The man who sank the unarmed British passenger ship Athenia on the first day of World War II, Kapitanleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, had managed to become a “U-boat Ace” in the 20 months of the war since his tragic mistake. Lemp had been credited with 22 ships sunk or damaged and awarded the Knights Cross, Germany’s highest award for valor. But in May of 1941 the brash, young U-boat commander’s luck was about to run out.
Two days after the Enigma code books for June were taken off the German trawler München (see blog post for Aug. 6. 2018), Lemp, now in command of U-110, attacked a westbound convoy off Greenland in the middle of the day. He fired a fan of four torpedoes at a horizon filled with Allied ships. Two shots struck home, adding two ships to Lemp’s tally. His third torpedo missed, and the fourth failed to launch from its tube. As Lemp waited at periscope depth to reset his forth torpedo for another shot, he was discovered by a British corvette that crippled U-110 with a depth charge attack.
Commander Joe Baker-Cresswell, the man in charge of the convoy escorts, was surprised to see U-110 pop to the surface in front of his flagship, H.M.S. Bulldog. He ordered his destroyer ahead at full speed, intent on ramming the U-boat, but thought better of it when he realized the Germans were abandoning ship. At almost that same instant, Kapitanleutnant Lemp was telling his radio operator not to worry about destroying the boat’s Enigma machine and code books, and to get off the ship immediately because it was sinking.
But U-110 did not sink, at least not immediately. Sensing a unique opportunity, Baker-Cresswell brought Bulldog to a stop just near U-boat He put David Balme, a 20-year-old sub-lieutenant, in charge of a boarding party and sent them off in small boat with instructions to gather up any signal books he could find on the submarine.
When they were nearly alongside the U-boat, their small boat was swept up by a large swell and smashed onto U-110’s deck. The men scrambled out onto the U-boat and climbed to the top of the conning tower, where Balme was surprised to find the entry hatch closed tight. Why close a hatch if the boat was intended to sink, he wondered? He opened the hatch and had to holster his revolver to climb down the ladder, feeling totally exposed if any Germans were still aboard.
“This was a nasty moment,” Balme later wrote, “one looked down below and wondered how many Germans were there. I went down the ladder to the lower conning tower where there was a similar closed hatch. On opening this hatch I found the control room deserted! Hatches leading forward and aft were open and all lighting on.”
He could hear air escaping somewhere in the U-boat, but there was no hint of chlorine, a deadly gas that could be produced by the boat’s batteries being submerged in seawater. For young Balme, the discoveries were just beginning, as we will see in our next blog.
