Why a U-Boat is 5 Stories Underground in Chicago transcript

Thank you for watching to support my channel, and don't forget that you can now buy my book on Amazon. 16 minutes. That's how long it took a handful of American sailors to do something the United States Navy hadn't done since 1815. [music] Capture an enemy warship on the open sea. But the submarine they dragged out of the Atlantic that morning wasn't the real prize. What was locked inside it was. And to protect that secret, the Navy would fake the deaths of 58 men, hide them from their own families, and very nearly court-martial the officer who pulled the whole thing off.

This is the story of U-505 and the two impossible missions it took. One to capture her, and one 10 years later to bring her home. But how a German submarine ended up four stories underground beneath a museum in Chicago, you have to start with a boat that its own crew believed was cursed. U-505 was a Type 9C, a long-range ocean hunter. 250 ft of steel, six torpedo tubes, built in Hamburg in 1941. On paper, she was one of the most dangerous machines in Hitler's Navy.

In practice, her own men came to believe she was jinxed. It started off Trinidad in 1942 when a British plane dropped a bomb that landed almost squarely on her deck. The blast was so close, it tore the aircraft apart in midair, but it also cracked the submarine's hull and nearly sent her to the bottom. She barely limped home. Then it got stranger. Through 1943, patrol after patrol was cut short by breakdowns. Drilled fuel tanks, ruined welds, sabotage gear.

It was the quiet work of French dockworkers in occupied Lorient, wrecking the boat every time she came in for repairs. The crew even found graffiti mocking them painted inside their own submarine pen. And then it got worse. On the 24th of October, 1943, pinned underwater by British destroyers in a relentless depth charge attack, U-505's commander did something no other U-boat captain is known to have done. In front of his own men in the control room, Peter Scherk shot himself.

His first officer took over and somehow brought the boat home. By 1944, U-505 had a new captain, Harald Lange, and a reputation as the unluckiest boat in the fleet. What she didn't know was that 3,000 mi away, an American officer had come up with an idea everyone around him thought was insane. His name was Daniel Gallery, and he was, by any measure, a character. Born in Chicago in 1901 to a big Irish Catholic family, three of the four brothers would become Navy admirals, and the fourth became a priest.

Gallery was a naval aviator, a former Olympic wrestler, and a genuinely funny writer who happened to command an aircraft carrier. By 1944, his hunter-killer group had already sunk several U-boats. And it was watching one of them claw its way to the surface that gave Gallery his idea. Every other commander in the Atlantic had exactly one job when a U-boat surfaced: sink it. Gallery wanted to do the opposite. He wanted to board one and take it intact.

Because he understood what was really inside, not the torpedoes, the Enigma machine. The cipher device that scrambled every German naval order and the code books that told you how to set it. Capture those, current and undamaged, and you could read the enemy's mail in real time. So, before his ship sailed, Gallery did something unusual. He ordered every crew to train boarding parties in advance. One team to seize the code books, a second to close the valves and rip out the scuttling charges before the boat could sink.

They drilled for a chance that might [music] never come. And for weeks off the coast of Africa, it didn't come. They found nothing. Fuel ran low. Gallery finally turned for port, and then on the 4th of June, 1944, he decided to give it one more day. At 11:10 that morning, the destroyer escort Chatelain reported a sonar contact. What happened next took just 16 minutes. Gallery threw fighter planes overhead and sent the escorts in.

The first attack missed. Then, the pilot spotted the submarine's shadow under the water and fired into the sea to mark it, and Chatelain rolled a full pattern of depth charges right on top of it. Below the surface, it was chaos. The blast jammed U-505's rudder, killed her lights, and split a seam. Water started pouring in. Convinced his boat was finished, Lang blew the tanks and forced her up. And the second she broke the surface, every American gun in range opened fire.

Not to sink her, but to sweep the German crew off the deck before they could reach their own guns. Lang, hit in both legs, gave the order, "Abandon ship and scuttle." His men poured out of the hatches and threw themselves into the sea, while the submarine, her rudder still jammed hard over, began steaming in a wide, driverless circle. And that is when Gallery gave an order that had not been spoken aboard an American warship since the War of 1812.

"Away all boarding parties." Here's what makes the next few minutes almost impossible to believe. A single whaleboat from the destroyer Pillsbury, nine men aboard, chased a circling submarine that could still explode at any second, and caught it. Leading them was a junior officer named Albert David. Nobody ordered David to go first. The smart money said the Germans had rigged the boat to blow the moment someone came aboard.

He went anyway, down the conning tower hatch, into a dark flooding control room with two men behind him and the water rising around their boots. And they didn't panic. They worked. They passed the code books and the Enigma machine up through the hatch first. Then a machinist named Zenon Lukosius spotted it, the open sea strainer, the very valve the Germans had cracked to sink her. And he jammed the cover back on, choking off the flood.

The others tore the wires out of 13 demolition charges before they could fire. For that, Albert David received the Medal of Honor, the only one awarded to an Atlantic Fleet sailor in the entire war. But saving the code books was one thing. Saving the whole submarine was another. And it very nearly didn't happen. The boat was still going down by the stern. So, Gallery sent over his chief engineer, Earl Trosino, who spent hours crawling through oily, waist-deep water in the dark, closing valve after valve by feel.

Then Trosino pulled off something worthy of a magician. He rigged the tow so that as the carrier pulled the submarine forward, the rushing water spun her propellers, which turned her motors into generators, which recharged her dead batteries, which powered her own pumps to pump herself dry. The submarine, in effect, was made to save itself. Now, Gallery had a 700-ton secret under tow in the middle of the Atlantic and nowhere safe to take it.

The nearest port, Casablanca, was crawling with German spies. So, he set course for Bermuda, 1,700 mi away, refueling from a tanker sent out to meet him, flying a huge American flag above a tiny German one. 2 weeks later, the prize reached Bermuda, and the base handed him a joke receipt. One Nazi U-boat, complete with spare parts. And that is where the story should have gotten easier. Instead, it nearly ended in a court-martial.

Because capturing the boat intact had created a terrifying new problem. The entire plan only worked if Germany never found out. If Berlin so much as suspected that a U-boat had been taken with its Enigma still aboard, they would change every code overnight, and the Allies would go blind. Right on the eve of the invasion of Europe. When word climbed to the top of the US Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest King, was reportedly furious.

Gallery had risked the single most valuable secret of the war for a trophy. There was open talk of a court-martial. So, the Navy buried the story. The captured submarine was repainted to look American and given a fake name, USS Nemo. The 58 prisoners were spirited off to a camp in the woods of Louisiana and cut off from the world. Their names withheld from the Red Cross, their letters home forbidden. And within weeks, the German Navy, hearing nothing, declared the entire crew dead.

Their families held funerals for men who were still alive. At the camp, the prisoners tried everything to get word out. They mixed cleaning chemicals to make hydrogen, blew up little balloons, decorated them with paper iron crosses and a message, U-505 lives, and floated them over the fence. None of it worked. The secret held. It helped that, 2 days after the capture, the entire world was looking somewhere else, Normandy.

And so, U-505 stayed a ghost until the war was over. And when the war ended, the Navy had no more use for her. By 1946, every scrap of intelligence had been squeezed out, and the most important submarine capture of the war was tied up at a navy yard in Maine, rusting, waiting to be towed out to sea and blown apart as target practice. Daniel Gallery, now an admiral, couldn't stand it. And Gallery, remember, was a Chicago boy to his bones.

So, his brother, the priest, floated an idea. Bring the submarine to Chicago. Make her a memorial to the thousands of sailors who never came home from the Atlantic. Put her in front of the Museum of Science and Industry. In the city where the Gallery brothers grew up. It was a wild proposal. The museum said yes. The navy agreed to donate the boat in 1954 on one condition. They wouldn't pay a single cent to move it. And moving a 700-ton submarine 1,700 miles inland is not cheap.

So, Chicago paid for it themselves. The city, the museum, and ordinary people raised a quarter of a million dollars, including school children emptying jars of pennies and nickels to bring a Nazi submarine home. In the summer of 1954, U-505 made one final, impossible voyage. Tugs hauled her 3,000 miles up the Saint Lawrence River, through 28 locks, across four of the five Great Lakes, and into Lake Michigan. But, the hardest part was the last 800 ft.

Getting a submarine out of the lake, across a major highway, and onto museum grounds. Engineers laid down rails and rollers. The city shut down Lakeshore Drive in the dead of night, and inch by inch, they dragged a German U-boat across a Chicago freeway. It took another week to crawl the rest of the way. And on the 25th of September, 1954, in front of a crowd of roughly 40,000 people, including 100 of the very men who had captured her, U-505 was dedicated.

Not as a trophy, as a memorial to the dead of the Battle of the Atlantic. Gallery had brought her home. There's a coda to this that's easy to miss. 20 years later, at a reunion at that same museum, Daniel Gallery, the man who captured the boat, met Harold Lang, the German captain who lost her. And Gallery handed Lang back a pair of binoculars from the submarine that had once been his. The two old enemies became friends.

Today, U-505 sits four stories underground in a climate-controlled hall. Moved indoors in 2004 after Chicago winters nearly destroyed a hull that was only ever built to last four years. She is the only German U-boat in the United States, one of just two of her kind left on Earth, and more than 20 million people have walked through her. And here's the thing worth sitting with. We remember U-505 as the sub we captured, a war trophy.

But that's not really why she's there. The 16-minute battle, the buried secret, the pennies from school kids, the highway shut down in the dark, all of it was really one man's refusal to let a story be forgotten. The men who died in the Atlantic mostly don't have graves you can visit. What they have instead is her. Thank you to my Patreon members who helped make this video possible.