Why Chicago Has a German U-Boat

the sprawling City of Chicago has a long and complicated history from our forefathers forgotten architecture to their unusual Spoils of War you see not far from the shore of Lake Michigan is a vintage German World War II submarine or in other words a U-Boat how it ended up here is an amazing story so join me as we uncover the Forgotten history of Chicago's German U-Boat I'm your host Ryan so cash and you're watching it's history [Music] this tale begins at the Battle for the Atlantic one of the most brutal military campaigns ever it was a stunning back and forth game of cat and mouse where Innovative tactics strategy and just plain luck decided who survived and who went to the Bottom of the Sea one crucial component of this for the German Navy was the U-Boat a silent deadly vessel that could travel almost anywhere in the world they were The Cutting Edge of Technology with German shipbuilders pushing to constantly improve their boats staying close to Germany and the English Isles wasn't an option for this reason as close air patrols and Naval support always favored the Royal Navy and Air Services so to reach the water's most rewarding for hunting Germany had to take their type 9 submarines and give them an even more extended range and better offensive abilities the product of this development was the type 90 with a greater length of 76 0.76 meters they could carry an additional 43 tons of fuel allowing them to reach anywhere in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea especially when they had access to French and Italian navy bases for much of the war the German Navy utilized auxiliary ships and had tenders hidden across the globe for resupply they also hired convert Spanish vessels to do the job for them in this game of cat Mouse these Subs were not to be taken lightly so basically U-boats were a big deal and the one that ended up in Chicago was a key player u505 herself was laid down on June the 12th 1941 in Hamburg and would launch on May the 26th that same year after training she joined the fourth U-Boat Fleet and set to the task of hunting Allied Merchant Marines by her second patrol she earned her first four kills traveling from Lori and France to French North Africa she sank four Freighters from many countries when British aircraft eventually attacked her on April the 18th they did very little damage on her third Patrol she targeted undefended shipping in the complex web of shipping lanes that was the Caribbean and it was there that she sank three other vessels the American sea thrush and the Thomas McKean but the third ship the yurias would create a new enemy for Germany you see the third ship in the Caribbean and her seventh Target in total would be the unfortunate Colombian sailing ship the yurias owned by a neutral country and having no no offensive weapons the Schooner was shelled 22 times by U-505 although technically the Lifeboat escaped the seven men aboard succumbed to the situation in the aftermath Colombia cited this incident as one of their reasons for joining the war against the Nazi regime patrols like this in the Caribbean exposed the soft underbelly of American and neutral shipping as the boat spent less than 500 hours submerged out of almost 13 000 yet caused such catastrophic destruction however u-505's career would not have that type of luck much longer she had already dived to avoid aircraft 30 times in her Caribbean Patrol and things were about to worsen U-Boat commanders briefly ran Wilds off the American Coast following Germany's declaration of war against the USA but u505 would not be one of them her luck arguably ran out on November the 7th 1942 when under are Captain Peter's czech's command the boat dispatched the British freighter ocean Justice in the previously undefended Caribbean Sea however three days later any idea of a good hunt Ended as a British Hudson freighter bomber dropped a depth charge directly on the submarine Stern the explosion didn't Doom the sub but it left its Machinery in a bad way forcing the patrol to end swiftly as they hightailed it back to occupied France despite receiving its crucial repairs and partly because of repeated Sabotage by French Dock Workers u505 would only spend 32 days at Sea in her following four War patrols mechanical failures were to be blamed for most of her absence but some of the more superstitious men blamed it on the sinking of the Schooner as Maritime tradition told sinking an innocent sailing craft would put a curse on your ship in an atmosphere of alienation by other summer Marine Crews contempt for his team and the transfer of his first officer to another craft Strack became the only U-Boat Commander to take his own life while not under enemy attack shooting himself in his bunk on October the 24th 1943 although there is some dispute over whether this is accurate as destroyers and depth charges were noted on the ship's log details no verified reports of this engagement appeared in the British or United States war archives either way it would seem that for this yubo the end was approaching from every conceivable angle the entry of the United States into the war changed the entire calculus for Allied planning while shipping losses briefly spiked and then plateaued mainly due to the United States Navy not having a significant escort Force ready when the wolf packs reached their Shores by 1943 that had changed entirely American naval air bases across the Atlantic and Caribbean coast gave the Allies an extensive hunting range in which U-Boat raids on the beach would be suicidal then there was America's significant Naval buildup we previously had a video detailing the impact and stories of the American Liberty ships so check that out if you need more context but one impact that they had which we didn't mention in that video was how they ended up being their escort forces you see between World War one and two the American and Royal navies had considered the role of a so-called escort carrier these carriers would be built on the halls of merchant ships former liners Freighters and tankers they had carrier flat tops and Hangers installed where their Merchant Marine functions formally were the initial results of these tests were few in numbers to the point of being strategically meaningless even so industrialists Henry Kaiser saw things differently and the man had a plan Henry Kaiser was a Savvy man and on top of noticing the need for freighters by the Allied navies he wasn't oblivious to the need for aircraft carriers as well almost immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor the U.S Navy transferred nearly every one of its Fleet carriers to the Pacific fleets and the Royal Navy's carriers were also at a premium familiar with the Escape carrier concept he began reconfiguring some of his shipyards to build escort carriers out of Liberty ships naming the class Casablanca like their unarmed cousins they were lightly protected crude but efficient to paraphrase a line from The Last Stand of the tin can soldiers six Casablanca class cves had the same number of aircraft as two SX Fleet carriers but if both formations lost one ship the strike force of the Essex group would be cut in half in contrast a Casablanca class would only lose 10 or 14 planes this had been felt several times in the Royal Navy with the loss of the HMS courageous glorious Arc Royal and other escort carriers in other words the low cost of cves was its form of Defense between July the 8th 1943 and July of 1944 50 Casablanca escorts were built and believe me they would not go unnoticed Kaiser's carriers began operating in the Atlantic in 1943 as part of the Allied War goals to destroy the U-Boat category immediately they set to work with cornering and Annihilation undaunted by the threat of aircraft or enemy surface vessels they focused entirely on anti-submarine warfare forming hunting parties known as hunter killer groups just two Ace warships the Bogan card sank and destroyed more than 20 submarines this was much in part thanks to the British American high frequency Direction finding allowing them to tune into German Transmissions at Sea to find the Bose operational area one of these carrier groups was sent to hunt and kill the U-505 and the other three submarines in its operation area in late May task force 22.3 was centered around the escort carrier Guadalcanal named for the first American victory against the Japanese Army and her five escort destroyers chetlin Flaherty Jenks Pillsbury and Pope this was the third Cruise of the Guadalcanal under Captain Daniel V gallery who had told his former crewmate turned Chief signal intelligence officer Henry Smith Hutton that he wanted to capture a U-Boat intact his previous Mission had convinced him not to be so quote bloody minded about it and that if a U-Boat returns to the surface it likely wouldn't fight he was confident of this even if it was only because the skipper wanted to save his hide he planned to surrender a surface submarine with his destroyers and focus their threat on the boat and the crew he was so confident in this concept that the crew drafted their boarding party plans Smith Hutton was pleased by his friends initiative and had been feeding him information like a prophet even before Admiral Ernest King's office assigned the hunt to capture or sink u505 that's right King commander-in-chief of the entire U.S Navy approved the orders for the mission despite being built from the hole an engine of a barely functioning merchant ship the task was briefly delayed when the Guadalcanal burst a boiler pipe but that wasn't anything outside of the norm the hunt began at the turn of June just before the Allied invasion of occupied France they pursued the 505 across half of the North African Coastline always just slightly out of range he pushed his ships to their limit and was told by his chief engineer that quote he better pray hard at mass as they nearly exhausted their entire fuel bunker the situation on u505 was no better as their overly sensitive air warning radar made it such that they had to resurface repeatedly the electric batteries were never fully charged by the start of the hunt the subs interior was almost uninhabitable from the heat moisture and machine fumes having to spend so much time submerged meant that even with depleting fuel tanks the relatively slow Hunting Party could catch up with them the Germans may have escaped if not for the decision to turn East towards the coast or task force 22.3 had already made The Prudent decision to take port for fuel chatlin was the first to make sonar contact and Chase down U-505 as the aircraft took to the skies for the hunt the attack was intense almost all of 22.3 surrounded the U-Boat and the aircraft machine guns were so loud that they could be heard by the sub's homophone the first volley of death charges was enough to rupture the pressure Hall causing a water leak into the main cabins one of the hunting Pilots watched an oil slick bubble from under the Destroyers and called on the radio we've struck oil the U-Boat rapidly Dove from 50 to 230 feet before the skipper ordered the valves blown and the boat brought to the surface as Galley had planned U-505 surfaced to be surrounded with machine guns trained on it from almost every angle the following events are somewhat unclear but to be fair to Captain Lang he had no good options he had no large caliber deck guns no time to evacuate and no pre-arranged plans to do so he wanted his crew to survive so he only had one option he let his men successfully out of their stricken boat as four destroyers surrounded them Pillsbury came barreling towards them to board still in this evacuation activating any scuttling devices or opening flood valves had to be neglected laying and the crew didn't have an option they didn't have time if they wanted to live in the evacuation he took several shots in both legs and was injured for the rest of his life his executive officer was too wounded to command the crew so chaos overtook the sailors on top of that the chief engineer also jumped ship leaving no one on board who knew where all the scuttling devices were damaged but not defeated the Guadalcanal and gallery took u505 undertow back to Bermuda where improvised repairs were made before task force 22.3 and their trophy returned to the USA this was a major score the boat's Enigma machine code books and communication items to contact the rest of the fleet were all captured by the US military this included their so-called address book giving the Allies such a valuable leg up against the German Navy that for the rest of June 1944 the American code breaking bombers could focus entirely on German Army Communications as you might guess this timed up perfectly with the preparation and execution of Operation Overlord u505's crew was carefully interned from there and their boat was repaired as the first enemy vessel to be captured by the US Navy since the War of 1812 it was a point of Pride and used as a training ship they called Nemo where other Crews were taught to disable board and capture German U-boats until the end of the war but after the war the U-Boat served no military purpose and its Destiny became unclear people were rooting for u-505's preservation in post-war America with Daniel gallery's job as a ranking U.S naval instructor and John Ireland's role as the community Reverend the two chicago-born men wanted the U-Boat to be preserved and considered many locations still they approached the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry as their favorite option Daniel knew from his incredibly brief commands of the Guadalcanal and the much larger Hancock that the Navy was stripping weight and didn't want his prized catch to return to the Bottom of the Sea fortunately for them the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry had wanted a submarine for years given that its founding inspiration in Munich had a similar installation of the U1 Germany's first U-Boat which had been preserved and enjoyed for visitors kids and Technical students the Chicago team led by director Lennox lore had been trying to get their submarine since the 1920s the U.S Navy had rebuffed them for years not taking the offers thoughtfully even though the Chicago team had virtually perfectly drafted plans for bringing a submarine to the windy city and this was all despite the fact that there were indeed enough submarines to go around for years rather than be preserved American submarines were just sunk by their own weapons tests few if anyone appreciated how difficult the work of bringing an ocean-foring submarine to the Great Lakes was for years Gallery believed the Navy would tow the ship for free but they wouldn't and as the museum and city fought to find funding for the project progress was painfully slow in fact it wasn't until 1953 that the city even had the means to purchase the vessel and this is where the real trouble began for one obscure tax laws prevented Canadian registered ships from towing a vessel while it was American proper 30 the best route was via Canadian Waters so this was problematic then the Navy informed mayor Kenly that the price of repairing and Hauling the sub would reach at least 175 thousand dollars which was well over the city's estimates but a solution was found when in April Chicago arranged a committee of 70 members to fund the project prominent Chicagoans including state senator Dirksen made their case to the State Assembly media Navy and National Congress for years but the needed repairs finances and preparations wouldn't all line up until 1954 when U-505 was finally towed out of Portsmouth on a lengthy Voyage to Northern Canada before moving into the Great Lakes on its way to Chicago U-505 came under tow by Captain Rodney Jones who carefully guided the submarine from the Naval Yard and out to sea well the strange but poetically I ironic sailor managed the u505 from a board by this time rear Admiral Dan Gallery had contacted one of his former Juniors Earl Turismo the chief engineer of the Guadalcanal who managed to keep U-505 from straying on its way this man briefly left his job as the chief engineer of an oil tanker and took command of the U-505 for its final Journey media coverage gave him as much of a spotlight as gallery and mistakenly claimed that he led the boarding party and was the sole contributor to keeping the boat from sinking that news didn't get too far however as he was humble enough to give his fellow sellers credit he and Jones led the submarine through the harsh Atlantic weather eventually reaching St Lawrence where they traveled upriver to Montreal with reporters and local pilots from there it met the first of 28 river lake and Canal locks that would allow its eventual access to the Great Lake where the relatively small waves were sometimes impossible to navigate what's more Jones had proven to the Canadian Tugboat crew that he could tie a submarine so tightly against his boat that both would fit in the narrow locks even though his Tugboat alone was 53 feet wide and so it was on June the 26 1954 the sub eventually reached Chicago where a board member of the preservation Society asked what ship is that to which Gallery who was standing Atop The sub's conning Tower at this point responded Nazi submarine U-505 from here a specially crafted rig buried U-505 from the lake down Lake Shore Drive a major road in Chicago we've also covered in a previous video but considering the weight of the sub the special Road rig moved very slowly and only at night when traffic was shut down for the operation They Carried the submarine 800 feet over a week to its current home I remember visiting this attraction as a school kid in the 1980s and I'm sure that anyone from the Chicagoland area can relate so in making this video I was delighted to see that the exhibition has not only been preserved but it's been massively upgraded originally u505 was an outdoor exhibit held next to a particular movie theater that told visitors the history of the boat and its Odyssey to Chicago since then it's been moved into an enclosed facility to better survive the wicked Chicago weather but it's still in roughly the same condition as it was when it was captured in 1944. most of the decks remained the same as they were back then you'll find fascinating details of Life at Sea like how there were two toilets but neither flushed because German submarines didn't use septic tanks for Waste storage you might even be awestruck by the amount of wood in the officer's quarters and the fine craftsmanship Germany put into the submarines more decorative components many people are surprised that the submarine's galley is smaller than most average bathrooms yet the kitchen fed 59 Sailors for several weeks at a time you can look at this Antiquated equipment and wonder how a crew of sailors arranged battle plans around these blips imperceivable to your eyes or ears and you'll probably think that from the outside at least the sub is enormous yet upon venturing inside you'll notice how everything is cramped and dim you'll hear how storing and fixing anything had to be done carefully if not surgically and with a constant eye out not just for unfriendly ships but French sabotage or sheer bad luck looking at the conning Tower you might even recognize the bullet holes from that fateful day the ship was captured ultimately u505 was considered by its Navy as an unlucky boat its three captains led a range of missions From Success to outright failure and eventual capture so if any Chicagoans have a story about visiting the submarine please share in the comments section below otherwise I hope you'll consider subscribing and definitely don't miss our video about the weirdest ships in history until next time this is Ryan silkash signing off

Channel: IT'S HISTORY

Views: 922,416

Keywords: -505, chicago, german submarine u-505 (ship), u505 chicago, chicago uboat, u-505 submarine, chicago museums, museum of science and industry chicago, chicago museum of science and industry, chicago sun-times (newspaper), u-505 on-board tour, msichicago, u505, u 505, u505 capture, ubot 505, lego u505 submarine, u505 submarine, ship, lego, lego bricklink model, german u505 submarine, american submarines ww2, the national archives (government agency), history

Id: wClY8ST6TC4

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023