The Capture of U-505: QMS2 Don Carter

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today we’ll hear from Signalman 2nd Class Don Carter. Carter served on the USS Guadalcanal in World War II, tasked with using flags and lights to send messages to other vessels. He was on the ship when it discovered and captured U-Boat 505. This was the only U-Boat obtained by the U.S. Navy during the war, and the information gained in its capture was crucial to the war effort.

QMS2 Don Carter:

Our mission when we were going out and as always, and what we were sent to do was to eliminate the German submarines who were attacking our convoys. We had the escort carrier, and we had the DE's with us to accomplish this mission.

Our patrol was in the Atlantic, and we patrolled from the North Atlantic to the South Atlantic, the Azores islands, and all in that area. Our refueling stations was in Casablanca and North Africa. And this is what we did that we just went on patrol and hunted submarines. Our planes went up and scouted the areas. And of course, we were getting intelligence from the intelligence approximately where the subs might be. And this is the area we operated in all the time.

As time went on we got credit for sinking three subs before the capture. But our mission was that, to hunt down and kill German submarines.

We liked what we were doing. We had a big, pretty good-sized ship. We had clean beds and good food, and our duty wasn't too bad. It was monotonous sometimes because we being young, we wanted to see more action. But we were sent to do this job. Sometimes you'd go 30, 40 days and wouldn't see an island, you would just be patrolling up and down in the middle of the Atlantic, and so you got a little monotonous. But for the duty, it was great. We had a good time, and we kept a warm bed every night and good food.

We knew we were doing something important because before the Jeep carriers and the escorts got into the Atlantic, the German submarines were just killing our convoys, especially the tankers coming out of Venezuela trying to get to ports in New Orleans. And we had a little deal down there, we called Torpedo Junction. They would just lay and wait for those tankers to come out of there and then just have a field day. They just used them for target practice because they were helpless. And so the chance of them getting through was pretty slim. They sent a bunch of them, so a few of them would get through to get our oil supply through here. But no, they was killing our convoys. And this is the reason that the commander set up this operation, something had to be done to stop the wolf packs of the German submarines.

Well, the mission on the U-505, it was no different than any other mission. We were just out there looking for a submarine to sink. And it was just so happened that we came up on this U-505, which was off the coast of Africa when we run into it.

Well, Captain Gallery decided that. He decided that if we can find one sometimes and we can capture it, this is what we're going to do. So he give the directive to the commanding officers of each division to come up with a list of people, volunteers to board a submarine and to capture it in case the occasion ever arose. Which it was something to just think about, not really thinking that we could ever do it, but it was something to think about.

So therefore, the list was made up of two whaleboats. Commander Trosino was in charge of one, and Lieutenant Hampton was in charge of the other whaleboat. There was two whaleboats. And so this list was made up and turned in. We had a few practice drills. And so when the occasion arose, all they'd done was say, "Boarders away." They passed the word, so everybody knew where to go and what whaleboat to get in, and what his duty was going to be when he got there. So that was all set up before this ever happened.

The USS Chatelain, DE first run into sonar contact with the submarine. As soon as they had sonar contact, naturally, they notified the command, which was Gallery. We had two fighter planes in the air that day. They were more or less on scouting duty. In fact, we were steaming north going to Casablanca, take on fuel supplies and recreation. As soon as the Chatelain said they had made sonar contact, well, the two fighter planes, they hovered overhead and they could see depths, they could see deeper into the water.

Lieutenant Cadel, which was in one of the fighter planes, he said he told the Chatelain, "I see the sub down below." And so by that time, the DEs just lined up and started making runs. I don't know how many ash cans they threw out of the tail, but it was a lot of them. There was huge explosions. And then Cadel came back and told the Chatelain, "You struck oil."

And so that is when the submarine started to surface because as it later came out, the captain of the submarine said that his main concern then was saving his men's lives. And so then he began to surface the sub. They went through whatever routines they were going through to open the seacocks and then to abandon ship going through the scuttling process to scuttle the sub, and therefore it didn't get done.

I was on the bridge at the time. I was the second one, and our duty was on the bridge. And I was on the bridge. I stayed up on the bridge with all the commanding officers on the bridge. In other words, I relayed the signals and we sent signals back and forth to the DEs.

We used a signal light in the daytime. And we had a gun that we used at night. We did use semaphore flags in close range. Now, when I was on the submarine, I used all semaphore because I was close enough to the carrier that they could read the messages or I could read the message they were sending to me asking questions.

I'm on the bridge. And then we see all of this happening. We are hearing the messages coming through from the Chatelain that they've made a contact, and they're getting ready to drop the depth charges. They were to our right, and when they did, we went left because we had to get out of there because a carrier, as Captain Gallery stated that it was like an old woman in a barroom ball. So we had to get out of there and get away from the torpedoes. And so we took off the other way and let the destroyers go in there, the escorts, and torpedo the submarine.

Yeah, we was getting out of the way because as big as we are, the torpedo would get us. So we got out of the way and we backed off. But we were still in sight of all the things that were going on. And the planes, the two fighter planes, as soon as they surfaced and the guys started coming on deck, they didn't want them to man them deck guns, so they started scraping the decks, the fighter planes did. Killed one man, that was all, what a miracle. If you could have been there and seen all the gunfire that was going on and all the shells and everything, and only one man got killed.

Of course, they had no idea of manning the guns, but we didn't know that. They were busy jumping in the water.

I had a front row seat. All of us on the bridge had a front row seat. And then of course, when it come time to man the whaleboats and go board the sub, why, that's when we took off to board the sub.

The captain gave the orders to do that. Captain Gallery, he gave the orders to man the whaleboats and to board the submarine, and to secure the submarine. Now, as you know, the Pillsbury, they had five or six men that were already on there. Lieutenant David, who got the Congressional Medal of Honor, was in charge of the whaleboat from the Pillsbury. And him and his crew, they went down, they went below the deck and got the seacock back and got it shut off. They had that done when we got there. And then when we got there, Commander Trosino, who was a full commander, he took charge of the operation from then on.

Well, the problem they went in down there, was there wasn't a lot they could do because all the engine rooms were flooded. We were down by the stern. They got the seacock closed, which kept the water from coming in. So the next thing to do, they went forward and raided the captain's office, got the code book, which I know you've heard about this. That code book gave away every secret that the German subs had. They could decode their messages. They knew where they were in port and everything. And so that was one of the most valuable pieces of information that we got from the German submarine.

The rest of the stuff was log books and diaries at the captain kept on what he did every day, the log book that he kept and stuff like that. But the code book that we retrieved, or they did, the guys that were below, and I don't know just who it was. I think it was Lieutenant David and some of his men from the Pillsbury. And then they took that code book as soon as they found out what it was. There was a plane left our deck and was with an officer, and it was flown straight to Washington D.C. on the 4th of June of 1944. That's how quick that code book got to Washington.

Now they started bringing all this equipment up after we got the water pumped out, and we got the submarine upright and floated. And then we started bringing the stuff back. We'd go over during the day and then we'd stay maybe four or five hours on the sub. And all the time we were cleaning out the stuff. And when we got back from the submarine, we piled it all up on the flight deck or on the hangar deck. And you've never seen such a pile of everything. Guns, clothing, pictures, cigarettes, cards, you name it, it was there. Whatever they had. We just cleaned out the submarine and brought it back to the carrier.

We didn't come face to face with any of the Germans at all. There was nobody on board the submarine when we boarded it, except the Americans. There was no Germans there. Because the Germans was already, the Chatelaine and the Pillsbury and the Pope and them had already picked them up.

Well, the next problem was to confront was to try to get the water out, try to pump the water out. And so there we took some pumps over from the carrier. We took some pumps over to the carrier, but they wasn't big enough to do any good. And so they ordered a seagoing tug, I think, out of Casablanca, I'm not for sure. But the seagoing tug came out of there, and they met us in two or three days, and they brought the heavy duty pumps. And from then on, they started working, pumping the water out. And we changed our course from Casablanca and headed to Bermuda.

But I got to back up a little bit and tell a story about the first day. The first day after we were on board the sub, we had no way, it was dead in the water, and so what do we do? So Captain Gallery decided, "Hey, we'll just tow it." So they run a big tow-line from the carrier. The whaleboat brought it out to us, and we hooked it onto the front up there. The carrier started towing the submarine. It's submerged in the water. So in the middle of the night that night, the rope parted. There we got the sub out there just sitting out there by itself. So we circled for the rest of the night, we circled the sub until the next morning. And we could go back and put another tow-line on it.

But we towed this sub until that seagoing tug got there and relieved us from that. And we were landing and taking off airplanes and scared to death half of the time, afraid that another German sub would come along and get us while we were moving so slowly in the water.

You turned the carrier into the wind always when you was making landings, and that would help. And with the flaps down, and then you got up at top speed that you could get, then our speed wasn't very high. It was about 20 knots. That's about as fast as we could go. And then the planes, we had the carrier into the wind, and then the planes would land with the flaps down.

Interviewer:

It was pretty dangerous when you had to slow your speed for the sub, wasn't it?

QMS2 Don Carter:

Yes, it was. It was dangerous. But that's the risk that we had to take in order to do the job that we'd set out to do. We had no other choice. Captain Gallery made those decisions, nobody else.

You've got to realize, we were just kids. We didn't realize we was making history. We were doing something that the captain had told us to do, and that's the way it is in the service. As far as realizing making history, no, we never thought about making history. We never even give that the first thought of this ever turning into something that it's turned into over the years. And people are still writing and talking about it 50 years later.

I didn't notice anything about the technology. I was sent on board to send the signals and receive signals from Captain Gallery. He would ask the questions and I would ask Commander Trosino or Lieutenant Hampton, and they would tell me what to tell him back. He would want to know, "What are you doing now? What is going on down below?" And all these kinds of questions. And then they would tell me what to tell him back. I was continually sending signals back because he had a question. By the time he got the answer, he had another question. So I was so busy doing that.

Now, later on, as we had it in tow, and we would go back and spend the days on the sub, we had a chance, we had pumped the water out and it was upright, and we had a chance to walk around the sub. Then you admire the complexity of the submarine, which we had never had any dealings with. And so you admire that and how they lived, and I guess Hans Goebeler told you about their hot bunk system that one went on watch and the other one went in the bunk. And their small kitchen, I think they only had a three-burner stove that cooked for 60 men. And so it was amazing what they did with the little space that they had.

The destroyers didn't have any facilities to keep prisoners, so we took all the prisoners every time that we picked up prisoners. Now, we had picked up prisoners from German submarines that we had sunk and brought them back. And so we had facilities on the carrier where they stayed. We had places for them to stay and feed them and give them showers and stuff like that. So no, immediately, as soon as they picked the German subs' prisoners up, why they brought them to the carrier. And we got all the prisoners all the time.

You could see them most every day. When they would lower the hangar, the elevator that comes from the hangar deck up to the flight deck that brought the planes up, and they would lower that elevator down, and that's where they did their exercise. In other words, it would be so low that they would guard them until the elevator went down and they would be so low that they couldn't jump out of there and jump overboard if anybody had any ideas of committing suicide or something like that. So no, we seen them every day just about.

Salt water showers from the hoses on the deck. Yeah, we gave them salt water showers. And that was done. Yeah. The German prisoners that we took aboard, I don't know about everybody else, but we treated them good. They got good food. They got the same food that we eat. They got exercise every day, and they got their salt water showers.

See, I was on the bridge. I was on the bridge all the time, and of course, I could just look down on the flight deck and see them. But no, we didn't have any personal contact. Now we did have, we had a Master-at-Arms on board who was fluent in German, and he did a lot of the translating for Captain Gallery and the questions he wanted to ask and things like that. Now he had personal contact with lots of them.

As we were going to Bermuda, Captain Gallery called everybody up on the flight deck, and he took over. And he told us how important it was to keep this a secret because of all the information that we had got. If the Germans found out that we had captured the sub and had the code books, then they could change all their codes and all their information. And so it was a must that we did not talk. He also said, and he drilled this into us, said, "If anybody ever talked about this, they would eventually find out who it was to. There would be no trial. It'd be a court-martial shot at sunrise. And that put the fear of God in everybody. They did not, as far as I know, I never heard of anybody ever mentioning a word until after the war was over in Germany. They said it was the best kept secret of World War II.

Well, we captured it on the 4th of June of 1944. The war in Germany wasn't over until the following May, almost a year. It was almost a year that we had to keep mum about it. There was nothing said about it. Nobody knew about it. The sub was at Bermuda all this time on the back side of the island at Bermuda.

We'd talk about it on the ship, yeah, sure. Among ourselves we'd talk about it, but there wasn't too much talked about it. Every once in a while there would be, especially in the days that we were taking it back to Bermuda. There was conversation about it all the time because we seen it. We could see it every day. But after you got off board ship, no, nothing. Nobody said nothing. In fact, I came home and married my wife during that time, and she never knew it. I didn't tell nobody. You didn't tell anybody. That was just the way it was.

Yes, it got back to us that… that was one of the most important things that happened was that code book. The sub itself, the material, but I'm talking of the material things that we got, which the logbook and the stuff like that. The code book was one of the most important things that was captured off of that submarine.

If I remember correctly, it was something like 16 days before we got to Bermuda with it. And then we pulled away and left the sub. And I never seen it again until I seen it in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Of course, now the story about bringing it to the Museum and Science Industry is quite a story within itself. They brought it from the Atlantic up the St. Lawrence into Lake Michigan. And then they built more or less like a dry dock and put it on wheels and drug it out of Lake Michigan, across Lake Shore Drive, and alongside the Museum of Science and Industry. Of course, Museum of Science and Industry, I don't know whether you've ever been there or not. It's real close to Lake Michigan. It's not too far.

But Captain Gallery had a brother that was an engineer, and he also had a brother that was a priest in Chicago. And they were very influential in getting money raised. The government did not pay for this. Getting money raised, and he was also a good friend of Arthur Godfrey, a very close friend of Arthur Godfrey, Captain Gallery was. And through their efforts, they raised the money to pay for getting this done. This is something that Captain Gallery wanted. And he's seen this done before he died. But that was quite a story.

I had that story somewhere. I tried to find it today, but I couldn't find it. Of all the work that went into raising the money and building the thing to get it across Lake Shore Drive and get it over to the museum. And of course you know that the Germans have spent many dollars, they sent many dollars to refurbish the submarine after it was at Science museum because they wanted it to look good too.

Interviewer:

Have you ever considered what would've happened if Hans would've been successful? How history would have totally changed?

QMS2 Don Carter:

Oh, yes, it would've changed. It would've prolonged the war, I'm sure of this. If he had have been successful in scuttling the sub, I'm sure that we would've had a longer battle of fighting the German submarines. But as it was, we made the battle shorter because of all the information we had that they didn't know we had it. They did not know it until after the war, until after it was published by the Navy Department. They did not know it.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Signalman 2nd Class Don Carter.

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