Seizing the Enigma (32 page)

The crew members still inside the U-boat heard the shooting and sensed or were told that the first men to emerge had been shot. This decreased whatever urgency there may have been to get out. Silence fell over the crew. Wilde wondered whether he should even climb out. Suddenly, as the
Broadway
raced toward the U-110, Lemp shouted, “Out! Out! The destroyer is going to ram us.”

Wilde knew that if capture threatened, the boat’s secret documents, including the cipher material, were to be destroyed. But the submarine’s rise to the surface had been so swift and unanticipated, especially in face of the expectation moments earlier that the vessel would go down, that no preparations had been made to wreck the Enigma and soak its keys, printed in water-soluble ink. None of his three superiors in the boat’s radio service had taken any steps to throw the machine or its papers overboard or otherwise render it useless to an enemy. And he had been indoctrinated with the belief that the machine was cryptographically so secure that even capture would not compromise its secrets. Still under the impress of the terror of death,
he was not able to react calmly. And now, with the captain’s shout raising in him the new fear that thousands of tons of steel were about to smash into his frail vessel and do what the depth bombs had failed to do, all thoughts of cipher machines vanished from his brain.

Wilde climbed up the ladder in the conning tower, went out onto the bridge, heard Lemp order, “Overboard!” and jumped 15 feet into the Atlantic. As he went down, he never thought about whether the water was cold or even that it was wet, only that it was a beautiful turquoise color. Still descending, he turned on the oxygen flask of his diving vest. It brought him up. His cap was floating next to him and, still in a trancelike state, he reached over and put it on. He saw others swimming in a group. The cook, next to him, said, “I’m swimming to a destroyer.” Then the group of men, to keep their spirits up, began to sing one of the songs Wilde had played over and over on the submarine’s loudspeaker system:
“Im Leben Geht Alles Vorüber”
(In life all things come to an end).

The
Broadway
, meanwhile, continued speeding toward the submarine. She did not intend to ram. Her plan was to drop two depth charges under the U-boat set to explode at about 100 feet to damage the sub so that she could not dive again and to encourage her crew to abandon ship. But the firing of the
Broadway
’s 4-inch guns had cracked her bridge windows so extensively that they were almost opaque, and her captain did not realize that he was on a collision course. He dropped his depth charges and at the last moment turned away, but the stern of the submarine, whose port motor had been running slowly, swung toward the destroyer. As the
Broadway
passed by, the U-boat’s after hydroplane sliced open the destroyer’s port forward fuel tank. Oil spilled into the water.

By then Baker-Cresswell had enforced his cease-fire order and, with his ship drifting only a hundred yards from the U-boat, was ready to realize his idea of boarding her. No plans had ever been made for the possibility of boarding a U-boat, so no training or drill had ever been carried out for it.

“Organize boarding party instantly,” Baker-Cresswell said to his second in command, Lieutenant John Aitken. “The sub-lieutenant will be in charge.”

The sub-lieutenant was David E. Balme, who in joining the navy had followed a long family tradition. Balme, just twenty, with a mischievous look and a twinkle in his eye, was once characterized as a type who made girls happy when he came ashore. He had studied at the Dartmouth naval school and sailed on training cruises in the Mediterranean and was serving aboard a destroyer as a midshipman when the war began. He liked the life and the responsibility, and in February 1941 he joined the
Bulldog
.

Someone hailed him: “Hey, you, sub! Away you go!” He reported to the bridge.

Baker-Cresswell instructed him. “Your job is to secure all important papers, ciphers, charts—anything that you can find.” Balme armed himself with a huge service revolver—as dangerous to him as to the enemy, he thought—and the eight ratings (enlisted men) with rifles, revolvers, hand grenades, and gas masks (in case sea water had evolved poisonous chlorine gas from the batteries). The ship lowered the 27-foot, five-oared whaler off its port side into the water. It was 12:45
P.M.
, Friday, May 9, 1941.

The
Bulldog
was lying to the windward of the U-boat, and a heavy swell was running. It would have been safer to row around the submarine and come up on her leeward side, but this would have taken more time, so Balme made directly for her. Suddenly Baker-Cresswell saw two men who appeared to be manning her forward gun. He gave the order to open fire with the Lewis gun, and the two men appeared to be hit. Within moments, the U-110’s whole crew seemed to have jumped or fallen into the water. They were picked up by the
Broadway
and the corvette
Aubretia
and promptly hustled below, so they were unable to see anything outside.

As the whaler approached the submarine, no fire came from her, so Balme grew confident that no one was in the conning tower. He
could see the numerous holes in the conning tower made by the
Bulldog
’s 3-inch gun and pom-poms. The bowman in the whaler leaped onto the U-boat with the light line, and Balme and the others followed, clambering onto the slippery hull. Soon one of the ocean swells carried the whaler onto the U-boat, jamming it between the conning tower and the steel guard rails. The pounding of the waves soon broke it up. Balme felt it was almost suicidal for an inexperienced man to climb down the conning tower of a submarine with one hand holding a weapon. So he bolstered his revolver. The sailors balanced themselves on the narrow, rocking deck, carrying their unwieldy weapons and trying not to accidentally shoot themselves or one another.

Balme climbed part way up the conning tower and entered through an opening on the starboard side. At his feet he saw a closed hatch. The boat had indeed appeared to be deserted, but if the hatch was closed, perhaps someone was aboard after all. For who would carefully close a hatch after abandoning a vessel under attack? And if the submarine was to be scuttled, wouldn’t its captain want the hatch to remain open, to let water in and air out more quickly? Cautiously Balme turned the wheel that held the hatch screwed down, released a clip, and watched the hatch spring open. He saw the lower conning tower, empty, with a similar hatch at the bottom, also closed. The same question arose: Was the submarine really deserted? If not, anyone in the control room just beneath that second hatch would be able to shoot Balme before he could fire back. The sub-lieutenant briefly considered dropping a grenade inside. But that would defeat the purpose of the boarding. He was there to do a job. He went down the ladder and opened the second hatch.

More than a bit scared, and feeling very vulnerable, he climbed down into the control room. All the lights were on. Everything was silent except for the hiss of air escaping and the rumbles of distant depth charges. Hatches forward and aft were open. A large metal splinter from a conning tower hit lay on the deck. The control room
was deserted—but were crew members lurking nearby, ready to kill their enemies? Would scuttling charges soon go off? Would the depth charges detonate them? Was sea water pouring in somewhere?

None of these things seemed to be happening, and no German appeared. Balme called the rest of the boarding party down into the submarine. As it became evident that no one was on the boat and no chlorine had been produced, they put down their weapons and their gas masks and looked around a little more carefully.

The submarine had clearly been abandoned in great haste. A plate of shrimps lay in the radio room. Books and gear were strewn about. The first quick examination took about five minutes. Balme ordered his party to send up all useful documents and equipment. He had signalman William Pollock wigwag a message that the boat was abandoned and appeared seaworthy and towable and that he was collecting gear. He ordered all books sent up except obviously recreational ones, so he recovered some general navigational texts in addition to the log books, signal books, and charts with heavy black lines showing the swept channels through minefields. The men passed these out of the ship by means of a human chain.

Baker-Cresswell watched nervously from the
Bulldog
, fearful that the men might drop into the sea the documents for which he had risked violating the Admiralty’s basic instructions to escort commanders: “The safe and timely arrival of the convoy is the primary object, and nothing relieves the escort commander of his responsibility in this respect.” In one anxious moment, he saw Able Seaman Claude Wileman stagger from the conning tower protecting an armful of documents with his body. He moved in spurts, hurrying a few paces, then holding on to the guard rail as a sea rocked the boat, then moving on. Once a wave all but covered him. He emerged, soaked but safe, and with the documents. Nor did any of the other seamen who maneuvered so carefully on the U-boat’s narrow hull lose anything. They put their treasures into a motorized whaler from the
Broadway
that had replaced the
Bulldog
’s smashed boat.

Meanwhile the telegraphist in the party, Allen O. Long, went to the radio room. It had apparently served as the boat’s office, for he found pay books and general correspondence as well as signal logs. He saw also the two compact high-frequency transmitters and the two receivers, a Telefunken and a civilian broadcasting receiver; he noted their settings. He also considered that the sets seemed far less complicated, far more compact than the Royal Navy’s. And there Long saw as well a device that looked like a typewriter. It was still plugged in, drawing its current from the boat’s power supply and not its own batteries, and appeared to have been in use when the U-boat was abandoned. Long pressed the keys. But the results seemed “peculiar”—pressing an
a
did not light up an A on the illuminated panel. It was not, therefore, just a special form of typewriter. Balme examined it as well. He hadn’t thought of cipher machines before, but he recognized it for what it was and understood that it was useful. It was bolted to the table. Long unscrewed the bolts by hand and passed the machine out of the submarine via the human chain to the
Broadway
’s whaler, which took it, and the documents, to the
Bulldog
.

Two boatloads of equipment went over, and Baker-Cresswell was pleased to see that the German papers printed in water-soluble ink had lost only small portions of their text. Balme also passed up half a dozen sextants, which he regarded as of superb quality, far superior to those supplied by the Admiralty, and nine of ten Super Zeiss binoculars. The tenth was not handed in, Balme later finding it by far the best binoculars he had ever used.

The minutes turned into hours as Balme continued to scour the ship. Among the officers’ belongings he found some wallets, slips of paper, cameras, a movie camera. In the radio room there was writing paper with well-printed letterheads and envelopes, ordinary books, cards, dice, and what he called “the usual art studies.”

He was impressed by the U-boat. She was “new and a fine ship both in the strength of the hull, in the fittings and instruments and general interior construction. … Spotlessly clean throughout. Ward
Room finished off in light varnished woodwork and all cupboards were numbered with corresponding keys to fit.… Plenty of tinned ham, corned beef and three sacks of potatoes in control room; also luxuries such as beer, cigars, Players cigarettes (German printing on packets).… Magnificent galley.…”

The
Aubrietia
and the
Broadway
picked up survivors while the
Bulldog
’s engineer officer went over to see whether the U-boat was seaworthy and to stop the port motor from its slow turning. He concluded that the vessel was able to stay afloat, and he slowed the motor by shifting what he presumed to be the central rheostat to the off position, but the shaft did not stop revolving. Nor did various other adjustments of the rheostat succeed in stopping it. And after a time the boat seemed to be a little more down by the stern than when he had come aboard.

Meanwhile, Baker-Cresswell was reporting that he had captured a U-boat, that she appeared to be taking water, that he had no one who could read German to fix her, and finally that he was taking her in tow to bring her to Scapa. But just as he started to attach a 3½-inch cable, and while the boarding party was aboard the submarine, news came that two ships of the convoy, which by now had steamed out of sight in the decreasing visibility, had been torpedoed. The submarine that had done this was being attacked by the ships of Escort Group 3 that had remained with the convoy. Soon the
Broadway
and the
Aubrietia
obtained an asdic contact with a presumed submarine and began dropping depth charges. Then lookouts on Baker-Cresswell’s own
Bulldog
shouted that they had seen a periscope. Baker-Cresswell slipped the tow to the U-boat and searched for the new submarine, with no success.

Gradually the excitement subsided, and the
Bulldog
resumed the tow. The U-boat seemed to keep turning to starboard, perhaps a consequence of the slow turning of her port motor. But this, though a nuisance, did not prevent the
Bulldog
from increasing speed to 4 knots. Baker-Cresswell ordered all watertight hatches and doors
to be closed on the submarine and the boarding crew to rejoin his ship. At 6:30 all were back, and the towing speed was increased to 6 knots. By 7 the next morning, however, the wind had become a strong breeze of up to 30 miles per hour and blowing from slightly south of west as the
Bulldog
headed northeast in a lumpy sea. It proved impossible to hold this course, so Baker-Cresswell let the submarine head downwind, a position in which she seemed comfortable, and kept the towing wire taut. Suddenly, at 11
A.M.
, the U-110, which had been settling by the stern, started to sink more rapidly. Soon her bow reared to the vertical. Baker-Cresswell had the towing line cut with an ax, and the submarine slid beneath the surface.