You've got a what in the basement?

As if gigantic trains and airplanes weren't enough, down in the basement of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry there lurks an actual German U boat. I imagine it's kept down there because everyone knows that submarines are much happier below the ground than they are above it. U-505 was successfully captured on June 4th, 1944 by the United States Navy. We had heard that there was a submarine at this museum, but I had no idea it would be so cool to see the thing. It was huge...I mean super huge...huge enough that its like impossible to get the right kind of picture of it without one of those fancy wide-eyed cameras. Not to mention, they have the room really dark (also to make the submarine feel more at home, as I imagine the depths of the ocean are quite dark), so that hopeful photographers have to sit there and debate whether to use the night settings or not. I decided to forget the camera and just enjoy the submarine.

Before she was captured by the Americans, U-505 was a pretty nasty little beast. She sunk 3 American ships, 2 British, 1 Norwegian, 1 Dutch and a Columbian schooner called Roamar. The story of how U-505 was actually captured got kinda confusing to me because there were all these ships and airplanes doing all kinds of weird-o maneuvers and I sorta zoned out. Suffice it to say that towards the end of the war the Americans were able to cause enough damage to get the Germans to abandon ship , but not so much damage that they sunk the submarine. The codebooks and equipment removed from the boat proved very useful in interpreting the German signals for the rest of the war.

In an effort to keep the capture a secret from the Nazis, the Americans docked U-505 at a Naval base in Bermuda and renamed her the USS Nemo. Also, to keep the Germans from finding Nemo the US soldiers declared all 59 of the crew members dead, where in actuality, 58 of them were in Louisiana under strict guard (the other guy actually did die during the capture). The family of the crewmen were told that they had been killed and funerals were held. Can you imagine the reactions of the family when their U-505 husbands and sons showed up at their doors in 1947 having finally been released by the US Govenrment. I wonder if any of them came home to a wife with a new husband?

Right after the war, the US Navy decided to use U-505 as target practice, but the brother of the Admiral who made such decisions convinced his brother to donate it to the newly established Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. After 8 years of fund raising, the people of Chicago came up with $250,000 to fund the towing and installation of the submarine in the front yard of the museum. There it stood, out in the snow, from 1954 to 2004 when the museum people noticed that the hull was getting all messed up by the elements. That's when it was moved into a specially designed room in the basement of the museum. A specially designed gigantic room, that is. I thought it interesting to note that after U-505 was moved inside, the museum curators thought it prudent to refurbish the innards of the sub so it would look brand new. This they did by actually contracting the original German designers of the submarine to do the work. We would have looked inside the boat, but we got there as the last sold-out tour was going through. Seeing an actual German U-boat was a very cool experience. Chicago is such a great town.