GALLERY-DANIEL

HE  CAPTURED  A  SINKING  GERMAN  SUBMARINE

 

One of the best kept secrets of World War II was the daring and unique capture of the German submarine U-505 on June 4, 1944.  Daniel Vincent Gallery, then CAPT and Commander of Task Group 22.3, was the mastermind behind this unprecedented event.  He first began to consider the possibility of capturing a U-boat when he commanded the American airbase at Reykjavik, Iceland, where his PBY flying boat pilots would sit around in the evenings thinking up ways they might capture a submarine.  Their wild and outrageous scenarios sparked a germ of truth and when CAPT Gallery became Commanding Officer of the escort carrier USS GUADALCANAL (CVE-60), he initiated training toward this objective and his plan was so effective that the Navy succeeded in boarding and capturing a foreign enemy man-of-war on the high seas for the first time since 1815.  The Memorial Day weekend issue of PARADE MAGAZINE in 1964 carried an article authored by RADM Gallery and the following are excerpts from the article:

 

This week I'm going to a party at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where I'll meet an old friend.  He tried to drown me 20 years ago.  I shot his leg off, took his ship away from him and fished him out of the Atlantic Ocean.  My friend is Harold Lange, and he comes from Hamburg, Germany.  He is a former First Lieutenant in the German Navy and commanded the submarine U-505 during World War II.  The U-505 is the only submarine captured by the U.S. in either world war.  It was my great good fortune to command the task group that did the job.  Lange and I tried to do each other in 20 years ago.  The banquet this week highlights the fact that nations as well as men who were enemies then are now friends.

 

I spent most of the war chasing subs and had been in on several kills where U-boats, battered by depth charges, had surfaced and scuttled.  After our task group sank three U-boats in 1944, I made plans with my destroyer skippers to try for a capture the next time we flushed a sub from the depths.  Maybe if we got aboard in time and closed the scuttling valves we might keep her afloat.  All ships got up boarding parties, kept whaleboats ready to lower and agreed that when the next U-boat popped up we would fire only small stuff at it.  It wouldn't do much damage to the sturdy hull of a U-boat, but it would encourage the Germans to get off so our boys could get on.  Meantime, we would call away boarders, lower boats and try to get aboard in time to close the scuttling valves.  This far-fetched scheme came off according to script!

 

After stalking the U-505 for over a week, the group caught up with her one Sunday noon, running submerged.  Depth charges jarred huge flakes of paint off her bulkheads and jammer her rudder.  Thinking he had had it, Lange gave the order to surface, abandon ship and scuttle.  As the last Germans went overboard, the USS PILLSBURY's (DE-133) whaleboat boiled up alongside.  Our men leaped aboard the heaving, slippery deck of the wounded sub, plunged down the hatch and closed the scuttling valves.  It was touch-and-go.  The U-boat was on the verge of upending and taking her final dive when our boys got aboard.  But they kept her afloat.  I took her in tow with the GUADALCANAL and two weeks later delivered her in Bermuda.  This capture was a windfall to the Office of Naval Intelligence.  It told our experts all they wanted to know about the radar, sonar, radio, torpedoes and everything else in a U-boat.  What's more, it gave us copies of all Adm. Doenitz's handbooks on U-boat tactics and the codes and ciphers in which he sent his orders out to them.  This justified the risks taken in making the capture.

 

One of the remarkable things about the capture was that we were able to keep it secret.  That was vital.  If the German's found out about the capture, they would have thrown the old code books away and replaced them with entirely new ones.  All navies have new codes ready for issue if the one in use is captured.  Even when the same code is used for many months, they reset the cipher machine every two weeks or so to keep enemy code breakers off balance.  But the key to all these routine changes was in the U-505's books!  Returning to the U.S. with the U-boat in tow, I knew that the 3,000 young sailors in the task group were all bursting with the best story of their lives.  En route to Bermuda we explained to them why they couldn't tell it – to anybody.  I am very proud of the fact that my boys did keep their mouths shut.  At the end of the war, the records of the German Navy carried the U-505 as “lost at sea,” like hundreds of other U-boats.

 

The leader of the PILLSBURY's boarding party was LTJG Albert David, an ex-enlisted man.  He got the Congressional Medal of Honor, the only one awarded in the Battle of the Atlantic.  Two enlisted men, Arthur W. Knispel and Stanley E. Wdowiak, got Navy Crosses, and the rest of the boarders, Silver Stars.  The whole task group received the Presidential Unit Citation.  After the war, the U-505 lay rusting in the Portsmouth Navy Yard for nine years.  Then a group of Navy Leaguers in Chicago got together to raise funds.  They said, “There are memorials all over the world to various land battles – but there are no tombstones on the sea.  Let's set one up here on the Lake Front in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry.”  The Museum, one of the world's finest, gladly agreed.  On September 25, 1954, Fleet Admiral Halsey dedicated the U-505 as a Naval Memorial.  Compared to a Polaris sub, the U-505 is like a bow and arrow.  But only 20 years ago, primitive boats like this almost drove our shipping off the high seas.  If Lange had commanded a Polaris sub that Sunday noon off the African coast, the party this week would be held in Berlin instead of Chicago.  I hope we will always remember the part that sea power has played in defending our freedoms.  Even in the atomic age it is still vital to our survival.

 

For his leadership in capturing the U-505, RADM Gallery was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.  He died on January 16, 1977, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

 

Submitted by CDR Roy A. Mosteller, USNR (Ret)