Captain Daniel Gallery opened his action report with this sentence. "Task Group twenty-two point three sailed from Norfolk on this cruise with the avowed intention of capturing an enemy submarine."

He did not write sinking. He wrote capturing. The United States Navy had not boarded and taken an enemy warship on the high seas since eighteen fifteen, and Gallery was proposing to do it with a ship that had been in commission for less than eight months.

His flagship was USS Guadalcanal, C V E sixty, a Casablanca class escort carrier. She had a merchant hull, no armor worth the name, a single five inch gun, and a top speed of nineteen knots. Her crews called the type jeep carriers. Fifty of them were built in under two years.

Twenty days after she left Norfolk, Guadalcanal was steaming across the Atlantic with a German submarine on the end of a wire. The boat was U five oh five, a Type nine C, two hundred fifty-two feet long and more than eleven hundred tons on the surface. She was afloat, her code machines were in American hands, and the biggest American flag the task group could find was flying over the German one.

Nine men in a whaleboat made that possible. To see why they were there at all, you have to go back to what a hunter-killer group was for, and why capture was the one thing it was never supposed to try.

By the spring of nineteen forty-four the Battle of the Atlantic had turned. Escort carriers now covered the middle of the ocean, where land based aircraft could not reach, and each one sailed with a screen of destroyer escorts as a self-contained group. Their job was simple. Find a U-boat, hold it down until its batteries and air ran out, and kill it.

Killing it was the doctrine for a reason. The British had already taken Enigma material from German submarines, from U one ten in May of nineteen forty-one and from U five fifty-nine in nineteen forty-two. Allied codebreakers were reading German naval signals, and that reading was what told the hunter-killer groups where to look. If Germany ever learned that a U-boat had been boarded, the code systems would change, and the reading would stop.

So the safe course was to sink every boat and let the evidence go to the bottom. A captured submarine was a prize, and it was also a secret that every sailor in the task group would have to keep.

There was a second reason nobody tried, and it was the ship.

The Casablanca class came from a proposal Henry Kaiser put to President Roosevelt in June of nineteen forty-two, when U-boats were sinking merchant ships within sight of the American coast. Kaiser offered to build small carriers the way he built Liberty ships, in welded prefabricated sections, at a yard in Vancouver, Washington, that had been built that same year. The Navy ordered fifty. The hulls were built to merchant standards. Protection amounted to splinter plating. Power came from two reciprocating steam engines of nine thousand horsepower, the kind of machinery the fleet had stopped putting in warships a generation before.

Guadalcanal was five hundred twelve feet long and displaced about eighty-two hundred tons standard. She was launched on the fifth of June nineteen forty-three and commissioned that September. She was designed to operate twenty-seven aircraft, and nothing in her was designed to stop a torpedo.

That last point was not theory. On the twenty-ninth of May nineteen forty-four, six days before the action in this story, a U-boat torpedoed and sank the escort carrier USS Block Island in the eastern Atlantic. Gallery wrote in his report that her loss was still very fresh in everyone's mind.

Now consider what a capture requires. The carrier has to stop. She has to put her stern within yards of a submarine, pass a wire, and then crawl away at towing speed for days, in water where other U-boats are known to be working. And before any of that, someone has to go aboard a boat whose crew has just abandoned it. German submarines carried demolition charges for exactly this situation. The standing order was to open the sea valves, set the charges, and leave nothing.

On paper, the plan asked a ship built to be expendable to make herself a stationary target, in order to save a vessel her enemy was trained to destroy.

What the paper left out was a single observation Gallery's group had made eight weeks earlier.

On the ninth of April nineteen forty-four, Task Group twenty-two point three hunted U five fifteen for most of a night and a morning. Guadalcanal kept Avengers in the air through the dark, which escort carriers were not supposed to be able to do, and every time the submarine came up to charge batteries an aircraft drove her back under. By early afternoon she was out of power and out of air. She surfaced in the middle of the escorts. Her crew came out of the hatches and went over the side, and the ships pounded the empty hull with gunfire and rockets until it sank.

Gallery watched that and drew a conclusion, which he put in the first paragraph of his next report. When a submarine surfaces during an attack, he wrote, it is highly probable that he has no intention of fighting, and his main objective is to save his hide. A boat in that condition is not a threat for the next few minutes. It is an abandoned ship with the engines running.

That changed the problem. If the crew was leaving anyway, the task was to hurry them along without holing the pressure hull. Gallery laid down three rules. Concentrate anti-personnel weapons on the boat, meaning machine guns and light cannon. Hold back anything that could sink her. Get men aboard as fast as a boat could be lowered.

He took this to the departure conference before the group sailed on the fifteenth of May. Every commanding officer was ordered to draw up a capture plan and organize a boarding party. On the way out, when a contact near Bermuda looked promising, Gallery signaled the whole group to remind them that the objective was capture.

The planning went down to names. The Plan of the Day for the fourth of June aboard Guadalcanal was printed and handed out the evening before. It listed the men assigned to operate a captured submarine. Among them was the carrier's chief engineer, Commander Earl Trosino, who had been a chief engineer in the merchant marine before the war and knew his way around a strange engine room.

There was one more piece, and it came down to fuel. The group hunted around the Cape Verde Islands from the twenty-sixth to the thirty-first of May and found nothing. Every ship was running on half its engineering plant to stretch the oil. On the night of the second of June, aircraft radar and sonobuoys picked up something about fifty miles east, and a full night's search came up empty. By the afternoon of the third the group was heading north for Casablanca because the tanks demanded it.

Gallery called a conference. The contacts had been real, he decided, and the fuel could be stretched for one more night. The group turned back. That night's search found nothing either. Gallery wrote afterward that the decision to turn back is what put them in position the next morning.

The details in this account come from that report and from the logs of the ships involved. If this is the kind of naval history you want more of, a subscription tells us to keep digging through reports like this one.

The fourth of June nineteen forty-four. By the task group's clocks it is eleven hundred. All six ships are on course due north at thirteen knots, about a hundred fifty miles west of Cape Blanco on the coast of French West Africa. Five destroyer escorts are spread in a line ahead of the carrier, twenty-five hundred yards apart. Two Wildcat fighters are overhead, due to be relieved in twenty minutes.

At eleven oh nine, USS Chatelain gets a sound contact eight hundred yards off her starboard bow. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Dudley Knox, reports it as possible. Three minutes later he calls it a submarine.

Guadalcanal does the only thing a jeep carrier can do. She turns away and runs. Gallery explained later that the contact put the submarine in perfect position to fire at him, and for all he knew a salvo was already in the water. Prisoners would later state that the boat did fire one acoustic torpedo at the carrier.

Chatelain is too close. Depth charges rolled from her stern would not sink fast enough to reach the target, so at eleven sixteen she fires her hedgehog, a forward throwing mortar, and misses.

Then the aircraft take over. Ensign John Cadle and Lieutenant Wolffe Roberts can see what the ships cannot, the long dark shape of the submarine running just under the surface. One of them radios the ship that just fired to reverse course. Then he fires his machine guns into the sea to mark the spot.

At eleven twenty-one Chatelain runs over the splashes and drops a full pattern of depth charges set shallow.

Inside U five oh five, the lights go out. Her captain, Oberleutnant Harald Lange, wrote in his own statement that water broke in, all the electrical machinery stopped, and the rudders jammed. He did not know the full damage. He ordered the boat to the surface on compressed air.

The pilot overhead sees the result first. The log records his call. "You struck oil. Sub is surfacing."

At eleven twenty-two and a half the submarine breaks the surface seven hundred yards from Chatelain, with depth charge plumes still coming down around her. Chatelain, Pillsbury and Jenks open fire. The two Wildcats strafe the conning tower. Gallery holds back his other ships and sends one message over the voice radio. The chronology logs it as "I would like to capture that bastard if possible."

Lange is first onto the bridge and is hit almost at once, in both legs and in the face. He orders the crew to abandon ship and sink her. They abandon her. The sinking is left half done. Some valves are opened, and a strainer cover is pulled, but the engines are still turning and the jammed rudder holds the boat in a tight circle to the right at about seven knots.

At eleven twenty-five Chatelain's captain sees the bow swinging toward him, takes it for an attack, and fires a torpedo. It passes ahead of the submarine. Had it hit, there would have been nothing to capture.

At eleven twenty-seven Commander Frederick Hall, commanding the escorts, orders all ships to cease fire. Gallery noted that the two fighter pilots acknowledged that order in the most disgusted tone of voice he had ever heard, and obeyed it.

The deck of the submarine is empty. Her crew is in the water. She is still under way, still circling, and slowly settling by the stern.

At eleven thirty-eight Pillsbury's motor whaleboat casts off. In it are Lieutenant junior grade Albert David and eight men. David is forty-one years old. He enlisted in nineteen nineteen, served in battleships and cruisers as an enlisted man, and was commissioned from the ranks in nineteen forty-two. He is Pillsbury's assistant engineering officer.

The whaleboat has to chase the submarine around its circle and catch it. Within minutes the party is alongside, and they jump.

There is one dead German on the deck. Nobody knows how many living ones are below, or how long the charges have been set. Gallery's report says what happened next in plain terms. Without hesitation, the party took their lives in their hands and plunged down the conning tower hatch.

The boat is empty. It is also flooding. Below decks a solid stream of sea water six inches across is pouring through an open strainer. The cover is lying nearby. Motor Machinist's Mate Zenon Lukosius finds it and gets it back on. Others go through the compartments shutting valves. Then, with no idea whether the boat is about to blow up or go down, they start gathering every paper that looks important and passing it up the hatch.

On the surface, Pillsbury is trying to get a line on a submarine that will not stop. From the carrier's bridge, Gallery wrote, it looked for all the world like a rodeo, with a cowboy trying to rope a wild horse. When the first line went across he sent a message. "Ride 'em cowboy."

The horse fought back. The submarine's bow planes, steel fins below the waterline, cut into Pillsbury's hull. Twice they went through. By thirteen twenty-three she had three compartments flooded, her motor room filled to the waterline, and she had to cast off and save herself.

A few minutes before that, David had found the way to cut the power. U five oh five stopped. That solved one problem and made another, because a submarine low in the water stays up partly by moving. Stopped, she began to sink by the stern.

Guadalcanal's parties arrived around twelve forty under Commander Trosino. One of their boats was lifted by a swell and dropped bodily onto the submarine's deck. They pulled demolition charges, rigged gasoline pumps, and carried out the code machines. Then they sent a message back to the carrier. "We must be towed to stay afloat."

So the jeep carrier came in. At fourteen fifteen Gallery began backing Guadalcanal's stern toward the submarine's bow. For several minutes the two were fifty feet apart, with the torpedo tubes pointing straight at the carrier. Gallery admitted what everyone aboard was thinking. Suppose there is just one man left on that boat.

There was not. At fourteen twenty-three an inch and a quarter wire was made fast, and the tow began. That evening Guadalcanal turned into the wind and landed her air patrol with a German submarine riding off her starboard quarter.

At midnight the wire broke.

At dawn on the fifth of June the carrier put her bow against the submarine's and passed a heavier line, two and a quarter inches. Even then the boat would not tow straight. Her rudder was jammed hard right, and the hand steering gear was in the after torpedo room, behind a watertight door nobody had opened. The boarders reported something rigged on the door's main latch. It looked like a booby trap.

Gallery had spent three years in a postgraduate ordnance course. He went across himself. What he found was an open fuse box cover that had been jarred against the latch. He closed it, cracked the door to see whether the compartment was flooded, and his party went aft and centered the rudder by hand.

On the morning of the seventh of June the fleet tug Abnaki and the oiler Kennebec met the group, and the tow was passed across. When the submarine lost her headway she settled until the conning tower hatch was nearly awash, and every swell sent water down it. Trosino and David went back aboard. They ran electric pumps on cables from the tug and carried every loose weight they could move up to the deck. Accounts of the salvage credit Trosino with one more trick. He uncoupled the diesels and left the electric motors clutched to the shafts, so that the tow itself spun the propellers, turned the motors into generators, and charged the batteries that ran the boat's own pumps.

By twenty hundred that night she was riding where she had been when they first boarded her. The salvage party reported she was definitely in the bag.

Twelve days later, on the nineteenth of June, U five oh five entered Bermuda after a tow of roughly twenty-five hundred miles.

The count was this. Fifty-eight prisoners were taken, Lange among them. One German sailor was dead. No American was killed. The destroyer escort Jenks was sent ahead at full speed on the ninth of June carrying ten sacks of officer messenger mail and the submarine's coding machines. Later accounts put the whole haul at about nine hundred pounds of code books and papers and two Enigma machines.

Two cautions belong here. U five oh five was not the first submarine to give up Enigma material. The British had done that three years before. What the American capture delivered was current material and an entire working boat, taken two days before the Normandy landings.

The timing is the second caution. The historian Clay Blair wrote that Admiral Ernest King, the Chief of Naval Operations, was furious when he learned of it, and considered a court-martial. If word reached Germany, the codes would change on the eve of the invasion.

So the Navy buried the story. The prisoners went to a camp in Louisiana, were kept apart from other Germans, and were denied Red Cross contact. The German Navy listed them as dead, and their families were told so. They did not go home until nineteen forty-seven. The submarine was repainted to look American and given the name Nemo. Every man in the task group was told to say nothing, and nothing came out until the war in Europe was over.

King's anger passed. The Presidential Unit Citation that the task group received was ordered by him personally.

Albert David was awarded the Medal of Honor. The citation calls it the first successful boarding and capture of an enemy man of war on the high seas by the United States Navy since eighteen fifteen. It was the only Medal of Honor given to a Navy man in the Atlantic theater during the war. David never held it. He died of a heart attack at Norfolk on the seventeenth of September nineteen forty-five, and President Truman presented the medal to his widow on the fifth of October. Arthur Knispel and Stanley Wdowiak, the first two men down the hatch behind him, received the Navy Cross.

The two ships ended very differently. After the war the Navy had no use for U five oh five and planned to sink her as a target. Gallery, who was from Chicago, fought that plan. In nineteen fifty-four she went to the Museum of Science and Industry in his home city, where she still is.

Guadalcanal spent the rest of her service qualifying pilots, nearly four thousand of them. She was decommissioned in nineteen forty-six and sold for scrap in nineteen fifty-nine. None of the fifty Casablanca class carriers survives.

The cheap ship went to the breakers. The submarine she caught was kept.

Nothing about the capture depended on the carrier being good. She was slow, unarmored, and running short of oil. What she had was a commander who had watched one crew abandon a boat and understood what he was looking at, a task group that had written its boarding lists the night before, and nine men from a destroyer escort who went down a hatch without knowing what was at the bottom.

Gallery ended his report on that point. He believed every man in the group would have volunteered for the boarding parties, and that those who could not go were envious of those who did.

They had sailed with the avowed intention of capturing an enemy submarine. They came home with one.