Thread by @ConStelz

Go to the Museum of Science and Industry, I was told. It has a submarine.

Ok. Submarines are cool.

What I didn’t realize until I got there is that it is a German submarine.

A NAZI SUBMARINE.

IN CHICAGO.

IN A MUSEUM BASEMENT.

I give you: U-505/1

By way of a narrative slowdown, this is how the enlisted men aboard U-505 hotbunked:

Above a live torpedo. As one does.

(Not live now, no worries.)/2

U-505 had destroyed eight Allied vessels in three years. It also had an Enigma coding machine on board. It was pursued by the US hunter-killer group 22.3, under Captain Dan Gallery on the USS Guadalcanal. U-505 was captured off West Africa on June 4, 1944./3

The U-505’s crew tried to destroy the sub, the Enigma and its codebooks, but failed. One sailor was killed, the other 58 were taken to Reston, LA.
All top secret, so the Nazi Navy Command wouldn’t change the codes. That sentence about the Geneva Conventions made me tear up./4

So Captain Gallery’ hunter-killer group towed U-505 from West Africa TO BERMUDA. ACROSS THE ATLANTIC.

Where the Navy removed the Enigma, the codebooks, and the periscopes. And then it was going to destroy the submarine.

But Capt. Gallery was from CHICAGO./5

Capt. Gallery said: Let’s bring this captured Nazi submarine U-505 from Bermuda TO CHICAGO, MY HOMETOWN.

Which is very much non-coastal & in fact in the middle of the United States.

But there is that lake. It feeds into other lakes, and those go into the St. Lawrence Canal. /6

This is how they towed U-505 from Portsmouth, NH to Chicago: through 28 locks on the St. Lawrence, and four of the Great Lakes.

Because, you know, Chicago./7