At 11:15 on the morning of April 9th, 1944, Lieutenant Commander George Castleman stood on the bridge of USS Pillsbury watching a German submarine break the surface 700 yd off his starboard bow. 10 months commanding a destroyer escort, dozens of depth charge attacks, zero captures. The yubot that had just surfaced was U515, commanded by one of Germany's deadliest submarine aces.
Verer Hanka had sunk 25 Allied ships. Over 600 men, women, and children had drowned when he torpedoed the British troop ship Ceramic in December 1942. Now Hanka's boat was crippled, forced to the surface by hours of relentless depth charging from Pillsbury and her sister ships.
The German crew scrambled onto the deck. Some manned their guns, others jumped into the Atlantic. Castleman's ship opened fire.
So did USS Flity. Machine guns raed the submarine's conning tower. Rockets stre across the water from aircraft circling overhead.
Within minutes, U515's bow lifted toward the sky. She slid backward into the Atlantic and disappeared. 44 German sailors were pulled from the water, including Hanka himself.
The task group had destroyed one of Germany's most successful yubot. By every measure, it was a victory. But Captain Daniel Gallery, commanding the escort carrier USS Guadal Canal and the entire Hunter Killer Group, saw something else entirely.
He saw a missed opportunity. Gallery had watched U515 float on the surface for nearly 10 minutes before she sank. 10 minutes.
In that time, his ships had done exactly what the Navy had trained them to do. They had destroyed the enemy. But Gallery realized that if he had been ready, if he had trained boarding parties in advance, he might have captured the submarine instead.
The intelligence value would have been extraordinary. German code books, Enigma cipher machines, torpedo guidance systems, acoustic homing technology. The Allies had been trying to crack German naval codes for years.
A captured yubot could hand them everything. No American warship had boarded and captured an enemy vessel at sea since 1815. The War of 1812, 129 years.
The Navy did not train sailors for boarding actions. There were no procedures, no protocols. No one had even considered it possible.
Gallery decided to change that. The problem was immense. German Yubot crews were trained to scuttle their boats within minutes of surfacing.
They opened sea valves. They set demolition charges. They destroyed code books and smashed equipment.
Even if American sailors could reach a surface submarine, they would be boarding a sinking ship rigged with explosives. The Germans would rather die than let their secrets fall into Allied hands. And the statistics were brutal.
In 1943 alone, German submarines had sunk over 300 Allied merchant ships. American destroyer escorts hunting faced a simple equation. Find the submarine, destroy it before it destroys you.
There was no time for boarding parties, no margin for error. Every second a Yuboat remained afloat was another second it could fire torpedoes. Castleman's Pillsbury was an Edelclass destroyer escort, 1,200 tons, 3-in guns, depth charges, and hedgehog mortars.
She was built to hunt and kill submarines, not to capture them. But Gallery had given the order. Every ship in task group 22.
3 would form a boarding party. They would train. They would prepare.
And on their next patrol, they would try something the United States Navy had not attempted in over a century. If you want to see how Castleman's crew prepared for an impossible mission, please hit that like button. It helps us bring these forgotten stories to more viewers.
Subscribe if you haven't already. Back to Pillsbury. The task group returned to Norfol in late April.
Castleman assembled his best men. He told them they were going to board a German submarine. They had 6 weeks to figure out how.
On May 15th, 1944, Pillsbury sailed from Norfolk with a new mission. The official order said routine anti-ubmarine patrol. But Gallery had received secret authorization from the highest levels of naval command.
Bring one back alive. The boarding party from Pillsbury consisted of eight men. Lieutenant Junior Grade Albert David would lead them.
He was 41 years old, a former enlisted sailor who had worked his way up through the ranks over 25 years in the Navy. He served as the ship's assistant engineering officer. He knew machinery.
He knew pipes and valves and how ships stayed afloat. David had never boarded an enemy vessel. No one in the United States Navy had, not in living memory.
The training began immediately after Pillsbury left Norfolk. Every day, David drilled his men on the fan tail. They practiced climbing over railings.
They rehearsed jumping from a whaleboat onto a moving deck. They memorized the general layout of a German type 9 submarine based on intelligence photographs and technical drawings. The challenges were staggering.
A surfaced hubot would be circling erratically, its rudder likely jammed by depth charge damage. The deck would be slick with seawater and fuel oil. German sailors might still be aboard, armed and desperate.
The submarine could dive at any moment, taking the boarding party down with it. And then there were the explosives. German commanders followed strict protocols for scuttling.
The moment a yubot surfaced under attack, the captain would order demolition charges armed. These were placed throughout the submarine, designed to detonate and send the boat to the bottom within minutes. The crew would also open sea valves, flooding the engine room and control spaces.
Even if American sailors reached the submarine, they would be entering a vessel that was simultaneously sinking and rigged to explode. David's team had to work fast. They estimated 3 to 5 minutes from boarding to catastrophic flooding.
In that window, they needed to locate and disarm demolition charges, find and close sea valves, and stop whatever other scuttling measures the Germans had initiated, all while navigating the cramped, unfamiliar interior of a foreign submarine in near darkness. The tools were basic wrenches, flashlights, sidearms. There was no specialized equipment for capturing enemy submarines because no one had ever needed any.
Gallery held conferences with his destroyer escort captains throughout the 3-week voyage. Commander Frederick Hall coordinated the tactical approach. The plan called for careful use of weapons once a yubot surfaced.
Ships would fire small caliber guns only, enough to drive the German crew overboard, but not enough to sink the submarine. Aircraft would strafe the decks to prevent the enemy from manning their guns, but pilots were ordered to avoid hits below the water line. The goal was to wound the submarine, not kill it.
Pillsbury's role was critical. She would be the first ship to lower a boarding party. Castleman positioned his whaleboat crews for rapid deployment.
The moment a yubot broke the surface, David and his men would be over the side and racing toward it. There was no guarantee the plan would work. The Navy had never attempted anything like this.
Intelligence suggested that German crews could complete scuttling procedures in under 4 minutes. If David's team was even 30 seconds too slow, they would go down with the submarine. The task group sailed south toward the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa.
Intelligence reports indicated yubot activity in the shipping lanes. Guaddle Canal's aircraft flew constant patrols, searching for periscopes and snorkel masts. Days passed without contact.
The men grew restless. David continued drilling his boarding party, but the repetition wore on them. They had memorized every procedure.
They had rehearsed every scenario. Now they simply waited. On the morning of June 4th, 1944, the task group was 150 mi west of Cape Blanco.
Gallery had ordered a course change to head for Casablanca to refuel. The patrol seemed finished. At 11:09, the sonar operator aboard USS Chadlane reported contact.
Bearing 045, range 800 yd. A submarine was running submerged directly toward the carrier Guadal Canal. David's team had trained for 6 weeks.
Now they had minutes. Shadelane turned hard to starboard and accelerated toward the contact. Two FM2 Wildcat fighters from Guadal Canal dove toward the sea.
Their pilots spotting the dark shape of a submarine running just below the surface. They opened fire with their machine guns, stitching lines of spray across the water to mark the position for the destroyers below. At 11:16, Shadowlane released her first pattern of depth charges.
The explosion sent white columns of water erupting skyward. Oil bubbled to the surface. The submarine was hit.
6 and 1/2 minutes after the first attack, the yubot broke the surface 700 yd from Shadowlane. She came up bow first, her gray hull streaming seawater. Her conning tower scarred with rust.
The depth charges had jammed her rudder. Her lights were out. Seaater poured through cracked pipes in her engine room.
The submarine began circling to Starboard at five or six knots, unable to steer. German sailors scrambled through the hatches onto the deck. Some tried to reach their deck guns.
Shadelane and the other escorts opened fire with everything that would bear. Machine gun rounds sparked off the conning tower. A German sailor fell dead on the deck.
The rest threw up their hands and began jumping into the Atlantic. On Pillsbury's bridge, Castleman watched the submarine spiral through the water. This was the moment.
He gave the order to lower the whaleboat. David and his eight-man team were already waiting. They dropped into the boat and cast off.
The coxin steering directly into the submarine's circling path. The yubot was still moving, still turning. They would have to intercept it like chasing a wounded animal.
The whaleboat cut inside the submarine's ark. The men could see the gray hull looming larger with each second. Oil slicked the water around them.
German sailors thrashed in the waves nearby, shouting and waving for rescue. David ignored them. His focus was the submarine.
The whaleboat pulled alongside. The hull was slick with oil and seaater. David grabbed a railing and pulled himself onto the deck.
His men followed. The submarine rolled beneath their feet. still circling, still sinking by the stern.
One German body lay face down near the conning tower hatch. No other enemy sailors were visible. David did not hesitate.
He climbed through the hatch and dropped into the control room. The interior was nearly dark. Emergency lighting cast red shadows across unfamiliar machinery.
Water sprayed from broken pipes. The deck was tilted at an angle. The submarine was flooding.
David could hear the rush of seaater somewhere below. The Germans had opened the sea valves before abandoning ship. He had minutes, maybe less, before the boat went down.
His men spread through the compartments. One found the sea strainer valve, a large pipe allowing ocean water to flood the BGE. The cover had been removed and thrown aside.
He located it nearby and screwed it back into place. The flooding slowed. Others searched for demolition charges.
They found 13 throughout the submarine, placed in the engine room, the torpedo compartments, the control spaces. Each one had to be located, examined, and disarmed. The charges had timers.
Some were set to detonate within minutes. David's team worked in near darkness, crawling through oily water, tracing unfamiliar pipes and cables. They pulled wires.
They removed detonators. They sealed valves and hatches. The submarine continued to settle by the stern.
her aft deck already submerged. Above them, the circling submarine posed a new danger. Without steering, the yubot swung toward Pillsbury herself.
Castleman had to maneuver his ship to avoid collision. The whaleboat that had delivered David's team was crushed between the two holes. Three of Pillsbury's compartments flooded from the impact, but the boarding party stayed aboard the submarine.
They had stopped the scuttling. The yubot was wounded, but she was not sinking. At 11:30, a second boarding party arrived from Guadal Canal, led by Commander Earl Troino, the carrier's chief engineer.
He found David's men still working in the flooded compartments, still pulling demolition charges from hidden corners. They had captured a German submarine. Now they had to keep her afloat.
Commander Trino crawled through the flooded compartments for hours. He was a merchant marine engineer before the war, experienced with ship systems and machinery, but he had never been inside a German submarine. No American had.
The type 9 yubot was larger than he expected, over 250 ft long, 11 compartments connected by watertight hatches. The design was foreign, the labels in German, the equipment unfamiliar. Trino traced pipelines by hand, following them through the oily billagege water until he understood how the submarine's systems connected.
The stern was already underwater. The depth charge damage had cracked pipes and ruptured tanks throughout the aft section. Seawater continued to seep in through dozens of small leaks.
If they could not stop the flooding, the submarine would sink within hours. Trino organized the salvage effort. He directed men to specific valves.
He identified which pumps still functioned. He juryrigged connections between compartments to redirect the flow of water. Slowly, the flooding stabilized.
While Troino worked on keeping the submarine aloat, David's team collected intelligence materials. They found two Enigma cipher machines intact, complete with their coding rotors. They gathered stacks of code books, signal documents, and operational orders.
They located charts showing yubot patrol zones across the Atlantic. 900 lb of classified German naval documents. The hall was extraordinary.
Allied codereakers at Bletchley Park in Britain had been working to crack German naval communications for years. They had achieved partial success, but the Germans regularly changed their cipher settings. Fresh code books and an intact Enigma machine could unlock months of intercepted messages.
But there was more. In the forward torpedo room, the salvage teams found two acoustic homing torpedoes. The Germans called them Zhoig.
The Allies had heard rumors of these weapons, but had never examined one. The torpedoes used sound to track their targets, homing in on the propeller noise of Allied ships. Understanding how they worked could save hundreds of lives.
Captain Gallery faced an immediate problem. His task group was now responsible for a captured enemy submarine 150 mi off the African coast. The yubot could not move under her own power.
She was barely staying afloat and 3,000 American sailors had just witnessed her capture. If the Germans learned that U505 had been taken intact, they would change their codes immediately. Every advantage gained from the captured materials would vanish.
The entire operation would be worthless. gallery ordered absolute secrecy. No radio transmissions about the capture.
No written records in ship logs. The German prisoners, 58 men, including their wounded captain, were confined below decks on Guad Canal, forbidden from speaking with anyone. Then Gallery received new orders from Washington.
The original plan had been tow the submarine to Casablanca. Now he was directed to take her to Bermuda instead. 2500 m across the open Atlantic.
The timing was critical. Allied forces were about to invade Normandy. D-Day was scheduled for June 5th, pushed to June 6th due to weather.
If German intelligence discovered that their codes had been compromised days before the largest amphibious invasion in history, the consequences could be catastrophic. Pillsbury attempted to take the submarine undertoe, but the collision during the capture had damaged her hull. Three compartments were flooded.
She could not maintain the strain. Water Canal herself rigged a toll line from the carrier to the yubot and began the slow journey north. The voyage took 15 days.
Storms threatened to swamp the waterlogged submarine. Salvage crews remained aboard around the clock, pumping water and monitoring leaks. The fleet tug USS Abnaki eventually took over towing duties, but the danger never lessened.
On June 19th, the task group entered Port Royal Bay, Bermuda. The Yubot was immediately hidden in a remote corner of the naval base. She was repainted to disguise her German origins and given a new designation, USS Nemo.
The 58 German prisoners were transferred to a secret camp in Louisiana. The Red Cross was denied access. Their families in Germany received notifications that they were missing, presumed dead.
They would not learn the truth until 1947. Admiral Ernest King, commander-in-chief of the United States Fleet, reviewed the intelligence hall. The code books alone were invaluable.
But King had another concern. Gallery had taken an enormous risk. If the capture had failed, if the Germans had learned their codes were compromised, the damage to Allied operations could have been incalculable.
The admiral's response was measured. Gallery would receive the Legion of Merit, but he would also receive a private warning. The secrecy had to hold.
If it did not, there would be consequences. The German Navy never learned what happened to U505. Admiral Carl Donuts, commander of the Yubot Fleet, received the final transmission from the submarine on June 3rd.
She reported her position off the African coast and indicated she was returning to base in Laurant, France. After June 4th, silence. This was not unusual.
Yubot disappeared constantly in 1944. Allied hunter killer groups and longrange aircraft had turned the Atlantic into a killing ground for German submarines. Donets assumed U505 had been sunk by depth charges or aerial attack like hundreds of others before her.
He ordered no changes to German codes. He issued no warnings about compromised communications. The marine continued using the same enigma settings, the same cipher procedures, the same operational protocols.
The secrecy held. 3,000 American sailors who had witnessed the capture said nothing. They wrote no letters home describing what they had seen.
They made no mentions in personal diaries. Captain Gallery had explained the stakes during the voyage to Bermuda. If word reached the Germans, the intelligence value would be destroyed.
Allied sailors and soldiers would die because of loose talk. The men understood. Not a single breach occurred.
At Bletchley Park in England, British codereakers received the captured materials within weeks. The Enigma machine and its rotors confirmed their understanding of German cipher methods. The code books provided settings valid through the summer of 1944.
Intercepted Yubot transmissions that had been gibberish suddenly became readable. The intelligence revealed German submarine positions across the Atlantic. It exposed patrol patterns and attack strategies.
It identified supply routes and rendevous points. Allied convoy commanders adjusted their courses to avoid known yubot concentrations. Hunter killer groups received precise coordinates for their targets.
The acoustic homing torpedoes proved equally valuable. American engineers at the Naval Ordinance Laboratory in Washington disassembled the zonoic weapons and analyzed every component. They discovered the torpedoes tracked the cavitation noise created by ship propellers.
Within months, the Navy developed countermeasures. Ships began towing noise makers called foxers, decoys that produced louder cavitation sounds than the ships themselves. The torpedoes chased the decoys instead of their intended targets.
German Yubot commanders noticed the change. Their acoustic torpedoes, which had been devastating Allied escorts, suddenly missed with alarming frequency. They reported the failures to headquarters.
Donut suspected the Allies had developed some form of countermeasure, but he never connected it to U505. He assumed the technology had been captured from a torpedo that failed to detonate, not from a submarine taken intact. The war in the Atlantic continued through the summer and fall of 1944.
Yubot losses mounted. New submarines left German shipyards equipped with snorkels, devices that allowed them to run their diesel engines while submerged. The technology extended their underwater endurance and made them harder to detect.
But the Allies had the codes. They knew where the new submarines were going before they arrived. Hunter killer groups intercepted them in mid ocean.
Aircraft caught them during surface transits. The Battle of the Atlantic, which had threatened to strangle Britain's supply lines for four years, was effectively won. Pillsbury returned to operations after repairs in Norfolk.
The collision with U505 had damaged three compartments, but the shipyard crews restored her within weeks. By late summer, she was back on patrol with task group 22. 3.
The Hunter Killer Group continued sweeping the Atlantic through the fall. They found no submarines. German yubot activity had collapsed in the central ocean.
The few boats still operating hugged the European coastline or lurked in distant waters where Allied air cover was thin. The war in Europe approached its end. By April 1945, Allied armies had crossed the Rine and were driving into Germany.
The Soviet forces closed on Berlin from the east. Hitler's Reich was collapsing, but the Yubot war was not finished. German Naval Command had one final operation planned.
A group of submarines equipped with the latest technology would cross the Atlantic and strike the American coast. The mission was desperate, a last attempt to prove that Germany could still threaten the enemy homeland. On April 8th, 1945, Pillsbury sailed from Norfolk as part of a new task group.
Their mission was to intercept the incoming submarines before they reached American waters. The operation was called Teardrop. Operation Teardrop was born from fear.
Allied intelligence had detected a group of German submarines heading west across the Atlantic in early April 1945. The boats were type 9 long range submarines capable of reaching the American coastline. But what alarmed naval planners was the cargo they might be carrying.
Rumors had circulated for months about German plans to launch V1 flying bombs or V2 rockets from submarine platforms. The weapons had devastated London. A single V2 striking New York or Washington could kill thousands.
American intelligence could not confirm whether the approaching submarines carried such weapons, but they could not rule it out. The Navy assembled two barrier forces to intercept the incoming boats. Task group 22.
7 included the escort carriers Bogue and COPS along with over a dozen destroyer escorts. Pillsbury was assigned to the screen. The barrier stretched across the western Atlantic approaches, a net of ships and aircraft designed to catch any submarine attempting to reach American waters.
For 2 weeks, the task group patrolled in shifting fog and heavy seas. Aircraft flew constant searches. Sonar operators listened for contacts.
The submarines were out there somewhere, running silent beneath the gray swells. On April 16th, the barrier scored its first kills. Destroyer escorts located U235 and U880 within hours of each other.
Depth charges sent both to the bottom. 6 days later, aircraft and surface ships destroyed U518, three submarines down. The barrier was working, but the Germans kept coming.
On the morning of April 24th, USS Frederick C. Davis was patrolling 650 mi northwest of the Azors. At 8:29, her sonar operator reported contact.
The range was 2,000 yd. A submarine was attempting to slip through the barrier. Frederick C.
Davis maneuvered to attack. The contact faded, lost in her own wake. Her officer of the deck ordered a hard turn to relocate the target.
At 839, with the submarine at only 650 yards, a torpedo struck her port side. The acoustic homing weapon detonated in the forward engine room. The explosion broke the destroyer escort in half.
Her bow section sank immediately. Her stern floated for 5 minutes while survivors scrambled into the water. 115 men died.
Only 77 were rescued. Frederick C. Davis was the last American warship sunk by enemy action in the Atlantic.
The submarine that killed her was U546 commanded by Capitan Lieutenant Paul Just. She had slipped through the barrier undetected, fired her torpedo at pointlank range, and now dove deep to escape. Pillsbury was 12 mi away when the distress call came.
Castleman ordered flank speed. Within an hour, eight destroyer escorts had converged on the datim point. Flareity arrived first and made sonar contact at 9:23.
She attacked with depth charges. The contact faded. The hunt lasted 10 hours.
U546 dove to 600 ft and ran silent. The destroyer escorts spread across the search area, their sonar beams probing the depths. Contact came and went.
The submarine maneuvered constantly using thermal layers and her quiet electric motors to evade detection. Pillsbury circled the perimeter while Flity coordinated the attacks. Shadowlane, Nunzer, Varian, Hubard, Jansen, and Keith joined the pursuit.
They dropped depth charges in overlapping patterns. They fired hedgehog salvos at suspected positions. Each attack forced U546 deeper, but she refused to surface.
By late afternoon, the submarine's batteries were nearly exhausted. She had been submerged for 8 hours. Her air was foul.
Her crew was exhausted. At 1943, after a final hedgehog attack from Flareity, U546 blew her tanks and broke the surface. The destroyer escorts opened fire immediately.
U546's captain ordered two torpedoes launched at Flity as a final act of defiance. Both missed. Machine gun fire swept the submarine's deck.
The German crew abandoned ship. 33 survivors were pulled from the water, including Capitan Lieutenant Ust. He was taken aboard the escort carrier Bogue for interrogation.
The Navy needed to know one thing. Were there more submarines carrying secret weapons? Eust had the answer.
The interrogation of Capitan Luton and Paul just lasted for days. Navy intelligence officers pressed him about secret weapons, submarine launched rockets, plans to strike American cities, just answered their questions. There were no V-Wapons aboard the German submarines.
There never had been. The boats crossing the Atlantic carried standard torpedoes and nothing more. The mission was a final conventional attack, a desperate gesture by a dying navy.
The feared rocket assault on the American homeland was a phantom. Operation Teardrop had succeeded. The barrier forces had destroyed five of the seven submarines sent against the United States.
U546 was the last. The remaining two boats surrendered when Germany capitulated on May 8th, 1945. Pillsbury was present for that surrender as well.
She and her sister ship Pope escorted U858 from Mid-Atlantic to Cape May, New Jersey after placing a prize crew aboard. The war in the Atlantic was over. The final accounting revealed the scale of Pillsbury's contribution.
In 13 months of combat operations, the small destroyer escort had participated in the destruction of two German submarines and the capture of a third. No other American warship could claim such a record. U515 had been one of the most successful yubot in the German Navy.
Her commander, Verer Hank, had sunk 25 Allied ships totaling over 150,000 tons. Pillsbury's depth charges had forced her to the surface in April 1944. U505 was the only German submarine captured by American forces during the entire war.
The intelligence materials recovered from her hull had provided months of insight into German naval operations. The Enigma machine and code books had allowed Allied cryptographers to read enemy communications during the critical summer of 1944 when the Normandy invasion hung in the balance. U546 was the last German submarine to sink an American warship.
Pillsbury had joined the 10-hour hunt that brought her to the surface and ended her threat. The Navy recognized the achievement with its highest unit honor. Task Group 22.
3 received the presidential unit citation for the capture of U505. The citation praised the coordinated attack, the swift boarding action, and the successful preservation of invaluable intelligence materials. Lieutenant Albert David received the Medal of Honor for leading the boarding party onto the circling submarine.
His citation described how he had plunged through the Conning Tower hatch, fully aware that the [clears throat] Yubot might sink or explode at any moment. He had risked his life above and beyond the call of duty. It was the only Medal of Honor awarded to a Navy sailor in the entire Atlantic theater of World War II.
Two members of David's boarding party, radioman secondass Stanley Woviaak and torpedo thirdclass Arthur Kisipell received the Navy Cross. The remaining borders received silver stars. Captain Daniel Gallery received the Legion of Merit, but the recognition came with a shadow.
Admiral King had made clear that the secrecy surrounding U505 had to hold until the war ended. Gallery had taken an enormous risk. If the capture had been revealed prematurely, if the Germans had changed their codes before D-Day, the consequences could have altered the course of the invasion.
King respected Gallery's audacity, but never fully forgave the danger he had created. The captured submarine remained hidden in Bermuda until Germany surrendered. Then the Navy put her to use one final time.
Repainted and restored, U505 toured American ports as part of the seventh war bond drive. Citizens who purchased bonds could climb aboard and walk through the compartments where David and his men had fought to keep her afloat. The bond drive raised millions.
The public finally learned the story that 3,000 sailors had kept secret for nearly a year. After the war, the Navy had no further use for the submarine. Plans were made to tow her out to sea and sink her with gunfire, a target for gunnery practice.
She would disappear beneath the Atlantic like the hundreds of other Ubot destroyed during the war. But Gallery had other ideas. The submarine that his men had risked their lives to capture deserved a different fate.
Rear Admiral Daniel Gallery, as he had become after the war, launched a campaign to save U505. He contacted civic leaders in Chicago, his hometown. He proposed that the submarine be transported to the city and displayed as a permanent memorial to the Battle of the Atlantic.
The Museum of Science and Industry agreed to host the exhibit, but getting the submarine to Chicago required moving a 750 ton vessel from the Atlantic Ocean to the shore of Lake Michigan. The journey would cover over a,000 m, much of it overland. In 1954, engineers floated U505 down the Atlantic coast, through the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Mississippi River system to Chicago.
The final leg required hauling the submarine across city streets on specially constructed rollers. Thousands of Chicagoans lined the route to watch the German yubot creep past their homes and businesses. On September 25th, 1954, Fleet Admiral William Hollyy dedicated U505 as a permanent war memorial.
She was placed outdoors on the museum grounds where visitors could climb aboard and walk through the same compartments that Albert David and his men had entered a decade earlier. David himself never saw the memorial. He died of a heart attack on September 17th, 1945, 3 weeks before he was scheduled to receive the Medal of Honor.
He was 43 years old. President Harry Truman presented the medal to his widow, Linda May David, at a White House ceremony the following month. The Navy honored David's memory by naming a destroyer escort after him.
USS Albert David was commissioned in 1968 and served until 1990. George Castleman returned to civilian life after the war. The Lieutenant Commander, who had watched two submarines sink and ordered the boarding of a third, resumed a quiet existence far from the Atlantic.
Like most veterans of his generation, he rarely spoke of what he had done. Pillsbury herself served until 1947 when she was decommissioned and placed in reserve. The Navy brought her back in 1955, converted to a radar picket ship for cold war duty along the Atlantic barrier.
She patrolled for Soviet submarines until 1960, then was decommissioned a final time. She was sold for scrap in 1966. No monument marks her service.
No museum displays her artifacts. The ship that participated in the only submarine capture by American forces since 1815 exists now only in photographs and official records, but U505 endures. In 2004, the Museum of Science and Industry completed a major renovation.
The submarine was moved indoors to a climate controlled underground exhibit hall. Visitors can now tour her interior, preserved almost exactly as she appeared when David's men came through the conning tower hatch. The Medal of Honor that David never lived to receive is displayed alongside the submarine.
So are the Enigma machines his team recovered, the code books that unlock German communications, the acoustic torpedoes that revealed enemy secrets. Over 30 million people have visited the exhibit since 1954. They walk through the control room where David searched for demolition charges.
They see the valve that Troino closed to stop the flooding. They stand in the compartments where eight American sailors saved a sinking enemy vessel through courage and determination. The capture of U505 remains the only time the United States Navy boarded and seized an enemy warship at sea since the War of 1812.
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