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The capture of U-505 is one of the most famous small naval actions of the Second World War, and was one of only a handful of occasions on which a German U-boat was captured intact.
I hadn’t realised that the capture of U-505 wasn’t the result of a lucky chance, but was instead the end result of a lot of careful planning on the part of Captain Daniel Gallery, the commander of TG 22.3. He had first considered the idea of capturing a U-boat intact while commanding an air group based on Iceland, and once he had his own hunter killer group began to develop his plans. Even with all of this planning, the actual encounter with U-505 was very clearly due to luck, with both sides attempting to return to base by the most efficient route
The obvious question posed by the title is just why this action was controversial. The answer lies in the complex problems posed by Ultra intelligence. Having broken the German naval codes the last thing the Allied intelligence services wanted was for the Germans to change the codes, but the intact capture of a U-boat was exactly the sort of thing that might prompt such a change. Gallery wasn’t high enough in rank to have been read into the Ultra secret, so he had no idea that the codes had been broken. Ironically one of his main objects in capturing U-505 was to seize a German Enigma machine and the associated documents. His plans were known to some people at COMINCH, but they couldn’t order him to abandon his plans without give some reason why. They seem to have decided that the risk posed by telling Gallery to stop was higher than the chance of his plan actually working, so decided to let him keep working on it.
One unusual aspect of this book is that we get detailed accounts of the battle from both sides, because all but one of the crew of U-505 survived the capture of their boat.
The actual raid itself was a very impressive action. The boarding party waited until the U-boat appeared to be empty, but they couldn’t be sure of that so had to be heavily armed. They could be sure that the Germans would have attempted to scuttle the U-boat, so they would be entered a sinking submarine. Luckily the scuttling efforts hadn’t been well organised – several senior officers had been wounded earlier in the action, so the explosive scuttling charges weren’t used. Even so the small party of Americans had to find all of the open valves, close them before the boat filled enough to sink, and then find a way to keep it afloat. At the same time they were searching for any valuable intelligence material and removing it from the U-boat in case it did sink.
This is an excellent look at this famous action, placing it firmly in the context of the wider battle of the Atlantic and the intelligence war, with details from both sides, and a good account of the daring raid that saw U-505 captured intact.
Chapters
Chronology
Origins
Initial Strategy
The Plan
The Raid
Analysis
Author: Mark Lardas
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 80
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2022