Christmas Eve on the U-boat

The run of days up to and including Christmas this year turned out very pleasant, especially Christmas Eve. We managed to get up, dressed and out of the house by around 9 a.m. on that day, something of a Christmas miracle by itself. But we had a goal that gray, drizzly morning: make it to the Museum of Science and Industry, located in Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago.

Nothing like a simulated coal mine, model trains, nuclear energy exhibits and a captured Nazi U-boat to get you in that Christmas spirit. That and a display of dozens of Christmas trees decorated according to nations of the world in the main hall of the museum, an annual exhibit that’s always good to see (especially trees you wouldn’t expect, such as India). The clincher, however, was that it was free day at the museum, and it had been more than a year since we’d all gone there, though I went late in the summer to see BodyWorlds (see August 26 & 29 and September 15, 2005).

Last summer, I wanted to see the inside of U-505, which is indeed a captured German submarine—taken by the US Navy in off the coast of west Africa on June 4, 1944, in an amazing feat of seamanship and luck. Eventually the vessel came to Science & Industry, and just last year the museum completed work on an entire new building to house it. Such construction work is a capital expenditure, partly recaptured by selling timed admissions to take tours of the inside of the submarine. I didn’t know that last summer, and so got a good look only at the exterior.

Yuriko didn’t have any interest in taking the interior tour, but surprisingly Lilly did, so I got two tickets. At 12:45 p.m. on Christmas Eve, we boarded the U-505 with about a dozen other tourists and a guide. Cramped hardly describes it, and even so we didn’t quite experience its original claustrophobic dimensions, since some of the bunks and bulkheads had been removed to accommodate the likes of us tour-takers.

But it has all the cool submarine details you’d expect from a U-boat. A forest of values and pipes and dials, much of it painted gray. Enormous diesel engines, torpedo tubes and a periscope. A skinny ladder up to the conning tower. A galley little bigger than a phone booth, with three hot plates to cook for more than 50 men. A lot of signs in German.

The guide had a number of interesting things to say, but one fact that I’d never heard, nor seen depicted in any submarine movie, was what happened when the captain ordered an immediate, emergency dive. Much of the crew, those who could be spared for it, would rush toward to bow to add their weight to a nosedive, practically crowding on top of each other. The stuff of both nightmares and comedy, I reckon.