- LONDON (Reuters) - David
Balme was a 20-year-old sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy in May 1941 when
he led a boarding party down the conning tower of a German submarine south
of Iceland and changed the course of World War II.
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- The prize at the bottom of three vertical ladders was
the unbreakable German code machine Enigma and a set of code books that
would finally enable the British to read enemy radio traffic and turn the
tide of war in the Atlantic.
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- Now 82, Balme, who retired with the rank of Lieutenant
Commander, still remembers vividly the details of the dangerous descent
into the bowels of the crippled submarine but admits he had no idea how
crucial his discovery would be.
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- "We didn't know what Enigma was. We thought it was
a funny looking typewriter -- an interesting bit of kit," he told
Reuters Friday.
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- "It was only when we got back to Scapa Flow (naval
base) 10 days later that the senior intelligence officer came aboard and
told me what we had got and how hard they had been looking for one."
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- It was on the morning of May 9, 1941 as convoy OB318
steamed steadily east toward England that U-110 commander Fritz-Julius
Lemp fired three torpedoes and sank two of the merchant ships.
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- Lemp was maneuvering for another shot when escort corvette
HMS Aubretia spotted his periscope and attacked, forcing him to crash dive.
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- A series of depth charges on the diving submarine forced
it to surface and the crew abandoned ship.
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- Lemp set scuttling charges but in his rush left the Enigma
machine aboard before he too leaped into the sea only to watch helplessly
as the charges failed to go off, allowing Balme and his boarding party
from the destroyer HMS Bulldog to board.
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- "It was terrifying. We knew there must be scuttling
charges which could go off at any time. I had been in action before, but
nothing quite like that," Balme said.
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- "For 20 years I would regularly wake up at night
thinking about that climb down into the conning tower," he added.
The precious Enigma machine was rushed back to England, the crew sworn
to secrecy, and given to the British cryptographers and math genius Alan
Turing at Bletchley Park to get to work.
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- Within two years, with the help of Turing's Colossus
-- the world's first computer -- the Allies were reading Axis coded radio
traffic like an open book.
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- The Battle of the Atlantic, vital to keeping the American
umbilical supply line to Britain open during what wartime leader Winston
Churchill called its darkest hours, was won and Germany was in retreat
on all fronts from Africa to the Urals.
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- Sixty years on, London's Imperial War Museum is celebrating
that battle with a new web-based exhibition, on www.iwm.org.uk/online/atlantic/campaign.htm,
detailing just how close the battle had been.
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