★★★★☆ The U-505 story

Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and The Elusive Enigma Machine

Charles Lachlan

If you read a lot of naval history (fiction included), you are familiar with stories in which sailors from one vessel board and capture another in battle. That happened a lot in the days of the tall ships, but fell out of fashion when ships were able to fire at each other from miles apart. The publisher's blurb claims that before 1944 the last "seizure of an enemy ship in battle" occurred during the War of 1812. (I don't vouch for the accuracy of this claim, which, frankly, I doubt.) I say "before 1944" because on 4-June-1944 American sailors boarded and captured the German submarine U-505. The same blurb implies that Charles Lachman's Codename Nemo is the story of that capture. It would be more accurate, however, to say that Codename Nemo CONTAINS the story of the capture of U-505.

In fact, Codename Nemo is a longitudinal history of U-505, extending from its launch 24-May-1941 to its current display in the Chicago Museum of Science and industry. It also tells the personal stories of many of the sailors whose careers involved U-505, both the Germans who fought in it from 1941-1944, and the US sailors who captured it and brought to port.

This is a great story, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I have two complaints, one minor and the other more important. I have already hinted at the first. Codename Nemo felt padded to me with a lot of history not strictly relevant to the capture. That is, we read of U-505's missions from 1941-1944. These are not uninteresting, but they are not really very different from the missions of other World War II U-boats. The unique interest of U-505 is its capture, and much in Codename Nemo seemed unnecessary to that story.

My other, more important complaint, was the failure of Codename Nemo to place the operation in the context of English code-breaking operations. Capturing a submarine is a difficult and dangerous operation -- why go to that trouble? The reason is hinted at in the subtitle, The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and The Elusive Enigma Machine. The value of a captured sub is intelligence. With a captured submarine you can study how a German submarine and torpedoes work. But more important than that is to get hands on German codebooks and cryptographic equipment. That is the Enigma machine mentioned in the subtitle. English mathematicians led by Alan Turing at the famous Bletchley Park operation broke the Enigma code and were reading German radio messages from fairly early in the war. (This is an utterly fascinating story told in Andrew Hodges' biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma.) There were several different versions of the Enigma. By far the most sophisticated was the naval Enigma, which German vessels of war, submarines included, carried. Bletchley Park could not crack the naval Enigma until they managed to capture one.

(In fact, the English captured thousands of Enigma machines. After the war they distributed them to their allies suggesting they could be used for secure communications. Without, of course, telling those allies that England had broken the code and could read any such communications. If you ever wonder how England got the nickname "Perfidious Albion", here's a hint.)

That is the most important reason why a captured German submarine was such a prize. The English were, of course, entirely aware of this. What's more, they had already mounted successful operations to capture naval enigmas. The first was U-110 in May 1941, before the USA had even entered the war. However, the English were acutely aware that this intelligence was valuable only if the Germans didn't know their opponents had an Enigma. Keeping the secret of captured Enigmas was so important that the English destroyed and sank the captured vessels.

In fact, the only appearance of the English in Codename Nemo is when, after hearing of the capture of U-505, the First Lord of the Admiralty sent a message to Commander in Chief, United States Fleet Earnest King, urging him to keep the capture of U-505 strictly secret. This can fairly be described as a freak-out by the English navy over what those meddling Americans had done. The capture of U-505 was a historic feat and makes a great story. But its importance cannot really be understood without the English context.

Codename Nemo is a story of one of the most unusual and harrowing naval operations World War II. It is not perfect, but the imperfections don't detract much from its value as entertainment.

Thanks to Edelweiss and Diversion Books for an advance reader copy of Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and The Elusive Enigma Machine.

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