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On the evening
of 18th July 2003 I was working on the web site when an old Goldonian, Jim
Hargreaves phoned me, he had been at Goldings with his two other
brothers Arnold and Arthur, all three learnt the print trade and
were in the same house Mount Steven House. All three brothers were
in the gym squad. They had also been
at
RCNS Poole, Dorset. before coming to Goldings
 Jim was very
impressed with the Goldonian web site as he was able
to view information of most of
the old homes and Goldings. Jim spoke of his
time at Goldings with great affection; he went
on to tell me about his older brother
Arnold, he had taken part in a secret operation while serving on HMS Bulldog.
He was one of eight of a
boarding party of U-110 he said Arnold had never spoken of the event
until the film U-571 in which it is suggested uncle Sam not only won
the war he also captured the first U-boat with an intact
Enigma machine.
This got me searching the internet for any
information on HMS Bulldog which held only limited information,
there was more information on the Enigma machine code which Alan
Turing had started to try and crack back in 1938, but his problem
was every two
weeks the code seemed to change. Below is what I have found over the
years since the phone call from Jim. The true
story of a 24 year old Able
Seaman
Arnold Hargreaves and his part in Adolf Hitlers'
downfall,,,,,,
The first recorded
capture of a Enigma I can find came in February 1941, with the
capture of the German trawler named Krebs off Norway. On board were
two Enigma machines and the Naval settings for the previous month.
This allowed German Naval Enigma to be read, albeit with some delay
in April, by code breakers at Bletchley. Then in the start of May
1941 a weather ship named the München was attacked and found with
part of Enigma code-books for June. On both occasions the crew had
started to destroy the Enigma machines. One code was not found the
all important short code book, this allowed the U boats to shorten
the messages sent. Without this Bletchley were unable to break the U
boat code.
On the night of 8 May
Kptlt. Lemp's U-110, from Lorient's 2nd U-Flotilla, had been
successfully shadowing convoy OB.318 awaiting the arrival of U-201
which arrived on station on the
9th May 1941
at Cape Farewell the convoy OB.318 was steaming steadily east
towards America from England awaiting the arrival of the Canadian
Navy for the onward trip to America. They were not aware they were
now being stalked by two
wolf pack subs the U-110 and U-201 The attack started when Kptlt. Fritz-Julius Lemp of U-110 fired
three torpedoes two found there mark with one hitting the Esmond and
the other hitting the Bengore, the third had gone wide of convoy. Lemp
stayed at periscope
depth and had been
manoeuvring for another shot when the escort corvette HMS Aubretia
spotted his periscope and started an attack, forcing Lemp to crash dive
in position
60N, 33W
Just before the
attack from HMS Aubretia the U-110 might have sunk a
third ship had it not been for an accident on board. The final
torpedo fired had remained stuck fast inside the tube. This was to have
fatal consequences for many of the crew of 47. Normally, after a
torpedo is fired from the U-boat's bow tube, water was pumped into
the tanks in the bow to compensate for the departure. The
torpedo on this occasion, never
left the U-boat, the pumped-in water merely unbalanced it for just
long enough to stop it diving out of harm's way.
Both HMS Aubretia and
HMS Bulldog were
now
directly above and both laying down 10 depth charges that exploded at the depth
the asdic sonar equipment had detected U-110. The U-boat vibrated
and shook with each explosion. The damage reports started to come in, the batteries had
been damaged, the port propeller had been damaged, but worst of all the emergency compressed air was
leaking into the submarine. Once this was gone Lemp would not be
able to control the sub so he used what compressed air that was left
in the tanks to surface.
The surface was no
safe haven as HMS Bulldog was heading straight for the U-110 firing
her three 4.7 Guns and all the
Lewis machine guns from the bridge, adding more damage to the already damaged U-110. Kptlt. Lemp ordered "Abandon Ship".
He had figured that since the boat was about to be rammed (and
presumably sunk) its secrets were safe within so they all
abandoned U-110 there had been no time to set any scuttling charges,
the engineers had opened up the vents so that the diving tanks
would flood. This on the earlier Mks would have taken the sub to the bottom. It was only when it failed to sink that Lemp and
one
another officer tried to swim back so they could climb back
on board to see what could be done. Lemp was never seen again.
Joe
Baker-Cresswell could see the
submarine crew all leaving the sub, so stopped his attack and ordered an
armed boarding party to launch so they could see what was about onboard, this would
be the first ever intact U-boat captured. Only two others during WW II
would be taken intact and boarded as the U110. Official records show
15 men were lost or killed in this action while 32 were captured and
taken on board other Escort vessels and kept in a secure location.
Picture of the whaler going over to U-110
Sub-Lieutenant David
Edward Balme, R.N.V.R (Left) who was aged 20 was put in charge of
the armed boarding party, which included Able Seaman Arnold Hargreaves
and six others. They boarded the whaler from Bulldogs port side at
about 12:20Hrs and were lowered towards the sea, the photo above shows the 8
man boarding party rowing over. It was David Balme who
went down the conning tower first, followed by the rest of his crew.
Inside the darkness was broken by the blue emergency lighting. The
boarding party now began a search of the deserted submarine. The bookshelves
still contained books of every description - navigation manuals,
seamanship manuals, code books and signal books. The Bulldog's
telegraphist Allen Osborne Long pointed to an interesting piece of
equipment that looked like a typewriter but had no place to put
paper. This, along with all the
books from the shelves, were put to one side to be transferred with
utmost care to HMS Bulldog. It was important that everything
was kept dry as the code books and signal books were printed in ink
that disappeared if they were dropped in seawater.
Picture of
the U-110 and boarding party
The U-110 was now
even
low in the water at it's stern, with the bow sticking out. Inside
the abandoned U-110 every bang of the whaler that had been moored on
the seaward side sounded as if the sub was about to sink or explode,
but in fact the reverse was true the whaler smashed against the side
of the submarine one too many times, the U-110 was to claim its last victim as the whaler sunk to the
bottom. A second stronger motor boat was sent over so they could
load what had been found. The young sub-lieutenant
was to find more important information in Lemp's roll top desk, this would give this country a
breathing pace to re-stock with food that was in very short supply along
with materials for the ever growing war machine. In total the
boarding party spent some six hours on board the U.110 and returned
to Bulldog at 18:35Hrs
This was not the
first
Enigma machine captured, but it was the first fully working Enigma
machine with the next six months of codes
plus they also found many other code and cypher books
in the U110. There were also some vital charts hitherto unknown to
the British. The most important of these were the special grid
charts used for positioning U-boats throughout the Atlantic and
charts showing all the German mine-fields and swept channels which
Britain would use to great effect for various raids, especially the St Nazaire
operation.
A 2 inch steel cable
from the U-110 was attached to HMS Bulldog, towing the yawing U-110 Baker Cresswell
steamed back to Iceland at 6 Knots which was some 400 nautical miles
to the north of their position, he received the following signal about the
operation which had been code-named "Primrose" from Sir Dudley
Pound, the First Sea Lord: "Hearty congratulations. The petals
of your flower are of rare beauty." The U-110 was kept afloat
for some 17 hours then they let the towline slip as U-110 started to
upended as it took on more water, in the end sinking
vertically with
her bow high in the air. Two days later, HMS
Bulldog docked in Scapa Flow, the British naval base in the Orkneys.
Baker Cresswell was greeted by Alan Bacon, an intelligence officer
who took charge of the documents removed from the U-110 Alan Bacon
arrived in London on the 13th May by 18:00Hrs. Some three hours
later, he was driven through the gates of Bletchley Park. As he
walked into the naval intelligence section, he triumphantly held his
briefcase containing the most important captured papers over his
head, like an athlete who had just won a gold medal. With this
information they had a near crystal ball which was used to sink
about fifteen German supply ships stationed around the North and
South Atlantic used for refuelling U-boats and armed raiders such as
the Prinz Eugen which had sailed from Norway with the Bismarck in
mid-May 1941.
The boarding party of
the U-110
were presented to King George VI, who stated that the operation
was "perhaps the most important single event in the whole war at
sea." The information was kept secret under the 50 year rule
so not many people got to hear about the boarding party. the Enigma
code during W.W.II. Which as we know from history gave us the edge
in the Atlantic war until about February of 1942 This had been the
turning point in history as England had been starved of food and
ammunition for the war machine. One member of the crew the Telegraphist
Allen Osborne Long was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and all the
others were ‘Mentioned in Despatches’ for ‘good work in salving
documents under conditions of danger and difficulty.’
The
Enigma machine and all supporting data was turned over to Bletchley
Park where top mathematician Alan
Turing had been working with Polish intelligence who had built a
decoding machine called a ‘Bomba'.
They believed that they could improve upon the Polish design using
electro-mechanics with an important refinement contributed by Gordon Welchmann.
Bletchley Park contacted the
British Tabulating Machine Company of Letchworth Garden City to
create a new machine which would be known as the Bombe. In BTM 1 factory the project was known to the few
people in the know as CANTAB or the 6/6502 project.
Four prototype
machines had been built at BTM by the Summer of 1940. The
first Bombe was called Victory and was installed in hut 1 some more
adjustments were needed as it did not work as planed, a second
version came into use about six months later. A year later there were around 6
Bombes in operation at Bletchley Park in Hut 11. The Bombes
were shipped around the country by a single army driver in ordinary
lorries covered with tarpaulin so as not to arouse suspicion. The Bombes were
large, about 1 metre high, 2 metres long and 1 metre wide and
weighed around one ton each. One machine, designed to interpret the Naval Enigma, was
made by linking four Bombes together. Known as the ‘Giant' it was
too heavy to move and so was operated at the Letchworth factory
basement next to where the Bombes were put together .
When it achieved a result, a special number to Bletchley Park was
telephoned with the message ‘the giant has caught a whale'. To see
what a bombe looked like and a link to a story as told by Stephen Hare who was
a young apprentice who worked on the Bombe
click here
Production increased
of the Bombe that in the spring of 1942 BTM took over the basement
of the Ascot Training Centre in Pixmore Ave No 5 Factory where
the drums and other parts were made, then a month later BTM took up further space at the Spirella Factory
Letchworth where teams of several hundred staff,
predominately women who had made ladies garments before the war,
worked day and night assembling unique wired rotors. By 1942 BTM
were producing at least one Bombe per week, in total 210 Bombes were
put together at Letchworth Factory.
 The
enigma cipher decoder shown left was the M3 that was captured on 9th
May 1941 which an operator could input Morse Code then scramble a code in over 150,000,000,000 000,000,000
ways! if this was not bad enough the Germans added a fourth wheel in
about February 1942 when they realised the code may have been
cracked. This had been given the code name of "shark" by
Bletchley Park who were unable to crack this code for some nine months.
On top of this problem the British Navy code had been broken by the Germans. The midnight oil
was burning to try and stay on top of the new
cipher.
Then In the Eastern Mediterranean on 30th Oct 1942 a
contact was made with a German U boat, HMS Petard laid down a heavy
depth charge attack on the U Boat which was U-559 and was badly
damaged in the attack. After some 12 hours the U Boat was forced to
the surface and its crew abandoned ship after opening its sea cocks.
HMS Petard, which was nearest, they attempted to board the U-559 led
by First Lieutenant Anthony Fasson and
Able-Seaman
Grazier and Tommy Brown a young lad from the canteen.
Fasson made his way down to the Captain's cabin, found some secret
looking documents and passed them up to Tommy Brown in the conning
tower. Fasson and Grazier then went back down to try to recover some
electronic equipment and while they were down the U Boat suddenly
started to sink. Tommy Brown jumped clear but Fasson and Grazier
were reported to have gone down with the U-559.
The documents retrieved arrived in Bletchley Park on 24th November
1942.
The documents
were the German Weather Short Code Book and the Short Signal Book
and were vital in "getting back into Shark" after the blackout
caused by the introduction of the 4 wheel Enigma.
In 1943 the war in the Atlantic had
near been won when a man called Tommy Flowers was told by the top brass, the war would be finished before
he could build his machine. Tommy funded and built it himself what we know today as Colossus, the first digital,
programmable, electronic computer. This was also fast enough to
decipher the Lorenz code used by Hitler to transmit commands to his
Generals. The Colossus computer was massive in size
5 metres long, 3 metres deep and 2.5
metres high - and weighed over a ton. The MKI was made up using
standard telephone exchange components and had about 1,500 valves, and the MKII had 2,500 valves,
and was able to work five time faster than
the original MKI Colossus
it contained about 100,000,000
electrical switches. The computer you are using today has the power
of 50,000 Colossus, that being just the central part of your CPU.
At wars end we were the leaders in the
computer field. Winston Churchill did not want anyone to know of
it's existence due to a mistake he made at wars end of the
great war, so all information regarding the bombe and
Colossus was burnt along with all the
drawings. The machine parts of Colossus were returned to Dollis Hill. It was reported that
two Colossus computers found their way to CHQ and
helped with the cold war that was about to start, they were
working till the late 60s. All information
regarding
the bombe and
Colossus
remained on the official secrets list
for over 50 years and today The algorithms used in 1943 are still I
understand on
the Official Secrets list.
What happened to?
Lt-Cdr David Balme
(Retired): The then
Sub-Lieutenant David Balme was personally awarded the Distinguished
Service Cross by King George V1 who described the action as "perhaps
the most important single event in the whole war at sea, the capture
of the Enigma machine from the U-110 which was seven months before
America entered the war. On the 3 March 1999 this was brought up in
the Houses of Parliament Prime Minister's Question Time. Brian
Jenkins MP asked the then Prime Minister "did he agree that the film
was "an affront" to British sailors." Tony Blair agreed with
questioner.
Those brown envelopes
found by David Balme from Lemps roll top desk, These were something
almost as valuable as all the books and logs from the U-110. In
these envelopes were the settings and procedure to be used for "Offizier"
Enigma messages, the especially important doubly enciphered messages
sent to officers in U-boats while they were at sea. These crucial
messages might never have been read by Bletchley Park.
In 1981 the German
Sunday paper, Bild am Sonntag, ran a serial on the Battle of the
Atlantic. The editor interviewed David Balme, and Dönitz. When
Dönitz was told how the British captured the Enigma from U110 and
had used it, he would not believe it, forty years after the event.
Dönitz died still not believing it.
 Able
Seaman Arnold
Hargreaves: After this event Arnold was transferred to a special
unit in which he would wear brown Army uniform, but that's another story.
He was also awarded ten shillings as his Timex watch had taken on
some water from the north
Atlantic swell. Apart from the war years Arnold
worked in the printing trade in Bedford where Arnold still lives
today and was 90 years
young on 8th October 2007. I have a photo of Arnold holding a torch
from U.110 and he also has a tin opener from the U.110 that he still
uses today. Arnold had an article posted in the Bedford Museum
about his start in life and his Navy days.
 Alan Turing MBE:
held many posts which
were top secret until he was tricked in to admitting he was a
practicing homosexual and was then charged on 31 March 1952,
offering no defence other than that he saw nothing wrong in his
actions. Turing was found guilty and was given the alternatives of
prison or oestrogen injections for a year
intended to neutralise his libido.
He accepted the latter and returned to a wide range of academic
pursuits.
After his conviction, his security
clearance was withdrawn. Worse than that, security officers were now
extremely worried that someone with complete knowledge of the work
going on at GCHQ was now labelled a security risk.
Alan Turing died of potassium cyanide
poisoning on the evening of
7th June 1954 while conducting electrolysis experiments. The cyanide was
found on a half eaten apple beside him, he had been found by his
cleaner on the morning of
8th June 1954. An inquest concluded that it
was self-administered, the coroner ruled that Turing took his own
life "while the balance of his mind was disturbed." his mother always maintained that it was
an accident. In fact they were both right; the half eaten apple, the
symbol of lost innocence?
Dr.
Tommy Flowers MBE: After the war, Tommy
Flowers received some recognition being repaid part of his expense of £1,000 and
the award of an MBE. He then returned to the Post Office Research
Station where he was Head of the Switching Division. He and his
group pioneered work on all-electronic telephone exchanges,
completing a basic design by about 1950. In 1964 he became Head of
the Advanced Development Group at Standard Telephones and Cables
Ltd., retiring in 1970
He
received an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University in 1977,
and another from De Montfort University in Leicester. This was after
the 50 year rule. It became known that he was being considered for a
knighthood, possibly in the New Years Honours List. Sadly, Tommy
Flowers died from heart failure at home in London on the 28th October,
1998. He was 92 years of age. While the
Americans
have got away with the myth that the
ENIAC (which was short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And
Computer) was the first large-scale electronic computer in the
world.
We know the truth as it being Tommy
Flowers who had gone one stage further with inventing
the
the first programmable,
electronic computer that was working as the MkI Colossus on 8th
December 1943 by
February of 1944 it was up and running.
The American
Government was given the details of Colossus by the British
Government as part-payment for all the food and armaments America
had supplied throughout the war that we still had to pay for with
hard cash and only finished in 2006.
HMS Bulldog
A little while after
the event recorded above HMS Bulldog went in for a weapons re-fit.
She had her old depth charge launchers removed and was fitted with
the new deadly Hedgehog launchers, these launched many mortar type bombes
spread in a much wider pattern which sunk many U Boats. On the 9th May, 1945
The surrender of the Channel Islands was signed on board HMS
Bulldog.
Type: Destroyer
Class: B
Penant: H 91
6th RN Vessel to bear the name HMS Bulldog
Built by: Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson Ltd. (Wallsend-on-Tyne,
U.K.): Wallsend
Laid down: 10 Aug, 1929
Launched: 6 Dec, 1930
Commissioned: 8 Apr, 1931
Armament: 4 x 4.7 in (119 mm) single guns,
2 x 2 pdr (37 mm/40 mm) AA guns,
2 x 21 in (533 mm)
quadruple Torpedo Tubes.
Decommissioned: 1945
HMS Bulldog survived the war and
was broken up in for scrap in 1946.
 Kptlt. Fritz-Julius Lemp
was killed in action or did he just drown? It was said he was shot while trying to swim
back to his submarine U-110. He was just 27 and the holder of the
Knights Cross (14.08.40). This version is recorded in some books. It is even
recorded he was shot by the boarding party! They say the truth
is out there. In 1988, through the Submarine Museum in Gosport and
the German U-boat Association, Herr Georg Hogel, who had been a
Petty Officer Telegraphist in both U30 and the U110, said that Lemp
was in the water with him and then just disappeared and was
certainly not shot.
Kptlt. Fritz-Julius Lemp while in
command of another submarine U-30 was responsible for sinking the passenger liner S.S
Athenia bound for Montreal; carrying some 1,103 civilians, including more than 300 Americans
hurrying home ahead of the clouds of war. 112 civilians died in the
sinking on September 3rd, 1939 just hours after the declaration of
hostilities between Britain and Germany. Lemp had attacked and sank
what he took to be an armoured cruiser. Germany denied they
had anything to do with the sinking and the true facts were not
known until the Nuremberg Trials.
This story may have
never been told apart from a few books but on 21st April 2000,
Universal Pictures released a mega-budget war-time movie "U-571"
that we all got to hear about. A thrilling story about an American
crew on a top-secret mission to capture an Enigma decoder
from a German U-Boat. I watched the film which was good entertainment but
it bore no
resemblance to fact apart from one fact was totally true, the action
took place on the water,
for the rest to be fact we would have to re-write history as we know America
entered the war some seven moths later on Monday 8th December 1941.
One fact that is not
talked about, the USA Navy did help with escort work, they are also
recorded as having sunk two
German U Boats before their declaration of war. The USA Navy did sustain many
casualties and deaths prior to this date which is a little known
fact. The last few words on this subject should really go to Lt-Cdr David Balme (Retired) " I don't know why anyone complains because no-one
had heard of this before the film"
Even Allo Allo had their version of
events called "Down The Drain" where allegedly two British secret
service agents landed in France and got extremely drunk on French
wine and were found singing "hear we go hear we go" on the sea
front. Now these could have been Goldings boys who spent the rest of
the war in a German prison camp. The enigma was pushed down the drain, a
very funny version and I think has more truth than the American
films version of
events.
Some of the data above has been gleaned from
three other
web sites, please check this site out if you want any further
information
Uboat.net Goldonian web would like to thank Gupmundur Helgason
for permission in copying some data from his web site for this page. Also
The First Garden City Museum for information and photographs for
this web site on the Bombe and the story written by
Stephen Hare
along with the permission from Mrs. Hare to
reproduce her late husbands memories as an apprentice at No 1 factory.
In 2008 I had a chance meeting with Eric Fitton who had worked at No 5 factory,
the old Ascot factory on the new
automatic lathe sent over from America. He admitted he did not have
a clue what he had been making till many years later. He recalls one
strange thing, at wars end all the parts he and others had made were
all smashed-up. Had they made the parts wrong? Many years later he
found out he was the one who made the thing that turned
cog that read the code. if you would like to view his web site
Link.
Can you add any more information to this
page? or do you know of other secret operations in which Goldings
boys were part of.
Collated and written by: Frank Cooke
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