As an artifact and irreplaceable piece of history, the 1,120-ton, U-505 German submarine at the Museum of Science and Industry is something Keith Gill doesn’t want to turn into the “George Washington’s Ax” nightmare of museum curators.
The tale of the fictional ax is one used in the museum industry as a caution against overzealous efforts to make old objects look like they did when they were new. It goes like this:
A visitor one day comes into an exhibit to view the museum’s most famous artifact: George Washington’s ax.
“Is this really the actual ax Washington used as a boy to cut down his father’s cherry tree?” the visitor asks a museum guide.
“Yes,” the guide assures the visitor, “it is, except for these two slight differences.”
The guide points to a sign that explains that in the 1800s the ax’s wooden handle had become so rotten that somebody had a replica made from a tree at Mt. Vernon to replace it. Then, in the early 1900s, the museum discovered the ax head had become so corroded that curators commissioned craftsmen to replace it with a replica made in a colonial-style forge.
“No matter how exacting you are in replicating parts of an object that is disintegrating due to the ravages of age and the elements, they are still replicas,” said Gill, the curator in charge of protecting the U-505.
This insider museum principle is driving an increasingly ambitious effort to raise $23.5 million to build a structure to house the sub and keep inexorable deterioration from transforming it into a replica instead of the real thing. Tuesday night the museum held the first of three consecutive members-only evenings this week dedicated to the treasured but disintegrating war relic.
Two American veterans who won Silver Stars for bravery for their part in capturing the submarine in 1944 and a German veteran who served on a boat identical to the U-505 are giving tours of the craft to museum members in the evening programs.
Time and the elements have not been kind to the submarine, which was the first enemy warship captured by U.S. forces since the War of 1812. Its decking and portions of its hull have already had to be replaced.
Though it is not yet in danger of becoming a maritime version “Washington’s Ax” if it does not get into a protected indoor environment in the next few years, it will risk becoming one, said Gill.
“We want to stabilize the U-505 and can’t because it continues to sit outside, subject to Chicago’s extreme temperature changes and brutal humidity,” Gill said.
For the last several years the museum has been devising a plan to put the submarine, easily its largest artifact, in a climate-controlled indoor exhibit space.
Projected costs, however, have caught the museum by surprise, even though it has moved extraordinarily large objects indoors already, including the entire, original Zephyr passenger train installed last year in the museum’s underground parking garage.
Two years ago, museum officials launched an $11.5 million fundraising drive to build a sunken, indoor exhibit space on the museum grounds to house the U-505. Later, more careful appraisal forced the museum to raise the fundraising goal to $23.5 million. So far, about $9.5 million has been raised. Museum officials say that construction of the protective space is still a few years away.
The submarine, the only Nazi U-boat captured by the American Navy in World War II, was declared a national monument in 1989 and is one of the most prized museum holdings in the nation. With only four Nazi submarines left in existence, the one in Chicago is the closest to original condition (two others are in Kiel and Hamburg, Germany, another in Liverpool, England).
Despite its relative state of authenticity, however, since it was captured by Americans on June 4, 1944, and moved to Chicago in 1954, the U-505 has undergone alterations small and large to protect it from disintegration.
Museum workers, for example, periodically have had to replace steel plates of the 252-foot-long submarine’s outer steel hull because of continual weather-related corrosion. The wooden deck has been replaced at least three times.
The diamond-treaded aluminum floorplates have been buckled and worn smooth in places by the shuffling feet of 23 million visitors who have toured the boat at the museum.
“Part of our upcoming project,” Gill said, “is to figure precisely just what is original equipment in the boat, and what has been replaced or replicated. We just don’t have a real good idea at this point, but we know the subs in Europe are far less authentic because they were put into service by other navies . . . and modified considerably.”
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Part of the planning process for putting the submarine into a climate-controlled exhibit space, Gill said, is deciding how he and others want the boat portrayed.
“It’s actually in far better shape today than it was the day it was captured in 1944,” he said. “It was incredibly rusty then, and there was all kinds of grease and dirt and grime on the inside of it.
“So do we want to make it look like it did when it was launched in 1941? When it was captured? When it was turned over to us by the U.S. Navy in 1954?”
Gill is passionate about preserving the submarine, having gone as far as firing up the old diesel engines that once propelled it under the Atlantic Ocean as it sank eight Allied freighters in 1942.
To maintain the submarine’s authenticity, Gill has been able to rely on the expertise of both ex-German submariners and American Navy veterans who took part in the U-505’s daring capture off the West African coast in 1944.
On the 50th anniversary of its capture five years ago, Gill brought three such veterans to the museum for a series of special members-only evenings to conduct tours of the submarine. It was so successful that the same three men, two American vets and a former German U-boater, have returned on the anniversary every year.
The Americans are Zenon Lukosius of suburban South Holland and Texan Wayne Pickels, the last two surviving members of the five man boarding party who stopped the submarine from sinking after it was scuttled by its crew.
The third veteran at the museum program is Pete Peterson, a 78-year-old ex-U-boater who has lived and worked in Toledo, Ohio, since 1950. He served on a sub identical to the U-505.
“I take about 20 members at a time through the sub, explaining things to them,” Peterson said. “When we get to the control room, I show them the sea strainer (valve) and say, `We wouldn’t be standing in here talking about this if it hadn’t been for two men who saved the boat when it was captured, and here they are.’ Then Pickels and Lukosius come down from the conning tower just like they did that day in 1944, though maybe a little slower now.”
As a national monument, the submarine is also a memorial to the 55,000 Americans who died at sea during the war.
As a museum artifact, it is the second most popular exhibit at the museum, the first being the underground coal mine.
Because of the submarine’s popularity and importance, museum officials are confident they can raise the funds needed to preserve it as an indoor exhibit.
“By the end of the war, German submarines had only a three-month life expectancy,” said Gill. “It’s extraordinary to have this one around still. It is so historically significant, we don’t want to lose any more of it.”