encounter. He theorized they could be neutralized and forced to the surface with well-placed depth charges and hedgehog anti-submarine mortars. When the crew abandoned their boat, he believed it would be possible to send a boarding party over, disable the charges set to scuttle the sub and capture the intel on board.
His primary objective was to capture a German Enigma, the machine used by the Nazis to encode their military communications. He had no idea that the Allies had not only already captured a machine but had broken Enigma and were reading German messages. In his mind, obtaining an Enigma machine would be a crucial win for the Allied cause.
After being detected by the American task force’s sonar, U-505’s position was marked by Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters while the USS Chatelain dropped a flurry of depth charges and hedgehogs. Its targeting was perfect; U-505 popped up out of the water, and the Americans began to pummel it with small-arms fire. Once the crew had abandoned ship, the U.S. sailors in the boarding party went in without hesitation – no small feat.
They had been told to expect that some German sailors would have remained aboard to kill any boarders and ensure the sub was scuttled. Naval intelligence told them that they had mere minutes to find and disable all 14 charges before they went off. The Americans thought they were going on a suicide mission but went anyway. Luckily, no one was left aboard, and in the crew’s haste to abandon ship, the charges hadn’t been properly set. U-505 was now in American hands.
That’s not the end of the story, however. U-505 still had to get back to a friendly port without its capture being discovered by the Germans. Adm. Ernest King was furious with Capt. Gallery because if the Germans believed their codes were compromised, they might change them. Find out how U-505 became the USS Nemo and how Capt. Gallery and his crew became heroes while keeping their capture secret in Charles Lachman’s gripping book.
“Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and The Elusive Enigma Machine” is available now, wherever books are sold. It can be found on Amazon in hardback, Kindle e-reader and audiobook starting at $17.99.
Read About Other Book Reviews
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