NO news, they say, is good news, but for the officers and crew of the German Unterseeboot U-505 at Bermuda in 1944, it was the equivalent of a personal hell. Apparently in contravention of the Geneva Conventions on warfare, they were to be held incommunicado for the remainder of the 1939-45 war.

It was verboten, forbidden, to send news to their families that they had not gone down with the boat, for indeed the boat, which had vanished from the radar screen of the German Navy, had not gone down at all.

The story of the capture off western Africa and the hiding of the submarine U-505 at Bermuda is one of the most remarkable of the oceanic activities of the Second World War. Several thousand men of the US Navy Task Force 22.3 kept the apprehension of U-505 a secret for over a year till the end of the war in Europe on May 7, 1945.

The story started in the way of many who loaded torpedoes and supplies into their U-boats for raiding in the Atlantic seas and departed from the massive concrete submarine pens on the west coast of France at the ports of Lorient and Brest.

The U-505 was a Type IXC submarine, the long-range workhouse of the German Navy and was developed in the decade before the Second World War, when the Kriegsmarine saw the need for boats that could operate in the Caribbean or into the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans without refuelling.

It should be remembered that one of the important chokepoints of the war for Germany was the southeast Caribbean, for much of the fuel for the Allies was shipped out of Venezuela and Trinidad.

The Type IXC went into service in 1941 and had a range of some 13,000 nautical miles and could therefore roam over the breath and length of both Atlantics. That range is one on the surface and for comparison was only a mere 60 nautical miles submerged, given the necessity to surface for air.

In the atomic age, modern subs can range the world completely submerged for months at a time. Fifty-four Type IXC boats were commissioned under war conditions, as were 87 of the advanced version, the Type IXC/40. The U-805 was one of the latter and became the first submarine to surrender at the end of the war on 15 May 1945, off Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The U-505 was built at the yards of Deutche Werft AG in Hamburg, from whence also came its last of four commanding officers, Oberleutnant Harald Lange. Commissioned in August 1941, the boat was on its 12th patrol, having sunk eight vessels over those voyages. In February 1944, Lange took the boat south to the sea lanes off southwest Africa to prey on supply vessels bound for Europe with supplies such as iron ore. On June 4, the submarine was intercepted by TF 22.3 under the command of Captain Daniel Gallery, USN and was depth-charged.

Lange brought the damaged boat to the surface to save his men and thus surrendered, actions for which he was for a time after the war ostracised at Hamburg, although they had taken all standard procedures to scuttle the boat.

Captain Gallery managed to get a boarding crew onto the U-505 before it could sink and they saved the boat intact. It was the first time since 1815 that the US Navy had captured an enemy vessel at sea.

The men of TF 22.3 were sworn in writing to secrecy and the boat was towed across the Atlantic by USS Abnaki to the US Naval Operating Base at Bermuda, where it arrived on June 19, accompanied by the ships of TF 22.3, USS Guadalcanal, Chatelain, Pillsbury and Pope.

This momentous event was eclipsed by an attempt by the Governor that evening at a dinner party at the Colonial Secretary's home to get the Commandant NOB to agree to pay wharfage for his ships to the Corporations of St. George's and Hamilton, 'as they were free and independent entities and were not necessarily bound by agreements with the Bermuda Government or the British Home Government'. The Commandant 'took the stand and stopped the discussion' telling the assembled party that no such payments would be made.

THE U-505 departed Bermuda for the Philadelphia Navy Yard on May 20, 1945 after 11 months undetected in the Great Sound, the crew having left for POW camps in the United States in the autumn of 1944.

Oberleutnant Lange had been taken from the water unconscious and severely injured and at Bermuda a leg had to be amputated, so he remained here longer. The U-505 was taken to Chicago in 1954 and forms a major exhibit and war memorial at the Museum of Science and Industry.

In the company of Rear Admiral Gallery, Harald Lange toured his last command in a meeting of friends in 1964. One member of the crew of the U-505 moved to Chicago and for several decades until his death was an intimate tour guide for the submarine.

While in Bermuda, Lange was cared for by a young nurse of the Jones family of 'Inwood', Shirley, the late wife of Lt. James Humphreys, USNR, of Paget. She related that Lange's major worry was that his wife would remarry in his absence, since it would have been assumed in Germany that the U-505 had been lost with all hands. Lange himself did not believe that his boat had survived the scuttling attempt until Captain Gallery showed him family articles from his cabin.

The U-505 was destined to become one of the most famous submarines of the war, not only for its capture with secret code books and machines intact, but for its enduring presence as a memorial to men lost at sea as a major museum exhibit.

An outside display for many years, the U-505 was recently moved into a purpose-built building to ensure its survival into the future as the only Unterseeboot to survive the war above water.

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. The views expressed here are his opinion, not necessarily those of the trustees or staff of the Museum. Comments can be sent to drharrislogic.bm, to PO Box MA 133, Sandys MABX, or by telephone at 799-5480.