This time, though, Captain Gallery had something different in mind. During the last cruise, U-515 surfaced right in the middle of the task group. The escorting destroyer escorts hit the U-boat with every caliber gun they had, from five-inch to .50-caliber machine guns, before the boat sank. This gave Gallery an idea. “Suppose we hadn’t been so bloody minded about sinking her,” he thought. Before leaving Norfolk, Gallery assembled the captains of all the escort ships in his group and told them that they would try to capture a submarine, if possible, on this cruise.

If a U-boat came to the surface, as U-515 had done, everyone was to assume that the captain had come up to save the lives of the crew. Instead of sinking it, the destroyer escorts would open up with .50-caliber machine guns. This would keep the crew away from the U-boat’s deck guns and would also “encourage them to get the hell off that U-boat.” After the crew had abandoned the submarine, a boarding party would be sent over to disarm any booby traps, close all scuttling valves, do everything possible to keep the boat afloat, and rig it for towing back to the United States.

From the expression on their faces, Captain Gallery could see that some of the destroyer escort captains thought he must be crazy. Everyone present kept their mouths shut. They all organized boarding parties as ordered and waited to see what might happen.

Throughout the month of May, the possibility of capturing a U-boat remained a moot point. Captain Gallery’s hunter-killer group looked for submarines in the vicinity of the Cape Verde Islands, but could not find a thing. The results were “unproductive,” Gallery wrote with disgust in his report. Naval Intelligence sent word that a submarine was within 300 miles of the group, and Guadalcanal picked up radio transmissions on the U-boat frequency, but there had been no contacts. By May 30, the ships were all nearing the safe limit of their fuel. Gallery had no choice but to leave the area and head for Casablanca to refuel.

The task group started for Casablanca but kept a lookout for submarines along with way. On the night of June 2, radar contacts were reported about 50 miles east of the group’s position. Encouraged by these reports, Captain Gallery decided to spend another day on the search, even though it meant stretching his fuel.

When the Chatelain reported a possible sound contact at 1110 hours on June 4, Gallery gave the order to investigate the contact. As Guadalcanal left the area, Pillsbury and Jenks rushed over to help Chatelain. Chatelain’s captain fired a salvo of 20 hedgehogs, small, forward-firing depth bombs, and missed the target—if there was a target. At 1116 hours, all doubts ended abruptly. The pilots of the two Wildcat fighters positively identified a submarine running below the surface and advised Chatelain to reverse course toward it. The fighter pilots also fired bursts of machine-gun fire to indicate the submarine’s position.

The captain of the Chatelain followed the pilot’s advice and, aided by the machine-gun fire of the two planes, fired a full pattern of shallow-set depth charges. From the bridge of his flagship, Captain Gallery felt the deck underneath him rock as the depth charges exploded and a dozen geysers sprouted into the air. A minute later, after the explosions subsided, one of the fighter pilots shouted, “You’ve struck oil, Frenchy, sub is surfacing!” As personnel from every ship in the group looked on, the U-boat broke the surface 700 yards from Chatelain. Captain Gallery could see white water pouring from the submarine’s deck and conning tower. He had his quarry.

The reaction of the destroyer escorts was to start shooting as soon as soon as the boat came up. No one knew for certain whether the U-boat captain had come up to surrender or to fire a spread of torpedoes. Gunners aboard Chatelain, Pillsbury, and Jenks opened fire with a murderous barrage of .50-caliber machine-gun fire along with 20mm and 40mm shells. Larger caliber guns also began shooting but missed their target. The circling Wildcats came down to strafe.

“I Want to Capture That Bastard if Possible.”

Shortly after coming to the surface, the U-boat began to circle to the right, making it look as though she was maneuvering to bring her torpedo tubes to bear. After about two minutes of machine-gun and cannon fire, men began popping out of hatches and jumping into the sea. It was obvious that the submarine had no intention of fighting it out with the group and was getting ready to surrender. Captain Gallery did not want the gunners to sink his prize. He broadcast to the escort ships, “I want to capture that bastard if possible.”

The submarine that Captain Gallery’s task group brought to the surface was U-505, commanded by 40-year-old Oberleutnant Harald Lange. U-505 was a Type IX-C submarine, commissioned at Hamburg on August 26, 1941. It was also the unluckiest boat in the Atlantic force. In fact, U-505 was the Typhoid Mary of Admiral Karl Dönitz’s entire U-boat fleet. Since its commissioning day, the submarine seemed to have developed the knack for having things go wrong.

Actually, U-505’s career had begun on a bright note. In November 1942, just after setting out on her first war patrol, she sank a 7,200-ton British freighter, and she eventually sank a total of eight Allied ships during her operational lifetime. Just two days after sinking her first freighter, however, she attacked another ship with four torpedoes—all four missed and her target got away. This was only the beginning of her bad luck. On the afternoon of November 10, she was depth-bombed by twin-engined aircraft and badly damaged. The captain managed to bring her back to France, but U-505spent the next seven months in the repair dock.

Her luck did not improve during her second cruise. Under the command of 24-year-old Peter Zschech, U-505 left Lorient on June 30, 1943, but had come out of the repair dock too soon and was not yet ready for the open sea, forcing a return to Lorient.

Captain Zschech set sail once again on July 3, but three days later the submarine was attacked by three British destroyers off Cape Finisterre. U-505 survived the attack but once again returned to Lorient for major repairs. Her next attempt at a war patrol came in September 1943, when U-505departed Lorient for the Atlantic shipping lanes. Two days out, one of her diesels locked up. The crew managed to repair the engine, but the main trim pump broke down three days later. Because no spare parts were on board for the pump, Captain Zschech had no choice but to return to Lorient on September 30.

The next cruise was probably the worst of all. With Captain Zschech on board, U-505 sailed for the Caribbean in October 1943. On October 9, the submarine was detected by unidentified Allied warships and attacked with depth charges. During the depth charge barrage, Zschech committed suicide with a handgun. The strain of the attack and the frustration of his failure as captain of U-505 had finally taken their toll. The executive officer assumed command and, as his first duty, buried Zschech at sea. U-505 returned to Lorient on November 7, damaged and without a commanding officer.

Oberleutnant Lange was assigned as U-505’s captain in December. U-boat command hoped that an older and steadier commander might help settle the crew after Captain Zschech’s suicide. Shortly after leaving port, the submarine picked up survivors from a German torpedo boat, T-25, and returned to France. Although this patrol was not nearly the fiasco of the previous cruise, it was still another aborted start. The crew was becoming highly frustrated with aborted war patrols, depth charges, and repair docks.

Captain Lange did not take U-505 to sea again until March 16, 1944. He patrolled the western coast of Africa for Allied shipping but never even spotted a single ship. “The hex is still with us,” a crewman complained. Actually, U-505’s failure to find Allied shipping had nothing to do with luck, bad or otherwise. Allied naval intelligence had been tracking the submarine through her radio transmissions and had diverted all shipping away from her.

At the end of May, Lange decided to return to Lorient—yet another unsuccessful patrol. The boat was low on fuel, the crew was frustrated and in low spirits, and nothing at all had been accomplished in nearly two and a half months. Lange did not know it, but Allied codebreakers were fully aware that he was returning to France and also had a good idea of the course he was taking. Intelligence passed this information along to Captain Gallery and his hunter-killer group. It was U-505 that Guadalcanal was picking up on the U-boat radio frequency.

Captain Lange had no idea that his boat was in danger until the morning of June 4, when the noise bearings of Gallery’s approaching destroyer escorts were picked up. He brought the submarine up to periscope depth and saw what he identified as three “destroyers,” along with another ship that might be an aircraft carrier. Although he ordered an immediate crash dive, the U-boat was convulsed by five explosions before it had the chance to reach a safe depth.

“Water broke in,” Lange reported. “Light and all electrical machinery went off and the rudders jammed.” The Chatelain’s depth charge salvo had found its target. “Not knowing the whole damage or why they continued bombing me,” Lange curiously noted in his report, as though he thought that shooting at his U-boat was bad sportsmanship, “I gave the order to bring the boat to the surface by [com]pressed air.”

As soon as the boat surfaced, Captain Lange was up on the bridge. He saw four U.S. Navy vessels around him, “shooting at my boat with calibre and anti-aircraft [.50-caliber machine gun and 40mm cannon.]” The nearest destroyer escort hit the conning tower, wounding Lange in his legs and also killing his chief officer. Lange ordered a turn to starboard, swinging away from the enemy and giving the American gunners less of a target to shoot at. He also ordered the boat scuttled.

At 1126 hours, 16 minutes after the first possible sound contact, Captain Gallery ordered the task group to cease fire. Immediately afterward, he sent an order over his flagship’s intercom that had not been heard on an American warship since the War of 1812: “Away all boarding parties!”

The first ship to react was the Pillsbury. Her boarding party, led by Lieutenant (j.g.) Albert David, climbed into the ship’s whaleboat and started off for the German submarine, which was still circling to starboard at five or six knots. The event reminded Captain Gallery of a scene from Moby Dick, with a boarding party chasing a U-boat instead of harpooners chasing a whale. It did not take very long for the crew to cut inside the submarine’s circle, overtake the boat, and jump on deck.

Now that they were actually on board the submarine, Lieutenant David and two other men had to take control of it. The only German they saw was dead, lying face down alongside the conning tower hatch. With David in the lead, the three men climbed through the hatch, went down the ladder, and jumped into the control room. No one was absolutely certain if any Germans were still on board or not. Luckily for the small boarding party, the compartment was deserted and silent. The only sounds came from the machinery that kept the U-boat moving in its slow circle.

It seemed as though the boat was about to sink. The submarine was about 10 degrees down by the stern and seemed to be settling deeper with each passing minute. So, the three men concentrated on saving the secret code books and the boat’s Enigma enciphering machines. They grabbed every secret document they could get their hands on and passed them up through the hatch and onto the bridge. Even if the boat sank, just saving the Enigma machines and the code books would have made everything the group had done so far well worth the effort.

Captain Gallery, however, was not satisfied with just the secret books and code machines. He wanted to save the submarine as well. Because Guadalcanal was no longer in danger from a torpedo attack, Gallery brought the carrier close enough to the U-boat to send a whaleboat with a 10-man boarding party to help David and his men. A wave sent Guadalcanal’s whaleboat crashing onto U-505’s forward deck, which thoroughly frightened the three men aboard the submarine. They had no idea that another boarding party had been sent.

The leader of the 10-man party was Commander Earl Trosino, an engineering officer and an expert on ships’ pipes and fittings. Before the war, Commander Trosino had been a chief engineer aboard Sun Oil (Sunoco) tankers. Although he had never been aboard a submarine, Trosino managed to solve a major problem within the first few minutes. An open seacock was allowing tons of water to pour into the U-boat, adding to the difficulty of keeping her afloat. Its cover was found nearby and was simply screwed back into place.

When Lieutenant David and his men began looking for booby traps, they found 13 demolition charges and disarmed them. Trosino made certain that all the valves were closed and did his best to keep the boat from sinking. He sent word to Captain Gallery that the U-boat would sink unless it was towed.

The captain of the Pillsbury attempted to come alongside the still-circling German submarine, pass a salvage pump over, and take the boat in tow. During the maneuver, one of the submarine’s diving planes punched a hole in the Pillsbury’s hull, flooding her engine room and forcing the ship to retire and repair the damage. After Pillsbury left the scene, Guadalcanal took over. Commander Trosino and his men attached their end of Guadalcanal’s cable to U-505’s bow, and the carrier began to pull.

The second problem was that U-505’s rudders were still turned to starboard. Commander Trosino reported that he had put the rudder amidships, but he had only succeeded in moving the boat’s electric rudder indicator. The indicator showed that the rudders were amidships, but they were actually still hard right. The only possible way of moving them was to use the boat’s manual steering mechanism, which was situated in the after torpedo room. Since the boat was already well down by the stern, adding the weight of a couple of men in that compartment would only make a bad situation worse. Also, Trosino reported that the aft torpedo room was flooded and that its hatch was booby-trapped.

As he made his way into the submarine through the conning tower hatch, which was almost awash, Gallery began to have second thoughts about leaving Guadalcanal. The air stunk, the boat seemed on the verge of sinking by the stern, and the trip “through the control room, diesel engine room and after motor room seemed endless,” he recalled.